The Moment Is Now: Carl Bernhard Wadström’s Revolutionary Voice on Human Trafficking and the Abolition of the African Slave Trade
In 1787, the king Gustav III of Sweden had commissioned Wadström to lead an expedition to West Africa to assess the possibility of establishing a Swedish colony there. But once he arrived, Wadström was so horrified by the practices he witnessed surrounding the slave trade that he would devote the rest of his life to ending slavery, and he never returned to Sweden but settled down in England and spent the last years of his life in France.
Although the focus of this book is the historical slave trade, the contributions take care to remind us that the issue of slavery is not just one of the past. Human trafficking is a crime that still affects millions of people across the globe, in virtually every country, and it flourishes in part because its dynamics are poorly understood. This book carries the hope that knowledge of the past will carry forward and help change the present.