"Confronting the Issue of Modern Slavery in International Supply Chains in the UK, 1897 to 1997"

In 2015, the United Kingdom passed the Modern Slavery Act, which requires British firms to take steps to eliminate unfree labour from their global supply chains. While often presented as a novel legislative breakthrough, this paper argues that similar proposals have surfaced repeatedly over the past century. In fact, proposals for laws similar in spirit to the 2015 MSA were discussed in parliament before the Great War. Our paper traces the long history of British efforts to confront forced labour in international commerce, discussing such episodes as the 1897 customs regulations, the Cadbury chocolate scandal, the 1911 Putamayo scandal, the outcry over the import of timber from the USSR during the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine.
The paper also explores later episodes using archival material from the National Archives and the records of Anti-Slavery International held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. We measure levels of media and policymaker attention to this issue and show that it fluctuated dramatically, vanishing during periods of total war and then reappearing in periods of peace, as in the pre-1914 and post-1989 periods.
Ultimately, the paper presents a theoretically informed causal model that explains why policymaker interest in the topic of modern slavery in suppy chains varied so dramatically over the period observed. Geopolitical context looms large in our model as a factor that explains whether or not policymakers in a given year will pay much attention to the issue of unfree labour in supply chains. By placing recent legislation in historical context, it highlights the enduring challenges of enforcing ethical standards in global trade. Our theoretical contribution is that we build on the public arenas model to develop a generalizable model for understanding why policymaker interest in this issue varies over time. We also identify lessons for policy practice.