Slavery

Slavery, or the treatment of a person as property, is one of the oldest institutions of human society. Slavery was present in the earliest human civilizations, such as those of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, and played a role in the rise of global powers through the nineteenth century. Although an abolition movement arose that led to the gradual banning of legal chattel slavery around the world, slavery continued to exist in various forms into the twenty-first century.

Definitions

Despite the near-universality of slavery in the history of most countries around the world, there is no consensus regarding what distinctive practices constitute slavery. In Western society, an enslaved person was typically treated as property by their enslaver, who in a legal sense was often considered the enslaved person's "master" or "owner;" enslaved people were almost always forced to perform labor for the enslaver. This definition, however, breaks down when applied to non-Western forms of slavery. In some African societies, enslaved people were not considered property by an individual but were thought of as belonging to a kinship group. The enslaved person could be sold, but so too could free and non-enslaved members of the kinship group. In certain African societies, enslaved people were exempted from labor and were used solely to bring honor to their enslaver by demonstrating his absolute power over another person.

The sociologist Orlando Patterson suggested that slavery is best understood as an institution designed to increase the power of a society's ruling group. Enslaved people might fulfill this role by laboring to make their enslavers rich, but they can also do so by bringing honor to the enslaver and their family. One of the defining, universal characteristics of slavery is that when a person is enslaved, they cease to exist as a socially meaningful person in their own right. The enslaved person relates to society only through the value and service they provide to their enslaver. Slavery includes many mechanisms to remove the enslaved person from membership in any groups, such as the family, through which the enslaved might derive an independent sense of identity. By placing the enslaved person in a dominant position over another individual, slavery is believed to increase the honor and power of the enslaver. The enslaved person's status may be permanent (as in chattel slavery) or temporary. In many forms, such as the system of slavery in the United States that lasted until 1865, is also passed down to the enslaved person's children. Some societies took additional steps to disenfranchise enslaved people and place obstacles to their self-advancement; for example, in the US, many states passed laws making it illegal to teach an enslaved person how to read, even with the consent of their enslaver.

History

The use of slavery was widespread in the ancient world, especially in Greece and Western Europe. During the classical ages of Greek and Roman society, enslaved people constituted about one-third of the population. Following the collapse of the Roman Empire in Western Europe during the fifth and sixth centuries, declining economic conditions destroyed the profitability of slavery and provided employers with large numbers of impoverished peasants who could be employed as a cheap source of labor. Over the next seven hundred years, slavery slowly gave way to serfdom. Although serfs, like enslaved people, were unfree laborers, serfs generally had more legal rights and a higher social standing.

Familiarity with the institution of slavery did not, however, disappear in Western Europe. A trickle of enslaved people from Eastern Europe and even from Africa continued to flow into England, France, and Germany. The enslavement of other Europeans persisted among the Vikings, who held enslaved people known as thralls, and in the tradition of "galley enslaved people" who rowed ships. Western Europeans also retained their familiarity with large-scale systems of enslavement through contacts with southern Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and with the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim world, where enslavement—including of Europeans—flourished. Western Europeans also inherited from their Roman forebears the corpus of Roman law, with its elaborate slave code. During the later Middle Ages, Europeans who were familiar with Muslim sugar plantations in the Near East sought to begin sugar production with enslaved labor on the islands of the Mediterranean.

Thus, as Western Europe entered the age of exploration and colonization, Europeans had an intimate knowledge of slavery and a ready-made code of laws to govern enslaved people. During the sixteenth century, as European nations sought to establish silver mines and sugar plantations in their new colonies in the Western Hemisphere, heavy labor demands led to efforts to enslave American Indians. This supply of laborers was inadequate, however, because of the rapid decline of the American Indian population following the introduction of European diseases into the Western Hemisphere. The Spanish and Portuguese then turned to Africa, the next most readily available source of enslaved laborers. Between 1500 and 1900, European enslavers trafficked 9.7 million African laborers into the Western Hemisphere. Every European colony eventually used enslaved labor, which became the principal form of labor in the Western Hemisphere. Because much of the wealth of several modern nations was created by enslaved labor, some contemporary Black activists and scholars have claimed the right to receive reparations payments from nations such as the United States, which continue to enjoy the wealth accumulated originally by the use of enslaved laborers.

Slavery and Race

There is no necessary connection between slavery and race. Indeed, a massive survey by Orlando Patterson of societies throughout history found that in three-quarters of societies with slavery, enslavers and enslaved people were of the same race. Slavery in the Western Hemisphere was in fact unusual in human history because enslaved people were drawn almost exclusively from Black populations. While many people now associate the term "slavery" with the historical enslavement of Africans and African Americans, people of all races and ethnicities have been enslaved throughout history—and continue to be affected by forms of slavery into the twenty-first century. Terms such as "Black slavery" and "White slavery" are generally attempts to focus on specific examples of slavery, but can prove problematic due to differing definitions.

The large-scale use of African enslaved people by European enslavers did raise new moral issues regarding race, however. In most colonies of the Western Hemisphere, the use of African enslaved people was accompanied by the rise of racism, which some scholars claim was an unprecedented phenomenon directly caused by slavery. Scholars seeking to understand contemporary race relations in the United States have been intrigued by the rise of prejudice in new slave societies. Did Europeans enslave Africans merely because they needed enslaved people and Africa was the most accessible source of enslaved people? If so, then prejudice probably originated as a learned association between race and subservience. Modern prejudice, then, might be broken down through integration and affirmative action programs aimed at helping Caucasians to witness the success of African Americans in positions of authority. Did Europeans enslave Africans because the Europeans saw Africans as inferior persons ideally suited for slavery? If so, then contemporary racism is potentially a deeply rooted cultural phenomenon, supporting the belief that African Americans will receive justice only if the government establishes permanent compensatory programs aimed at equalizing power between the races.

Historical research has not resolved these issues. Many sixteenth-century Europeans apparently did view Africans as inferior beings, even before the colonization of the Western Hemisphere. These racial antipathies were minor, however, in comparison to modern racism. Emancipated enslaved people in recently settled colonies often experienced little racial discrimination. The experience of slavery apparently increased the European settlers' sense of racial superiority over Africans.

After the enslavement systems of the Western Hemisphere became fully developed, racial arguments became the foundation of the proslavery argument. Supporters of slavery claimed that persons of African descent were so degraded and inferior to White people that it would be dangerous for society to release the enslaved people from the control of an enslaver. In the United States, some proslavery theorists pushed the racial argument to extreme levels. In explaining the contradiction between slavery and the American ideal that all persons should be free, writers such as Josiah Nott and Samuel Cartwright claimed that African Americans were not fully human and, therefore, did not deserve all the rights belonging to humanity.

A minority of proslavery writers rejected the racial argument and the effort to reconcile slavery and American egalitarian ideals. Writers such as George Fitzhugh claimed that all societies were organized hierarchically by classes and that slavery was the most benevolent system for organizing an unequal class structure. Slavery bound together enslavers and enslaved people through a system of mutual rights and obligations. Unlike the "wage enslaved people" of industrial society, chattel enslaved people (theoretically) would have certain access to food, clothing, shelter, and medical care, all because the enslaver's control over the enslaved people's bodies encouraged diligent care for one's property. Therefore, slavery was depicted by some proslavery theorists as the ideal condition for the White working class.

The Antislavery Movement

From the dawning of human history until the middle of the eighteenth century, few persons appear to have questioned the morality of slavery as an institution. Although some persons had earlier raised moral objections to certain features of slavery, almost no one appears to have questioned the overall morality of slavery as a system before the middle of the eighteenth century. Around 1750, however, an antislavery movement (abolitionism) began to appear in Britain, France, and America.

StateYearAlabama1863–1865Arkansas1863–1865California1850Connecticut1784Delaware1865Florida1863–1865Georgia1863–1865Illinois1787Indiana1787Iowa1820Kansas1861Kentucky1865Louisiana1864Maine1783Maryland1864Massachusetts1783Michigan1787Minnesota1858Mississippi1863–1865Missouri1865New Hampshire1783New Jersey1804New York1799North Carolina1863–1865Ohio1787Oklahoma1866Oregon1846Pennsylvania1780Rhode Island1784South Carolina1863–1865Tennessee1865Texas1863–1865Vermont1777Virginia1863–1865Washington, D.C.1862West Virginia1863Western Territories1862Wisconsin1787

The sudden rise of antislavery opinion appears to be related to the rise of a humanitarian ethos during the Enlightenment that encouraged people to consider the welfare of humans beyond their kin groups. The rise of the antislavery movement was also related to the growing popularity of new forms of evangelical and pietistic religious sects such as the Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers, which tended to view slaveholding as sinful materialism and enslaved people as persons worthy of God's love. The rise of the antislavery movement was encouraged by the American and French Revolutions, whose democratic political philosophies promoted a belief in the equality of individuals. The rise of antislavery opinion also coincided in time with the rise of industrial capitalism. The historian Eric Williams argued in Capitalism and Slavery (1944) that the economic and class interests of industrial capitalists rather than the moral scruples of humanitarians gave rise to the antislavery movement.

Antislavery activism initially focused on the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Reformers succeeded in prompting Britain and the United States to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Other nations followed this lead over the next half century until the Atlantic slave trade was virtually eliminated.

The campaign to abolish the slave trade achieved early success because it joined together moral concerns and self-interest. Many persons in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were prepared to accept the end of the slave trade while opposing the end of slavery itself. Even some enslavers were angered by the living conditions endured by people who were trafficked on crowded, disease-infested ships. Some enslavers, in fact, attempted to justify their ownership of enslaved people by claiming that the conditions on their plantations were more humane than the conditions on slave-trading ships or in Africa, which White enslavers considered to be "primitive;" the concept that enslavers were actually creating a better life for the people they enslaved is often referred to as paternalism, and was a commonly held belief by American enslavers in the years leading up to the US Civil War (1861–5). Some enslavers supported the abolition of the slave trade because they realized that limiting the supply of new enslaved people from Africa would economically benefit them by increasing the value of the existing enslaved population. Finally, many people believed that it was wrong for human traffickers and enslavers to deny liberty to freeborn Africans and African Americans, but that it was not wrong for enslavers to exercise control over persons who were born into the status of slavery. Indeed, supporters of slavery argued that the well-being of society required enslavers to exercise control over persons who had no preparation for freedom and might be a threat to society if emancipated.

The campaign to eradicate slavery itself was more difficult and was accompanied by significant political upheavals and, in the case of Haiti and the United States, revolution and warfare. British reformers such as William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and Granville Sharp made, perhaps, the most significant contributions to the organization of a worldwide antislavery movement. In 1823, British activists formed the London Antislavery Committee, soon to be renamed the British and Foreign Antislavery Society. The society spearheaded a successful campaign to abolish slavery in the British Empire and, eventually, worldwide. It remained in existence into the twenty-first century as Anti-Slavery International. Antislavery reformers were also active in the United States. From the 1830s through the 1860s, abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass sought to arouse the moral anger of Americans against slavery. Arguably more effective, however, were politicians such as Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, and Salmon P. Chase, whose antislavery message was a mixture of idealism, self-interest, and expedience.

Emancipation of Enslaved People

Beginning in the late eighteenth century and accelerating through the nineteenth century, slavery was abolished throughout the Western Hemisphere. This was followed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the legal abolition of slavery in Africa and Asia.

In evaluating the success of abolition in any society, it is necessary to distinguish between legal and de facto emancipation. Changing the legal status of an enslaved person to that of a free person is not the same thing as freeing the enslaved person from the control of an enslaver. Legal emancipation often has little impact on persons held as enslaved people if governments fail to enforce the abolition of slavery. For example, Britain in the nineteenth century outlawed slavery in its colonies in India, the Gold Coast, Kenya, and Zanzibar. Yet, fearing a disruption of economic production in these colonies, the British government simply abstained from enforcing its own abolition laws until pressure from reformers put an end to slavery in practice.

A similar situation existed in Mauritania, where slavery was prohibited by law three separate times, in 1905, 1960, and 1981, yet the government of Mauritania enacted no penalties against enslavers who kept enslaved people in violation of the emancipation law, and the government waged no campaign to inform the enslaved people of their freedom. As a result, journalists and investigators for the International Labour Organization found slavery still flourishing in Mauritania in the 1990s. In 2007, the country passed legislation allowing enslavers to be punished after pressure from the international community, but even this did not fully eradicate the practice of slavery in Mauritania. The Walk Free Foundation's Global Slavery Index estimated a minimum of 90,000 Mauritanians remained enslaved in 2016.

Even in societies that vigorously enforced their acts of abolition, legal emancipation was usually followed by a period of transition in which former enslaved people were held in a state resembling that of slavery. The Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833, which outlawed slavery in most colonies of the British Empire, provided that enslaved people would serve as apprentices to their former enslavers for a period of four to six years. In the American South after the US Civil War, former enslaved people were subject for a time to Black codes that greatly reduced the freedom of movement of African Americans and required them to work on the plantations of former enslavers. After the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment outlawed such practices, southerners created the sharecropping and crop-lien systems, which allowed planters to control the labor of many African Americans through a form of debt bondage.

The efforts of former enslavers to control the labor of former enslaved people were a part of a larger effort by postemancipation societies to determine what rights freedpeople should exercise. In the United States, for instance, emancipation raised many questions regarding the general rights of citizens, the answers to which often remained elusive more than a century after the abolition of slavery. Should freedpeople be considered citizens with basic rights equal to other citizens? How far should equality of citizenship rights extend? Should equality of rights be kept at a minimum level, perhaps limited to freedom of movement, the right to own property, and the right to make contracts and enforce them in a court of law? Should citizenship rights be extended to the political realm, with guarantees of the right to vote, serve on juries, and hold political office? Should citizenship rights be extended to the social realm, with the protection for the right to live wherever one wanted, to use public spaces without discrimination, and to marry persons of another race?

Antislavery and Imperialism

Ironically, the international effort to abolish slavery raised troubling new moral issues tied to European imperialism. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, nominally to suppress the African slave trade at its source, Britain and other European nations demanded of African rulers certain police powers within African kingdoms. Throughout Africa, European colonial powers gradually asserted their domination over natural resources, local economies, and political institutions. The era of European colonialism in Africa was marked by systematic human rights abuses and had devastating long-term impacts on many countries throughout the continent. The Europeans also organized new African industries to encourage the shift from the slave trade to the "legitimate trade" in other commodities. In this manner, the humanitarian impulse of antislavery combined with less humane motives to produce the New Imperialism of the 1880s through the 1910s.

During this thirty-year period, nearly all of Africa fell under European colonial domination. Time and again, the campaign to suppress the slave trade became a cloak for the imperialist ambitions of the European powers. It is worth remembering that the two international conferences in which the European powers agreed to carve up Africa among themselves, the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and the Brussels Conference of 1889–90, both devised significant agreements for ending the African slave trade.

Slavery in the Contemporary World

In the twentieth century, most Westerners believed slavery to be nothing more than a memory of the past. Major international treaties such as the Slavery Convention of the League of Nations (1926), the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1948), and the United Nations (UN) Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery (1956) seemed to indicate the emergence of an international consensus that slavery in all its forms should be eradicated. In reality, throughout the twentieth century, new forms of slavery continued to appear. The UN Supplementary Convention defined debt bondage, serfdom, bridewealth (bride price), and child labor as modern forms of slavery. Many persons considered the use of compulsory labor by authoritarian regimes such as those of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to be a form of slavery.

International cooperation toward ending slavery in the twentieth century sometimes faltered because of Cold War rivalries. Communist states were often hostile to the antislavery work of the United Nations because Westerners sought to define the compulsory labor systems in several communist states as a form of slavery. The Soviets, in return, charged that the wage system of capitalist countries constituted a type of slavery, since the wage system compelled people to work in jobs they did not like out of fear of starvation.

In 2022, various investigations by international human rights organizations and by journalists determined that roughly 49.6 million people around the world were enslaved. A 2023 Global Slavery Index estimate by the Walk Free Foundation ranked the ten countries with the highest prevalence of modern slavery as North Korea, Eritrea, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Tajikistan, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. Antislavery advocates noted that while full chattel slavery still persisted in some illegal cases, much more prevalent were various forms of forced labor, indebted or bonded labor, and child slavery. Most human rights activists consider such activities modern slavery.

Even in countries such as the United States, where slavery had long been actively suppressed by the government, isolated cases of the enslavement of workers occasionally came to light, especially regarding migrant workers and undocumented aliens. Other forms of slavery still practiced include sex slavery and forced marriage or child marriage. Many forms of slavery also remained closely tied to human trafficking, and such activities remained entrenched despite widespread official illegality.

Efforts to combat such persistent forms of slavery around the world continued into the twenty-first century. Bipartisan legislation was passed by the US Congress as part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2017 that was signed into law by President Barack Obama in December 2016. This bill provided authorization for the End Modern Slavery Initiative, which raised funds for a nonprofit foundation dedicated to measurably reducing modern slavery, particularly human trafficking, by targeting areas outside of the United States where it is particularly prevalent. The resulting Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS) also drew funding from other nations and private donors, and began work in various countries around the world. The US and other countries continued to enact other antislavery efforts as well; for example, in December 2021, US president Joe Biden signed a law outlawing goods manufactured in China by enslaved Uyghur people, a religious minority in China who had been subjected to widespread persecution and imprisonment by the Chinese government.

Bibliography

"Slavery in History." Free the Slaves, www.freetheslaves.net/about-slavery/slavery-in-history/. Accessed 5 Aug. 2024.

Bender, Thomas, editor. The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation. U of California P, 1992.

Burkhalter, Holly. "A Game-Changer in the Fight against Modern Day Slavery." The Hill, 27 Feb. 2015, thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/civil-rights/233955-a-game-changer-in-the-fight-against-modern-day-slavery. Accessed 26 Apr. 2017.

Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. New ed., Oxford UP, 1999.

Engerman, Stanley, et al. Slavery. Oxford UP, 2009.

"The Global Slavery Index." Walk Free, Minderoo Foundation, www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/. Accessed 5 Aug. 2024.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard UP, 1982.

"The 1619 Project." The New York Times, 4 Sept. 2019, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html. Accessed 28 Oct. 2022.

"What Is Modern Slavery?" Anti-Slavery International, www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/modern-slavery/. Accessed 5 Aug. 2024.

"Who We Are." Global Fund to End Modern Slavery, gfems.org/what-we-do/. Accessed 5 Aug. 2024.