Slavery: System under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work

This person is usually called a slave and the owner is called a slavemaster. It often means that slaves are forced to work, or else they will be punished by the law (if slavery is legal in that place) or by their master.

There is evidence that even before there was writing, there was slavery. There have been different types of slavery, and they have been in almost all cultures and continents. Some societies had laws about slavery, or had an economy that was built on it. Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome had many slaves.

During the 20th century, almost all countries made laws forbidding slavery. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that slavery is wrong. Slavery is now banned by international law. Nevertheless, there are still different forms of slavery in some countries. The Islamic Republic of Mauritania was the last country in the world to officially ban slavery. In 2007, "under international pressure", its government passed a law allowing slaveholders to be prosecuted.

However, in 2019, approximately 40 million people, were still enslaved throughout the world despite slavery being illegal. About 26% of these were children. In the modern world, more than half of the people who are slaves provide forced labour, usually in the factories and sweatshops of the private sector of a country's economy.

In industrialised countries, human trafficking is a modern form of the slave trade. In non-industrialised countries, enslavement by debt bondage is a common form of enslaving a person. Modern forms of slavery include captive domestic servants, people in forced marriages, and child soldiers.

The English word "slave" comes from the medieval word for the Slavic peoples of Central Europe and Eastern Europe, because these were the last ethnic group to be captured and enslaved in Central Europe. According to Adam Smith and Auguste Comte, a slave was mainly defined as a captive or prisoner of war. Slave-holders used to buy slaves at slave auctions. In many cases, slaves were not allowed rights.

Slavery has existed for a long time. Early hunter-gatherers had no use for slaves. They did everything for themselves. Having another pair of hands to help them meant another mouth to feed. Slavery or owning another person made no sense to these people. Once men gathered in cities and towns and there was more than enough food, having a cheap supply of labor made sense. This is when the earliest forms of slavery appeared. Slavery can be traced back to the earliest records, such as the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1760 BC). This refers to it as an established institution.

In the Ancient Near East, captives got by warfare often became slaves. This was seen by the laws in the Bible book of Deuteronomy as a legal form of slavery. But the Israelites were not allowed to enslave other Israelites. The Deuteronomic Code calls for the death penalty for the crime of kidnapping Israelites to enslave them.

In Ancient Egypt, slaves were mainly prisoners of war. Other ways people could become slaves was by inheriting the status from their parents who were slaves. Someone could become a slave if he could not pay his debts. People also sold themselves into slavery because they were poor peasants and needed food and shelter. The lives of slaves were normally better than that of peasants. Young slaves could not be put to hard work, and had to be brought up by the mistress of the household. Not all slaves went to houses. Some sold themselves to temples, or were assigned to temples by the king.

In many places, citizens were partly or fully protected from being enslaved, so most slaves were foreigners.

 

Slaves were important in society and the economy of ancient Rome. They did simple manual labor and domestic services, but also could have complex jobs and professions. Teachers, accountants, and physicians were often slaves. Greek slaves were often well educated. Most slaves, such as those who were made slaves as punishment, worked on farms, in mines, and at mills. Their living conditions were very bad, and they did not live for very long.

Slaves were considered property under Roman law and were not legally people. Unlike Roman citizens, they could suffer corporal punishment, sexual exploitation (sex workers were often slaves), torture, and summary execution. A slave's testimony could not be accepted in a court of law unless the slave was tortured. This was because they thought that slaves would be too loyal to their masters to reveal damaging evidence unless coerced. Over time, however, slaves gained some legal protection, including the right to file complaints against their masters. Attitudes changed in part because of the influence among the educated elite of the Stoics, whose egalitarian views of humanity extended to slaves, and also because of slave rebellions. Better treatment meant fewer rebellions.

Roman slaves could hold property which, even though it belonged to their masters, they were allowed to use as if it were their own. Upper class slaves were allowed to earn their own money. With enough money they could buy their freedom.

After the Roman Empire broke up, slavery gradually changed into serfdom. Which was similar to slavery but the worker received a set amount of wages and had certain civil rights and could leave the employment of the master.

Both non-Muslims and Muslims in Southeast Asia during the 18th century bought Japanese girls who came by sea. Japanese slave girls were still owned by India-based Portuguese (Lusitanian) families according to Francisco De Sousa, a Jesuit who wrote about that in 1698. This was long after the 1636 edict by Tokguawa Japan had expelled Portuguese people.

China imported Korean slaves and Indochinese slaves.

Japanese children in medieval Japan could be taken as slaves if debts were not repaid by their parents. Japanese parents sold their daughters to Portuguese in Kyushu. Japanese children and women from the Bungo domain were sold as slaves to Europeans in Higo after Bungo was attacked in 1586 by the Satsuma domain.

 

Historians estimate that between 650 AD and the 1960s, 10 to 18 million people were enslaved by Arab slave traders. They were taken from Europe, Asia and Africa across the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara desert. Male slaves were often employed as servants, soldiers, or workers by their owners. Many male slaves were castrated. It has been claimed that as many as six out of every ten boys bled to death during the process, though the source may not be reliable. Eunuchs fetched a higher price: that made castration worthwhile. According to Ronald Segal, author of Islam’s Black Slaves: the other black diaspora (2002), "The calipha in Baghdad at the beginning of the 10th Century had 7,000 black eunuchs and 4,000 white eunuchs in his palace”. Women and children taken as slaves were mainly used as servants and concubines. While the later Atlantic slave trade concentrated on men for labor, the Arab slave trade started with men and boys, but shifted over time to concentrate more on woman and young girls for sexual purposes. By the 1900s, Arab slave traders had taken between 10 and 18 million slaves out of Africa.

For four centuries, beginning in the late 15th century, millions of Africans were taken as slaves by Europeans. Europeans began exporting Africans to the New World as a source of cheap labor on colonial plantations.

Between 1452 and 1455, Pope Nicolas V issued a series of papal bulls authorizing the Portuguese to take African slaves. At first slave traders raided coastal areas and carried black people off. But the mines and fields of the colonies needed more and more slaves. In the early 16th century Spain began to issue licenses and contracts to supply slaves. By the 1750s large slaving companies were established. Most of Europe at the time was involved in the slave trade.

 

Many Europeans who arrived in North America during the 17th and 18th centuries came under contract as indentured servants. The change from indentured servitude to slavery was a gradual process in Virginia. The earliest legal documentation of such a shift was in 1640. This is where an African, John Punch, was sentenced to lifetime slavery for attempting to run away. This case also marked the disparate treatment of Africans as held by the Virginia County Court, where two white runaways received far lesser sentences.

After 1640, planters started to ignore the expiration of indentured contracts. They kept their servants as slaves for life. This was demonstrated by the case Johnson v. Parker. The court ruled that John Casor, an indentured servant, be returned to Johnson who claimed that Casor belonged to him for his life. According to the 1860 U. S. census, 393,975 individuals, representing 8% of all US families, owned 3,950,528 slaves. One-third of Southern families owned slaves. Slavery in United States was legally abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865.

Millions of people are still slaves in some parts of the world, mostly in South Asia and Africa. It is less common in the developed world because of better law enforcement, but it still happens there as well. The ways in which it is done have changed. While people are still bought at sold, like beforehand, this is less common today. Today, people get trapped in slave-like conditions in other ways. Modern slavery is often linked with poverty. There are countries and areas, where people are poorly-educated, and where there is little or no rule of law. This can create a setting where slavery is seen as acceptable. It is commonly seen in impoverished countries, and those where there are vulnerable minorities. Tens of thousands of people work in slave-like conditions in industries such as mining, farming, and factories; they produce goods for consumption inside the country or export to more prosperous nations.

In the older form of slavery, slave-owners spent more on getting slaves. It was more difficult for them to be disposed of. The cost of keeping them healthy was considered a better investment than getting another slave to replace them. In modern slavery people are easier to get at a lower price so replacing them when exploiters run into problems becomes easier.

Modern slavery can be quite profitable. Corrupt governments tacitly allow it, even thoug it is outlawed by international treaties such as Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery and local laws. Total annual revenues of traffickers were estimated in 2014 to over $150 billion, though profits are substantially lower. In 1809, American slaves were sold for around the equivalent of US$40,000 in today's money. Today, a slave can be bought for $90–$100. Bales explains, "This is an economic crime ... People do not enslave people to be mean to them; they do it to make a profit."

Today, slaves may work because of things like a high debt. Many victims are told that their families will be harmed if they report the slave owners. Many slaves are forced to be domestic servants. In some cases, their families sell their children because of poverty. Some slaves have been trafficked from one part of the world to another. These people are illegally in their host country, and therefore do not report the abuse. Forced prostitution is a type of slavery. Another form of slavery still happening today is forced child labor. Some children have to work in mines or in plantations, or they have to fight wars as child soldiers.

One study says that there are 27 million people (but others say there could be as many as 200 million) in slavery today.

Other terms that describe the recruitement of laborers, and that may have similarities to slavery are Blackbirding, Impressment and Shanghaiing.

Countries

 

Some of the countries where there is still slavery are in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. In summer 2007, 570 people were found to be slaves for brick makers in China. They included 69 children. The Chinese government made a force of 35,000 police check northern Chinese brick kilns for slaves, and sent lots of kiln supervisors and officials to prison and sentenced one kiln foreman to death for killing a worker who was a slave.

In Mauritania, it is thought that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are^[when?] slaves, and that many of them are used as bonded labour. Slavery in Mauritania was made illegal in August 2007. In Niger, there is also much slavery. A Nigerien study has found that more than 800,000 people are slaves, almost 8% of the population. Child slavery has commonly been used when making cash crops and mining. According to the United States Department of State, more than 109,000 children were working on cocoa farms alone in Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) in 'the worst forms of child labour' in 2002.

 

In November 2006, the International Labour Organization said that it would prosecute members of the junta that rules Myanmar (also called Burma) at the International Court of Justice for "Crimes against Humanity". This is because the military makes some citizens do forced labour. The International Labour Organisation says that it thinks that about 800,000 people are forced to work this way.

In the 2010s, ISIL (or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), were taking part in slave trade (of non-Muslim women), on the largest territory that they controlled.^[source?] Scholars of Islamic law have condemned the revival of the slave trade of non-Muslim women by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Starting in the 18th century, there were ideas of stopping or banning slavery.^[source?] Many of these were done in territories that were part of the British Empire, or in its sphere of influence. The movement of wanting to stop slavery is called abolitionism. People such as William Wilberforce, John Newton, and Olaudah Equiano were well-known in the movement. In 1833, the British Empire stopped slavery.^[source?] In artile 118 of the Congress of Vienna, there's a statement that slavery is bad. Laws in britain stopped the atlantic slave trade. The American Civil War ended slavery in the United States in 1865. There was the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1865, when the North won, all slaves were made free. Still more countries abolished slavery afterwards. Pedro II of Brazil abolished it in 1888. Forced labor however continued, either against the law or by debt peonage or other methods which the laws of the various countries did not count as slavery. France abolished slavery in 1794 during the Revolution. In 1802, it was restored under Napoleon.

 

• Lovejoy P.E. 2012. Transformations of slavery: a history of slavery in Africa. London: Cambridge University Press.
• Stillwell, Sean 2013. Slavery and slaving in African history, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
• Thornton, John. 1998. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. Cambridge University Press.
• Eden, Jeff 2018. Slavery and Empire in Central Asia. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-63732-9.
• Gordon, Murray 1989. Slavery in the Arab World. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-941533-30-0
• Drescher, Seymour 2009. Abolition: a history of slavery and antislavery. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-48296-7.
• Westermann, William Linn 1955. The slave systems of Greek and Roman antiquity. American Philosophical Society. ISBN 978-0-87169-040-1

• Aesop circa 6th century BC
• Spartacus (died 71 BC)
• Epictetus (about AD 55 - AD 125)
• Pope Callixtus I (died AD 222)
• Saint Patrick (about AD 387-461)
• Olaudah Equiano (about 1745-1790)
• George John Scipio Africanus (1763-1834)
• Denmark Vesey (about 1767-1822)
• Sojourner Truth (about 1797-1883)
• Dred Scott (about 1799-1845)
• Nat Turner (1800-1831)
• Solomon Northup (about 1808-1863)
• Harriet Jacobs (about 1813-1897)
• Frederick Douglass (about 1818-1895)
• Harriet Tubman (1820-1913)
• Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)

• Crimes against humanity
• Debt bondage
• Unfree labour
• Serfdom
• Human trafficking
• Slave trade
• Sexual slavery
• American Civil War