Thread by @LizMarieGhost

@BrianKarem @deejaymcguire - I despise Trump but his statement about human trafficking may be right. Let's go through the numbers, ok?

Some references. World total population was est. 450 million in 1500, just over 1 billion in 1800, and is 7.5 billion today.

Historically, the largest block of slaves globally were those sent from Africa to North America from 1500 to 1808, when the US outlawed importation of slaves. That TOTAL was 12 million human beings over 300 years.

From 1500 to 1808 global population rose to 1 billion. In the US, largest benefactor of slavery, slave population peaked in 1860, at 4 million total approx. US slave pop was 400,000 in 1790 so it grew 10-fold 1790-1860.

theroot.com/slavery-by-the…

But what about modern slavery and human trafficking today? It exists in the US but not like 1860, right? Correct, but the rest of the world is engaged in slavery on a significant scale when it was not before. Let's talk about that.

An estimated 40.3 million men, women, and children were victims of modern slavery on any given day in 2016.1 Of these, 24.9 million people were in forced labour and 15.4 million people were living in a forced marriage.

Women and girls are vastly over-represented, making up 71 percent of victims. Modern slavery is most prevalent in Africa, followed by the Asia and the Pacific region. Source: globalslaveryindex.org/2018/findings/…

This means that, as recently as 2016, four TIMES as many people are being trafficked and in forced labor (often sex labor) PER YEAR than the TOTAL from 1500 to 1800.

Now the problem I have with this data is that I cannot find estimates for total data globally for the 1500-1800 period but 40 million would have been 10% of the entire world's population in 1500 and 4% in 1800.

Thus it seems unreasonable that, in any given year, slavery encompassed 40 million human beings at any time between 1500 and 1860. Thus, slavery may really be a bigger problem today than any time in the last 500 years, on a GLOBAL scale.

So I have questions - I've not been able to find total global slavery population estimates historically, just related to North America and the US. Is anyone aware of global slavery estimates, especially the 1500-1860 time period?

The other aspect of this is that this shows the power of compound growth (in population). Global population is almost 18 TIMES larger than in 1500 and while slavery today may be smaller as a PERCENTAGE, it can easily be larger in raw numbers.

The obvious problem here is the lack of global slavery estimates from 1500-1860 but since the US was one of the largest slave economies in the world at that time, the number of US slaves is an important consideration in that time period.

Can anyone else get better estimates of total human trafficking historically?

I am pretty sure the Global Slavery Index is one of our best sources for modern global slavery estimates.

globalslaveryindex.org