In this era of heightened awareness of human rights, the title looks like ablasphemy, but bitter truth is often more repugnant than fiction. For instance,presently, a slave costs 1/38th of the price 160 years ago, making the businessvery profitable with a ROI of 8 times.
Throughout history (and even now, though outside law in almost all thecountries) and across cultures, humans have been exploiting their own kind inmany forms, the omnibus term for which is slavery. No timeline can be drawn toshow its formation, growth and decline because of the diversity of its formsand close relationship with a human attribute, domination. It can also beargued that there is no decline in sight, at best the practice is standingstill, in status quo. It was already there, as an established institution inone of the earliest written records, the law code of Hammurabi(Mesopotamia, ca 18th century BCE) . Interestingly, one of the roots of theEnglish word “slave” is the medieval Latin sclavus referring to the peoplesof eastern and central Europe, as many of these people had been capturedand then sold as slaves. The other roots are: the medieval English sclave, theold French esclave and the early Greek sklabos. Also, there are sklabenoi Slavsof Slavic origin, which again is similar to the old Russian slovene, thename of an east Slavic tribe. A Convention on Slavery held in 1926 defined it as “…the status and/or condition of a person over whomany or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised…” Itwould appear from this definition that slaves cannot leave who supposedly ownthem, nor can they leave their master or the place where they are heldwithout an explicit permission to do so. It follows therefore(hypothetically, so to say) that they would be restored to their owners andthat they would be returned to their owners should they escape. Thus a systemof slavery compared to the isolated instances of bonded or forced labour in anysociety would require official, legal recognition of ownership, or widespreadunrecorded agreements from local authorities by masters who wield someinfluence because of their social and/or economic status. The first is asituation not exactly tenable at present while the second is possible when thepowers that be look the other way. An illustration of this is the recent (2007)press report of captive brick kiln workers in the People’s Republicof (Communist) China.
According to the International Labour Office (ILO) forced labour is “allwork or service which is extracted from any person under the menace of anypenalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily”.There are, of course, exceptions to this, such as, compulsory military serviceor conscription, forced labour to which convicted criminals are subjected to,essential services needed by a state during emergencies and community servicesto be performed by an individual (ordered by the judiciary) for minorinfractions of the law. Using their own defining terms, the InternanationalLabour Organization insist that all child labour is nothing but forced labour.While that makes sense upto a point (child labour also brings monetary benefitsto the family) there are sections of people who use the word slavery in unusualcontexts. Using the notion of economic coercion, some anarchists, communistsand socialists denounce many forms of employment as wage slavery or economicslavery where employees are paid significantly low wages or given money notenough for sustenance, thus leaving them in perpetually semi-starvedconditions. Anarcho-capitalists and libertarians compare taxes imposed bygovernments on people as tributes extracted from slaves. Likewise, someconscientious objectors to drafting regard compulsory military service as aform of slavery. Not to be left behind are some animal rights activists whoargue that the conditions of animals kept by humans are generally not differentfrom those of the slaves. The word serf (as it is presently used) is, however,not the same as slave. It is is so because serfs in the middle ages werebelieved to possess rights as human beings as opposed to the slaves who hadnone whatsoever and were considered as things or properties like cattles.Slaves were people owned and controlled by others in a manner which excludedalmost all the rights and the freedom of movement. They were not paid for theirlabour, excepting food, clothing and shelter needed for survival. Inother words, slavery was a systematic exploitation of the work done by andservices performed by someone else without consent and payment.
From a socio-economic point of view, slavery is a system depriving anindividual of all personal freedom and forcing the person to work or renderservices without paying for it, and considering the individual as the propertyor chattel of someone or a household. (Hence the term chattel slave.) From thetime of their capture or births to slave parents or purchase from slave marts,they were held against their will and were not free to leave or to refuse workfor which they receive no wages. It is for these reasons slaves are also calledunfree labourers. As regards its prevalence in modern times, it isbelieved that there are currently 27 million people in the world under someform of slavery practiced in secret. As recently as August 2007, Mauritania inwestern Africa passed a law proclaiming slavery as a criminal act, where nearly600,000 of its men, women and children (20 percent of the population) areconsidered to be bonded labourers if not slaves. A recent study in itsneighbouring state of Nigeria revealed that over 800,000 people there or about8 percent of its population are still slaves.
Trafficking in people
Trafficking in people or human trafficking is yet another form of slavery,and is also known as sex trafficking because most of the victims are women andchildren who are forced to become prostitutes. It is, however, different fromwhat is called smuggling of people, in which a fee is charged for helping thepeople to cross the borders of the country they intend to settle downillegally. After that, the people are free to do whatever they want. Not so arethe victims of trafficking who remain permanently enslaved. The victims oftrafficking are either tricked by the lure of false promises or simply forcedto participate. Coercive tactics employed by the traffickers to control theirvictims include deception, fraud, intimidation, isolation, threat and use ofphysical force. They also take the advantage of debt bonding and even go to theextent of force-feeding their victims with drugs of abuse. Besides womenand children forced into prostitution, their other victims include men, womenand children who are forced to do manual work under hazardous conditions. Thenumbers of such people trafficked illegally are not known, but a reportpublished in 2003 by the U S Government states that 800,000 to 900,000 peopleworldwide are taken in this manner across borders each year, not includingthose who are trafficked within a country.
Economic models
There have been attempts by economists to create models of economicconditions during which slavery and its milder forms like serfdom prevailor become moribund, especially in agrarian contexts. It has been found thatwhen land is abundant but labour is not (and freemen demand high wages) slavesare preferred as labourers. If, however, labour is abundant and land is not,then freemen labourers are willing to work for low wages, and landholdersprefer to engage them. Under such conditions, slaves are relatively costly dueto the expenses for their maintenance and the wages of the supervisors guardingthem. In the opinion of the economists, for this reason slavery (and its lessharsh version serfdom) gradually decreased in Europe as the populationincreased. It appeared in the Americas and was reintroduced in Russia whenlarge sparsely populated new land areas were brought under cultivation. Yetanother finding is that
slavery was more common when the work was relatively simple, such as largescale growing of a single crop, and did not require close supervision. Forcomplex tasks, however, it was much more difficult and costly to check that theslaves were carrying out their tasks properly. In view of this, slavery wasfound to be decreasing with technological advancements which requiredemployment of more skilled people at high wages vis-a-vis the low maintenancecost of slaves. Cultures with institutionalised slavery were thus found to below in technological advancement, since the emphasis was on increasing thenumber of slaves and not on finding new methods of production or newsources of energy. It was for this reason a wide gap separated theoreticalknowledge and learning from physical labor and manufacturing in ancient Greekand Roman cultures.
From 1945 and in the 1960s and 70s, known as the development decadesespecially, economists debated over issues concerning the relationship betweenunfree labour and capitalist production. In the Indian context, the discussionmainly dealt with the agrarian transition that was going on at that time, andthe role of unfree labour therein. Stated simply, unfree labour is the modernterm (or euphemism) for slavery. Unlike slaves of yore, they are not the peopleof a vanquished state nor prisoners of war, but their plight is just the same.Such people are employed against their will by the threat of destitution,detention, violence (including death), or other extreme hardship to themselves,or to members of their families. The term forced labour can also be used todescribe these forms of employment, but usually violence is the coerciveelement there. Strictly speaking, serfdom is also a form of unfree labour, butusually applied to pre-industrial, feudal societies. In the sphere of politicaleconomy, this debate on who among the labourers is or is not unfree is going onfor long and has actually not been resolved so far. The Latin American peon,the Indian bonded labour, the indentured Fijian-Indian, etc. were past examplesof unfree labour. Advocacy groups apart (who place the numbers worldwidebetween 27 to 200 million), a section of political economists contend that thenumber of the unfree in capitalist forms of production is considerable.
Then there are the disposable people, exemplified by the victims of theholocaust over half a century ago. The Nazis in Germany during 1933-45 createdlabour camps for the Jews to work while keeping them in starvation, and sentthem to gas chambers when they could not work anymore. Before that, labourcamps were established in Russia in 1930 which continued upto the late 50s(according to some, the camps or gulags were set up earlier still by Lenin).Compared to the holocaust, the social history of which has been studiedexhaustively, not much is available on the social history of the gulags. Therealso unreachable production targets, little food and harsh living conditionsfinished off nearly eighty percent of the inmates, who were found disposablenot because what they had done but because who they were. Their present-daycounterparts are the AIDS-affected prostitutes (though not on the same scale)left to die when they could earn no more as also people working under hazardousconditions in mines.
Evolution of slavery
Humans had been keeping slaves even before they learned to write, to saynothing of the practice of forcing captive women into sexual services.Generally, slaves were captured in wars by the winners or spirited awayin isolated raids. Also, there were occassions when parents sold their childrento slavery due to extreme poverty or such other compulsion. It would appearthat in ancient times quite a lot of slaves were born of slave parents. Theparents were in turn captives from some past war. Such wars resulted in slaveryfor prisoners and their families who were either killed, exchanged for money orsold as slaves. They were considered as rewards of the war and as properties oftheir captors. Thus, as a commodity of trade, slaves were sold or bartered inexchange for other goods. Apparently, it was a kind act to let them liveinstead of killing them outright, but the consequence was that particularlyweak and vulnerable groups became more and more enslaved. People taken intoslavery in this manner sometimes differed from their captors by race, religion,nationality or ethnic origins, but quite often they were the same as theirenslavers in these respects. It was quite likely for a dominant group in anarea to take captives and turn them into slaves with little fear of sufferingthe same fate; but such a possibility was always there in time to come due toreversals of fortune. Seneca the Younger pointed out this to the Romans whentheir empire was at the peak of its glory and added that when various powerfulnations fight amongst themselves anyone might find himself enslaved. It was sobecause all that was needed to kidnap an individual (otherwise secure fromwarfare) was a forceful raid of short duration. In his Confession, SaintPatrick narrated how he was kidnapped by pirates, and the Hebrew Bible saysthat Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers along with the cautionarypassage :
“And as often as you reflect how much power you have over a slave, rememberthat your master has just as much power over you. “But I have no master,” yousay. You are still young; perhaps you will have one. Do you not know at whatage Hecuba entered captivity, or Croesus, or Plato, or Diogenes?
The causes due to which the population of ancient societies ended up asslaves were mainly incessant wars and the resulting lawlessness. Conditions forthe development of such situations were overpopulation leading to widespreadfamines. Then, such societies were normally underdeveloped in a cultural andtechnological sense, and were easily conquered by those who were superior tothem in this regard. The proces is still going on in Africa, where theillegal slave trade turns into slaves rural people after forcing them to moveto cities, or purchase them in rural areas and sell them into slavery incities. It happens due to population increases, thefts of land and loss of eventhe subsistence level agriculture the people were carrying outearlier.
A feature of the legal systems of ancient societies was that persons (oftenincluding their family) convicted of serious crimes could be sold into slavery,and the proceeds from such transactions were generally handed over to thevictims as compensation. King Hammurabi (~ 1800 BCE)proclaimed in his Codes ofLaw that if someone looking after a dam failed to do his job properly, the costof the property damaged due to the resulting flood should be recovered fromhim. If his property was not enough for the damage done, then he shouldbe sold as a slave to makeup the shortfall. For other crimes the laws pescribedenslavement of the perpetrator,and some laws even required that the criminal and all his property be handed overto his victim. There was also the system of selling a person as a slave so asto pay off the debts he incurred, and if the loaned amount was large his familywas included to square the deal. It was not uncommon for parents to sell theirchildren into slavery during famine; not for the price, but to save the kidsfrom death by starvation. Generally, in institutionalised slavery, children born to slave parents were considered property of their owners. Insome cultures, the status of the mother or father was the defining element forthe child, but mostly the status of the mother was considered important. It waspossible in some cultures for a slave to earn his freedom by hard work and goodbehaviour, a reward denied in others
Tasks set for the slaves
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Work done by the slaves depended on the historical time period and thegeographical position of the place of their slavery. Usually, they wereassigned work similar to that carried out by the supporting members (lowerrungs) of the society which held them as slaves. They, however, receivedno wages for their labour excepting the bare necessities like food, shelter sndclothing. Normally, they were employed as domestic helps, agriculturallabourers, mine workers, army recruits, and commercial and industrial workers.Around the middle ages, it was customary for the rich people in Europe to keepfour-five female slaves and their children for householdwork. In some places such chattels (as they were commonly known) were required cook,clean, as also to draw water from wells or outside water sources. Grindingcorns was also a part of their work, in which along with other works they wereassisted by outside hired helps. Slaves, however, were mostly engaged inagricultural work or cultivation from antiquity to the middle of the nineteenthcentury when slavery was supposedly abolished. They were required to work forlong hours in the fields, with hardly any recess for rest, water or food. Asthey were regarded as valuable property, slave-owners usually ensured that theywere not worked beyond endurance and gave them food, shelter and clothing tokeep them in reasonable good health.
Thanks to the otherwise tiring work regime, they were generally of robusthealth except for the seasonal afflictions or the unforeseen epidemics. Inplantations or estates with absentee landlords, the overseers were not so welldisposed to the slaves and often worked them to death. Most of the slavemineworkers were males. They worked in the salt mines to extract salt, apredominant commodity of trade in the 19th century. In ancient times, chattelslaves were trained to fight in their nation’s army and other militaryservices. Such slaves were also trained as artisans in workshops for commercialand industrial purposes. Generally, the men worked as metalworkers whilethe females were engaged in textile trades or did household work. Very rarelydid the owners paid the chattels for their work excepting free board, room andclothing.
It was a long established practice of Arab traders to abduct women slavesfrom Africa, and to sell them into prostitution or concubinage in MiddleEastern countries and kingdoms. Normally, women slaves were sold at a pricelower tha the males. The exceptions were Irish women captured by the Vikingsduring their raids in the north and sold in the Middle East during 800-1200CE.
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Slavery in the distant past
Slavery was practiced in the Sumerian civilization, one of the most ancientcultures. It was also prevalent in ancient Egypt, Akkadia, Assyria, Greece,Roman Empire and the following Islamic Caliphate. Slavery in its usual sensewas not practiced in ancient Egypt. Prisoners of war, people under debt orconvicted criminals were turned into slaves. Actually, some of the slaves livedbetter than free men, a reason for which impoverished people sold themselves toslavery ostensibly to pay off debts. Regarded as property, slaves could besold, inherited or bequeathed as gifts: but there was no bar on them fromgetting educated, achieving greater social rank, purchasing property ornegotiating other contracts. There is a papyrus from the New Kingdom recordingmasters being testified against by slave witnesses. Another document from the18th dynasty limiting the use of slave children for strenuous work indicatesthat there was some kind of authoritative protection for them. It is also saidthat as per common belief (and the stories in the Bible) slave labour was notused to build the pyramids. The pyramids were built by citizens who had no workdue to floods in the Nile.
As in Egypt, the ranks of the slaves elsewhere were also made up of slavechildren born of parents in slavery, victims of unpaid debt, abandonedchildren, convicted criminals and prisoners taken in wars. It would appear thatnearly 25% of the population of the Roman empire before its explosiveexpansions were slaves. The Greek city states owed quite a lot for theirdevelopments to slave labour, and records of slave keeping are extant fromMycenaean Greece. In the neigbouring city state of Sparta, an entirepopulation of some other country was held as slaves, and were called Helots.Greeks were believed to have been somewhat harsh in their treatment of slaves,who constituted as much as 30% of the population of the ancient city ofAthens.
With the expansion of the Roman empire, more and more countries weresubjugated, leading to a plethora of slaves captured from Mediterrnean andEurope. Oppressive controls exercised by an elite minority over such a vastmass of people often gave rise to slave revolts, the most furiously waged andnotably bloody of which was the Third Servile War under the leadership of theslave Spartacus. The slave population consisting of Arabs, Jews, Africans,Germans, Thracians, Gauls and Celts and many more were not only used for worksbut also for amusement in gladiatorial combats and sexual slavery. More andmore and particularly in the late Republican period, the slaves became animportant economic tool for the creation of wealth in Rome. They were keptunder close watch, and runaway slaves were invariably crucified to serve as awarning to others. With a strict citizenship law in force, qualifying onlynative-born adult males, there was a time when slaves in Rome far outnumberedthe citizens.
Norsemen slave traders
Between the 6th and 13th centuries, Norsemen or the Vikings hit upon theidea of slave trade as a profitable means to acquire wealth along with, ofcourse, their usual vocation of raid, plunder and piracy. This branch of theiractivity reached a peak in the 8th-9th century when they indiscriminatelyraided, captured and enslaved people weaker than them and sold them as slaves.A persian merchant, Ibn Rustah narrated how the Swedish Vikings, also known asthe Varangians and Rus Khaganate terrorized entire Slavic viillages and tookthe entire population into slavery, whom they called Thralls (Old Norse). Thethralls were captured mostly from western Europe and had Franks, Anglo-Saxons,Celts, Germans and peoples of Baltic, Slavic and south European origins amongthem. This Viking slave trade admittedly introduced a different kind ofpigmentation in the otherwise black-skinned slaves who were in amajority.
It was to the credit of the Catholic Church to bring the practice to an endwhen Catholicism became the main religion in Scandinavia and followed theinjunction that a Christian could not morally own another Christian.Subsequently, in 1350 the thrall system was entirely abolished.Presumably, due to the harsh wintry conditions and the sparsely populatednature of the land, there was never ever any need to introduce serfdom in thecountries of Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
Slavery in Europe in the Middle Ages
Unsettled conditions and endemic foreign invasions contributed to taking ofslaves in Europe in the early Middle Ages almost a regular practice. It wouldappear St. Patrick himself was captured and sold as a slave, and in hisLetter to the Soldiers of Coroticus protested against enslavement ofnewly baptized Christians. In France under the Carolingian European Dynasty,slaves formed approximately 20% of the entire population. It was so prevalentin early medieval Europe that the Roman Catholic Church took measures repeatedly prohibiting it and ensured that at least the export of Christianslaves to non-Christian lands was stopped. The matter was thorouglydiscussed in the Council of Koblenz in 922, in the Council of London in 1102,and in the Council of Aramagh in 1171. Likewise, export of English slaves wasstopped by William the Conqueror. Slave trade in the early medieval period wasgenerally carried out in the east where the markets were in the ByzantineEmpire and the Muslim World and the supplies came from
pagan Central and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus and the Tartary. The slavemerchants were collectively known as Radhanites and were composed of Viking(Scandinavian), Arab, Greek and Jewish nationals. The brunt of the attack wason the Slavs – so many of them were enslaved over so many centuries that theword Slav came to mean slaves not only in English but also in Arabic and otherEuropeanlanguages.
Genoese and Venetian merchants and cartels took over the slave trade duringthe late Middle Ages and operated in the area known as Golden Horde, which wasthe name a Mongol and later Turkicised Khandom in the parts of present dayRussia, Ukraine and the Caucasus after the dissolution of the Mongol Empire inthe 1240s. It would appear that some 10,000 eastern European slaves were soldin Venice in the decade 1414-1423 while Genoese traders organized the slavetrade from the Crimea to Mamluk Egypt. The Mamluks were slaves converted toIslam who served in the army of the Caliphs. Haci I Giray in 1441 separatedfrom the Golden Horde and created the Crimean Khanate. The khanate was amassive supplier of slaves to the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East until theearly eighteenth century by a process called the “harvesting of the steppe”, inwhich they enslaved many Slavic peasants. Consequently, in Crimea nearly 75percent of the population were slaves. The Islamic World gained a lot ofChristian slaves during the Byzantium-Ottoman wars and the other wars Ottomansfought in Europe.
The Christians were also not beyond selling Muslim slaves captured in wars.In Malta, the Knights of the realm attacked Muslim and pirate ships and tookthe sailors as slaves. Malta became a centre for selling captured North Africanand Turkish slaves, and continued to do so upto the late 18th century CE. Thoseslaves were used as galley slaves, and normally a ship would require a thousandpairs of such hands. In the 15th century, slavery was banned in Poland whileLithuania abolished it with a decree in 1588. Russians retained slaveryas a major institution upto 1723, when Peter the Great converted the householdslaves into house serfs. Those known as agricultural slaves were namedagricultural serfs in 1679.
Slavery in Europe before Industrialization
European colonialism beginning with 15th century Portuguese exploration ofthe African coast brought in its wake slave trade, a major prop of colonialismtill the late eighteenth century. Afonso V of Portugal was ordained byPope Nicholas V to bring into hereditary slavery “Saracens, pagans and anyother unbelievers” under the papal bull Dom Diversas issued in 1452.Confirmed by his Romanus Pontiflex bull of 1454, these papal decrees provided asort of legitimacy to European colonialism and slave trade. However, for ashort period after 1462, Pope Pius II declared slavery as “a greatcrime”. Anyway, Mercado de Escarvos, the first slave market in Europe forimpoprted African slaves was opened in 1444 in the Portuguese maritime town ofLagos, a site even now shown to tourists. The famous Prince Henry the Navigatorwas a major sponsor of Portuguese expeditions and received 20% of the profitsfrom slave trade. Subsequently, European slave trade diverted the slaves tonewly established colonies in America, which for Portugal was Brazil.Nonetheless, it was the custom of the Meditteranean countries to use condemnedcriminals as rowers or galley slaves in their war ships or galleys. Althoughthe sentences were for a specified number of years, most of the rowers died dueto the harsh conditions even if they were lucky to survive shipwreck or tortureand death at the hands of the enemies or pirates. It was also the practice ofvictorious navies to use “infidel” prisoners of war as rowers, a fate sufferedby historical figures like the Ottoman navy chief TurgutReis.
During that time in Austria, Hungary, Poland, Prussia and Russia, secondserfdom was introduced, giving nobility the power to put a serf to death. Itwas in effect in Poland upto 1768, and in most of Russia until 19February 1861. In fact, some clans of the Roma people in Romania were heldunder slavery for over five centuries and were relieved only in 1864. Thefamous warrior Timur Lame conquered Armenia and Georgia in 1400 introducing“devsirme”, also known as blood tax or child collection. Through this numerousBalkan and Turkic males along with Circassian males from the Caucasusmountains as also the Black Sea regions were captured from their homes andforcibly enlisted in the Ottoman army. They were called Janisseries in theBalkans and Mamluks in Egypt. The first became an important element in thecourt intrigues of Istanbul while the second defended Egypt against theCrusaders and the Mongols. Moulay Ismail, known as the Bloodthirsty Sultan(1672-1727) brought Morocco under his domination through his 150,000 strongarmy of slaves called the Black Guards.As a consequence (of such slaveacquisitions), many regions of Armenia were depoulated and over 60,000 peoplewere captured from the Caucasus. The Poland-Lithuanian region were subjected tothe depredations of the Tatars from !569, who looted, pillaged and capturedpeople to sell them into slavery. Actually, the eastern borderland of the areawas under a state of semi-permanent warfare upto the 18th century. It isestimated that more than three million Poles, Russians and Circassians wereheld as slaves in the Crimean Khanate, and it ended with the abolition ofslavery in the 1780s after the Russians overran Crimea. Slavery was prevailingin the Otomman empire in early twentieth century. About 20 percent of thepopulation of Istanbul were slaves, and as late as 1908 women were soldthere.
Arabian & African slave trade
The Arabian world was engaged in trading in slaves for over a millennium,which apparently began with transporting slaves from Sub-Saharan regions.Merchants from Arabia, India and nearby regions captured people and aftercrossing the Sahara Desert sold them as slaves in Middle East,Indian Ocean region and Indian sub-continent. The coastal cities of Dar EsSalam, Mombasa and Zanzibar were the centres of their activities, where Africanand Arabian traders usually dominated. It is estimated that in the periodbetween 650 and the early years of the twentieth century 11 to 17 millionslaves were transported across Red Sea, Indian Ocean and Sahara Desert. TheMoors from North Africa and Spain joined their ranks in the 8th century andcame to be known as Barbary pirates. They captured people from Europe in the15th and 16th century and exported the captives as slaves to North Africa. Itis said that over 1 million Europeans were sold by the Barbary Pirates in theOttoman empire and North Africa. Due to their raids on coastal villages andtowns in Italy and Mediterranean islands, Italians and Spaniards fled fromtheir homes leaving long stretches of seashore uninhabited. From 1600 onwards,the Barbary pirates began to foray into the Atlantic going as far as Iceland.Their commander Turgut Reis, known as Drugut in Europe, took the entire 5,000to 6,000 residents of the Maltese island Gozo in 1551 for slavery in Libya. Dueto their frequent raids, seashore watchtowers were constructed and churchesfortified in the Balearic islands, and the island of Formentera was deserted.They continued to attack ships on the high seas upto the !9th century taking asslaves the entire crew. When the United States became independent andbegan to trade with Europe, Barbary pirates raided American ships if theyrefused to pay ransom.
Not much difference existed in African societies between free peasants andthose who were vassals of some feudal lord. For instance, vassals in theSonghay Muslim empire did labour for their masters and offered crops as atribute but their freedom was somewhat restricted. They were more or lessworking class people. However, vassals in the Kanem Bornu empire were threerungs below the nobles and intermarriages between them were common, thusblurring the divisions. According to French historian Fernand Braudel, variousforms of slavery permeated African Society and were parts of the socialstructure. “Slavery came in different disguises in different societies: therewere court slaves, slaves incorporated into princely armies, domestic andhousehold slaves, slaves working on the land, in industry, as couriers andintermediaries, even as traders” (Braudel 1984 p. 435). Zanzibar was theleading port in African slave trade where African, Arab, Indian and Europeantraders gathered to do business. Unlike the Europeans, the Arabs carriedout the raiding expeditions themselves often going deep inside the territoriesto capture slaves and preferred females over males. When the Europeans becametheir rivals in the eastern coast of Africa, the Arabs drove the capturedslaves overland across the Sahara Desert to North Africa. In 1870, a Germanexplorer (Gustav Nachtigal) witnessed slave caravans departing from Kukawa inBornu to destinations in Libya (Tripoli) and Egypt. In fact, upto 1898 slavetrade was the major revenue earner for the state of Bornu.
Crossing the Atlantic to reach the Americas known as the Middle Passage wasone part of the triangular slave trade carried out by Portuguese, French, Dutchand British in which slaves were transported in holds of ships undersuffocating conditions. After dropping the slaves in Carbbean islands, theships would take cargoes like sugar, coffee, indigo, cotton, etc. and sail forLisbon, Amsterdam, Liverpool or Nantes. On the voyage to West Africa from thoseports, they would carry trinkets, pots & pans made of copper and tinalloys, cotton piecegoods (some imported from India), copper bangles &ornaments, alcohol, gunpowder, firearms and iron bars. Great profits were madeon every unloading. Slave trade reached its maximum during the late eighteenthcentury when large numbers of people were captured by raids in the interiorregions of Africa. Usually, such raids were mounted by African kingdomslocated in the coasts like the Oyo and Dahomey empires. They entered intoregular contracts with the Europeans, who also used raiding parties by payingthem bounties. Those captured people ended up as slaves in colonies of theAmericas, and the British got the monopoly of supplying slaves to the Spanishcolonies after the Spanish War of Succession. It is a reasonable guess thatover hundreds of years, some 12 to 15 million people were taken as slaves byEuropeans and nearly 15 percent of them were dead before reaching thejourney’s end. Most of them were taken to the Americas, and the rest toEurope or South Africa. As late as the nineteenth century, such raids carriedout from Sudan depopulated the eastern parts of the present day Central AfricanRepublic, where the population density is still abysmally low. In the opinionof some historians, the total loss of life during the long march with the slavecaravans and during the raids far exceeded the number of people living inSub-Saharan Africa when this overt commerce became covert. Others contend thatthe traders were themselves interested in keeping their captives alive and thatavailability of new types of food like cassava and maize form the Americasstaved off the reduction in the numbers of people to some extent. This wasparticularly noticeable in western Africa during 1760-1810, and in Mozambiqueand surrounding areas half a century later. About the very large presence ofmales among the captives, obviously that was due to their ability to do hardmanual work. Nonetheless, women were also rounded up during the raids so as toact as “brides” for the captives and their protectors or husbands were regardedas subsidiary catch for export. With the beginning of the labour-intensiveharvesting (tapping) of rubber in late 19th and early 20th century, there wereincreasing frontier raids and to meet the demands of a booming slave trade inAfrica. For instance, in the personal estate of Belgian king Leopold II((Belgian Congo) there was mass murder and enslavement of people forcing themto work in rubber plantations.
European slave trade started getting bigger than the Arabian from the 16thcentury when export of slaves to the Americas commenced. In their colony inSouth Africa, the Dutch imported indentured labourers from Asia. With theenactment of Slave Trade Act of 1807, Britain banned slavery in its largenumber of colonies in Africa.
Slavery in the Americas
Before Columbus discovered America, slavery in the inhabited parts of thecontinent like Central Mexico, Mississipi, Costa Rica, etc. (calledMesoamerica) also followed the practice of enslaving prisoners of war, indebtedpeople and so on. The victims of human sacrifices carried out as rituals andreligious ceremonies there were generally prisoners of war and slaves.According to an Aztec chronicle, in 1487 about 84,000 people were sacrificed ina temple inauguration. Slavery there was not hereditary, children of slaveswere born free. The Incas were required to work free for the state’s purposesby a system known as mita. Extended families or Aylluswould decide which member was to be deputed for this, and it is not clear ifthat was a form of slavery. Societies and tribesowning slaves in pre-ColumbianAmerica included the fishermen living along the coast of Alaska to California,the Comanche of Texas, the Tehuelche of Patagonia, the Caribs of Dominica, theTupinamba of Brazil and so on. The Haidas of Pacific Nothwest (BritishColumbia) were fierce warriors and raided as far as California to captureslaves. About a quarter of the population of these tribes were slaves.
Brazil
When Brazil became a Portuguese colony, slavery turned out to be the mainprop of its economy. Nearly 37 percent or about 3 million of all exportedAfrican slaves were sent there to work in the mines and to raise sugar cane.Initially, the Portuguese colonialists forced the native Tupi tribal people towork for them. But Tupis started dying, and from around 1550 imported Africanslaves were used. Slavery was abolished in Portugal in 1761, but continued inher colonies for long for its advantages. Firstly, the Africans were somewhatimmune to tropical diseases. Secondly, their costs were a tiny fraction of theprofits the colonialists reaped. Due to harsh working conditions, the slavesdid not survive long, and on an average 15 percent of them died each year. Tofill in the diminishing numbers of slaves, Bandierantas or bandits of mixedPortuguese and native parentage began raiding countries in the south along theAmazon river for native American Indians. Their attacks were so violent that aFrench traveller reported in 1740 of “…hundreds of miles of river banks with nosign of human life and once-thriving villages that were devastated andempty.” To defend the tribals, Jesuit missionaries present in some areasof Amazon basin, notably among the Guranis of southern Brazil andParaguay, formed corps of fighters along military lines. Even then, numerousAmerindians were taken as slaves between mid and late nineteenth century towork in the rubber plantations. Slaves naturally tried to escape andoften succeeded. They came to be known as Maroon people, and played importantroles in social formartion of Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Suriname and Jamaica.The Maroon villages in Brazil were known as Quilombos, and the villagers livedby agriculture and hunting. They also attacked the plantations, burning crops,killing the slaveowners and inviting the slaves there to join them. The Frenchpainter Jean Baptiste Debret, commissioned to portray the Brazilian Royalfamily, depicted the harsh conditions of the slaves vividly in his worksevoking concern in Europe and Brazil itself. There was concern in England aswell because Brazilian sugar sold at a lesser price (slave labour was cheap)than that produced in the British colonies in the West Indies. Besides, theevangelical group known as Clapham Sect exerted pressure on the Britishgovernment to persuade Brazil to end this practice. It took several years to doso, the first step for which was to ban foreign slave trade in 1850. Childrenof slaves were freed in 1871, and slaves aged over 60 in 1885. During theParaguyan war, more slaves earned freedom by joining the military. There was adrought in 1877-78 when plantation owners tried to sell of their slaves, and inthe ensuing starvation and turmoil many emancipation groups were formed leadingto a ban on slavery in Ceara province in 1884 to be followed by the Golden Lawof 1888 ending slavery all over Brazil. Slavery in colonial Brazil, the lastnation in western hemisphere to end this practice, was not exactly a racialconditoin. It was more like a social condition with respected public figureslike the writer Machado de Assis and engineer Andre Reboucas descending fromblack ancestors.
United States
The colonization of North Carolina attempted by Lucas Vasquez de Aylon in1526 may be regarded as the first instance of Europeans making use of slaves.It, however, ended in failure: the slaves ran away in the forests and tookshelter with the Cofitachiqui Creek people. In 1528, a Moroccan slaveEstevanico was taken as a guide for the Narvaez expedition, which found Quiviraand CAbola in 1539. Eighty years later (1619), a Dutch soldier sold twentyAfricans as indentured servants in Jamestown, Virginia. The first reference toslavery was in a Virginia law of 1661 meant for Caucasian servants who ran awaywith a black servant. The African- Americans were branded as slaves with theSlave Codes of 1705, a fate they suffered for the next 160 years. It continueduntil the end of the American Civil War when the 13th Amendment of theConstitution was ratified in December 1865. Slave trade in North America,however, was slow to expand. It was completely abolished in Mexico around 1810.Following the Slave Trade Act of 1807, Canada as a British colony was subjectto this legislation and slave ownership was banned there in 1833. Slavery inthe territories north of the Ohio River (in the United States) was banned in1787, and importation of slaves into the country in January 1808. Therewas, however, no restriction on internal slave trade nor participation in itelsewhere in the world. Consequently, there was a massive political, culturaland economic divide between the slave-free states in the north and the statesin the south where slavery continued. In 1860, nearly 25% of the families inthe south held one or more slaves. Since ninety percent of the slaves lived inthe south, emancipation was more a concern there than in the north.Abolitionist public figures formed the Republican Party in 1860, and madeLincoln the president by the election held that year. The southern states didnot vote for him, his name was not in the ballot papers in most of them. Theylost control in the centre after decades in power, and separated from the unionto form the Confederate States of America. The northern states did notlike a new state dominating the Mississipi River and regions south of it, andcivil war broke out. Contrary to the common belief, the civil war was not onthe issue of abolition of slavery. Actually, Lincoln’s declaration offreeing the slaves in 1863 in the confederacy was a reluctant gesture. It didnot liberate the slaves in the rest of the union , nor in the strategicallysituated border states. Anyway, after the declaration, abolition of slaverybecame the war goal and slaves were liberated as the union took over theconfederate states. Many of them just walked out of their bondage to work aslabourers or to fight as soldiers. Officially, slavery was outlawed bythe 13th Amendment of 1865 but blacks were treated generally as second classcitizens until the civil rights protests of the 1950s and 60s.
Asia - the Indian Subcontinent
In his book Indica, the Greek historian Arrian stated:
“This also is remarkable in India, that all Indians are free, and no Indianat all is a slave. In this the Indians agree with the Lacedaemonians. Yet theLacedaemonians have Helot for slaves, who perform the duties of slaves; but theIndians have no slaves at all, much less is any Indian a slave.”
There was no slave trade (as commonly understood) in the region but therewas in different forms unfree labour for centuries in the Medieval ages. Debtbondage was quite common during the Mughal period, and money lenders madeslaves of peasants who failed to repay loans. This became hereditary inpractice and sons were liable for the loans taken by fathers. Slaves fromAfrica were sold in western India by Arab traders since the first century CE.The Delhi Sultanate, ruling over parts of central and north India was foundedby Qutubuddin Aibak, a slave of the Turkish warrior Muhammad Ghori whoconquered and subjugated the area. For nearly hundred years (1206 – 90) Aibak’sdescendants, commonly known as the slave dynasty, continued to rule. A memberof the viceroy’s council said that there were eight to nine million slaves inIndia in 1841, mostly in the Malabar region. The Indian Slavery Act of 1843banned slavery in the subcontinent to be followed by the Indian Penal Code of1861 making enslavement of people a criminal offence.
Korea, Japan and China
There were indigenous slaves in Korea during the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910)and nearly forty percent of the population were slaves. People were takeninto slavery as a punishment, which continued for generations. Peasants duringtimes of famine volunteered to become slaves so as to survive. There wereprivately- and state-owned slaves. Slaves belonging to the state were at timesassigned to upper class people. The Gabo Act of 1894 officially abolishedslavery in Korea.
Slavery in Japan was also indigenous, and slaves were called seiko inJapanese meaning “living mouth”. There is a third century Chinese documentrecording the export of a slave from Japan but the nature of the trade is notknown. A series of laws on slavery were passed in the 8th century and one outof every hundred people in the modern Ibaraki province was a slave. Inwestern parts of the country the proportion was still higher. Slavery becameout of fashion during the Sengoku period (1467-1615) and slave trade wasabolished by Hideoshi Toyotomi in 1588. Japan abolished slavery in thecountries it conquered during the 19th century but forced the prisonersof war it captured in the second world war to work under harshconditions.
In China , the practice of slavery was sporadic. There was no dearth ofcheap labour due to its large population, still there was a kind of serfdom.During the rule of the Han dynasty (ca 206 BCE to 220 CE) nearly five percentof the people were slaves. The practice of keeping serfs (or slaves) continuedtill 1910, when it was abolished finally.
Other Regions of Asia
In the Khmer empire (modern Cambodia) slaves were engaged to do the hardlabour in the construction of monuments and temples in Angkor Vat. Generally,they were people captured during raids on mountain tribes. Debtors unable topay back were also used as slaves. In Burma and Thailand, about a third of thepopulation in some areas were slaves during the period between 17th and early20th centuries. The Toraja tribe of Indonesia kept chattel slaves. It was alsothe practice among Torajans to opt for slavery to pay off a debt. Prisoners ofwar were regarded as slaves and were sold in Java and Siam or Thailand. Slaveswere not permitted to wear gold or silver, nor to decorate their residences.The Dutch colonial government banned slavery in Indonesia in 1909. Around1870, Russians invaded the central Asian Islamic khanates of Khiva, Samarkandand Bukhara and ended slavery there. The infamous slave market in Khivaopened in 17th century was closed and Russians and Persians held in captivityby Turkoman raiders were liberated.
Polynesia and New Zealand
The whaling fleet operating in the Pacific Ocean started raiding Polynesianislands for slaves to work as labourers in early 19th century. Then Peruviansbegan to raid South Sea islands to get slave labour for their guano industry.The Maoris of New Zealand traditionally held their prisoners of war in slaveryand continued to do so till the annexation of New Zealand by Britain in1840. When administration was extended to the entire country in !860, slaveryfinally came to anend.
Efforts to Abolish Slavery
An established fact of history, humans have been keeping slaves in some formor the other over the ages. And slaves have been trying to break free frombondage ever since. The Book of Exodus in the Bible narrating the flight of theIsraelites from ancient Egypt under the leadership of Moses is regarded asprobably the first exhaustive story of the efforts of the slaves to freethemselves. However, that was an account of the success of a particulargroup of slaves to become free, and was different from what is calledabolition of all kinds of slavery. The Persians were the first society to banslavery, and their monarch Cyrus the Great (died 530 BCE) enshrined this in apassage in his charter of citizen’s rights which can be seen in the BritishMuseum:
“… And until I am the monarch, I will never let anyone take possession ofmovable and landed properties of the others by force or without compensation.Until I am alive, I prevent unpaid, forced labor. To day, I announce thateveryone is free to choose a religion. People are free to live in all regionsand take up a job provided that they never violate other’s rights. No one couldbe penalized for his or her relatives’ faults. I prevent slavery and mygovernors and subordinates are obliged to prohibit exchanging men and women asslaves within their own ruling domains. Such traditions should be exterminatedthe world over. …”
Removal of a slave from England against his will was the subject matter of alawsuit concerning James Somersett in Britain in 1772, and was ruled as anillegal act. Similarly, in the matter of Joseph Knight, slavery was declaredagainst the Laws of Scotland in 1777. The Act for the Abolition of Slave Tradewas passed by the British Parliament in 1807, and became a law the next yeardue to the efforts of protesters against slavery. In order to make the entireAtlantic slave trade illegal all over the British empire, it imposed a fine of100 pounds for every slave if and when found in a British ship. The subsequentSlavery Abolition Act outlawed slavery itself in all the British colonies, andall slaves were eventually freed in 1838. In France slavery was prevalent, butnot authorized. It was, however, important for its colonies in the Caribbean;more so in Saint-Domingue, where the slaves rose in revolt in August 1791.Unable to control the uprising (known as the Haitian Revolution), slavery wasabolished in all French colonies by the Revolutionary Commissioners in Paris in1794. Napoleon, on becoming emperor, tried to revive it by sending troops toGuadeloupe. They succeeded there, but were defeated by the former slavesof Saint-Domingue who declared independence. That was how the first blackrepublic of Haiti came to exist on 1st January, 1804. A French Law passed in2001 proclaimed slavery as a crime againsthumanity.
“Underground Railroad” was the route taken by many escaped slaves from theUnited States to Canada. In 1865, slavery was abolished in the United States bythe thirteenth amendment of that country’s constitution. Prominent Americanabolitionists who wanted slaves to be sent back to Africa, joined hands withAmerican Colonization Society, and selected a site negotiating with the localtribal chiefs on the west coast of the continent. There the first settlementsof freed American slaves were established in 1822, which was named Liberia in1824 and became the oldest independent republic in Africa in 1847. The blacksin America, however, preferred to stay back even though there was oppositionfrom white wage earners and later on from trade unions. Liberia’s next doorneighbour, Sierra Leone was the country set up by the British for the samepurpose for their former slaves in Africa.
In 1926, under the auspices of the League of Nations, a Slavery Conventionwas arranged, considered to be the first significant move towards the banningof slavery world over. Slavery was banned explicitly under Article 4 of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 by the United NationsGeneral Assembly. This was followed by the United Nations 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery to outlaw and ban slaveryworldwide, including child slavery. Again, in December 1966, theInternational Covenant on Civil and Political Rights derived from the UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights banned slavery in its Article 8. Having beenratified by 35 nations, this international treaty came into force inMarch 1976. By November 2003, it had been ratified by 104nations.
Paradoxically, according to Kevin Bales of the advocacy group “Free theSlaves”, there are more people under slavery today than has ever been in thepast. However, percentage-wise they are the smallest ever of the total humanpopulation. The group states further that a young, adult, male slave in Malicosts 40 US dollars while a HIV-free young female in Thailand (forprostitution) sells for a thousand. Usually, this is the price paid to theprocurer or the parents. Paradoxically, again, this price-range is the lowestever that has been paid for slaves historically in basic labour terms. Forinstance, a male slave in America of the 1850s would have cost 1000 dollars inthose days (which equals 38,000 dollars now). So, slaves are now 1/38th in costthan what they were over 150 years ago in America. This has made slavery a veryprofitable business averaging 8 times returns of money invested.
In the opinon of the advocacy group, slavery is still very active butcarried out in secret. People, mostly women and children abducted from poorcountries in Africa, Asia and South America, are shipped to a foreign country(usually the Middle East or Asia) to be sold into slavery. The men and malechildren work as labourers while the women and girls become unwilling domesticslaves andprostitutes.
From Wikipedia and other sources
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