Columbia University Press
Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia
Key Metrics
- Siddharth Kara
- Columbia University Press
- Paperback
- 9780231158497
- 8.8 X 5.8 X 0.9 inches
- 0.97 pounds
- Business & Economics > Labor - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Drawing on eleven years of research in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, Kara delves into an ancient and ever-evolving mode of slavery that ensnares roughly six out of every ten slaves in the world and generates profits that exceeded $17.6 billion in 2011. In addition to providing a thorough economic, historical, and legal overview of bonded labor, Kara travels to the far reaches of South Asia, from cyclone-wracked southwestern Bangladesh to the Thar desert on the India-Pakistan border, to uncover the brutish realities of such industries as hand-woven-carpet making, tea and rice farming, construction, brick manufacture, and frozen-shrimp production. He describes the violent enslavement of millions of impoverished men, women, and children who toil in the production of numerous products at minimal cost to the global market. He also follows supply chains directly to Western consumers, vividly connecting regional bonded labor practices to the appetites of the world. Kara's pioneering analysis encompasses human trafficking, child labor, and global security, and he concludes with specific initiatives to eliminate the system of bonded labor from South Asia once and for all.
Author Bio
Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher, screenwriter, and activist on modern slavery. He an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a Visiting Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health. Kara has authored three books on modern slavery: Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2009); Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia (2012); and Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective (2017), each with Columbia University Press. Kara adapted Sex Trafficking into a Hollywood film, Trafficked, which held its world premiere at the United Nations in New York.
Sex Trafficking also won the prestigious Frederick Douglass book prize at Yale University for the best non-fiction book on slavery. Kara has also authored the reports: Tainted Carpets: Slavery and Child Labor in India's Hand-Made Carpet Sector (Harvard, 2014), and Tainted Garments: The Exploitation of Women and Girls in India's Home-Based Garment Sector (UC Berkeley, 2019). He is working on a fourth book about the horrors of cobalt mining in the Congo.
Across twenty years of almost entirely self-funded research, Kara has traveled to more than fifty countries to document the cases of several thousand slaves of all kinds. He has mapped global human trafficking networks, explored the perilous underground of trafficked sex slaves, and traced global supply chains of numerous commodities tainted by slavery and child labor. Kara advises several UN agencies and numerous governments on anti-slavery policy and law.
He has also appeared extensively in the media as an expert on modern slavery, including on CNN, the BBC, the Guardian, CNBC, National Geographic, and numerous documentary films. Previously, Kara was an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, then ran his own finance and M&A consulting firm. He holds a Law degree from England, MBA from Columbia University, and BA from Duke University.
Source: Harvard University
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