The Political Economy of Human Trafficking: Slavery and Early Modern Capitalism

Human trafficking and slavery are commonly framed as moral aberrations that existed at the margins of capitalist development. This paper challenges that view by locating coerced human mobility and forced labour at the structural core of early modern capitalism. Drawing on political economy, historical materialism, and global economic history, it argues that slavery and organised trafficking were not survivals of a pre-capitalist past but rational and indispensable mechanisms of capital accumulation between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Enslaved bodies were transformed into productive assets, financial collateral, and units of exchange within expanding imperial markets. European states, chartered companies, and financial institutions actively organised and protected these systems of extraction, integrating violence into the normal functioning of commerce. By examining plantation economies, transoceanic trade networks, labour discipline, resistance, gendered reproduction, and post-abolition labour regimes, the paper demonstrates that capitalism’s association with “free labour” emerged only after centuries of systematic coercion. Contemporary forms of trafficking and unfree labour, it concludes, represent not a deviation from capitalism’s logic but a historical continuity rooted in its formative period.¹