The conclusion summarises the answers to the book’s four animating questions: How did modern slavery emerge on the global political agenda? Where do key actors in the global antislavery network draw the boundary between free and unfree labour? How does the multifaceted approach to modern slavery keep the different legal domains to which unfree labour is assigned from clashing? How do attempts to govern transnational forms of unfree labour reconfigure sovereignty? It argues that modern slavery laws attempt to mediate the escalating tensions around borders and markets created by neoliberal capitalism’s reliance on managed migration and free trade as engines of accumulation. Probing the social relations that propelled transnational modern slavery law, it reveals that the border between free and unfree labour is a contested and gendered act of governance operating across different scales. It concludes by considering the vexed question: what makes labour ‘free’?

After profiling a disabled woman who lives by her wits and a meeting of potential guest workers in Jamaica who were subjected to the humiliations of labor recruiters, I raise the central questions that guide the narrative. Why does conventional economics ignore so many forms of labor? What roles do reproductive, domestic productive, cultural, and other forms of labor play in economies? How do they provide theoretical clues to understanding the world's many economies? The chapter ends with a brief history of the preoccupation among early states and employers with labor control, which has been at the heart of today's guest worker programs.