Trafficking, Smuggling, and Illicit Migration in Gendered and Historical Perspective, c 1870-2000

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Human trafficking, 'people smuggling' and clandestine migration are some of the most politically volatile and socially pressing issues in the present day, but they also have a long history. This project will contribute significantly to the emerging study of the history of illicit and clandestine migration by examining the history of trafficking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in comparative and global perspective. The PI, Julia Laite, a specialist on trafficking and migration in the British World, and the CI, Philippa Hetherington, a specialist on trafficking in the Russian empire, will collaborate to produce a comparative study of trafficking and clandestine migration in these two nations and empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while organizing a series of workshops and a major digital collaboration project that will bring together historians who are studying trafficking, smuggling and illicit migration in other areas of the world in the modern period. This digital collaboration will also produce a web-application, centred around an interactive mapping project, which will be collaboratively built by project participants based on their own research and expertise and shared widely with both academic and non-academic stakeholders.The history of trafficking is transnational and multifactorial by its very nature: people moved across national borders, states responded to trafficking at national and international levels, and law enforcement operations communicated across national jurisdictions and around empires. The comparative and collaborative nature of the project will enable us to explore a unique set of methodological questions. How can we write a collaborative global history of trafficking that also captures complex national, local, and individual factors? How can we develop lasting and usable collaborations between those who research the history of trafficking around the globe? How can we digitally represent the complexity and changing story of modern trafficking and illicit migration?We will seek to entangle concepts and experiences of trafficking. Rather than seeking to clarify trafficking and smuggling as normative or legal categories, we will instead question the utility of separating 'trafficking,' 'smuggling', and 'illicit migration' as unique experiences of migration and specific targets for crime or migration control. Secondly, we will examine trafficking in the context of the history of international crime and wider migration control. We will ask, how does trafficking policy relate to migration control more broadly, and how has it influenced the development of migration law and enforcement? Thirdly, we will explore the connections between gender, sex, labour, and illicit migration, both in terms of law and policy, but also in terms of individual people's experiences in the past.This proposed research project will make a significant contribution to existing scholarship and improve insights and understandings of the history of trafficking and smuggling in several ways. The work will examine not only discourses about trafficking but the operation of law enforcement and the experiences of trafficked persons and their traffickers, and will move beyond the existing scholarship which focuses overwhelmingly on international campaigns against trafficking. Through its planned international network and collaborative digital project, the proposed research program will build on and facilitate the work of other emerging scholars, and share this work with a broad academic audience and with non-academic beneficiaries. It will help to build a global history of trafficking, at a time when historical perspective is critically needed to improve understanding of the phenomenon in the present day.