Historicizing Modern Slavery: Free-Grown Sugar as an Ethics-Driven Market Category in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- PDF / 854,454 Bytes
- 22 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 11 Downloads / 200 Views
ORIGINAL PAPER
Historicizing Modern Slavery: Free‑Grown Sugar as an Ethics‑Driven Market Category in Nineteenth‑Century Britain Andrew Smith1 · Jennifer Johns2 Received: 1 October 2018 / Accepted: 15 October 2019 © The Author(s) 2019
Abstract The modern slavery literature engages with history in an extremely limited fashion. Our paper demonstrates to the utility of historical research to modern slavery researchers by explaining the rise and fall of the ethics-driven market category of “free-grown sugar” in nineteenth-century Britain. In the first decades of the century, the market category of “free-grown sugar” enabled consumers who were opposed to slavery to pay a premium for a more ethical product. After circa 1840, this market category disappeared, even though considerable quantities of slave-grown sugar continued to arrive into the UK. We explain the disappearance of the market category. Our paper contributes to the on-going debates about slavery in management by historicizing and thus problematizing the concept of “slavery”. The paper challenges those modern slavery scholars who argue that lack of consumer knowledge about product provenance is the main barrier to the elimination of slavery from today’s international supply chains. The historical research presented in this paper suggests that consumer indifference, rather than simply ignorance, may be the more fundamental problem. The paper challenges the optimistic historical metanarrative that pervades much of the research on ethical consumption. It highlights the fragility of ethics-driven market categories, offering lessons for researchers and practitioners seeking to tackle modern slavery. Keywords Slavery · Market categories · Consumption ethics
Introduction Over the last 15 years, social activists have succeeded in raising awareness of the existence of slavery and in forcing governments and firms into tackling this problem (Murphy 2015). The victims of so-called “modern slavery” work in agriculture, construction, quarries, brothels, homes, and other places. Approximately 30 million people in the world today can be reasonably described as enslaved (Bales 2000; ILO 2012). The products of their labour often end up in the supply chains of multinational firms. Management academics have recently begun to participate in the on-going academic conversations about modern slavery (e.g., Crane * Andrew Smith [email protected] Jennifer Johns [email protected] 1
University of Liverpool Management School, Chatham St, Liverpool L69 7ZH, UK
Department of Management, University of Bristol, 12A Priory Rd, Bristol BS8 1TU, UK
2
2013; Crane et al. 2017). Unfortunately, the management research on modern slavery is largely ahistorical as it ignores the parallels and continuities with historical forms of slavery. Our paper uses the British sugar market in the era in which slavery was gradually being suppressed in Western countries to refine our understanding of the relationship between shifting ethical norms, consumption ethics, and market cate
Data Loading...
