The oldest human rights movement is the anti-slavery movement dating from the 18th century. There are more slaves now than there were when the movement was founded.
In this day and age, we should be able to get basic facts like this in five minute or less, right? So I tried to verify the claim in five minutes or less.
Here's a screencast of my attempt:
My rating scale, from best to worst, is VERIFIED TRUE, UNVERIFIED, VERIFIED UNSUPPORTED, VERIFIED FALSE.
I'd chalk this one up as VERIFIED UNSUPPORTED. I found the book that is the likely source, read that part of the book on Amazon, and it looks like the author has not provided any particular back-up for his claim.
If I am wrong, I'd love to hear about it! Please let me know.
I followed the footnote on Wikipedia's 12 million to the ILO, a UN agency, and after a few more searches found this 2005 ILO report. It details the methodology used to give 12.3 million as a lower limit on forced labor worldwide.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I couldn't verify the number of slaves in 1787, a reasonable year to use for the founding of the international anti-slave movement. The U.S. 1790 census counted ~700k. The highest estimate I found for Indian slavery was 8-9m in 1841; it's reasonable to believe the number would be much lower in 1787. Other regions of the world list relatively low numbers, so it seems likely that the international number was lower than 12 million, though I can't verify it.
Thanks so much Anshul. The methods used by ILO strike me as very appropriate and even conservative. 12.3 million is a lot of people. Wow. I hope we have more opportunities to highlight this sickening problem! At first thought, shaming the countries that host this kind of atrocity on a wide scale seems like a good first step.
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