Siddharth Kara is a tireless chronicler of the human cost of slavery around the world. He has documented the dark realities of modern slavery in order to reveal the degrading and dehumanizing systems that strip people of their dignity for the sake of profit—and to link the suffering of the enslaved to the day-to-day lives of consumers in the West. In Modern Slavery, Kara draws on his many years of expertise to demonstrate the astonishing scope of slavery and offer a concrete path toward its abolition.
From labor trafficking in the U.S. agricultural sector to sex trafficking in Nigeria to debt bondage in the Southeast Asian construction sector to forced labor in the Thai seafood industry, Kara depicts the myriad faces and forms of slavery, providing a comprehensive grounding in the realities of modern-day servitude. Drawing on sixteen years of field research in more than fifty countries around the globe—including revelatory interviews with both the enslaved and their oppressors—Kara sets out the key manifestations of modern slavery and how it is embedded in global supply chains. Slavery offers immense profits at minimal risk through the exploitation of vulnerable subclasses whose brutalization is tacitly accepted by the current global economic order. Kara has developed a business and economic analysis of slavery based on metrics and data that attest to the enormous scale and functioning of these systems of exploitation. Beyond this data-driven approach, Modern Slavery unflinchingly portrays the torments endured by the powerless. This searing exposé documents one of humanity’s greatest wrongs and lays out the framework for a comprehensive plan to eradicate it.
Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher, and activist on modern slavery. He is a British Academy Global Professor and an associate professor of human trafficking and modern slavery at Nottingham University. Kara is the author of Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2008), which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and inspired the film Trafficked (2017), and Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia (2012), both from Columbia University Press. His most recent book is Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives (2022).
Table of Contents
Preface Acknowledgments 1. Modern Slavery: An Overview 2. Sex Trafficking: The Case of Nigeria 3. Labor Trafficking: Slavery at Your Dining Table 4. Organ Trafficking: Sold for Parts 5. Technology and Human Trafficking: Friend and Foe 6. Debt Bondage: Beyond South Asia 7. Global Supply Chains: Blood and the Sea 8. A Framework to Eradicate Slavery Appendix A: Global Slavery Metrics Appendix B: Select Slavery Economics Appendix C: Sample Research Questionnaire Notes Works Cited Index
