Many significant global challenges are embedded within social, economic and political systems that transcend national borders (Drinkwater, Rizvi and Edge, 2019: 5). One issue that sits at the intersection of these transnational processes is slavery. Mainstream analyses tend to present slavery in two distinct phases: ‘historical’ slavery as a legal institution abolished in the nineteenth century; and ‘new’ (Bales, 2004) or ‘modern’ slavery (Kara, 2017) as a separate phenomenon, which is primarily associated in the policy literature with criminality in the global South. In these ways slavery is frequently de-coupled from the transnational systems that have shaped and continue to shape it. Recent global events involving the removal of statues have renewed focus not only on the historical legacies and contemporary manifestations of slavery, but their connections to transnational systems. While there is a need for education to explore historical slavery there is a pressing need to consider the contemporary slavery, and the relationships between these forms (Quirk, 2009). This article proposes a framework of critical development education and history education, across conceptual, didactic, affective and active domains to support educational practices that challenge dominant Eurocentric discourses to address the complexities of contemporary forms of slavery.