Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

by Johan Norberg

The anti-slavery bandwagon was seemingly unstoppable. Even the more authoritarian countries followed suit eventually. Russia freed its serfs in 1861, the Ottoman Empire ended slavery in 1882 and China in 1906. In the next century, Nazi Germany and communist states re-introduced slavery on a massive scale, but they were also the two systems that were most decisively defeated, militarily and ideologically, during the twentieth century. The long arc bends towards emancipation. Slavery has been most persistent in the Arab world, but even there, the last states abolished slavery after the Second World War. Oman abolished slavery in 1970 and Mauritania in 1981, even though it was not criminalized there until 2007. There can hardly be a stronger example of human progress than the fact that slavery, which existed in almost all countries as late as 1800, is now formally banned everywhere. But this does not mean that slavery is not still practised. Millions still suffer from forced labour, debt bondage, trafficking and forced marriages. Sometimes bans are not enforced by governments, and sometimes it takes place in the informal sector where governments are not able to combat it. The 2014 Global Slavery Index from the Walk Free Foundation estimates that more than thirty-five million people live in modern slavery. The worst offenders are Mauritania and Uzbekistan, where around four per cent of the population lives in some kind of slavery. Islamist terrorist groups like IS and Boko Har...