MAKING SLAVES AND THEIR MASTERS: DRUG TRAFFICKING, MODERN SLAVERY, AND THE AFTERLIVES OF EMPIRE IN AUSTERITY BRITAIN

Contracted with Oxford University Press

Recent efforts to decolonise criminology and criminal justice have not always foregrounded the role of the state in disrupting and entrenching intersecting inequalities. Making Slaves and their Masters shows why such an analytical task is called for: here, the same government that has driven up levels of inequality, implemented austerity politics and pursued a ‘war on gangs’ has also invented some of its most marginalised constituencies as victims and modern slaves. Drug dealers involved in the street level economy of heroin and crack cocaine linking cities to smaller towns – commonly referred to as ‘county lines’ – are no longer treated as criminals to be punished but as slaves in need of saving.

Drawing on fifteen years of ethnographic research on Britain’s marginalised council estates that are home to many of the Black, mixed race as well as white young men now discovered as slaves, and triangulating this with an ethnography of Crown courts, government offices and police stations, I analyse what happens when criminals are rethought as victims. While those tasked with the role of identifying and responding to ‘modern slavery’ come with genuine intentions, they struggle to distinguish victims from perpetrators, slaves from their masters.

Ultimately, Making Slaves and their Masters questions the idea that the politics of redemption unfolding in austerity Britain constitutes a departure from the much theorised ‘punitive turn’. Rather we can think of it as an instance of pacification to govern Britain’s disenfranchised populations as the enemy from within. At a time when movements such as Black Lives Matter have brought the afterlives of slavery to the fore, the British state has re-invented the moral and legal register of slavery – not to address empire’s racial and classed afterlives but to project the figure of the slave master onto the body of disenfranchised, often minoritised youth, on home ground.