What is it about?
It is a book review of Judy Fudge’s Constructing Modern Slavery: Law, Capitalism, and Unfree Labour—and it’s essentially about how “modern slavery” is understood, and why that framing can be misleading
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Why is it important?
This review is important because it challenges how we think about “modern slavery” and shows that exploitation is not just about isolated abuses, but is deeply connected to law, capitalism, and global inequality. It highlights how current legal and policy approaches can sometimes mask the structural causes of exploitation rather than resolve them, urging a more critical and historically grounded understanding of labour injustice.
Perspectives
Understanding and stopping "modern slavery” isn’t just about preventing criminals from doing bad things. We need to understand how systems work in the past and in the present like, law, capitalism, and global inequality and how they contribute to creating conditions where exploitation thrives.
Professor Foluke Ifejola Adebisi
University of Bristol
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Judy Fudge: Constructing Modern Slavery: Law, Capitalism, and Unfree Labour, Feminist Legal Studies, April 2026, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s10691-026-09608-4.
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