Caracterización de los resultados obtenidos para la síntesis cualitativa

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money, globalized trade and money are rapidly freeing themselves of national controls and becoming supranational activities. In slavery there is a clear parallel: the nation-state is of diminishing signiWcance in under-standing or dealing with slavery, and slavery as an economic activity con-tinues unabated. In the nineteenth century, slavery was, by deWnition, a social and economic relationship tied to, and determined by, nation-states. Slavery created a relationship, as did marriage or a business con-tract, that was given a precise legal status enforceable within the bound-aries of a state. A slave in one place could be automatically free when moved to another jurisdiction. This conXating of slavery with its legal deWnition meant that the abolition of slavery came to be equated with the abolition of the laws that regulated slavery.

In fact the abolition of laws regulating slavery did not end slavery.

While it was greatly diminished within certain jurisdictions, as an eco-nomic activity it has continued around the world. Within the shadow economy, it has grown whenever conditions permitted, and globalization has been important in fostering those conditions. As noted earlier, slav-ery emerges when economic vulnerability combines with suYcient pop-ulation and a lack of regpop-ulation or control over the use of violence. The deregulation of world markets, seen as an opportunity by the Wall Street stockbroker and as a threat by the Indian farmer, adds signiWcantly to the economic vulnerability of a large proportion of the world’s poor. When this occurs in countries where corruption allows the illicit use of violence to capture and control vulnerable people, slavery emerges. But new forms of slavery are not just outcomes of the globalization of the econ-omy: they are part of the globalization process itself.

Globalization, as opposed to internationalization, involves a functional integration of dispersed economic activities.³Consider how the transna-tional company must be aware of a potential advantage or threat arising in any part of the globe. This globalized trade also produces a challenge to national governments, which, as Albrow puts it, “is a loss of control, a control which governments hitherto thought the international system guaranteed.”⁴Both the dispersal of economic enterprises based on slav-ery and the loss of government control are key attributes of slavslav-ery today. Meanwhile slavery has become globalized in other ways. Albrow asserts that globalization “now carries connotations of the commercial-ization of humanity.”⁵In a very particular way, this commercialization indicates new forms of slavery. If the old forms of slavery were anything, they were the commodiWcation of human beings. People as legal property was the basis of chattel slavery. Today slavery has moved away from slaves

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as capital investments to the use of slaves as inputs in an economic process. As is true of other key factors in the global economy, slaves are transformed from Wxed assets into Xexible resources.

This is clearly seen in the decreasing importance of time as an attrib-ute of slavery. One of the drawbacks of old slavery was the cost of main-taining slaves who were too young or too old. Careful analysis of both American cotton plantations and the Brazilian coVee farms in the nine-teenth century shows that the productivity of slaves was linked to their age.⁶Children did not bring in more than they cost until the age of ten or twelve, in spite of putting them to work as early as possible. Pro-ductivity and proWts to be made from a slave peaked when the slave reached about age thirty and fell oV sharply when a slave was Wfty and older. Slavery was proWtable, but the proWtability was diminished by the cost of keeping infants, small children, and unproductive old people. In the past, slavery was legally mandated as a permanent, lifelong state.

Altering the temporal nature of that state—for example, through manu-mission—required precise and strictly controlled legal acts. Today slav-ery is sometimes of short duration, and some people fall in and out of slavery and back in again. For the observer who still requires the existence of legal ownership to identify a slave, this might be seen as “virtual” slav-ery.⁷ The contemporary slaveholder addresses questions of location, advantage, process, and Xexibility, not concerns of Wxed assets, inheri-tance, or the return on capital investment over time. The latter are the pre-occupations of modernity, the former of globality.

What is important is that these attributes of the new form of slavery—

this shift from ownership to control and appropriation—are present in virtually all contemporary slavery across national or cultural boundaries.

Whether a slave cuts cane in the Caribbean, makes bricks in the Punjab, mines in Brazil, or is kept as a prostitute in Thailand, the basic relation-ship of slave and slaveholder takes on this form, becoming more reXective of global economic practice. In this respect we see the conXation of slav-ery in its culturally speciWc forms with an emerging globalized form.

In one Wnal way, slavery has been transformed in the process of its globalization. One of the key debates about globalization is whether it is a process that is homogenizing the globe or increasing its diversity through hybridization, but this debate engenders a false dichotomy.

Both processes are inherent in globalization, one often sparking oV the other. The slaveholder in Pakistan or Brazil, for example, watches televi-sion just like everyone else. When he sees that industries in many coun-tries are switching to a “just in time” system for the delivery of raw mate-114 G L O B A L I Z AT I O N A N D R E D E M P T I O N

rials or necessary labor, he draws the same conclusions about proWtability that captains of industry have drawn. As jobs for life disappear from the world economy, so does slavery for life. The economic advantages of short-term enslavement far outweigh the costs of buying new slaves when needed. Lifetime enslavement, like plowing behind a horse, may not be unproWtable, but what is the point when a much more lucrative method exists? One might see this as homogenization, but it takes place through the alteration of locally speciWc forms of slavery or debt bondage.

Through globalization, slavery is neither homogenizing nor becoming radically diversiWed. These are not useful categories in understanding con-temporary slavery. Slavery existed in diverse forms long before the advent of modernity. What is happening now is both the proliferation and the elaboration of those forms. Proliferation happens when the right condi-tions occur and those people who have the power to do so choose to enslave others. The underlying and essential elements of slavery are then manifested—violence and its threat, absolute control, economic exploita-tion—but the form that these elements take reXects crosscutting currents of economic expediency and cultural inXuence. In this way new forms of slavery mimic the world economy by shifting away from ownership and Wxed asset management, and by concentrating on control and use of resources or processes. These new forms are the elaboration of slavery into further iterations. The social and economic relationship is still one of slav-ery, but the expression of the relationship is constantly evolving. In these elaborated forms, slavery may be more or less temporary, more or less proWtable, and more or less exploitative of children; and the bait that lures people into slavery may be money, food, work, the opportunity to migrate, or a color television. But whatever its form, it can still be identiWed as slavery. And while there are many ways into slavery, there are also many ways out. Some of the ways to freedom, such as redemption, are themselves controversial.