Comparative Forced Labour Paper Update

Today I got a first complete draft of my comparative forced labour paper done for the proposed conference in Ho. Although nobody has heard from the German conference organizers in Berlin yet I am still going to finish the manuscript. I also still feel that the sections on Africa, particularly the specific case studies of Angola and Mozambique under the Portuguese and Rhodesia under the British are the weakest parts of the paper. So if the conference does not come through those sections will be stripped out when I revise the manuscript for publication elsewhere. The current draft is over 10,000 words right now so ripping out a couple of thousand words won't really hurt it in terms of heft. Right now I am still hoping that the conference will still be going forward as planned in January and that the proceedings will be published as a book. If nothing else I have considerably increased my knowledge of how forced labour worked in Portuguese Mozambique and learning new things is something we should all try and do on a regular basis.