Children of Other Worlds - Exploitation in the Global Market

This book is a reflection on children and their social function, drawing largely upon a comparison between industrial Britain in the early nineteenth century and present-day Bangladesh. It is not intended to offer a comprehensive view of child work-in any case, the literature on it is already so extensive that I would hesitate to add to it, if 1 did not feel that there are other ways of approaching the issue than the pietistic (saving the children), prejudged (children should never work), fatalistic (the children of the poor must work to support their families), bureaucratic (it may be possible to eliminate some of the worst abuses) or economistic (when countries get rich as we have become rich, child labour will wither away). It is a commonplace that the satanic mills of the early industrial era in Britain have been relocated in the Third World. My starting point was that it might be useful to observe the similarities in the lives shaped by them, both historically and in the present time. The obvious question is what are the effects of another culture, another tradition, another climate? How does child labour in a South Asian, predominantly Muslim, country at the beginning of the twenty-first century differ from child labour in a cold Christian land of the early nineteenth?