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      Historicizing Modern Slavery: Free-Grown Sugar as an Ethics-Driven Market Category in Nineteenth-Century Britain

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      1 , , 2
      Journal of Business Ethics
      Springer Netherlands
      Slavery, Market categories, Consumption ethics

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          Abstract

          The modern slavery literature engages with history in an extremely limited fashion. Our paper demonstrates to the utility of historical research to modern slavery researchers by explaining the rise and fall of the ethics-driven market category of “free-grown sugar” in nineteenth-century Britain. In the first decades of the century, the market category of “free-grown sugar” enabled consumers who were opposed to slavery to pay a premium for a more ethical product. After circa 1840, this market category disappeared, even though considerable quantities of slave-grown sugar continued to arrive into the UK. We explain the disappearance of the market category. Our paper contributes to the on-going debates about slavery in management by historicizing and thus problematizing the concept of “slavery”. The paper challenges those modern slavery scholars who argue that lack of consumer knowledge about product provenance is the main barrier to the elimination of slavery from today’s international supply chains. The historical research presented in this paper suggests that consumer indifference, rather than simply ignorance, may be the more fundamental problem. The paper challenges the optimistic historical metanarrative that pervades much of the research on ethical consumption. It highlights the fragility of ethics-driven market categories, offering lessons for researchers and practitioners seeking to tackle modern slavery.

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          Most cited references103

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              An Exploratory Study into the Factors Impeding Ethical Consumption

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                adasmith@liverpool.ac.uk
                Jennifer.johns@bristol.ac.uk
                Journal
                J Bus Ethics
                J Bus Ethics
                Journal of Business Ethics
                Springer Netherlands (Dordrecht )
                0167-4544
                1573-0697
                28 October 2019
                28 October 2019
                2020
                : 166
                : 2
                : 271-292
                Affiliations
                [1 ]GRID grid.10025.36, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 8470, University of Liverpool Management School, ; Chatham St, Liverpool, L69 7ZH UK
                [2 ]GRID grid.5337.2, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 7603, Department of Management, , University of Bristol, ; 12A Priory Rd, Bristol, BS8 1TU UK
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8589-7608
                Article
                4318
                10.1007/s10551-019-04318-1
                7510010
                32981996
                ed0a4c8f-6123-4c9c-ac30-a178d4b83195
                © The Author(s) 2019

                Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

                History
                : 1 October 2018
                : 15 October 2019
                Funding
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100002992, Department for International Development, UK Government;
                Award ID: TS170023
                Award Recipient :
                Categories
                Original Paper
                Custom metadata
                © Springer Nature B.V. 2020

                slavery,market categories,consumption ethics
                slavery, market categories, consumption ethics

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