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He also serves on the Board of Directors of the International Cocoa Initiative. His book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, published in 1999, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and has now been published in ten other languages. Archbishop Desmond Tutu called it “a well researched, scholarly and deeply disturbing exposé of modern slavery”. A revised edition was published in 2005. In 2006, his work was named one of the top “100 World-Changing Discoveries” by the association of British universities.

The Italian edition of Disposable People won the Premio Viareggio for services to humanity in 2000, and the documentary based on his work, which he co-wrote, Slavery: A Global Investigation, won the Peabody Award for 2000 and two Emmy Awards in 2002. He was awarded the Laura Smith Davenport Human Rights Award in 2005; the Judith Sargeant Murray Award for Human Rights in 2004; and the Human Rights Award of the University of Alberta in 2003. He is a Trustee of Anti-Slavery International and was a consultant to the United Nations Global Program on Trafficking of Human Beings. Bales has been invited to advise the US, British, Irish, Norwegian, and Nepali governments, as well as the governments of the Economic Community of West African States, on the formulation of policy on slavery and human trafficking. He recently edited an Anti-Human Trafficking Toolkit for the United Nations, and published, with the Human Rights Center at Berkeley, a report on forced labor in the USA, and completed a two-year study of human trafficking into the US for the National Institute of Justice. He is working with the chocolate industry to remove child and slave labor from the product chain, and writing on contemporary slavery (see for example his feature article in the April 2002 Scientific American). His book Understanding Global Slavery was published in September 2005. He is the author of New Slavery: A Reference Handbook (revised 2nd ed. 2005). His book Ending Slavery, a roadmap for the global eradication of slavery, was published in September 2007. He is currently editing a collection of modern slave narratives, and co-writing a book on slavery in the United States today with Ron Soodalter. He gained his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics.

Ben Skinner, born in 1976, was raised in Wisconsin and northern Nigeria, where his father had served as a British colonial administrator. He first learned about slavery as a child in Quaker meeting. The Quakers, who believed that the divine spark animates every man, were the first abolitionists. Skinner’s Sunday school teachers spent as much time on Harriet Tubman and William Lloyd Garrison as they did on Moses and Jesus.

Skinner himself comes from abolitionist stock. His great-great-grandfather, Robert Pratt, served with the 1st Connecticut Artillery at the Siege of Petersburg, the ten-month campaign which bled white the Confederate Army and led to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Pratt’s uncle was a comb-maker too old to serve at the time, but not too old to make fiery antislavery speeches. When one of his distributors told him his abolitionist talk was hurting sales in the south, he exploded: “If they won’t buy my Yankee combs, then let them go lousy!”

In 2003, as a writer on assignment in Sudan for Newsweek International, Skinner met his first survivor of slavery. He had first flown in under enemy radar with an Evangelical group purporting to buy slaves en masse to secure their freedom. Afterwards, on his own, he hitched a ride on a U.N. Cessna to the frontlines of the north-south Sudanese civil war. There he met Muong Nyong. Like Skinner, Nyong was 27 at the time, and pondering what to do with the rest of his life. Unlike Skinner, he had spent the first part of that life in bondage.

After meeting Nyong, Skinner traveled the globe to find others like him. Scholars estimate the total number of modern-day slaves is greater than at any point in history. But the number means nothing, unless slavery means something. Skinner adopted a narrow definition: slaves are forced to work, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence.

Though there are more slaves today than ever before, finding them would prove the most daunting challenge of Skinner’s professional life. Slaves languish in shadows, kept hidden by violent traffickers and masters. Going undercover when necessary, Skinner infiltrated trafficking networks and slave quarries, urban child markets and illegal brothels. In the process, he became the first person in history to observe the sales of human beings on four continents.