Posted by As a general concept, ‘slavery’ can be defined as the ‘ownership and/or complete control of one person by another person or by an institution or organization and the near complete loss of personal liberty and decision-making power by the enslaved person’.
Contrary to what many people think, slavery was not only endured by black people (sub-Saharan Africans) in America. And Africans were not only the victims. Black people, in particular West African governments, were instrumental in hunting down their own and selling them to the Arabian and European slave traders.
Slavery is indeed one of humankind’s oldest institutions. Historic reports tend to describe slavery as an institution that comes with and from specialized urban civilization. Indeed, the Sumerian “Code of Hammurabi”, which was probably written around 1800 BC, does mention slavery. The code also shows that Sumerian slaves were not totally without rights. They were e.g. allowed to own personal property. But the regulations concerning slaves appear to have been harsh. Here two examples from the Hammurabi Code:
“If anyone takes a male or female slave of the court, or a male or female slave of a freed man, outside the city gates [i.e. allows the slave to escape], he shall be put to death.”
“If anyone receives into his house a runaway male or female slave of the court, or of a freedman, and does not make it known to the police, the master of the house shall be put to death.”
Slavery is mentioned in the Old Testament as “forced labor”. King Solomon, for example, build the first temple and his splendid palace entirely with forced laborers. Since Jehovah had forbidden the enslavement of Jews by Jews, Solomon recruited the laborers from what Israel’s wars of conquest had left of the original population of Palestine (Ammonites, Amorites, Jebusites, Philistines etc.). But all the kingdoms around Israel, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Akkadians, the Hittites etc. had, of course, also slaves. Most of these slaves were prisoners of war, but some were also traded by slave traders and sold on slave markets.
However, slavery is probably much older than the beginnings of urban civilization in the Near East. It is as unlikely that early Cro-Magnon populations killed all members of competing groups, as it is unlikely that they let their adversaries go free. It is much more probable that they would take at least children and women prisoners and keep them as slaves.
The earliest slave societies about which we have some detailed knowledge are those of Athens and Sparta in ancient Greece.
The Spartans were essentially a pre-Marxist collectivist society. Yet they had slaves. Spartan slaves were typically conquered people, who continued to live in their original homelands but had to perform forced labor for the Spartans. The conditions of these slaves varied greatly depending on the work they had to do.
In Athens, the mining slaves were worst off. But most Athenian slaves were domestic slaves. Men were home or household administrators and women looked after the children or were concubines – or both. Athenians disliked subordinate positions. They assigned managerial and secretarial work to male slaves, who consequently gained much influence in public administration, banking, and commerce. Some slaves were government-owned like e.g. the 300 Scythian archers who formed the police force of the city (“polis”) of Athens to maintain law and order. These polis slaves even acquired a certain prestige.
The Romans made the same mistake of handing their commercial and financial affairs over to slaves, some of which had a better education than their Roman masters, especially the Greek slaves. In addition, they imported slaves from Greece and Syria as teachers for their schools. The historian Theodor Mommsen believed that, in particular, the Syrian slaves had a deleterious effect on the Roman culture, because of their moral and social decadence, which carried over to the Roman children they taught. They undermined traditional Roman values and virtues and helped to destroy the moral fortitude of Romans, generation after generation (sounds familiar, doesn’t it?).
Roman gladiators were mostly slaves from all parts of the world. There were several revolts by Roman slaves, the most famous of which was led by the Greek slave Spartacus in 73 BC. The personal security detail of the West Roman empire that protected the emperor consisted mostly of German slaves. East Roman emperors preferred Viking slaves as bodyguards.
Until Julius Caesar destroyed them, the Mediterranean pirates were a main source of slaves. During the eastward expansion of the Germans in the 10th century so many “Slavs” were captured that their racial name became the generic term for a ‘slave’. During the same period, the delivery of slaves to the Black Sea region was an important part of the early economy of Russia.
South of the Mediterranean, the dynasties of Arabs along the coast stimulated the African slave trade. The town of Zawila developed in the Sahara in about 700 AD specifically as a trading station for slaves. Captured in the region around Lake Chad, black Africans were sold to Arab households in a Muslim world, which by the 8th century stretched from Spain to Persia.
Slavery was an accepted part of life in Arabia during the time of Muhammad, in the 7th century, and the Muslim Holy Book, the Qur’an, offers no arguments against the practice. It takes it for granted and merely states, particularly in relation to female slaves, that they should not be mistreated. The trans-Saharan slave trade of the Muslim Caliphates with West African kingdoms and chiefs preceded the trans-Atlantic slave trade by nearly a thousand years.
The Muslim habit of using slaves to fight in their armies lead to the rise of the Mameluke slave soldiers. In 1210 AD, they overthrew the Egyptian sultan and established a Mameluke empire, which lasted for nearly 200 years.
The Vikings and other nations kept slaves and there were slave markets in cities like London, Dublin, and Rome. The Vikings collaborated closely with the Muslim Caliphates trading their prisoners of war as slaves to them.
In Saxon England, slaves were called thralls. They did the hardest and dirtiest work. However, slavery quickly declined and by the mid-12th century, it had vanished from England.
Among the continental Germans, slavery was a very common institution known as “Leibeigenschaft” (ownership of a body). Even Tacitus mentioned that among the Germans some were free and some were not. In fact, slavery was not legally abolished in Germany until the early 19th Century. In Bavaria in 1808, in the Kingdom of Hannover in 1833, in Hesse 1813, in Prussia 1811, in Saxony 1832, in Westphalia 1808 etc.
Slavery also existed in Central and North America before the Europeans arrived. According to Almon Lauber’s booklet, “Indian Slavery In Colonial Times Within The Present Limits Of The United States”, published by the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia University in 1913, slavery and slave trade were nearly universally practiced among the ‘Native’ Indians prior to the appearance of the White man on the North American continent.
The Mayans kept slaves who did all the hard work. The Aztecs too had slaves. So did the Inca. And the North American Indians enslaved each other as a result of their constant tribal wars. Sometimes slaves were prisoners of war or criminals but sometimes people were forced to sell themselves or their children into slavery due to extreme poverty and not infrequently, they became slaves because they lost when gambling. However, slavery was not hereditary. A slave’s children were free.
The Mongol Empire (1206-1368) had a tremendous impact on slavery across Eurasia. While slaves played a minor role in pre-Imperial Mongolia, the Mongols saw people mainly as a resource, to be distributed among the imperial family and used for imperial needs, like material goods. This view created a whole spectrum of dependency running from free men to full slaves. The conquests of the United Mongol Empire (1206-60) resulted in huge supplies of war captives, many of whom were sold in the Eurasian slave markets. With the dissolution of the Empire and the halt of its expansion, the demand for slaves remained high, and other means were sought for supplying them. Since the Mongol empire was run like a family enterprise, becoming a slave in it did not always mean social death.
The trade with black African slaves between the African West Coast and North America that was started by the Portuguese in the 17th Century was not solely driven by profit-oriented white Americans and Europeans. It was also a major income source for the African chiefs and kingdoms of the West Coast who carried out the slave raids in the interior of West Africa and sold their fellow countrymen to the slave traders. They had been doing this across the Sahara for centuries to supply the Muslim Arabs with black African slaves. For them, the American slave trade constituted just another market opportunity.
Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated in March of 1801, he inherited troubled relations with the so-called Barbary states — the Ottoman Regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, along with independent Morocco. These states sent their fleets out into the Mediterranean and the Atlantic as pirates. They seized mostly European and American commercial ships and sold their crews and passengers as slaves. Jefferson tried to stop this practice. He had to fight several wars – the so-called “Barbary Wars” – to end the Muslim piracy and slave trade in and around the Mediterranean. BTW – this is how the US Marine Corps came into existence.
Today, slavery should no longer exist in this world. Yet, it seems that is does. According to the “Global Slavery Index” the following countries still had slavery in 2018 (total number of slaves):
- India – 7,989,000
- China – 3,864,000
- North Korea – 2,640,000
- Nigeria – 1,386,000
- Iran – 1,289,000
- Indonesia – 1,220,000
- Dem Rep Congo – 1,045,000
- Russia – 794,000
- Philippines – 784,000
- Afghanistan – 749,000
Contrary to what many black Americans believe, Africa was never a slavery-free continent. Slave holding and slave trading have always been widely practiced in Africa. Today, the top five modern African slave trading countries are Mauretania, Sudan, Libya, Egypt, and South Africa.
The American Holocaust Museum writes:
“People with limited freedom were found throughout African societies for thousands of years prior to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. … The spread of Islam across Northern Africa both reinforced the institution of slavery, while at the same time restricting those who were defined as slaves. Free Muslims regardless of race could not be enslaved. However, a slave’s conversion to Islam did not guarantee freedom.”
https://www.abhmuseum.org/enslaved-peoples-in-african-societies-before-the-transatlantic-slave-trade/
Gakunzi writes:
“..the Arab slave trade has affected more than 17 million people. In the Saharan region alone, more than nine million African captives were deported and two million died on the roads.”
David Gakunzi, “The Arab-Muslim Slave Trade: Lifting the Taboo, 2018”
Sex slavery is still rampant in the world. Let’s compare. While a total of approximately 10.7 million Africans were shipped as slaves to the Americas over a period of approximately 200 years, fewer than 400,000 were shipped directly to North America. UNICEF says that in 2001 there were approximately 1.75 million sex slaves worldwide and this number, while probably a low estimate, is likely much higher today. In 2003, the US State Department estimated that in the USA approximately 50,000 – 100,000 young women are trafficked as sex slaves every year.
However, our definition of ‘slavery’ would seem to include the most modern form of loss of personal freedom in the form of total dependence on government subsidies and supervision: the government plantation. Everything is taken care of by government agents and programs. The individual citizen is softly liberated of his/her liberties by an ever-increasing complex of government “support” that alleviates him/her of the need to work, and to carry responsibility for his/her own life and decisions by taking all decision-making power away from the individual.
This is what I heard a government representative say on TV a few days ago (approximately):
“We must follow through with the establishment of the new liberal world order in which people will own nothing but be happy.”
The liberal new world order aims at establishing total digital control over all functions of our lives. If it succeeds, it will be the most perfect and total form of global mass slavery ever imposed on humankind.
If you think iron-shackle slavery is bad, just wait until they perfected the digital brain control of the Liberal New World Order. Reject the total digital government slavery of the liberal new world order now, while you still can, or you will be doomed to suffer it – sooner or later.