Slavery has taken on added significance in the twenty-first century as a result of its inclusion in the Statute of the International Criminal Court and it being a component part of the 2001 UN and 2005 Council of Europe conventions against trafficking. With limited and conflicting case-law on the issue, the compiling of the Travaux Préparatoires of the 1926 League of Nations and the 1956 United Nations conventions become essential in seeking to holding States or individuals responsible for violations of international law touching on slavery. The Travaux Préparatoires of the slavery conventions provide insights into the definitions of slavery, the slave trade, and various types of servile statuses while revealing information regarding the various obligations that States have undertaken to suppress the various manifestations of human exploitation.

There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only began after World War II. In this book, the nineteenth century's absence is conspicuous - few have considered that era seriously, much less written books on it. But as this author shows, the foundation of the movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade.

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