ABSTRACT
People have captured, traded and enslaved one another throughout human history, though their practices have shifted over time with changing political and economic conditions. The motors of European development were the same colonial expansion and international trade patterns that coerced and enslaved many people throughout the globe. The contemporary human trade received a huge impetus from globalization, with its accelerating flow of ideas, products, and people within an ever-expanding world economy. Like any social practice, human trafficking takes place within social networks and organizations that promote it or allow it to occur. Yet in many parts of the Global South, economic development has privatized land ownership and concentrated agricultural resources into large, often foreign-owned agri business enterprises. Global immigration accelerated as industrialization and economic growth increased labor demand in the 19th and 20th centuries, though it slowed during times of economic crisis such as the Great Depression and during the two world wars.
