There are 27 million slaves alive today - more than at any point in history. This number is also greater than the total population stolen from Africa during four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade.

Written by the world’s leading experts and campaigners, this book blends original research with shocking first-hand accounts from the slaves themselves to reveal the truth behind one of the worst humanitarian crises facing us today.

Conservative estimates put the number of enslaved people in the US at 40,000, with about 14,000-17,500 new people being trafficked into the country per year. Worldwide, slaves are also weaving carpets, cleaning houses, and picking cotton – all to keep prices for you the consumer, at a bargain.

Only a handful of slaves are reached and freed each year, but the authors offer hope for the future with a global blueprint that proposes to end slavery in our lifetime and shut down a market that has transformed human beings into something cheap and disposable.

Kevin Bales is the world's leading expert on modern slavery, president of Free the Slaves, and advisor to the UN and the US and British governments. His book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, US.

Zoe Trodd teaches in the history and literature department at Harvard University.

Alex Kent Williamson, of Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard University, is a board-certified pathologist who specializes in pediatric and forensic pathology.

"Modern Slavery is the most riveting exposee I've read in recent years and should forever redfine the phase "economic injustice." Barbara Ehrenreich, award-winning journalist and bestselling author, whose books include 'Nickel and Dimed' and 'Global Woman'

"A dazzling work of scholarship and protest, a clarion call that will, like the abolitionist literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, awaken people to the dehumanizing effects of global capitalism. Bales, Trodd, and Williamson are leading the way in the effort to end modern slavery." John Stauffer, award-winning author and one of the world's leading scholars of antislavery movements