The chapter describes the central place of the four Neapolitan conservatories in the development of string pedagogy. New archival evidence and a reassessment of known documents allow the analysis of the financial and administrative structure of these educational institutions, the reconstruction of the artistic networks, and the admission process and daily teaching schedule of students. While the conservatories could guarantee a professional future to the children enrolled, the figlioli in turn constituted the main economic resource for these institutions. The pedagogical methods applied in these institutes were based on years of absolute dedication that exploited child labor. This systematic, if arduous, approach to music education played a crucial part in the professional training of the Neapolitan musicians and fostered the emergence of virtuosi whose fame became widespread in Europe. The details of the career of Giovanni Carlo Cailò, a Roman violinist who moved to Naples with Scarlatti and became the most influential string teacher in two of the four conservatories, explain the role and influence of a famed string maestro. A generation of eighteenth-century violin and cello virtuosi formed under Cailò contributed to disseminate the fame of the excellence of the string school established in the Neapolitan conservatories.

Generations after the end of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (TAST), West African digital creative writers imagine newer iterations of slavery or recreate parodies of the TAST. Whether a story revolves around a street child hawking goods in Accra traffic, or a gifted child who is trafficked from a village in Nigeria to America, these short stories perpetuate fears of—but also resistance to—new forms of trafficking and labor exploitation that are endemic in the West African sub-region. While research has examined the ways in which these tropes appear in cheap popular fiction, not much has been done regarding new media, such as online short fiction, which is avidly consumed by West African youth. This chapter uses two short stories to interrogate different types of slavery in online spaces and to explore literary choices that inform the treatment of this theme in the digital age.

This chapter first provides a glimse of the development of international labor rights movement. It then discusses the concept of labor rights including the right to strike. It explores the issues of equal opportunity and equal treatment, right to unionize and collective bargaining, freedom from forced and compulsory labor, and child labor, four so-called “core labor standards,” and their status under international and regional human rights law. The chapter also examines the relationship among labor rights, migration and globalization, focusing on the issues of how to promote workers’ rights effectively in developing countries in the global economy. Labor rights concerning migrant workers are considered as well.

This chapter provides an overview of some of the more common human rights violations with corporate involvement. The non-exhaustive overview aims to provide some initial insights into how corporate conduct can affect and impact human rights and to show the breadth of issues that fall under a BHR lens. Hence, the focus is on problems rather than solutions. The issues and violations dealt with are selected with a view on multinational corporations in particular. Furthermore, the selected issues are cross-cutting – that is, not specific to one particular industry. The chapter covers human rights problems relating to employment relations, corporate supply chains, affected communities, the environment, and particularly vulnerable groups such as Indigenous peoples or human rights defenders. Violations include discrimination, child labor, forced labor and modern slavery, and land grabbing, among others.

Previous generations of ethnographers have described the successful adaptation of children to societies that are themselves successfully adapted to their environment and material circumstances (Korbin 1987b). But, as these patterns of cultural adaptation are stressed by global forces that overwhelm local coping strategies, the lives of children are adversely affected. Anthropologists are prominent in the corps of concerned observers working to understand the contexts in which contemporary children live and to offer ideas to improve their lot (Schwartzman 2001: 15).

We will see that the distinction posed at the outset between cherubs, chattel, and changelings continues to apply in the present and into the future. In the neontocracy, the elevation of children to god-like cherubs, and corollary expense, show no signs of slowing. Among the poor, parents continue to seek the means to divest themselves of unwanted changelings or to convert their offspring to usable chattel.

Much of the contemporary literature on children identifies the parent–child relationship as central to the functioning of society. Furthermore, this relationship is seen as largely unidirectional. That is, the parent has manifold obligations to his/her child, while the child has few, if any, to his/her parent. However, as we review literature on children in other societies, a very different picture emerges. For example, West African “Ijo perceive of inheritance as flowing from sons to fathers as readily as the reverse” (Hollos and Leis 1989: 29). This contrast is captured in the two “value pyramids” labeled gerontocracy and neontocracy (Figure 1) in the first chapter.

This Chapter was initially drafted during the Obama Administration. The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) had been negotiated and, although it had not yet been ratified in the United States, the Administration and majority of policy makers were in favor of its implementation. Since that time, as previous Chapters have made clear, the United States Administration changed and the United States withdrew from participation in the TPP. While unfortunate, the Administration’s political decision to withdraw from the TPP does not come as a surprise; an examination of the negotiating history of those provisions illuminates a stark political divide within the United States, even prior to the change in Administrations. Fortunately, the other eleven parties to the TPP persevered, resulting in the Comprehensive and Progressive TPP.

This chapter examines the experiences of slaves in various sectors of the economy, including agriculture, manufacturing, mining and domestic labor, as well as banking, commerce and the state bureaucracy.

This chapter explores the intended and unintended actions of rural people and their allies during the War on Poverty who significantly pushed an alternative image of family farm environmental politics onto the urban table of public concern by the 1980s. Farmworker co-ops and consumer-focused activism in the mid-1960s prefigured these consumer-based and child-focused strategies of food activism of the 1980s. War on Poverty organizing in the West and the farmworker movement previewed the powerful potential combination of producer and consumer politics that helped to remake the image of the family farm in the minds of consumers. The emerging image linked everyday choices about food to the broader social and environmental contexts in which children’s health was always paramount. This chapter emphasizes the parallel and connected story of counterculture or alternative agriculture activism of the 1970s and 1980s as well, a movement that emerged to fill the vacuum of trust in industrial agriculture and that saw great successes in bridging the gap between urban consumers and rural producers around concerns for small-scale, local, and pesticide-free foods. But the question was always, Whose children?

This chapter revisits the well-known case involving the death of a child wife in India, Queen-Empress v. Hurree Mohun Mythee. While it is usually assumed that the signs of violence and immaturity found on the corpse of the child wife led to the passage of the Age of Consent Act (1891), this chapter draws on insights from sexuality and science studies to argue that the autopsy served as a technology to construct the child as embodied. It traces the construction of the “child” as a natural category – by medicine, the law, and perhaps more surprisingly, by history – and suggests that the “child” is created by, and serves to obscure, the epistemic contract on age – an implicit agreement that age is a natural measure of legal capacity for all humans, but which can, in fact, be traced to liberal political theory and its dissemination in jurisprudence.

This chapter summarizes the key arguments in the book. The chapter explains why a specific children’s rights focus is granted within the broader business and human rights debates and seeks to move beyond legal fiction to situate businesses as children’s rights duty-bearers. The chapter summarizes the arguments and analysis on how children and their rights are treated within existing normative frameworks on business and human rights. The legalization of business duties and norms specifically related to children’s rights within that context are sketched out. Insights from the four case illustrations are used in refining and defining the need for a forward-looking proposal on duty-bearing, which concludes the chapter.