Modern slavery originated offshore outsourcing that still hides production conditions

Evidence

Racially produced and enacted slavery (and indentured labor from Asia in its wake, as Lisa Lowe is now showing), in short, is western modernity’s shadow. Outsourcing of jobs, the production of resources and manufactured goods are not recent phenomena but a constitutive feature of modern political economy from its earliest formative moments. Modern slavery initiates outsourcing, hiding the conditions of the cheap production of goods by shipping production offshore, to the South in the case of the US, generally to the periphery. This “elsewhere-ness” hides not only the inhumane conditions under which outsourced production takes place. It thus hides too the conditions making possible less expensive and otherwise more comfortable lives especially for those, or at least for those who could afford it, in the northern hemisphere. And it equally covers over the brutal sources of wealth creation in Europe and the US. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 842

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the Milgrom law-merchant material (offshore/peripheral institutions hiding conditions) and the Grafting & Growth essay’s theme of infrastructural extraction whose human cost stays invisible.
• SEED: Wire this claim into the outsourcing-of-production essay angle: modern sweatshop outsourcing is not a late-20th-century novelty but the constitutive logic of modernity itself.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 842