Drugs, race, and the politics of modern slavery law
Forthcoming with Oxford University Press (2026)
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.
“This book is a testament to the power and virtue of ethnography at its best. Original and compelling, it illuminates how the reframing of British youth involved in ‘county lines’ drug dealing in the UK as victims of ‘modern slavery’ continues colonial logics and cements existing racialized and classed inequalities. Rather than challenging such inequalities… the language of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘slavery’ has been woven into a humanitarian narrative of salvation that facilitates new forms of state surveillance, control and punishment. Remarkably, Drugs, Race and the Politics of Modern Slavery Law not only exposes the structures of racial and class domination that are concealed by this narrative, but also renders visible the resistance and humanity of those most negatively impacted by state racism and the enduring coloniality of the law. Truly innovative and beautifully written, this book makes a ground breaking contribution to understandings of race and the politics of ‘modern slavery’.”
selected endorsements
“Great ethnography sometimes requires good fortune – being in the right place at the right time. Drugs, Race and the Politics of Modern Slavery Law is a fortuitous product of the right person being in the right place, just when needed. Following the publication of her groundbreaking Personalizing the State, Insa Lee Koch returned to ‘Park End’ as UK police turned their attention to ‘county lines’ – an apparently new phenomenon involving drug dealing networks, operating across geographical boundaries, drawing on the labour of exploited youth…The ethnography brings into focus the British state’s persistent refusal to reckon with its histories of slavery and it subverts these silences in the most important way – by providing a platform for those who ought to shape the narrative from here on. On publishing this book, Insa Lee Koch gifts British criminology with yet another exemplary piece of ethnographic work, which will be of value for a long time to come. ”
“Rigorous in method and breathtaking in its ambition…this pathbreaking study challenges those who link the recruitment of the young Black dispossessed into the illicit economy to the collective pathology of a community that needs to be saved from itself. Koch’s exhilarating and energetic ethnographic approach leads her to befriend Glodi - the first young man ever convicted for human trafficking in a county lines case, and the mothers and sisters of other defendants…… In the process, Koch opens a window onto the dangerous world of the ‘hood economy’, which we live alongside, though the middle class all too often fail to see. Crucially, Koch develops a searing analysis of the state building project inherent in modern slavery prosecutions. At one and the same time, both heart-breaking and inspiring, Koch’s painstakingly constructed narrative arc ensures that we will never see the criminal justice system - a bureaucratic carceral monster reconfigured under liberal imperatives of ‘white saviourism’ - in the same light. Drugs, Race and the Politics of Modern Slavery is far more than an academic study. It is a work of counter-hegemonic political labour that foregrounds - and supports – everyday resistance. It is a labour of love.”