| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Suzanne Miers. Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira. 2003. Pp. xx, 505. Cloth $90.00, paper $35.95.
Building on her distinguished record of publications, Suzanne Miers carefully traces the development of the international antislavery movement during the last century. She assiduously chronicles the campaigns of the London-based Anti-Slavery Society (now AntiSlavery International) within changing systems of international power. Miers carries the story from the British-dominated nineteenth-century network of bilateral and international treaties through the international conventions and mechanisms of the League of Nations and the United Nations (UN).	1
This book scrupulously details successive attempts to define, refine, and extend the legal constraints on slavery. It also chronicles the unweary and inglorious attempts to limit the mechanisms designed to expose, constrain, and eradicate that institution and other forms of bondage. One of the major contributions of Miers's study is to show the degree to which antislavery was a weapon for the furtherance of national ambitions. Often, in both the League of Nations and the UN, that meant doing as little as politically possible. In such a complex situation, ironies and paradoxes abound. One may glimpse the British Foreign Office in the mid-1930s, consoling itself for the Italian conquest of Ethiopia in terms of its antislavery potential: it might be a "Godsend" in heralding the abolition of slavery. The secretary of the British Anti-Slavery Society also eagerly welcomed an "effective" Italian administration. Fifteen years later, the lessons of Ethiopia stimulated the British Foreign Office to renew abolitionist pressure on its allied oil-rich Arab kingdoms. Their weakened moral position as slaveholding societies enhanced their negative propaganda value to the USSR.	. . .

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