Summary

The League of Nations and the International Labour Organization (ILO) turned to the problems of slavery and forced labor in the context of a general program to promote welfare and social justice as the foundations of a lasting peace after World War I. Their initiatives for abolition and labor regulation, global in scope but focused mainly on Africa, were driven forward by humanitarians and defined ultimately by colonial interests. While the colonial powers attempted to induce the League and the ILO to accommodate their coercive labor systems in Africa, they also proved positively responsive to critical international oversight and especially to the charge of slavery. Humanitarianism and imperialism intersected most clearly in the case of Ethiopia, with which the League’s work on slavery effectively began and ended. Although the League’s Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery, 1926, and the ILO’s Convention Concerning Forced or Compulsory Labour, 1930, had limited constructive effects on colonial labor systems in Africa between the wars, they laid important groundwork in international law for the long-term development of new norms in the rights of labor worldwide.