Tiago Ferreira on Modern Day Slavery: A Reading of Orwell's Animal Farm

Pedro Tiago Ferreira, University of Lisbon, Faculty of Arts and School of Law, is publishing Modern Day Slavery: A Reading of Orwell's Animal Farm in series Iii, No. 11, of the Revista Anglo Saxonia (2016). Here is the abstract.

This article intends to call attention to the fact that slavery is not solely a legal institution. The rules that make up the institution of slavery are also social, moral and religious. This means that the revocation of the legal rules which are a component of the institution of slavery is not enough to abolish the institution as a whole. In order to understand the weight that the non-legal rules have on modern slavery—i.e. slavery which is not condoned by the law—George Orwell’s Animal Farm is discussed, as this tale of apparent liberation turns out to be one of de facto, or modern day, slavery. Before turning to Animal Farm, I discuss slavery as an institution, and whether or not it still remains a legal possibility in the United States.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.