When you hear the word slavery, chances are you think of the past. You think of a black field hand in the antebellum South, picking cotton, wearing rags, a bandanna wrapped around his or her head. You don’t think of the chocolate bar you ate yesterday afternoon, or the sugar you swirled into your coffee on the way to work this morning. But these items may be as much a product of slavery today as cotton was in the nineteenth century.
In his book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (University of California Press), Kevin Bales asserts that slavery is alive and well in the world today. Through products produced in the global economy, he says, slavery touches all our lives.
