Slavery is a form of
forced labor in which people are considered to
be the property of others. Slaves can be held against their will
from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of
the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive
compensation (such as
wages). Evidence of slavery predates written records,
and has existed to varying extents, forms and periods in almost all
cultures and
continents. In some societies, slavery existed as
a legal institution or socio-economic system, but today it is
formally outlawed in nearly all countries and condemned by the
Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Nevertheless, the practice
continues in various forms around the world.
BBC
Millions 'forced into slavery'
The English word slave derives - through
Old
French and
Medieval Latin - from
the medieval word for
Slavic people
of
Central and Eastern
Europe, who were the last ethnic group to be captured and
enslaved in Central Europe. For thousands of years, according to
Adam Smith and
Auguste Comte, a slave was principally defined
as a captive or prisoner of war.
History of slavery and the slave trade
Slavery is rare among
Hunter
gatherer populations, as slavery depends on a system of social
stratification. Slavery also requires economic surpluses and a high
population density to be viable. Due to these factors, the practice
of slavery would have only proliferated after the invention of
agriculture during the Neolithic revolution about 11,000 years
ago.The earliest records of slavery can be traced to the
Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1760 BC), and the
Bible refers to it as an established
institution.
Slavery was known to occur in civilizations
as old as Sumer, as well as almost every other
ancient civilization, including Ancient
Egypt, the Akkadian
Empire
, Assyria, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire and the Islamic Caliphate.
Such institutions were a mixture of
debt-slavery, punishment for crime, the
enslavement of
prisoners of war,
child abandonment, and the birth
of slave children to slaves. Records of
slavery in Ancient Greece go as
far back as
Mycenaean Greece.
Two-fifths
(some authorities say four-fifths) of the population of Classical
Athens
were slaves. Greek philosophers such as
Aristotle accepted the theory of natural
slavery, that is, that some men are slaves by nature.
As the
Roman Republic expanded
outward,
entire
populations were enslaved, thus creating an ample supply from
all over Europe and the Mediterranean.
Greeks,
Illyrians,
Berbers,
Germans,
Britons,
Thracians,
Gauls,
Jews,
Arabs, and many more were
slaves used not only for labour, but also for amusement (e.g.
gladiators and
sex
slaves). This oppression by an elite minority eventually led to
slave revolts (see
Roman Servile Wars); the
Third Servile War led by
Spartacus being the most famous and severe. By the
late Republican era, slavery had become a vital economic pillar in
the wealth of Rome, as well as a very significant part of Roman
society. It is estimated that over 25% of the population of
Ancient Rome was enslaved. According to
some scholars, slaves represented 35% or more of
Italy
's
population. In the city of Rome
alone, under
the Roman Empire, there were about
400,000 slaves. During the millennium from the emergence of
the Roman Empire to its eventual decline, at least 100 million
people were captured or sold as slaves throughout the Mediterranean
and its hinterlands.
The early
medieval slave trade was mainly
confined to the South and East: the
Byzantine Empire and the
Muslim world were the destinations,
pagan Central and
Eastern Europe, along with the
Caucasus and
Tartary, were important sources.
Viking,
Arab,
Greek and
Jewish merchants (known
as
Radhanites) were all involved in the
slave trade during the
Early Middle Ages.
Medieval Spain and
Portugal were the scene of almost
constant
warfare between
Muslims and
Christians.
Periodic
raiding expeditions were sent from Al-Andalus
to ravage the Iberian Christian kingdoms, bringing
back booty and slaves. In raid against Lisbon
, Portugal
in 1189, for
example, the Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur took 3,000 female and child
captives, while his governor of Córdoba
, in a subsequent attack upon Silves, Portugal in 1191, took 3,000 Christian
slaves. From the 11th to the 19th century, North African Barbary Pirates engaged in Razzias, raids on European coastal towns, to
capture Christian slaves to sell at
slave markets
in places such as Algeria
and Morocco
.
At the
time of the Domesday Book,
compiled in 1086, nearly 10% of the English
population
were slaves. Slavery
in early medieval Europe was so common that
the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly
prohibited it — or at least the export of Christian slaves to
non-Christian lands was prohibited at e.g. the Council of Koblenz
in 922, the
Council of
London , and the Council of Armagh (1171). In the 15th century,
the Catholic Church legitimised enslavement of non-Christians in
overseas territories. In 1452,
Pope
Nicholas V issued the
papal bull
Dum Diversas, granting
Afonso V of Portugal the right to
reduce any "Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers" to
hereditary slavery which legitimized the slave trade, at least as a
result of war. The approval of slavery under these conditions was
reaffirmed and extended in his
Romanus
Pontifex bull of 1455.
However, the Dominican friars who arrived at
the Spanish settlement at Santo Domingo
strongly denounced the enslavement of the local
Indians. Along with other priests, they opposed their
treatment as unjust and illegal in an audience with the Spanish
king and in the subsequent royal commission.
The
Byzantine-Ottoman wars
and the
Ottoman wars in
Europe brought large numbers of Christian slaves into the
Islamic world too.
After the Battle of
Lepanto
approximately 12,000 Christian galley slaves were
freed from the Ottoman
Turks. Eastern Europe suffered a series of
Tatar invasions, the goal of which was to
loot and capture slaves into
jasyr. Seventy-five Crimean
Tatar raids were recorded into
Poland–Lithuania
between 1474-1569. There were more than 100,000 Russian captives in
the
Kazan Khanate alone in 1551.
The transatlantic slave trade
Slavery was prominent presumably elsewhere in
Africa long before the beginnings of the
transatlantic slave trade.
The maritime town of Lagos,
Portugal
, was the
first slave market created in Portugal for the sale of imported
African slaves - the Mercado de Escravos, opened in
1444. In 1441, the first slaves were brought to
Portugal from northern Mauritania
. By the year 1552 black African slaves made up 10 percent of the
population of Lisbon
.
In the
second half of the 16th century, the Crown gave up the monopoly on
slave trade and the focus of European trade in African slaves
shifted from import to Europe to slave transports directly to
tropical colonies in the Americas - in the case of Portugal,
especially Brazil
. In
the 15th century one third of the slaves were resold to the African
market in exchange of gold.
Spain had to fight against relatively powerful and hardy
civilizations of the
New World. However,
the Spanish conquest of the indigenous peoples in the Americas was
also facilitated by the spread of diseases (e.g.
smallpox) due to lack of biological immunity.
(although diseases such as
syphilis were
spread to the Europeans from first nations origins.) Natives were
used as forced labour (the
Spanish
employed the
pre-Columbian draft
system called the
mita), but the
diseases caused a labour shortage and so the Spanish colonists were
gradually involved in the
Atlantic
slave trade.
The first Europeans to use African slaves in
the New World were the Spaniards who
labourers on islands such as Cuba
and Hispaniola
, where the alarming decline in the native population had
spurred the first royal laws protecting the native population
(Laws of Burgos, 1512-1513).
The first African slaves arrived in Hispaniola in 1501. England
played a prominent role in the
Atlantic slave trade. The "
slave triangle" was pioneered by
Francis Drake and his associates.
By 1750, slavery was a legal institution in all of the 13
American colonies, and the profits
of the slave trade and of West Indian
plantations amounted to 5% of the British economy at the time of
the Industrial
Revolution.
The Transatlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when
the largest number of slaves were captured on raiding expeditions
into the interior of West Africa.
These expeditions were typically carried
out by African kingdoms, such as the Oyo
empire (Yoruba), the Ashanti
Empire
, the kingdom of Dahomey, and
the Aro Confederacy.
Europeans rarely entered the interior of Africa, due to fear of
disease and moreover fierce
African resistance. The slaves were brought to coastal outposts
where they were traded for goods. An estimated 12 million Africans
were shipped to the
Americas from the 16th
to the 19th centuries.
Of these, an estimated 645,000 were brought
to what is now the United
States
. The white citizens of Virginia decided to
treat the first Africans in Virginia as
indentured servants. Over half of all
European immigrants to Colonial America during the 17th and 18th
centuries arrived as indentured servants. In 1655,
John Casor, a black man, became the first legally
recognized slave in the present United States. According to the
1860 U.S. census, 393,975 individuals owned 3,950,528 slaves.
The
largest number of slaves were shipped to Brazil
.
Author Charles Rappleye argued that
Slavery in the United States
Although the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended shortly after the
American Revolution, slavery remained a central economic
institution in the Southern states. All the Northern states passed
emancipation acts between 1780 and 1804; most of these arranged for
gradual emancipation. In the South, however, slavery expanded with
the westward movement of population. Historian Peter Kolchin wrote,
"By breaking up existing families and forcing slaves to relocate
far from everyone and everything they knew" this migration
"replicated (if on a reduced level) many of [the] horrors" of the
Atlantic slave trade. Historian Ira Berlin called this forced
migration the Second
Middle Passage.
Characterizing it as the "central event” in the life of a slave
between the
American Revolution
and the Civil War, Berlin wrote that whether they were uprooted
themselves or simply lived in fear that they or their families
would be involuntarily moved, "the massive deportation traumatized
black people, both slave and free." By 1860, 500,000 slaves had
grown to 4 million. As long as slavery expanded, it remained
profitable and powerful and was unlikely to disappear. Antislavery
forces, however, proposed to put it on the path to extinction by
stopping further expansion. If it became unprofitable, few people
would spend the large sums of cash needed to buy and keep slaves,
and the system would fade away quietly as it had in most countries
in world history.
The plantation system, based on tobacco growing in Virginia, North
Carolina, and Kentucky, and rice in South Carolina, expanded into
lush new cotton lands in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi—and needed
more slaves. But slave importation became illegal in 1808. Although
complete statistics are lacking, it is estimated that 1,000,000
slaves moved west from the
Old South
between 1790 and 1860.
Most of the slaves were moved from Maryland
, Virginia
, and the Carolinas.
Michael Tadman, in a 1989 book
Speculators and Slaves: Masters,
Traders, and Slaves in the Old South, indicates that 60-70% of
interregional migrations were the result of the sale of slaves. In
1820 a child in the Upper South had a 30% chance to be sold south
by 1860.
Political division over slavery was temporarily resolved by the
Compromise of 1850 which sought
to divide new territories between slave and free states. However,
the status of Kansas was left unresolved, producing
bloody clashes between pro-slavery and
anti-slavery settlers. In 1860, the election of
Abraham Lincoln as President on a program of
limiting slavery led to the secession of Southern States and the
outbreak of the
US Civil War. Although
Lincoln initially disclaimed any intention to interfere with
slavery, the progress of the war produced the
Emancipation Proclamation freeing
slaves in Southern states still in revolt, and ultimately the
Thirteenth
Amendment to the United States Constitution in December 1865,
which ended legalized slavery in the United States.
The Arab slave trade
Historians say the
Arab slave trade
lasted more than a millennium. Slaves in the
Arab World came from many different regions,
including
Sub-Saharan Africa
(mainly
Zanj), the
Caucasus (mainly
Circassians),
Central
Asia (mainly
Tartars), and
Central and
Eastern
Europe (mainly
Saqaliba).
Ibn Battuta tells us several times that
he was given or purchased slaves. Slaves were purchased or captured
on the frontiers of the
Islamic world
and then imported to the major centers, where there were
slave markets from which they were widely
distributed.
In the 9th and 10th centuries, the black
Zanj slaves may have constituted at least a
half of the total population in lower Iraq
. At
the same time, many tens of thousands of slaves in the region were
also imported from
Central Asia and the
Caucasus.
Zanzibar
was once East Africa's
main slave-trading port, and under Omani
Arabs in the
19th century as many as 50,000 slaves were passing through the city
each year. Some historians estimate that between 11 and
18 million black African slaves crossed the Red Sea
, Indian
Ocean
, and Sahara Desert from 650
AD to 1900 AD, compared with the 9.4 to 12 million Africans who
were taken to the Americas. One of the main justifications
European powers gave for colonizing nearly the entire African
continent during the 1880s and 1890s was the desire to end slave
trading and slavery in Africa.
Central and Eastern European slaves were generally known as
Saqaliba (i.e., Slavs).
The Moors, starting in the 8th century, also raided
coastal areas around the Mediterranean
and Atlantic Ocean
, and became known as the Barbary pirates. It is estimated that
they captured 1.25 million white slaves from
Western Europe and
North America between the 16th and 19th
centuries.
Slave trade in Europe
In Western Europe slavery largely disappeared by the later
Middle Ages.
The trade of slaves in England
was made illegal in 1102. Thralldom in Scandinavia was finally abolished in the
mid-14th century. Slavery persisted longer in
Eastern Europe.
Slavery in Poland
was
forbidden in the 15th century; in Lithuania
, slavery was formally abolished in 1588; they were
replaced by the second serfdom. In
Kievan Rus and
Muscovy, the slaves were usually classified as
kholops.
Slavery remained a major institution in
Russia
until the year 1723, when the Peter the Great converted the household
slaves into house serfs. Russian agricultural slaves were
formally converted into serfs earlier in 1679.
Serfs in Russia were freed from their
lords by an edict of
Alexander
II in 1861.
According to Robert Davis between 1 million and 1.25 million
European were captured by
Barbary pirates and sold as slaves
in
North Africa and
Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th
centuries.
There was also an extensive trade in
Christian slaves in the Black Sea region for several centuries
until the Crimean Khanate was
destroyed by the Russian
Empire
in 1783. In the 1570s close to 20,000 slaves a year
were being sold in the Crimean port of Kaffa
. The
slaves were captured in southern Russia,
Poland-Lithuania,
Moldavia,
Wallachia, and
Circassia by
Tatar
horsemen in a trade known as the "harvesting of the steppe". Some
researchers estimate that altogether more than 3 million people
were captured and enslaved during the time of the Crimean Khanate.
It is estimated that up to 75% of the Crimean population consisted
of slaves orfreedmen.
Slavery in Africa
In early
Islamic states of the western
Sudan, including
Ghana (750-1076),
Mali (1235–1645),
Segou (1712–1861), and
Songhai (1275-1591), about a third of the
population were slaves. In
Senegambia, between 1300 and 1900,
close to one-third of the population was enslaved.
In Sierra Leone
in the 19th century about half of the population
consisted of slaves. In the 19th century at least half the
population was enslaved among the Duala
of the Cameroon
, the Igbo and other
peoples of the lower Niger, the Kongo, and the Kasanje kingdom and Chokwe of Angola
.
Among the
Ashanti and
Yoruba a third of the population consisted of
slaves. The population of the
Kanem
(1600–1800) was about a third-slave. It was perhaps 40% in
Bornu (1580–1890). Between 1750 and 1900 from
one- to two-thirds of the entire population of the
Fulani jihad states consisted of slaves.
The
population of the Sokoto
caliphate
formed by Hausas in the northern
Nigeria
and Cameroon was half-slave in the 19th
century. Between 65% to 90% population of Arab-Swahili Zanzibar
was enslaved. Roughly half the
population of Madagascar
was enslaved. When British rule was
first imposed on the Sokoto Caliphate
and the surrounding areas in northern Nigeria at the turn of the 20th
century, approximately 2 million to 2.5 million people there were
slaves. Anti-Slavery Society estimated there were 2
million slaves in Ethiopia
in the early 1930s out of an estimated population
of between 8 and 16 million.

Southern Central Africa in 1880.
One of the most famous slave traders on the East African coast was
Tippu Tip, who was himself the grandson of
an enslaved African.
The prazeros slave traders,
descendants of Portuguese and Africans, operated along the Zambezi
. North of the Zambezi, the
waYao and
Makua people
played a similar role as professional slave raiders and traders.
The
Nyamwezi slave traders operated further
north under the leadership of
Msiri and
Mirambo.
Slavery in Asia
As late as 1908, women slaves were still sold in the
Ottoman Empire.
A slave market for
captured Russian and Persian slaves was centred in the Central Asian khanate of Khiva
. According to Sir
Henry Bartle Frere (who sat on the
Viceroy's Council), there were an estimated 8 million or 9 million
slaves in
India in 1841. In
Malabar, about 15% of the population were
slaves. Slavery was abolished in both
Hindu
and
Muslim India by the
Indian Slavery Act V. of 1843.
In Istanbul
about one-fifth of the population consisted of
slaves.
In
East Asia, the Imperial
government formally abolished slavery in China
in 1906,
and the law became effective in 1910. Slave rebellion in
China at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century
was so extensive that owners eventually converted the institution
into a female-dominated one. The
Nangzan in
Tibetan history were hereditary household
slaves.
Indigenous slaves existed in Korea
.
Slavery was officially abolished with the
Gabo Reform of 1894 but remained extant in
reality until 1930.
During the Joseon Dynasty
(1392–1910) about 30% to 50% of the Korean population were slaves. In late 16th century
Japan
, slavery was officially banned; but forms of
contract and indentured labor persisted alongside the period penal
codes' forced labor.
In
Southeast Asia, a quarter to a third
of the population of some areas of Thailand
and Burma
were
slaves. The
hill
tribe people in
Indochina were "hunted
incessantly and carried off as slaves by the Siamese (Thai), the
Anamites (Vietnamese), and the Cambodians." The Siamese military
expedition had been converted into a slave hunting operation on a
large scale.
Abolitionist movements
Slavery has existed, in one form or another, through the whole of
recorded
human history — as
have, in various periods, movements to free large or distinct
groups of slaves. According to the
Biblical
Book of Exodus,
Moses led
Israelite slaves
out of
ancient Egypt — possibly the
first written account of a movement to free slaves.
Later Jewish laws
(known as Halacha) prevented slaves from
being sold out of the Land of
Israel
, and allowed a slave to move to Israel if he so
desired.
One of the first protests against the enslavement of Africans came
from German and Dutch
Quakers in
Pennsylvania in 1688.
One of the most significant milestones in
the campaign to abolish slavery throughout the world occurred in
England
in 1772, with British judge Lord Mansfield, whose opinion in Somersett's Case was widely taken to have
held that slavery was illegal in England. This judgement
also laid down the principle that slavery contracted in other
jurisdictions (such as the American colonies) could not be enforced
in England..
In 1777, Vermont
became the first portion of what would become the
United States to abolish slavery (at the time Vermont was an
independent nation). In 1794, under the Jacobins,
Revolutionary France abolished slavery.
There were celebrations in 2007 to commemorate the 200th
anniversary of the Abolition of the slave trade in the United
Kingdom through the work of the British
Anti-Slavery Society.
William Wilberforce received much of the
credit although the groundwork was an anti-slavery essay by
Thomas Clarkson.
Wilberforce was also urged by his close
friend, Prime Minister
William
Pitt the Younger, to make the issue his own, and was also given
support by reformed Evangelical
John
Newton. The
Slave Trade Act
was passed by the British Parliament on 25 March 1807, making the
slave trade illegal throughout the
British Empire, Wilberforce also campaigned
for abolition of slavery in British Empire, which he lived to see
in the
Slavery Abolition Act
1833. After abolition slave trade act 1807 was passed these
campaigners switched to encouraging other countries to follow suit,
notably France and the British colonies.
Between 1808 and 1860, the British
West Africa Squadron seized
approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were
aboard.
Action was also taken against African
leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the
trade, for example against "the usurping King of Lagos
", deposed
in 1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50
African rulers.
In the
United
States
, abolitionist pressure produced a series of small
steps towards emancipation. After January 1, 1808, the
importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited, but
not the internal slave trade, nor involvement in the international
slave trade externally. Legal slavery persisted; and those slaves
already in the U.S. would not be legally emancipated for another 60
years. Many American abolitionists took an active role in opposing
slavery by supporting the
Underground Railroad. Violence soon
erupted, with the anti-slavery forces led by
John Brown, and
Bleeding Kansas, involving anti-slavery and
pro-slavery settlers, became a symbol for the nationwide clash over
slavery. The
American Civil War,
beginning in 1861, led to the end of slavery in the United
States.
In 1863 Lincoln issued the
Emancipation Proclamation, which
freed slaves held in the Confederate States; the
13th
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
(1865) prohibited slavery throughout the country.
In the 1860s,
David Livingstone's
reports of atrocities within the
Arab
slave trade in Africa stirred up the interest of the British
public, reviving the flagging abolitionist movement.
The Royal Navy
throughout the 1870s attempted to suppress "this abominable Eastern
trade", at Zanzibar
in particular.
On December 10, 1948, the
United Nations General
Assembly adopted the
Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, which declared freedom from slavery is an
internationally recognized
human right.
Article 4 of the
Universal Declaration of
Human Rights states:
Chronology of abolition
- 1761 Portugal abolishes slavery in mainland Portugal and in
Portuguese possessions in India, but not Brazil or Africa,
- 1794 France abolishes slavery (partly-abortively)
- 1804 France re-legalizes slavery
- 1807 Great Britain abolishes slave trade within and to the
British Empire
- 1811 Spain abolishes slavery at home and in all colonies except
Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo
- 1813 Argentina abolishes slavery
- 1821 Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela abolish slavery
- 1823 Chile abolishes slavery
- 1824 The Federal Republic of Central America abolishes
slavery
- 1829 Mexico abolishes slavery
- 1831 Bolivia abolishes slavery
- 1833 British Empire abolishes slavery
- 1842 Uruguay abolishes slavery
- 1848 Slavery abolished in all French and Danish colonies
- 1854 Venezuela abolishes slavery
- 1863 Slavery abolished in Dutch colonies
- 1865 United States abolishes slavery
- 1869 Portugal abolishes slavery in the African colonies
- 1886 Cuba abolishes slavery
- 1888 Brazil abolishes slavery
- 1894 Korea abolishes slavery
- 1905 Siam (Thailand) abolishes slavery
- 1906 China abolishes slavery
- 1923 Afghanistan abolishes slavery
- 1942 Ethiopia abolishes slavery
- 1958 Bhutan abolishes slavery
- 1962 Saudi Arabia abolishes slavery
- 1963 United Arab Emirates abolishes slavery
- 1970 Oman abolishes slavery
- 1981 Mauritania abolishes slavery
Contemporary slavery
Since 1945, debate about the link between
economic growth and different relational
forms (most notably unfree social relations of production in Third
World agriculture) occupied many contributing to discussions in the
development decade (the 1960s). This continued to be the case in
the mode of production debate (mainly about agrarian transition in
India) that spilled over into the 1970s, important aspects of which
continue into the present (see the monograph by Brass, 1999, and
the 600 page volume edited by Brass and van der Linden, 1997).
Central to these discussions was the link between capitalist
development and modern forms of unfree labour (
peonage,
debt bondage,
indenture, and chattel slavery (which
involves outright ownership of the slave)). Within the domain of
political economy, the debate has a long historical lineage, and -
accurately presented - never actually went away. Unlike advocacy
groups, for which the number of the currently unfree is paramount,
those political economists who participated in the earlier debates
sought to establish who, precisely, was (or was not) to be included
under the rubric of a worker whose subordination constituted a
modern form of unfreedom. This element of definition was regarded
as an
epistemological necessary
precondition to any calculations of how many were to be categorized
as relationally unfree.
Though slavery was officially abolished in China in 1910, the
practice continues unofficially in some regions. Slavery also
exists in other countries across the world, including among nations
within Africa. Groups such as the
American Anti-Slavery Group,
Anti-Slavery
International,
Free the Slaves,
the
Anti-Slavery Society, and
the Norwegian Anti-Slavery Society continue to campaign to rid the
world of slavery. Conditions that are considered slavery include
debt bondage,
indentured servitude,
serfdom,
domestic
servant kept in captivity,
adoption in
which children are effectively forced to work as slaves,
child soldier, and
forced marriage.
More people suffer slavery than in the past but slaves are a
smaller proportion of the human population. Slaves are cheap and
can therefore be treated as expendable. Worldwide slavery is a
criminal offence but criminal slave owners can get very high
returns for their actions. According to researcher Siddharth Kara,
the profits generated worldwide by all forms of slavery in 2007 was
$91.2 billion. That is second only to drug trafficking in terms of
global, criminal, illicit enterprises. The weighted average annual
profits generated by a slave in 2007 was $3,175, with a low of an
average $950 for bonded labor and $29,210 for a trafficked sex
slave. Approximately forty percent of all slave profits each year
are generated by trafficked sex slaves, representing slightly more
than 4 percent of the world's 29 million slaves.
Human trafficking
Trafficking in human beings (also called
human
trafficking) is one method of obtaining slaves. Victims
are typically recruited through deceit or trickery (such as a false
job offer, false migration offer, or false marriage offer), sale by
family members, recruitment by former slaves, or outright
abduction. Victims are forced into a "debt slavery" situation by
coercion, deception, fraud, intimidation, isolation, threat,
physical force, debt bondage or even
force-feeding with
drugs
of abuse to control their victims. “Annually, according to U.S.
Government-sponsored research completed in 2006, approximately
800,000 people are trafficked across national borders, which does
not include millions trafficked within their own countries.
Approximately 80 percent of transnational victims are women and
girls and up to 50 percent are minors,” reports the U.S. Department
of State in a 2008 study.
Whilst the majority of victims are women, and sometimes children,
who are
forced into prostitution
(in which case the practice is called
sex
trafficking), victims also include men, women and children
who are forced into
manual labour. Due
to the illegal nature of human trafficking, its exact extent is
unknown. A U.S. Government report published in 2005, estimates that
600,000 to 800,000 people worldwide are trafficked across borders
each year. This figure does not include those who are trafficked
internally. Another research effort revealed that between 1.5
million and 1.8 million individuals are trafficked either
internally or internationally each year, 500,000 to 600,000 of whom
are sex trafficking victims.
Current situation
Although outlawed in nearly all countries, forms of slavery still
exist. Several estimates of the number of slaves in the world have
been provided. According to a broad definition of slavery used by
Kevin Bales of
Free the Slaves (FTS), an advocacy group
linked with
Anti-Slavery
International, there were 27 million people in slavery in 1999,
spread all over the world. In 2005, the International Labour
Organisation provided an estimate of 12.3 million forced labourers
in the world,. Siddharth Kara has provided an estimate of 28.4
million slaves at the end of 2006 divided into the following three
categories: bonded labour/debt bondage (18.1 million), forced
labour (7.6 million), and trafficked slaves (2.7 million). Kara
provides a dynamic model to calculate the number of slaves in the
world each year, with an estimated 29.2 million at the end of 2009.
The weighted average global sales price of a slave is calculated to
be approximately $340, with a high of $1,895 for the average
trafficked sex slave, and a low of $40 to $50 for debt bondage
slaves in part of Asia and Africa.
Enslavement is also taking place in parts of
Africa, the
Middle East,
and
South Asia.
The Middle East Quarterly reports that
slavery is still endemic in Sudan
.
In June
and July 2007, 570 people who
had been enslaved by brick manufacturers in Shanxi
and
Henan
were freed by the Chinese government. Among
those rescued were 69 children. In response, the Chinese government
assembled a force of 35,000 police to check northern Chinese brick
kilns for slaves, sent dozens of kiln supervisors to prison,
punished 95 officials in Shanxi province for dereliction of duty,
and sentenced one kiln foreman to death for killing an enslaved
worker.
In 2008, the Nepalese
government abolished the Haliya system of forced labour, freeing about 20,000
people. An estimated 40 million people in India
, most of
them Dalits or "untouchables", are bonded workers, many working to pay off debts
that were incurred generations ago.
In
Mauritania alone, it is
estimated that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the
population, are enslaved with many used as
bonded labour.
Slavery in Mauritania was
criminalized in August 2007.
In Niger
, slavery
is also a current phenomenon. A Nigerien study has found
that more than 800,000 people are enslaved, almost 8% of the
population.
Pygmies, the people of
Central Africa's
rain
forest, live in servitude to the
Bantus.
Some tribal sheiks in Iraq
still keep
blacks, called Abd, which means
servant or slave in Arabic, as slaves. Child slavery has commonly been used in the
production of
cash crops and mining.
According
to the U.S.
Department of State
, more than 109,000 children were working on
cocoa farms alone in Côte
d'Ivoire
(Ivory Coast) in "the worst forms of child labor" in 2002.
In
November 2006, the International Labour
Organization announced it will be seeking "to prosecute members
of the ruling Myanmar junta for crimes
against humanity" over the continuous forced labour of its citizens by the military
at the International Court of
Justice
. According to the International Labor
Organization (ILO), an estimated 800,000 people are subject to
forced labour in Myanmar
.
The
Ecowas
Court of
Justice is hearing the case of Hadijatou Mani in late 2008, where
Ms. Mani hopes to compel the government of Niger to end slavery in its
jurisdiction. Cases brought by her in local courts have
failed so far.
Apologies
On May 21, 2001, the
National Assembly of France
passed the
Taubira law,
recognizing slavery as a
crime
against humanity. Apologies on behalf of African nations, for
their role in trading their countrymen into slavery, remain an open
issue since slavery was practiced in Africa even before the first
Europeans arrived and the
Atlantic
slave trade was performed with a high degree of involvement of
several African societies. The black slave market was supplied by
well-established slave trade networks controlled by local African
societies and individuals. Indeed, as already mentioned in this
article, slavery persists in several areas of
West Africa until the present day.
Several historians have made important contributions to the global
understanding of the African side of the
Atlantic slave trade. By arguing that
African merchants determined the assemblage of trade goods accepted
in exchange for slaves, many historians argue for African agency
and ultimately a shared responsibility for the slave trade.
The issue of an apology is linked to
reparations for slavery and is still
being pursued by a number of entities across the world. For
example, the Jamaican Reparations Movement approved its declaration
and action Plan.
In September, 2006, it was reported that the UK Government may
issue a "statement of regret" over slavery, an act that was
followed through by a "public statement of sorrow" from
Tony Blair on November 27, 2006.
On
February 25, 2007 the state of
Virginia
resolved to 'profoundly regret' and apologize for
its role in the institution of slavery. Unique and the first
of its kind in the U.S., the apology was unanimously passed in both
Houses as Virginia approached the 400th anniversary of the founding
of Jamestown
, where the first slaves were imported into North
America in 1619.
On August
24, 2007, Mayor Ken Livingstone of
London
, United
Kingdom
apologized publicly for Britain's role in colonial
slave trade. "You can look across
there to see the institutions that still have the benefit of the
wealth they created from slavery," he said pointing towards the
financial district. He claimed that London was still tainted by the
horrors of slavery.
Jesse Jackson
praised Mayor Livingstone, and added that reparations should be
made, one of his common arguments.
Reparations
Sporadically there have been movements to achieve reparations for
those formerly held as slaves, or sometimes their descendants.
Claims for reparations for being held in slavery are handled as a
civil law matter in almost every
country. This is often decried as a serious problem, since former
slaves' relative lack of money means they often have limited access
to a potentially expensive and futile
legal process. Mandatory systems of fines
and reparations paid to an as yet undetermined group of claimants
from fines, paid by unspecified parties, and collected by
authorities have been proposed by advocates to alleviate this
"civil court problem." Since in almost all cases there are no
living ex-slaves or living ex-slave owners these movements have
gained little traction. In nearly all cases the
judicial system has ruled that the
statute of limitations on these
possible claims has long since expired.
Nonetheless, from time to time misinformation is circulated (often
through
e-mail) to United States residents
describing a $5000 "slavery
tax credit,"
supposedly passed into law under President
Bill Clinton's administration during the 1990s,
but never announced to the public. No such credit exists, and
persons attempting to promote or take advantage of the alleged
credit are subject to prosecution. (See
Slavery reparations scam for
further information.) A similar scam involves a "tax credit"
available to
Native
Americans.
Economics
Economists have attempted to model during which circumstances
slavery (and milder variants such as
serfdom) appear and disappear. One observation is
that slavery becomes more desirable for land owners when land is
abundant but labour is not, so paid workers can demand high wages.
If labour is abundant but land is scarce, then it becomes more
costly for the land owners to have guards for the slaves than to
employ paid workers who can only demand low wages due to the
competition. Thus first slavery and then serfdom gradually
decreased in Europe as the population grew. It was reintroduced in
the Americas and in Russia (serfdom) as large new land areas with
few people became available. . In his books,
Time
on the Cross and
Without Consent or Contract: the Rise
and Fall of American Slavery, Robert
Fogel maintains that slavery was in fact a very economical
method of production, especially on bigger plantations. Fogel
discusses that although immoral and extremely unjust, slavery in
the time prior to the Civil War had whites in the South more
successful financially than those in the North.
Another observation is slavery is more common when the labour done
is relatively simple and thus easy to supervise, such as large
scale growing of a single crop. It is much more difficult and
costly to check that slaves are doing their best and with good
quality when they are doing complex tasks. Therefore, slavery was
seen as the most efficient method of production for large scale
crops like sugar and cotton, whose output was based on economies of
scale. This enabled a
gang system of
labor to be prominent on large plantations where field hands were
monitored and worked with factory-like precision. Thus, slavery
tends to decrease with technological advancements requiring more
skilled people, even as they are able to demand high wages.
It has also been argued that slavery tends to retard technological
advancement, since the focus is on increasing the number of slaves
rather than improving the efficiency of labour. Because of this,
theoretical knowledge and learning in Greece—and later in Rome—was
not applied to ease physical labour or improve manufacturing. Some
Russian scholars have argued that the Soviet Union's
technological development was hindered by
Stalin's use of slave labour.
Adam Smith who was opposed of slavery,
colonialism, empire and critical of colonial and slave masters in
his minor works and both of his two major works,
The Theory of Moral
Sentiments and the
Wealth of
Nations stated that "
domestic
slavery" in Europe's past was the "vilest of all states",made
the generally well known argument that free labor was better than
slave labor, and argued further that slavery in Europe ended during
the Middle Ages, and only then after both the church and state were
separate, independent and strong institutions, that it is nearly
impossible to end slavery in a free, democratic and republican
forms of governments since many of its legislators or political
figures were slave owners, and would not punish themselves, and
that slaves would be better able to gain their freedom when there
was centralized government, or a central authority like a king or
the church. Similar arguments appear later in the works of Auguste
Comte, especially when it comes to Adam Smith’s belief in the
separation of powers or what
Comte called the "separation of the spiritual and the temporal"
during the Middle Ages and the end of slavery, and Smith's
criticism of masters, past and present. As Smith stated in the
Lectures on Jurisprudence, "The great power of the clergy thus
concurring with that of the king set the slaves at liberty. But it
was absolutely necessary both that the authority of the king and of
the clergy should be great. Where ever any one of these was
wanting, slavery still continues."
Religion and slavery
Other uses of the term
The word
slavery is often used as a pejorative to describe
any activity in which one is coerced into performing.
See also
- Various
- Slavery by region
- Slavery by religion and era
- Opposition and resistance
- Films
- Stanley Kubrick, Spartacus , 1960
- Sergio Giral, Cimarron,
1967
- Marlon Brando, Burn!, 1969
- Sergio Giral, El Otro
Francisco (The Other Francisco), 1975
- Tomas Gutierrez Alea,
La Ultima Cena (The Last Supper), 1976
- Alex Haley, Roots, 1977 mini-series based on
Haley's book
- Carlos Diegues,
Quilombo, 1984
- Julie Dash, Daughters of the
Dust, 1991
- Haile Gerima, Sankofa,
1993
- Charles Burnett,
Nightjohn, 1996
- Steven Spielberg, Amistad, 1997
- Jonathan Demme, Beloved,
1998
- Kevin Willmott, C.S.A.: The
Confederate States of America, 2004
(mockumentary/political drama)
- Owen 'Alik Shahadah,
500 Years Later, 2005
- Michael Apted, Amazing Grace, 2006
- Marco Kreuzpainter, Trade,
2007
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External links
- Historical