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"Chillingly described." - New York Times
"Sober, well-researched, pioneering ... A convincing and moving book" - Financial Times "Accessible ... Serious, impassioned, and unflinching." - The National Post "Avoiding easy moralism and sensationalism alike, it discloses the daily soul-destroying brutality of slavery on our planet today." - Christian Science Monitor Slavery is illegal throughout the world, yet more than twenty-seven million people are still trapped in one of history's oldest social institutions. Kevin Bales's disturbing story of slavery today reaches from brick kilns in Pakistan and brothels in Thailand to the offices of multinational corporations. His investigation of conditions in Mauritania, Brazil, Thailand, Pakistan, and India reveals the tragic emergence of a "new slavery," one intricately linked to the global economy. The new slaves are not a long-term investment as was true with older forms of slavery, explains Bales. Instead, they are cheap, require little care, and are disposable. Bales's vivid case studies present actual slaves, slaveholders, and public officials in well-drawn historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. He observes the complex economic relationships of modern slavery and is aware that liberation is a bitter victory for a child prostitute or an enslaved miner if the result is starvation. Bales offers suggestions for combating the new slavery and provides examples of very positive results from organizations such as Anti-Slavery International, the Pastoral Land Commission in Brazil, and the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan. He also calls for researchers to follow the flow of raw materials and products from slave to marketplace in order to effectively target campaigns of "naming and shaming" corporations linked to slavery. Disposable People is the first book to point the way to abolishing slavery in today's global economy. Disposable People is available in: German, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Arabic and Japanese. All of the author's royalties from this book go to fund anti-slavery projects around the world. |
