Slavery is involuntary servitude, enforced by violence or by other methods. It is sometimes an expectation associated with other relationships, such as marriage and other family relations, military service, or debt relationships. See debt slavery.
Unfree labour is a generic term which includes all forms of slavery and similar labour systems.
Slavery is in all countries considered to be a criminal activity, outlawed by UN conventions. However some states such as Myanmar and Sudan do facilitate the institution of slavery, according to anti-slavery groups such as Free the Slaves.
In chattel slavery, the most common conception of slavery, one person is treated as the property of another person, providing slave labour from birth to death. This is not the most common relation in modern slavery. Capture of modern slaves is normally accomplished by deception or fraud - usually of the young, who are taken from family by slavers who offer them money and some promise or story that this represents advances on wages in some respectable job, or, simply kidnap the children. The slaves are usually not worked to death, but at some point usually escape or are released, often because they are of no further use. For instance, in Thailand, slave prostitutes are thrown onto the street as soon as they test positive for HIV - usually about three years after they are bought at the age of 13 or 14. Thus modern slaves are often called disposable people(see also economics of slavery section below).
It is quite common for a slave to be told that they are working off a debt, but to have no access to an accounting for that debt, and no right to take any lower-paying or less supervised employment. These people may be considered slaves if they are under the impression that challenging these conditions, or leaving in protest of them, would lead to serious bodily harm. This is a difficult legal line; almost all soldiers and many professional sports players are contracted for a period of years, but they are not contracted until a debt is paid, and are most definitely not "sold" into that status by parents or others.
Historically, slaves were often those of a different ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race (Animal rights and Great Ape personhood advocates would also include species) from those who enslaved them, but in general such slaveries were short. It has been relatively rare in history for an entire ethnic group to be held as slaves for more than a couple of generations. In most such cases intermarriage, granting of liberty, right to buy one's own freedom, have caused slave and slave-owning populations to merge.
Societies characterized by poverty, population pressures, and cultural and technological backwardness are frequently exporters of slaves to more developed nations. Today most slaves are rural people forced to move to cities, or purchased in rural areas and sold into slavery in cities. These moves take place due to loss of subsistence agriculture, thefts of land, and population increases.
Slavery is almost always a matter of economics - in effect, those with poor birthright or bad luck in any society have sometimes been forced to throw themselves on the mercy of those with better birthright and luck, or simply been forced to provide service to those who had power and were willing to use it to subordinate others.
Historical examples include the Slavs and various African societies, such as the Ibo of Nigeria (see below for details). These were sometimes what we would today consider prisoners of war.
Individuals could also find themselves condemned to slavery as a result of being convicted of crimes or in fulfillment of religious requirements.
Undoubtedly a majority of slaves were condemned to agricultural or industrial labour and lived hard lives. In some of the city-states of Greece and in the Roman Empire, slaves were a very large part of the economy, and the Roman Empire built a large part of its wealth on slaves acquired through conquest.
Slaves could be freed by their masters and often rose to positions of power.
Some of the greatest philosophers of antiquity vindicated slavery as a natural and necessary institution; and Aristotle declared all barbarians to be slaves by birth, fit for nothing but obedience. According to the Roman law, "slaves had no head in the State, no name, no title, no register; they had no rights of matrimony, and no protection against adultery; they could be bought and sold, or given away, as personal property; they might be tortured for evidence, or even put to death, at the discretion of their master. Cato the Elder expelled his old and sick slaves out of house and home. Hadrian, one of the most humane of the emperors, wilfully destroyed the eye of one of his slaves with a stylus. Roman ladies punished their maids with sharp iron instruments for the most trifling offences. A proverb prevailed in the Roman empire: "As many slaves, so many enemies." Hence the constant danger of servile insurrections, which more than once brought the republic to the brink of ruin, and seemed to justify the severest measures in self-defence.
Greek and Roman urban slaves, as opposed to agricultural slaves, seem to have had some chance at manumission. In Rome, slaves were organised as a social class, and some authors found in their condition the earliest concept of proletariat, given that the only property they were allowed to own was the gift of reproduction. Slaves lived then within this class with very little hope of a better life, and they were owned and exchanged, just like goods, by free men. They had a price as "human instruments"; their life had not, and their patron could freely even kill them. There was however a sort of class of freedmen and freedwomen, called liberati, in Roman society at all periods.
Their symbol was the Phrygian cap.
These people were not numerous, but Rome needed to demonstrate at times the great frank spirit of this "civitas", so the freed slaves were made famous, as hopeful examples. Freed people suffered some minor legal disabilities that show in fact how otherwise open the society was to them—they could not hold certain high offices and they could not marry into the senatorial classes. Their children, however, had no prohibitions.
Much of the wealth of classical Athens came from its silvermines, which were worked by slave labor under extremely inhumane conditions.
Most of the gladiators were slaves. One of them, Spartacus, formed an army of slaves that battled the Roman armies in the Servile War for several years.
The Latin poet Horace, son of a freedman, served as a military officer in the army of Brutus and seemed headed for a political career before the defeat of Brutus by Octavian and Antony. Though Horace may have been an exceptional case, freedmen were an important part of Roman administrative functions. Freedmen of the Imperial families often were the main functionaries in the Imperial administration.
Several Classical comedies feature enterprising home slaves, who must use their wits to profit from their masters or to provide them their requests.
The beginnings of Christianity did not seriously change slavery. Though the Christian leaders often called for good treatment for slaves and condemned the enslavement of Christians, the institution itself was not questioned. The shift from chattel slavery to serfdom in medieval Europe is otherwise an economic rather than a moral issue.
The institution of slavery pre-existed Islam in the Arab world, and was permitted under the laws of Islam. Manumission was encouraged, though not required; however, it was forbidden to free slaves against their will, to prevent them being turned out to starve in hard times or when they were sick or old. Usually, only prisoners of war or the children of slaves could be slaves; however, there were exceptions from time to time, one of the most notable being the practice of devsirme, by which people were accepted as payment of taxes. As there was usually an exploitable peasant population to perform agricultural work, the demand for slaves usually was more for specialised forms of service—eunuchs, artisans, concubines, janissaries etc. This often led wealthy people to have their children trained in valuable skills like carpet making or gardening, in case ill fortune ever made them captives; without that value of their own, if they could not be ransomed they would simply have been killed.
In Al-Andalus, Slavic slaves (saqaliba) were trained in the public administration. Some of them even ruled the taifa of Denia.
Race had no impact on slavery in Arabia under Islam. Islam as a political movement was often a liberating force for those held in racial slavery. However, like other ancient cultures, Islamic rulers made a custom of enslaving those defeated in war. Mere conversion to Islam did not automatically result in manumission, either. As those peoples—notably the Turks—became Muslims, their use as slaves did not end immediately. The Islamic world bought and captured slaves from Europe and Africa on a large scale for roughly a thousand years.
The institution of serfdom in medieval Europe was weaker than chattel slavery; serfs were obligated to serve or work the land for their master, but were not chattel property. Serfdom was reintroduced in Eastern Europe in 16th and 17th century and persisted until the mid-19th century. It was abolished by the Kingdom of Prussia in 1811/1823, Austria in 1848 and in Russia in 1861/1864. See also feudalism and guild.
Slavery was common and widespread throughout Africa into the 19th century. The Dutch imported slaves from Asia into their colony in South Africa. Britain, which held vast colonial territories on the continent (including South Africa), made the practice of slavery illegal in these regions. Ironically, the end of the slave trade and the decline of slavery was imposed upon Africa by its European conquerors. This action is what today may be called an instance of cultural imperialism, albeit being one of the less mal-intentioned manifestations of the phenomenon.
The nature of the slave societies differed greatly across the continent. There were large plantations worked by slaves in Egypt, the Sudan, and Zanzibar, but this was not a typical use of slaves in Africa as a whole. In some slave societies, slaves were protected and almost incorporated into the slave-owning family. In others, slaves were brutally abused, and even used for human sacrifices. Despite the vast numbers of slaves exported from Africa, it is thought that the majority of African slaves remained in Africa, continuing as slaves in the regions where they were first captured.
Prior to the 16th century, the bulk of slaves exported from Africa were shipped from East Africa to the Arabian peninsula. Zanzibar became a leading port based on this trade. Arab slave traders differed from European traders in that they would often capture slaves themselves, sometimes penetrating deep into the continent. They also differed in that their market greatly preferred the purchase of female slaves over male slaves. This reflected their desire for household and sexual slaves rather than slaves to work on plantations.
The African slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of slaves were captured in West Africa and shipped to the colonies of the New World (triangular trade).
As a result of the Spanish War of Succession, Britain obtained the monopoly (asiento de negros) of transporting African Negroes to Spanish America.
It is estimated that over the centuries, twelve to thirteen million people were shipped as slaves from Africa, of whom some 15 percent died during the terrible voyage. The great majority were shipped to the Americas, but some also went to Europe and the south of Africa. While much of the slave trade in Africa was related to external protagonists, an internal slave trade unrelated to non-Africans did exist.
The demographic impact of the slave trade on Africa is an important question, regarding which consensus remains elusive. Some historians conclude that the total loss—persons removed, those who died on the arduous march to coastal slave marts and those killed in slave raids—far exceeded the 65-75 million inhabitants remaining in Sub-Saharan Africa at the trade's end. Others believe that slavers had a vested interest in capturing rather than killing, and in keeping their captives alive; and that this coupled with the disproportionate removal of males and the introduction of new crops from the Americas (cassava, maize) would have limited general population decline to particular regions at particular times—western Africa around 1760-1810 and Mozambique and neighbouring areas half a century later. There has also been speculation that within Africa female captives were taken in preference, for domestic and dynastic reasons, with many male captives being a "bycatch" who would have been killed if there had not been an export market for them. So the balance and timing of the two demographic sorts of market could make a difference.
Slavery persists in Africa above all other continents. Mauritania abolished slavery only in 1981, but several human rights organizations are reporting that the practice continues there. The trading of children has been reported in modern Nigeria and Benin. In parts of Ghana, a family may be punished for an offense by having to turn over a virgin female to serve as a sex slave within the offended family. In the Sudan slavery continues as part of an ongoing civil war.
Slavery in the Americas during the 17th century was an institution that made little distinction as to the race of the slave or the free man. But by the 18th century, the overwhelming number of black slaves was such that white and Native American slavery was less common. Slavery under European rule began with importation of white European slaves (or indentured servants), was followed by the enslavement of local aborigines in the Caribbean, and eventually was primarily replaced with Africans imported through a large slave trade as the native populations declined through disease. Most slaves brought to the Americas ended up in the Caribbean or South America where tropical diseases took a large toll on their population and required large numbers of replacements.
In Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica the most common forms of slavery were those of prisoners-of-war and debtors. People unable to pay back a debt could be sentenced to work as a slave to the person owed until the debt was worked off. Slavery was not usually hereditary; children of slaves were bor Source | Copyright
