Introduction

When promoting his newly invented roller spinning machine in Britain's textile industry, John Wyatt wrote in 1741: ‘Adopting the machine, a Clothier formerly employing a hundred spinners might turn off thirty of the best of them but employ an additional ten infirm people or children …’ The attorney general was won over and, in granting a patent to the invention, noted with awe how ‘even Children of five or six Years of age’ could operate the machine.

Commending an invention for its ability to facilitate child labour or upholding children's work as an instrument to out-compete other nations in global trade are now matters of distant history. In fact, quite soon after Mr Wyatt's invention began replacing adults with children, Britain started to discuss policy for curbing child labour, which culminated in Robert Peel's Factories Act, 1802. By the end of the nineteenth century child labour was on the decline in most industrialized nations. However, the global child labour problem did not come to an end. As data began to emerge from developing countries, it was evident that child labour, especially some of the worst forms found mainly in factories and the manufacturing sector, had simply shifted to the Third World.

Over the last ten years, thanks to serious effort at collecting data, we have come to acquire a fairly good picture of the global map of child labour.