For all of the material and technological success of globalisation and modernisation, there is a corresponding black market of drug running, gun running and money laundering run by well organized mafias. There is also a long history of slavery that while prevalent since ancient times accelerated on a mass scale with the development of the modern world system after 1500. On this page we'll survey some ways to approach these topics.
Go to my website on the Atlantic and Slavery for more information on the Columbian Exchange and the corresponding development of slavery in the modern world system.
Go to my website on the Atlantic and Slavery for more information on the Columbian Exchange and the corresponding development of slavery in the modern world system.
Trans-Atlantic Slavery Database
The Trans-Atlantic Slavery
Database project is a consortium of worldwide scholars and institutions.
It allows students to research and survey broad patterns in the
development of Atlantic slavery as well as individual data on slave ship
purchases and movements. This project is the result of several
generations of scholarship on the history of Atlantic Slavery, including the
important work by Philip Curtin and David Brion Davis. Daniel Eltis who
co-edits this project is the author of The Rise
of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
In this course,
we'll have a computer lab workshop that allows us to explore the use of this
database project and how we may learn from it. The database contains the
detailed transactional information on 35,000 slave voyages across the Atlantic
from the 16th to the 19th centuries. For example you may find the voyages
of the slave ship, The Amistad, that
was the basis for the Stephen Spielberg film of the same name.
A good place to
begin in this website is the Introductory
Maps section. These maps are selections from David Eltis and
David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic
Slave Trade (Yale, 2010).
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Fig.
1 Map of Atlantic Slave Trade from Africa
Source:
http://mapmaker.rutgers.edu/355/AfricanSlaveTrade.png
 For a discussion of how modern day slavery is rarely prosecuted see this video:
This lecture by Professor Jean Allain views the history of modern anti-slavery movements since the League of Nations era (1920s-30s) up to today.
Drugs, Guns and Mafias:
The mafia and other organized gangs constitute a threat to civil society and stable and equitable relations. Some estimate that the underworld of global mafias and gangs with their illegal but profitable activities in selling and smuggling, drugs, guns and prostitutes across borders may be as much of 1/4 of the economy. These mafias deal in cash transactions and engage in money laundering in which they pass or deposit vast amounts of cash from their profits into bank accounts or other financial instruments to convert their illegal activities into legitimate bank accounts. Watch this video by journalist Misha Glenny on the scale of the problem.
Here is a recent piece by Misha Glenny in the New York Times
Glenny, Misha. New York Times (Online), New York: New York Times Company. Mar 7, 2016.
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Money Laundering:The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that illegal money laundering is from 2-5% of total global GDP. Others argue the combined effect of money laundering, illegal trade from drugs, guns, gambling and prostitution is much larger than that. For some sources on this major problems:Governments around the world struggle to keep up with ways to catch and limit these activities - see the reports from representative countries below: |
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