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Jessica Pliley

Texas State University, History, Faculty Member

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Papers by Jessica Pliley

Gender, enslavement, and trafficking

A Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking in the Age of Global Conflict: Volume 5: Global Conflict, Colonialism, and Decolonization, 1900-1945, 2024

Today, self-proclaimed abolitionists declare that more people are trapped in slavery than at any ... more Today, self-proclaimed abolitionists declare that more people are trapped in slavery than at any other time in history, that slavery has reemerged as a deviant practice of modern capitalism that entraps children and women into sexual bondage, and that the world must come together to fight the scourge of trafficking and modern slavery

Perpetual banishment: The transcarceral crimmigration case of Mary Masako Akimoto

Gender & History, 2024

The case of Mary Masako Akimoto illuminates how carceral systems based on immigrant criminalisati... more The case of Mary Masako Akimoto illuminates how carceral systems based on immigrant criminalisation, known as crimmigration, intersected with gendered notions of decent and indecent work in 1930s America. Mary Akimoto was deported from the USA in compliance with US anti-sex trafficking law for the crime of selling sex in a brothel (indecent work). Yet, as part of her rehabilitation or as a requirement of her release in the months and years that followed her initial arrest, she regularly found herself in coerced labour situations engaging in vocations gendered as decent work. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Ambivalent Abolitionist Legacies: The League of Nations’ Investigations into Sex Trafficking

Fighting Modern Day Slavery and Human Trafficking: History and Contemporary Policy , 2021

Jessica R. Pliley 5.1 introduction Modern abolitionists look to the past to find inspiration. The... more Jessica R. Pliley 5.1 introduction Modern abolitionists look to the past to find inspiration. They seek heroes to emulate, tactics to embrace, and strategies to follow. They also make arguments that antislavery and anti-trafficking campaigns of the past need to be pulled into the present to fight a new, more insidious form of human trafficking and modern slavery. Most of the "saving," "rescuing," awareness raising, and fundraising of contemporary activists focus on fighting sex trafficking. 1 When activists pull on the past in their fight against contemporary sex trafficking, they frequently turn to the history of antislavery abolitionism that offers seemingly uncomplicated heroeslike Frederick Douglass, William Wilberforce, and Harriet Tubmanand a victorious narrative. For example, Operation Underground Railroad, a current group that operates out of Utah, claims the legacy of Harriet Tubman, requests donations of a "Lincoln" ($5), and utilizes paramilitary tactics to liberate children (always portrayed as children of color). 2 Similarly, the Polaris Project, which runs the US National Human Trafficking Hotline, is named after the North Star that guided enslaved people to freedom and, according to its own publications, was also

Sex Trafficking in the Motor City: The Construction of an International Deportation Infrastructure in Detroit, USA, 1924-1944

Global Labor Migrations: New Directions, 2022

Archival Trouble: Researching Sex Trafficking in Early Twentieth-Century America

Researching Forced Labour in the Global Economy, 2018

This Chapter examines the challenges that historians face when researching illicit labour and the... more This Chapter examines the challenges that historians face when researching illicit labour and the shadow economy – in this case, prostitution and sex trafficking. It argues that generating reliable data about the extent of prostitution and sex trafficking continues to be an insurmountable challenge for historians, just as it was for the historical subjects historians study. It notes that like today’s debates about what practices actually constitute forced labour, the parameters of the term ‘white slavery’ were similarly contested. And it suggests that political forces produced the quantifiable data about white slavery, but the very archives that house the sources historians use are themselves political spaces and function to legitimize state power, reformers’ values, and narratives where the ‘victim’ was rendered silent.

Prostitution in America

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History

Commercialized sexuality became a prominent feature of American urban settings in the early 19th ... more Commercialized sexuality became a prominent feature of American urban settings in the early 19th century when young men migrated far from the watchful eyes of family as soldiers and laborers. Concentrated in large populations, and unable to afford the comforts of marriage, these men constituted a reliable pool of customers for women who sold sexual access to their bodies. These women turned to prostitution on a casual or steady basis as a survival strategy in a sex segregated labor market that paid women perilously low wages, or in response to family disruptions such as paternal or spousal abandonment. Prostitution could be profitable and it provided some women with a path towards economic independence, although it brought risks of venereal disease, addiction, violence, harassment by law enforcement, and unintended pregnancy. By mid-century most American cities tolerated red-light districts where brothels thrived as part of the urban sporting culture. Fears that white women were bei...

Trafficked White Slaves and Misleading Marriages in the Campaigns Against Sex Trafficking, 1885-1927

Federal History, 2019

Troubling Habits, Poisons of Civilization, and State Growth: Review of The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State by Lisa McGirr

Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , 2018

In this path-breaking book, Lisa McGirr sets out to rewrite the history of Prohibition, transform... more In this path-breaking book, Lisa McGirr sets out to rewrite the history of Prohibition, transforming it from a widely acknowledged policy failure thought to be a holdover of Victorian moralism to a policy initiative that gave birth to the modern law-and-order state, the federalization of crime control, and the formation of the Democratic political coalition that produced the New Deal. In this effort, she succeeds. As a social history of state growth and political realignment, this book changes our understanding not only of Prohibition, but also of the origins of the coalition of urban ethnic voters that flocked to the Democratic Party in pursuit of a drink. The War on Alcohol offers a compelling story of the growth of " infrastructural power " developed by sociologist Michael Mann and advocated by William J. Novak as a useful analytic for investigating the expansion of the American state. Infrastructural power refers to the state's ability to " penetrate civil society " to carry out policies like Prohibition. 1 The Eighteenth Amendment emerged out of the intersection of the progressive reform wave and the zeal of evangelical Protestants seeking to harness the power of the state, as well as wartime emergency, to save America from its own " bad habits " by shutting down the fifth largest industry in America. 2 Evan-gelical Protestants were able to achieve their goals due to their highly organized churches and the overrepresentation of rural areas in Congress. The targets of enforcement—urban ethnic neighborhoods that would see their communities ravaged by organized-crime entrepreneurs peddling dangerous and expensive bootlegged liquor and bribing policemen and politicians alike—lacked the political power to resist Prohibition, to prevent criminal infiltration, and to demand honesty from their politicians. These neighborhoods were filled with immigrants, ineligible to vote, and with little motivation to pursue naturalization and the ballot. The enforcement of the Volstead Act could only be described as selective. Looking at the state level of enforcement (many states had passed their own Prohibition legislation) reveals that enforcement was very uneven: in Virginia, the poor residents—black and white—caught up in enforcement built the state's highways as forced laborers on notorious chain gangs, an example of the carceral state serving the infrastructure modernization goals of the state; in California, Mexican Americans made up a quarter of those charged with violating the state's liquor law in 1924; and law enforcement arrested so many working-class female bootleggers that Congress allocated funds to open the first federal prison for women (92, 98). 3 The working classes bore the brunt of the selective enforcement of Prohibition laws by local and federal forces. Enforcement of the Prohibition laws empowered vigilante volunteers to police their communities, terrorize their booze-drinking neighbors, and buttress the power of the state's Volstead enforcement apparatus. Groups like the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League blurred the

Pliley-Protecting the Young and Innocent.pdf

Child Slavery Before and After Emancipation: An Argument for a Child-Centered Slavery Studies, 2017

From White Slavery to Antiprostitution-Human Bondage.pdf

Human Bondage and Abolition: New Histories of Past and Present Slaveries,, 2018

Prostitution in America Prostitution in America Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, 2018

Commercialized sexuality became a prominent feature of American urban settings in the nineteenth ... more Commercialized sexuality became a prominent feature of American urban settings in the nineteenth century as young men migrated far from the watchful eyes of family as soldiers and laborers. Concentrated in large population, and unable to afford the comforts of marriage, these men composed a reliable pool of customers for women who sold sex. These women turned to working as prostitutes on a casual or steady basis due to the sex segregated labor market that paid women perilously low wages, or due to family disruption like paternal or spousal abandonment, or limited opportunities within their home life. Selling sex was profitable and allowed some women a path towards economic independence; though sex work had its risks of venereal disease and violence. By mid-century American cities had adopted a policy of tolerated red-light districts where brothels thrived as part of urban sporting culture. Fears of sexual slavery emerged in the 1910s and led to a concerted attack on the brothels by progressive reformers. These reformers used the emergency of World War I to close the regulated brothels, pushing America’s sex markets into clandestine spaces and empowering pimps to manage women’s sexual labor. World War II raised concerns about soldiers’ venereal health that prompted the U.S. military to experiment with different schemes of regulating prostitution. After the war, the introduction of antibiotic and the celebration of heterosexual normativity in the form of marriage and family nudged prostitution into the margins of society, where women who sold sex were seen as deviant, yet men who purchased sex were thought to be sexually liberated. The dawning of second wave feminism gave birth to the sex workers rights movement and a critique of the criminalization of prostitution. Yet, attitudes about prostitution continue to divide activists, and sex workers still bear the brunt of criminalization.

Protecting the Young and Innocent

Introduction: A Plea for a 'Vicious' Turn in Global History

by Jessica Pliley and Robert Kramm

The FBI's White Slave Division: The Creation of a National Regulatory Regime to Police Prostitutes in the United States, 1910-1918

<i>Texas through Women’s Eyes: The Twentieth-Century Experience</i> (review)

Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 2011

Vice Queens and White Slaves: The FBI's Crackdown on Elite Brothel Madams in 1930s New York City

The Petticoat Inspectors: Women Boarding Inspectors and the Gendered Exercise of Federal Authority

Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Jan 2013

Texas State University–San Marcos In the early twentieth century, anti-white-slavery activists so... more Texas State University–San Marcos In the early twentieth century, anti-white-slavery activists sought to construct a new position for women inspectors in the Immigration Bureau. These activists asserted that immigrant girls traveling without a family patriarch deserved the U.S. government's paternal protection, yet they argued that women would be best suited to provide this protection because of women's purported maternal abilities to perceive feminine distress. By wielding paternal government authority—marked by a badge, the ability to detain, and presumably the power to punish—these women could most effectively protect the nation's moral boundaries from immoral prostitutes while also protecting innocent immigrant girls from the dangers posed by solitary travel. In 1903 the Immigration Bureau launched an experiment of placing women among the boarding teams at the port of New York. The experiment, however, was short-lived, as opponents of the placement of women in such visible positions campaigned against them. This episode reminds us that the ability to represent and exercise federal authority in the early twentieth century was profoundly gendered; and women's increased participation in government positions during the Progressive Era was deeply contested.

Claims to Protection: The Rise and Fall of Feminist Abolitionism In the League of Nations' Committee on the Traffic In Women and Children, 19191936?

Journal of Women's History, Jan 1, 2010

Voting for the Devil: Unequal Partnerships In the Ohio Women's Suffrage Campaign of 1914

Ohio History, Jan 1, 2008

" A Kick is Sometimes a Boost": The 1914 Woman Suffrage Campaign In Franklin County, Ohio

Gender, enslavement, and trafficking

A Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking in the Age of Global Conflict: Volume 5: Global Conflict, Colonialism, and Decolonization, 1900-1945, 2024

Today, self-proclaimed abolitionists declare that more people are trapped in slavery than at any ... more Today, self-proclaimed abolitionists declare that more people are trapped in slavery than at any other time in history, that slavery has reemerged as a deviant practice of modern capitalism that entraps children and women into sexual bondage, and that the world must come together to fight the scourge of trafficking and modern slavery

Perpetual banishment: The transcarceral crimmigration case of Mary Masako Akimoto

Gender & History, 2024

The case of Mary Masako Akimoto illuminates how carceral systems based on immigrant criminalisati... more The case of Mary Masako Akimoto illuminates how carceral systems based on immigrant criminalisation, known as crimmigration, intersected with gendered notions of decent and indecent work in 1930s America. Mary Akimoto was deported from the USA in compliance with US anti-sex trafficking law for the crime of selling sex in a brothel (indecent work). Yet, as part of her rehabilitation or as a requirement of her release in the months and years that followed her initial arrest, she regularly found herself in coerced labour situations engaging in vocations gendered as decent work. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Ambivalent Abolitionist Legacies: The League of Nations’ Investigations into Sex Trafficking

Fighting Modern Day Slavery and Human Trafficking: History and Contemporary Policy , 2021

Jessica R. Pliley 5.1 introduction Modern abolitionists look to the past to find inspiration. The... more Jessica R. Pliley 5.1 introduction Modern abolitionists look to the past to find inspiration. They seek heroes to emulate, tactics to embrace, and strategies to follow. They also make arguments that antislavery and anti-trafficking campaigns of the past need to be pulled into the present to fight a new, more insidious form of human trafficking and modern slavery. Most of the "saving," "rescuing," awareness raising, and fundraising of contemporary activists focus on fighting sex trafficking. 1 When activists pull on the past in their fight against contemporary sex trafficking, they frequently turn to the history of antislavery abolitionism that offers seemingly uncomplicated heroeslike Frederick Douglass, William Wilberforce, and Harriet Tubmanand a victorious narrative. For example, Operation Underground Railroad, a current group that operates out of Utah, claims the legacy of Harriet Tubman, requests donations of a "Lincoln" ($5), and utilizes paramilitary tactics to liberate children (always portrayed as children of color). 2 Similarly, the Polaris Project, which runs the US National Human Trafficking Hotline, is named after the North Star that guided enslaved people to freedom and, according to its own publications, was also

Sex Trafficking in the Motor City: The Construction of an International Deportation Infrastructure in Detroit, USA, 1924-1944

Global Labor Migrations: New Directions, 2022

Archival Trouble: Researching Sex Trafficking in Early Twentieth-Century America

Researching Forced Labour in the Global Economy, 2018

This Chapter examines the challenges that historians face when researching illicit labour and the... more This Chapter examines the challenges that historians face when researching illicit labour and the shadow economy – in this case, prostitution and sex trafficking. It argues that generating reliable data about the extent of prostitution and sex trafficking continues to be an insurmountable challenge for historians, just as it was for the historical subjects historians study. It notes that like today’s debates about what practices actually constitute forced labour, the parameters of the term ‘white slavery’ were similarly contested. And it suggests that political forces produced the quantifiable data about white slavery, but the very archives that house the sources historians use are themselves political spaces and function to legitimize state power, reformers’ values, and narratives where the ‘victim’ was rendered silent.

Prostitution in America

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History

Commercialized sexuality became a prominent feature of American urban settings in the early 19th ... more Commercialized sexuality became a prominent feature of American urban settings in the early 19th century when young men migrated far from the watchful eyes of family as soldiers and laborers. Concentrated in large populations, and unable to afford the comforts of marriage, these men constituted a reliable pool of customers for women who sold sexual access to their bodies. These women turned to prostitution on a casual or steady basis as a survival strategy in a sex segregated labor market that paid women perilously low wages, or in response to family disruptions such as paternal or spousal abandonment. Prostitution could be profitable and it provided some women with a path towards economic independence, although it brought risks of venereal disease, addiction, violence, harassment by law enforcement, and unintended pregnancy. By mid-century most American cities tolerated red-light districts where brothels thrived as part of the urban sporting culture. Fears that white women were bei...

Trafficked White Slaves and Misleading Marriages in the Campaigns Against Sex Trafficking, 1885-1927

Federal History, 2019

Troubling Habits, Poisons of Civilization, and State Growth: Review of The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State by Lisa McGirr

Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , 2018

In this path-breaking book, Lisa McGirr sets out to rewrite the history of Prohibition, transform... more In this path-breaking book, Lisa McGirr sets out to rewrite the history of Prohibition, transforming it from a widely acknowledged policy failure thought to be a holdover of Victorian moralism to a policy initiative that gave birth to the modern law-and-order state, the federalization of crime control, and the formation of the Democratic political coalition that produced the New Deal. In this effort, she succeeds. As a social history of state growth and political realignment, this book changes our understanding not only of Prohibition, but also of the origins of the coalition of urban ethnic voters that flocked to the Democratic Party in pursuit of a drink. The War on Alcohol offers a compelling story of the growth of " infrastructural power " developed by sociologist Michael Mann and advocated by William J. Novak as a useful analytic for investigating the expansion of the American state. Infrastructural power refers to the state's ability to " penetrate civil society " to carry out policies like Prohibition. 1 The Eighteenth Amendment emerged out of the intersection of the progressive reform wave and the zeal of evangelical Protestants seeking to harness the power of the state, as well as wartime emergency, to save America from its own " bad habits " by shutting down the fifth largest industry in America. 2 Evan-gelical Protestants were able to achieve their goals due to their highly organized churches and the overrepresentation of rural areas in Congress. The targets of enforcement—urban ethnic neighborhoods that would see their communities ravaged by organized-crime entrepreneurs peddling dangerous and expensive bootlegged liquor and bribing policemen and politicians alike—lacked the political power to resist Prohibition, to prevent criminal infiltration, and to demand honesty from their politicians. These neighborhoods were filled with immigrants, ineligible to vote, and with little motivation to pursue naturalization and the ballot. The enforcement of the Volstead Act could only be described as selective. Looking at the state level of enforcement (many states had passed their own Prohibition legislation) reveals that enforcement was very uneven: in Virginia, the poor residents—black and white—caught up in enforcement built the state's highways as forced laborers on notorious chain gangs, an example of the carceral state serving the infrastructure modernization goals of the state; in California, Mexican Americans made up a quarter of those charged with violating the state's liquor law in 1924; and law enforcement arrested so many working-class female bootleggers that Congress allocated funds to open the first federal prison for women (92, 98). 3 The working classes bore the brunt of the selective enforcement of Prohibition laws by local and federal forces. Enforcement of the Prohibition laws empowered vigilante volunteers to police their communities, terrorize their booze-drinking neighbors, and buttress the power of the state's Volstead enforcement apparatus. Groups like the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League blurred the

Pliley-Protecting the Young and Innocent.pdf

Child Slavery Before and After Emancipation: An Argument for a Child-Centered Slavery Studies, 2017

From White Slavery to Antiprostitution-Human Bondage.pdf

Human Bondage and Abolition: New Histories of Past and Present Slaveries,, 2018

Prostitution in America Prostitution in America Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, 2018

Commercialized sexuality became a prominent feature of American urban settings in the nineteenth ... more Commercialized sexuality became a prominent feature of American urban settings in the nineteenth century as young men migrated far from the watchful eyes of family as soldiers and laborers. Concentrated in large population, and unable to afford the comforts of marriage, these men composed a reliable pool of customers for women who sold sex. These women turned to working as prostitutes on a casual or steady basis due to the sex segregated labor market that paid women perilously low wages, or due to family disruption like paternal or spousal abandonment, or limited opportunities within their home life. Selling sex was profitable and allowed some women a path towards economic independence; though sex work had its risks of venereal disease and violence. By mid-century American cities had adopted a policy of tolerated red-light districts where brothels thrived as part of urban sporting culture. Fears of sexual slavery emerged in the 1910s and led to a concerted attack on the brothels by progressive reformers. These reformers used the emergency of World War I to close the regulated brothels, pushing America’s sex markets into clandestine spaces and empowering pimps to manage women’s sexual labor. World War II raised concerns about soldiers’ venereal health that prompted the U.S. military to experiment with different schemes of regulating prostitution. After the war, the introduction of antibiotic and the celebration of heterosexual normativity in the form of marriage and family nudged prostitution into the margins of society, where women who sold sex were seen as deviant, yet men who purchased sex were thought to be sexually liberated. The dawning of second wave feminism gave birth to the sex workers rights movement and a critique of the criminalization of prostitution. Yet, attitudes about prostitution continue to divide activists, and sex workers still bear the brunt of criminalization.

Protecting the Young and Innocent

Introduction: A Plea for a 'Vicious' Turn in Global History

by Jessica Pliley and Robert Kramm

The FBI's White Slave Division: The Creation of a National Regulatory Regime to Police Prostitutes in the United States, 1910-1918

<i>Texas through Women’s Eyes: The Twentieth-Century Experience</i> (review)

Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 2011

Vice Queens and White Slaves: The FBI's Crackdown on Elite Brothel Madams in 1930s New York City

The Petticoat Inspectors: Women Boarding Inspectors and the Gendered Exercise of Federal Authority

Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Jan 2013

Texas State University–San Marcos In the early twentieth century, anti-white-slavery activists so... more Texas State University–San Marcos In the early twentieth century, anti-white-slavery activists sought to construct a new position for women inspectors in the Immigration Bureau. These activists asserted that immigrant girls traveling without a family patriarch deserved the U.S. government's paternal protection, yet they argued that women would be best suited to provide this protection because of women's purported maternal abilities to perceive feminine distress. By wielding paternal government authority—marked by a badge, the ability to detain, and presumably the power to punish—these women could most effectively protect the nation's moral boundaries from immoral prostitutes while also protecting innocent immigrant girls from the dangers posed by solitary travel. In 1903 the Immigration Bureau launched an experiment of placing women among the boarding teams at the port of New York. The experiment, however, was short-lived, as opponents of the placement of women in such visible positions campaigned against them. This episode reminds us that the ability to represent and exercise federal authority in the early twentieth century was profoundly gendered; and women's increased participation in government positions during the Progressive Era was deeply contested.

Claims to Protection: The Rise and Fall of Feminist Abolitionism In the League of Nations' Committee on the Traffic In Women and Children, 19191936?

Journal of Women's History, Jan 1, 2010

Voting for the Devil: Unequal Partnerships In the Ohio Women's Suffrage Campaign of 1914

Ohio History, Jan 1, 2008

" A Kick is Sometimes a Boost": The 1914 Woman Suffrage Campaign In Franklin County, Ohio

Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890-1950: Fighting Drinks, Drugs & 'Immorality', Cambridge: CUP, 2016.

by Jessica Pliley, Harald Fischer-Tiné, and Robert Kramm

Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI

America’s first anti–sex trafficking law, the 1910 Mann Act, made it illegal to transport women o... more America’s first anti–sex trafficking law, the 1910 Mann Act, made it illegal to transport women over state lines for prostitution “or any oth- er immoral purpose.” It was meant to protect women and girls from being seduced or sold into sexual slavery. But, as Jessica Pliley illus- trates, its enforcement resulted more often in the policing of women’s sexual behavior, reflecting conservative attitudes toward women’s roles at home and their movements in public. By citing its mandate to halt illicit sexuality, the fledgling Bureau of Investigation gained entry not only into brothels but also into private bedrooms and justified its own expansion.

Policing Sexuality links the crusade against sex trafficking to the rapid growth of the Bureau from a few dozen agents at the time of the Mann Act into a formidable law enforcement organization that cooperated with state and municipal authorities across the nation. In pursuit of offenders, the Bureau often intervened in domestic squabbles on behalf of men intent on monitoring their wives and daughters. Work- ing prostitutes were imprisoned at dramatically increased rates, while their male clients were seldom prosecuted.

In upholding the Mann Act, the FBI reinforced sexually conservative views of the chaste woman and the respectable husband and father. It built its national power and prestige by expanding its legal authority to police Americans’ sexuality and by marginalizing the very women it was charged to protect.

Trafficking, Smuggling, and Illicit Migration in Historical Perspective: Conference Report

Philippa wrote this lovely conference report of our exciting gathering in London in June 2015.

A Crop of Boys and Girls

Review of Gabrial Rosenberg's The 4-H Harvest

Introduction: fighting modern slavery from past to present

by Genevieve LeBaron and Jessica Pliley

Fighting Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking: History and Contemporary Policy, 2021

Over the last two decades, fighting modern slavery and human trafficking has become a cause célèb... more Over the last two decades, fighting modern slavery and human trafficking has become a cause célèbre. Yet large numbers of researchers, non-governmental organizations, trade unions, workers, and others who would seem like natural allies in the fight against modern slavery and trafficking are hugely skeptical of these movements. They object to how the problems are framed, and are skeptical of the “new abolitionist” movement. Why? This book tackles key controversies surrounding the anti-slavery and anti-trafficking movements head on. Champions and skeptics explore the fissures and fault lines that surround efforts to fight modern slavery and human trafficking today. These include: whether efforts to fight modern slavery displace or crowd out support for labor and migrant rights; whether and to what extent efforts to fight modern slavery mask, naturalize, and distract from racial, gendered, and economic inequality; and whether contemporary anti-slavery and anti-trafficking crusaders' use of history are accurate and appropriate.