1.
Slavery
–
A slave is unable to withdraw unilaterally from such an arrangement and works without remuneration. Many scholars now use the chattel slavery to refer to this specific sense of legalised. In a broader sense, however, the word slavery may also refer to any situation in which an individual is de facto forced to work against his or her will. Scholars also use the generic terms such as unfree labour or forced labour. However – and especially under slavery in broader senses of the word – slaves may have some rights and/or protections, Slavery began to exist before written history, in many cultures. A person could become a slave from the time of their birth, capture, while slavery was institutionally recognized by most societies, it has now been outlawed in all recognized countries, the last being Mauritania in 2007. Nevertheless, there are still more slaves today than at any point in history. The most common form of the trade is now commonly referred to as human trafficking. Chattel slavery is still practiced in the Islamic State of Iraq. An older interpretation connected it to the Greek verb skyleúo to strip a slain enemy, there is a dispute among historians about whether terms such as unfree labourer or enslaved person, rather than slave, should be used when describing the victims of slavery. Chattel slavery, also called traditional slavery, is so named because people are treated as the chattel of the owner and are bought, although it dominated many societies in the past, this form of slavery has been formally abolished and is very rare today. Even when it can be said to survive, it is not upheld by the system of any internationally recognized government. Indenture, otherwise known as bonded labour or debt bondage is a form of labour under which a person pledges himself or herself against a loan. The services required to repay the debt, and their duration, debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation, with children required to pay off their parents debt. It is the most widespread form of slavery today, debt bondage is most prevalent in South Asia. This may also include institutions not commonly classified as slavery, such as serfdom, conscription, Human trafficking primarily involves women and children forced into prostitution. And is the fastest growing form of forced labour, with Thailand, Cambodia, India, Brazil, in 2007, Human Rights Watch estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 children served as soldiers in current conflicts. A forced marriage may be regarded as a form of slavery by one or more of the involved in the marriage
Slavery
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Photograph of a slave boy in
Zanzibar. 'An Arab master's punishment for a slight offence.' c. 1890.
Slavery
Slavery
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Thousands of children work as bonded labourers in
Asia, particularly in the Indian subcontinent.
Slavery
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A world map showing countries by prevalence of female trafficking
2.
Contemporary slavery
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Contemporary slavery, also known as modern slavery, refers to the institutions of slavery that continue to exist in the present day. Estimates of the number of slaves today range from around 21 million-29 million to 46 million, Modern slavery is a multibillion-dollar industry with estimates of up to $35 billion generated annually. The United Nations estimates that roughly 27 to 30 million individuals are caught in the slave trade industry. India has the most slaves of any country, at roughly 18.4 million, china is second with 3.4 million slaves, followed by Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Uzbekistan. By percentages of the living in slavery Uzbekistan tops with 4% of its population living under slavery followed by Cambodia, India. Mauritania was the last nation to abolish slavery, doing so in 2007. Despite being illegal in every nation, slavery is still present in several forms today, Slavery also exists in advanced democratic nations, for example the UK where Home Office estimates suggested 10,000 to 13,000 victims in December 2015. This includes, forced work of various kinds, such as forced prostitution, the UK has recently made an attempt to combat modern slavery via the Modern Slavery Act 2015. Large commercial organisations are now required to publish a slavery and human trafficking statement in regard to their supply chains for each financial year, bales warned that, because slavery is officially abolished everywhere, the practice is illegal, and thus more hidden from the public and authorities. This makes it is impossible to obtain exact figures from primary sources, the best that can be done is estimate based on secondary sources, such as UN investigations, newspaper articles, government reports, and figures from NGOs. Slaves can be an attractive investment because the slave-owner only needs to pay for sustenance and this is sometimes lower than the wage-cost of free labourers, as free workers earn more than sustenance, in these cases slaves have positive price. When the cost of sustenance and enforcement exceeds the rate, slave-owning would no longer be profitable. Free workers also earn compensating differentials, whereby they are more for doing unpleasant work. Neither sustenance nor enforcement costs rise with the unpleasantness of the work, however, as such, slaves are more attractive for unpleasant work, and less for pleasant work. Because the unpleasantness of the work is not internalised, being borne by the rather than the owner, it is a negative externality. Slaves can also be forced to do work like pick pocketing. Total annual revenues of traffickers were estimated in 2004 to range from US $5 billion to US $9 billion, american slaves in 1809 were sold for around $40,000. Today, a slave can be bought for $90, the conscription of child soldiers by some governments is often viewed as a form of government-endorsed slavery
Contemporary slavery
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Slavery
3.
Child labour
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This practice is considered exploitative by many international organisations. Legislation across the world prohibit child labour, Child labour has existed to varying extents, through most of history. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, many children aged 5–14 from poorer families still worked in Europe and these children mainly worked in agriculture, home-based assembly operations, factories, mining and in services such as news boys. Some worked night shifts lasting 12 hours, with the rise of household income, availability of schools and passage of child labour laws, the incidence rates of child labour fell. In developing countries, with poverty and poor schooling opportunities. In 2010, sub-saharan Africa had the highest incidence rates of child labour, worldwide agriculture is the largest employer of child labour. Vast majority of labour is found in rural settings and informal urban economy, children are predominantly employed by their parents. Poverty and lack of schools are considered as the cause of child labour. Globally the incidence of child labour decreased from 25% to 10% between 1960 and 2003, according to the World Bank. Nevertheless, the number of child labourers remains high, with UNICEF. Child labour forms a part of pre-industrial economies. In pre-industrial societies, there is rarely a concept of childhood in the modern sense, Children often begin to actively participate in activities such as child rearing, hunting and farming as soon as they are competent. In many societies, children as young as 13 are seen as adults, the work of children was important in pre-industrial societies, as children needed to provide their labour for their survival and that of their group. In pre-industrial societies, there was little need for children to attend school and this is especially the case in non literate societies. Most pre-industrial skill and knowledge were amenable to being passed down through direct mentoring or apprenticing by competent adults, with the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the late 18th century, there was a rapid increase in the industrial exploitation of labour, including child labour. Industrial cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool rapidly grew from small villages into large cities and these cities drew in the population that was rapidly growing due to increased agricultural output. This process was replicated in other industrialising counties, the Victorian era in particular became notorious for the conditions under which children were employed. Children as young as four were employed in factories and mines working long hours in dangerous, often fatal
Child labour
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Early 20th century witnessed many home-based enterprises involving child labour. An example is shown above from New York, USA (1912).
Child labour
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A succession of laws on child labour, the so-called
Factory Acts, were passed in Britain in the 19th century. Children younger than nine were not allowed to work, those aged 9–16 could work 16 hours per day per
Cotton Mills Act. In 1856, the law permitted child labour past age 9, for 60 hours per week, night or day. In 1901, the permissible child labour age was raised to 12.
Child labour
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Child labourers,
Macon, Georgia, 1909
Child labour
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Children going to a 12-hour night shift in the United States (1908).
4.
Conscription
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Conscription, or drafting, is the compulsory enlistment of people in a national service, most often a military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and continues in countries to the present day under various names. The modern system of national conscription for young men dates to the French Revolution in the 1790s. Most European nations later copied the system in peacetime, so that men at a certain age would serve 1–8 years on active duty and those conscripted may evade service, sometimes by leaving the country. As of the early 21st century, many no longer conscript soldiers. The ability to rely on such an arrangement, however, presupposes some degree of predictability with regard to both war-fighting requirements and the scope of hostilities, many states that have abolished conscription therefore still reserve the power to resume it during wartime or times of crisis. Around the reign of Hammurabi, the Babylonian Empire used a system of conscription called Ilkum, under that system those eligible were required to serve in the royal army in time of war. During times of peace they were required to provide labour for other activities of the state. In return for service, people subject to it gained the right to hold land. It is possible that this right was not to hold land per se, various forms of avoiding military service are recorded. While it was outlawed by the Code of Hammurabi, the hiring of substitutes appears to have practiced both before and after the creation of the code. Later records show that Ilkum commitments could become regularly traded, in other places, people simply left their towns to avoid their Ilkum service. Another option was to sell Ilkum lands and the commitments along with them, with the exception of a few exempted classes, this was forbidden by the Code of Hammurabi. The levies raised in this way fought as infantry under local superiors, although the exact laws varied greatly depending on the country and the period, generally these levies were only obliged to fight for one to three months. Most were subsistence farmers, and it was in everyones interest to send the men home for harvest-time, the bulk of the Anglo-Saxon English army, called the fyrd, was composed of part-time English soldiers drawn from the landowning minor nobility. These thegns were the aristocracy of the time and were required to serve with their own armour. Medieval levy in Poland was known as the pospolite ruszenie, the system of military slaves was widely used in the Middle East, beginning with the creation of the corps of Turkish slave-soldiers by the Abbasid caliph al-Mutasim in the 820s and 830s. In the middle of the 14th century, Ottoman Sultan Murad I developed personal troops to be loyal to him, the new force was built by taking Christian children from newly conquered lands, especially from the far areas of his empire, in a system known as the devşirme
Conscription
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Ottoman
janissaries
Conscription
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Conscription of Poles to the Russian Army in 1863.
Conscription
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Young men registering for conscription during
World War I, New York City, June 5, 1917.
Conscription
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Soviet conscripts. Moscow, 1941.
5.
Debt bondage
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Debt bondage, also known as debt slavery or bonded labor, is a persons pledge of labor or services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation. The services required to repay the debt may be undefined, debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation. Currently, debt bondage is the most common method of enslavement with an estimated 8.1 million people bonded to labor illegally as cited by the International Labour Organization in 2005. Debt bondage has been described by the United Nations as a form of modern day slavery, though most countries in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are parties to the Convention, the practice is still prevalent primarily in these regions. It is predicted that 84 to 88% of the laborers in the world are in South Asia. Lack of prosecution or insufficient punishment to this crime are the causes as to why this practice exists at this scale today. When the bonded laborer dies, debts are passed on to children. Although debt bondage, forced labour, and human trafficking are all defined as forms or variations of slavery, debt bondage differs from forced labour and human trafficking in that a person consciously pledges to work as a means of repayment of debt without being placed into labor against will. Debt bondage only applies to individuals who have no hopes of leaving the labor due to inability to pay debt back. Those who offer their services to repay a debt and the employer reduces the debt accordingly are not in debt bondage. In the 19th century, people in Asia were bonded to labor due to a variety of reasons ranging from farmers mortgaging harvests to drug addicts in need for opium in China. When a natural disaster occurred or food was scarce, people willingly chose debt bondage as a means to a secure life, in the early 20th century in Asia, most laborers tied to debt bondage had been born into it. In certain regions, such as in Burma, debt bondage was far more common than slavery and these continued added loan values made leaving servitude unattainable. Moreover, after the development of the economy, more workers were needed for the pre-industrial economies of Asia during the 19th century. A greater demand for labor was needed in Asia to power exports to growing industrial countries like the United States and it started from the end of slavery in 1833 and continued until 1920. Important to both East and West Africa, pawnship, defined by Wilks as the use of people in transferring their rights for settlement of debt, was common during the 17th century, the system of pawnship occurred simultaneously with the slave trade in Africa. Though the export of slaves from Africa to the Americas is often analyzed, development of plantations like those in Zanzibar in East Africa reflected the need for internal slaves. Furthermore, many of the slaves that were exported were male as brutal and this created gender implications for individuals in the pawnship system as more women were pawned than men and often sexually exploited within the country
Debt bondage
–
Portrait bust of
Solon (from a later period).
Debt bondage
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Slavery
6.
Bride buying
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Bride-purchasing or bride-buying is the industry or trade of “purchasing a bride” to become property and at times as property that can be resold or repurchased for reselling. Bride-purchasing or bride-selling is practiced by bride-sellers and bride-buyers in parts of such as India and China. The practice is described as a form of “marriage of convenience” but is illegal in countries in the world. Bride-buying is an old practice in many regions in India, bride-purchasing is common in the states of India such as Haryana, Jharkhand, and Punjab. According to CNN-IBN, women are “bought, sold, trafficked, raped and married off without consent” across some parts of India, bride-purchases are usually outsourced from Bihar, Assam, and West Bengal. The price of the bride, if bought from the sellers, the brides parents are normally paid an average of 500 to 1,000 Indian rupees. The need to buy a bride is because of the low ratio of females to males, such low ratio in turn was caused by the preference by most Indian parents to have sons instead of daughters, and female foeticide. In 2006, according to BBC News, there were around 861 women for every 1,000 men in Haryana, the women are not only purchased as brides or wives but also to work as farm workers or househelp. Most women become “sex slaves” or forced laborers who are later resold to human traffickers to defray the cost, according to the Punjabi writer, Kirpal Kazak, bride-selling began in Jharkhand after the arrival of the Rajputs. The tribe decorate the women for sale with ornaments, the practice of the sale of women as brides declined after the Green Revolution in India, the “spread of literacy”, and the improvement of the male-female ratio since 1911. The ratio, however, declined in 2001, the practice of bride-purchasing became confined to the poor sections of society such as farmers, Scheduled Castes, and tribes. In poverty-stricken families, only one son gets married due to poverty, bride buying is also an old tradition in China. The practice was largely stamped out by the Chinese Communists, however, the modern practice is not unusual in rural villages, it is also known as mercenary marriage. According to Ding Lu of the non-governmental organization All-China Womens Federation, some human rights groups state that the figures are not correct and that the real number of abducted women is higher. Bay Fang and Mark Leong reported in U. S, causes include poverty and bride shortage in the rural areas. As women leave rural areas to work in cities, they are considered more vulnerable to being tricked or forced into becoming chattel for men desperate for wives. The shortage of brides in turn is due to amplification of the preference of Chinese couples for sons by the 1979 one-child policy in China. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimated that in 1998 there were 120 men for every 100 women, the increase in the cost of dowries is also a contributing factor leading men to buy women for wives
Bride buying
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Slavery
7.
Wife selling
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Wife selling is the practice of a husband selling his wife and may include the sale of a female by a party outside a marriage. Wife selling has had numerous purposes throughout the history. In some societies, the wife could buy her own way out of a marriage or either spouse could have initiated this form of divorce, reducing a husbands liability for family support and prenuptial debts was another reason for wife sale. Taxes were sometimes paid by selling a wife and children and paying the value as the required amount, famine leading to starvation was a reason for some sales. Gambling debts could be paid by selling a free or slave wife, a society might not allow a woman the rights reserved to men regarding spouse sale and a society might deny her any rights if her husband chose to sell her, even a right of refusal. A divorce that was by mutual consent but was without good faith by the wife at times caused the divorce to be void, a husband might sell his wife and then go to court seeking compensation for the new mans adultery with the wife. By one law, adultery was given as a justification for a husband selling his wife into concubinage, a free wife might be sold into slavery, such as if she had married a serf or her husband had been murdered. Sometimes, a sold an enslaved wife. In wartime, one side might, possibly falsely, accuse the other of wife sale as a method of spying, a wife could also be treated as revenue and seized by the local government because a man had died leaving no heirs. Wife sale was sometimes the description for the sale of a wifes services, If a sale was temporary, in some cases wife sale was considered temporary only in that the sold-and-remarried wife would, upon her death, be reunited with her first husband. Constraints existed in law and practice and there were criticisms, a society might tax or fine a wife sale without banning it. The nearness of a foreign military sometimes constrained a master in a sale that otherwise would have divided a family. Among criticisms, some of the sales have been likened to sales of horses, wives for sale were treated like capital assets or commodities. One law made wives into husbands chattels, other sales were described as brutal, patriarchal, and feudalistic. Wife sales were equated with slavery, one debate about the whole of Africa was whether Africans viewed the practice as no crime at all or as against what Africans thought valuable and dear. Some modern popular songs against wife sale are vehicles for urban antipoverty, a story in a popular collection written by a feminist was about a suggestion for wife sale and the wifes objection to discussing it followed by no wife sale occurring. Another story is about a feminist advocate for justice in which a husband is censored or censured for selling his wife in a gamble, in Rwanda, it was the subject of a wartime accusation. Specific bans existed in Thailand, Indonesia, ancient Rome, and ancient Israel and partial bans existed in England, Wife sale was a topic of popular culture in India, the U. S. China, Scandinavia, Nepal, Guatemala, and the Dutch Indies
Wife selling
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Slavery
8.
Human trafficking
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Human trafficking is the trade of humans, most commonly for the purpose of forced labor, sexual slavery, or commercial sexual exploitation for the trafficker or others. This may encompass providing a spouse in the context of forced marriage, or the extraction of organs or tissues, including for surrogacy, Human trafficking can occur within a country or trans-nationally. Human trafficking is a crime against the person because of the violation of the rights of movement through coercion. Human trafficking is the trade in people, and does not necessarily involve the movement of the person from one place to another, according to the International Labour Organization, forced labor alone generates an estimated $150 billion in profits per annum as of 2014. Estimated that 21 million victims are trapped in modern-day slavery, of these,14.2 million were exploited for labor,4.5 million were sexually exploited, and 2.2 million were exploited in state-imposed forced labor. Human trafficking is thought to be one of the activities of trans-national criminal organizations. Human trafficking is condemned as a violation of rights by international conventions. In addition, human trafficking is subject to a directive in the European Union, the protocol is one of three which supplement the CTOC. The Trafficking Protocol is the first global, legally binding instrument on trafficking in over half a century, one of its purposes is to facilitate international cooperation in investigating and prosecuting such trafficking. Another is to protect and assist human traffickings victims with full respect for their rights as established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in 2014, the International Labour Organization estimated $150 billion in annual profit is generated from forced labor alone. The average cost of a trafficking victim today is USD $90,000 which. The average slave in 1800 America was the equivalent to USD $40,000, though illegal, there may be no deception or coercion involved. After entry into the country and arrival at their ultimate destination, Human trafficking, on the other hand, is a crime against a person because of the violation of the victims rights through coercion and exploitation. Unlike most cases of smuggling, victims of human trafficking are not permitted to leave upon arrival at their destination. While smuggling requires travel, trafficking does not, trafficked people are held against their will through acts of coercion, and forced to work for or provide services to the trafficker or others. The work or services may include anything from bonded or forced labor to commercial sexual exploitation, the arrangement may be structured as a work contract, but with no or low payment, or on terms which are highly exploitative. Sometimes the arrangement is structured as debt bondage, with the not being permitted or able to pay off the debt. Bonded labor, or debt bondage, is probably the least known form of labor trafficking today, generally, the value of their work is greater than the original sum of money borrowed
Human trafficking
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Warning of
Prostitution and Human trafficking in South Korea for G.I. by United States Forces Korea.
Human trafficking
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Slavery
9.
Penal labour
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Penal labour is a generic term for various kinds of unfree labour which prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context, forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios, labour as a form of punishment, the system used as a means to secure labour. These scenarios can be applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, large-scale implementations of penal labour include labour camps, prison farms, penal colonies, penal military units, penal transportation, or aboard prison ships. Punitive labour, also known as labour, prison labour. Punitive labour encompasses two types, productive labour, such as work, and intrinsically pointless tasks used as primitive occupational therapy. Sometimes authorities turn prison labour into an industry, as on a farm or in a prison workshop. On the other hand, for example in Victorian prisons, inmates commonly were made to work the treadmill, in some cases, similar punishments included turning the crank machine or carrying cannonballs. Semi-punitive labour also included oakum-picking, teasing apart old tarry rope to make caulking material for sailing vessels, section 1 of the Penal Servitude Act 1891 makes provision for enactments which authorise a sentence of penal servitude but do not specify a maximum duration. It must now be subject to section 1 of the Criminal Justice Act 1948. Sentences of penal servitude were served in prisons and were controlled by the Home Office. After sentencing, convicts would be classified according to the seriousness of the offence of which they were convicted, first time offenders would be classified in the Star class, persons not suitable for the Star class, but without serious convictions would be classified in the intermediate class. Habitual offenders would be classified in the Recidivist class, care was taken to ensure that convicts in one class did not mix with convicts in another. Penal servitude included hard labour as a standard feature, notable recipients of hard labour under British law include Oscar Wilde and John William Gott. In Inveraray Jail from 1839 prisoners worked up to ten hours a day, most male prisoners made herring nets or picked oakum, those with skills were often employed where the skills could be used, such as shoemaking, tailoring or joinery. Female prisoners picked oakum, knitted stockings or sewed, forms of labour for punishment included the treadmill, shot drill, and the crank machine. Prisoners had to six or more hours a day, climbing the equivalent of 5,000 to 14,000 vertical feet. While the purpose was mainly punitive, the mills could have used to grind grain, pump water
Penal labour
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Female convicts chained together by their necks for work on a road.
Dar es Salaam,
Tanganyika c.1890-1927.
Penal labour
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Convict labourers in
Australia in the early 20th century.
Penal labour
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Prisoners picking oakum at
Coldbath Fields Prison in London (ca. 1864).
Penal labour
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Inmates sewing in a
Brazilian prison.
10.
History of slavery
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The history of slavery spans nearly every culture, nationality, and religion from ancient times to the present day. However the social, economic, and legal positions of slaves were vastly different in different systems of slavery in different times and places, Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations, as it is developed as a system of social stratification. Slavery was known in the very oldest civilizations such as Sumer in Mesopotamia which dates back as far as 3500 BC, the Byzantine–Ottoman wars and the Ottoman wars in Europe resulted in the taking of large numbers of Christian slaves. Slavery became common within much of Europe and the British Isles during the Dark Ages, the Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, British, Arabs and a number of West African kingdoms played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade, especially after 1600. During the 1983–2005 Second Sudanese Civil War people were taken into slavery, evidence emerged in the late 1990s of systematic slavery in cacao plantations in West Africa, see the chocolate and slavery article. Evidence of slavery predates written records, and has existed in many cultures, however, slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations. Mass slavery requires economic surpluses and a 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. Such institutions were a mixture of debt-slavery, punishment for crime, the enslavement of prisoners of war, child abandonment, French historian Fernand Braudel noted that slavery was endemic in Africa and part of the structure of everyday life. During the 16th century, Europe began to outpace the Arab world in the export traffic, the Dutch imported slaves from Asia into their colony in South Africa. In 1807 Britain, which extensive, although mainly coastal, colonial territories on the African continent, made the international slave trade illegal. In Senegambia, between 1300 and 1900, close to one-third of the population was enslaved, in early Islamic states of the Western Sudan, including Ghana, Mali, Segou, and Songhai, about a 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, among the Ashanti and Yoruba a third of the population consisted of slaves. The population of the Kanem was about a third slave and it was perhaps 40% in Bornu. Between 1750 and 1900 from one- to two-thirds of the population of the Fulani jihad states consisted of slaves. The population of the Sokoto caliphate formed by Hausas in northern Nigeria and it is estimated that up to 90% of the population of Arab-Swahili Zanzibar was enslaved. Roughly half the population of Madagascar was enslaved, the Anti-Slavery Society estimated that there were 2,000,000 slaves in the early 1930s Ethiopia, out of an estimated population of between 8 and 16 million
History of slavery
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C. 1480 BC, fugitive slave treaty between Idrimi of Alakakh (now
Tell Atchana) and Pillia of
Kizzuwatna (now Cilicia).
History of slavery
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Slaves working in a mine. Ancient Greece.
History of slavery
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Cast of the corpse of a prisoner (as evidenced by the manacles that remain on his ankles) recovered from the ruins of
Pompeii, 79 AD
History of slavery
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Ottoman advances resulted in many captive Christians being carried deep into Muslim territory.
11.
Slavery in antiquity
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Masters could free slaves, and in many cases such freedmen went on to rise to positions of power. This would include children born into slavery but who were actually the children of the master of the house. Their father would ensure that his children were not condemned to a life of slavery, the institution of slavery condemned a majority of slaves to agricultural and industrial labor and they lived hard lives. The Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu includes laws relating to slaves, written circa 2100 –2050 BCE, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, dating to c.1700 BCE, also makes distinctions between the freeborn, freed and slave. Hittite texts from Anatolia include laws regulating the institution of slavery, in Ancient Egypt, slaves were mainly obtained through prisoners of war. Other ways people could become slaves was by inheriting the status from their parents, one could also become a slave on account of his inability to pay his debts. Slavery was the result of poverty. People also sold themselves into slavery because they were peasants and needed food. The lives of slaves were better than that of peasants. Slaves only attempted escape when their treatment was unusually harsh, for many, being a slave in Egypt made them better off than a freeman elsewhere. Young slaves could not be put to work, and had to be brought up by the mistress of the household. Not all slaves went to houses, some also sold themselves to temples, or were assigned to temples by the king. Slave trading was not very popular later in Ancient Egypt. Afterwards, slave trades sprang up all over Egypt, however, there was barely any worldwide trade. Rather, the individual seem to have approached their customers personally. Only slaves with special traits were traded worldwide, prices of slaves changed with time. Slaves with a special skill were more valuable than those without one, slaves had plenty of jobs that they could be assigned to. Some had domestic jobs, like taking care of children, cooking, brewing, some were gardeners or field hands in stables
Slavery in antiquity
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C. 1480 BC, fugitive slave treaty between Idrimi of Alakakh (now
Tell Atchana) and Pillia of
Kizzuwatna (now Cilicia). Ref: 131447.
Slavery in antiquity
–
Slavery
Slavery in antiquity
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Slaves working in a mine of
Laurium
Slavery in antiquity
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A drunk man vomiting, while a young slave is holding his forehead.
Brygos Painter, 500-470 BC
12.
Slavery in ancient Rome
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Slavery in ancient Rome played an important role in society and the economy. Besides manual labour, slaves performed many services, and might be employed at highly skilled jobs. Accountants and physicians were often slaves, Greek slaves in particular might be highly educated. Unskilled slaves, or those sentenced to slavery as punishment, worked on farms, in mines and their living conditions were brutal, and their lives short. Slaves were considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood, unlike Roman citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation, torture, and summary execution. Over time, however, slaves gained increased legal protection, including the right to file complaints against their masters, attitudes changed in part because of the influence among the educated elite of the Stoics, whose egalitarian views of humanity extended to slaves. Roman slaves could hold property which, despite the fact that it belonged to their masters, skilled or educated slaves were allowed to earn their own money, and might hope to save enough to buy their freedom. Such slaves were freed by the terms of their masters will. A notable example of a slave was Tiro, the secretary of Cicero. Tiro was freed before his masters death, and was enough to retire on his own country estate. However, the master could arrange that slaves would only have enough money to buy their freedom when they were too old to work. They could then use the money to buy a new young slave while the old slave, unable to work, Rome differed from Greek city-states in allowing freed slaves to become citizens. After manumission, a slave who had belonged to a Roman citizen enjoyed not only passive freedom from ownership. A slave who had acquired libertas was thus a libertus in relation to his former master, as a social class, freed slaves were libertini, though later writers used the terms libertus and libertinus interchangeably. Libertini were not entitled to public office or state priesthoods. During the early Empire, however, freedmen held key positions in the government bureaucracy, any future children of a freedman would be born free, with full rights of citizenship. Vernae were slaves born within a household or on a farm or agricultural estate. There was a social obligation to care for vernae, whose epitaphs sometimes identify them as such
Slavery in ancient Rome
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Roman mosaic from
Dougga, Tunisia (2nd century CE): the two slaves carrying wine jars wear typical slave clothing and an
amulet against the
evil eye on a necklace; the slave boy to the left carries water and towels, and the one on the right a bough and a basket of flowers
Slavery in ancient Rome
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4th-century sarcophagus
relief of Valerius Petronianus, with his slave holding writing tablets
Slavery in ancient Rome
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Mosaic depicting two female slaves (ancillae) attending their mistress.
Slavery in ancient Rome
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"Here lies Eros, Posidippus' chef, a slave": epitaph on a
stele
13.
Babylonian law
–
Babylonian law is a subset of cuneiform law that has received particular study, owing to the singular extent of the associated archaeological material that has been found for it. Historical inscriptions, royal charters and rescripts, dispatches, private letters, even grammatical and lexicographical texts contain many extracts or short sentences bearing on law and custom. The so-called Sumerian Family Laws are preserved in this way, the discovery of the now-celebrated Code of Hammurabi has made possible a more systematic study than could have resulted from just the classification and interpretation of other material. Fragments of other Ancient codes exist and have published. There survive legal texts from the earliest writings through the Hellenistic period, the Code forms the backbone of most reconstructions. Much Babylonian legal precedent remained in force, even through the Persian, Greek and Parthian conquests, which had little effect on life in Babylonia. The laws and customs that preceded the Code may be called early, the law of Assyria was derived from the Babylonian, but it conserved early features long after they had disappeared elsewhere. The early history of Mesopotamia is the story of a struggle for supremacy between the cities, a metropolis demanded tribute and military support from its subject cities but left their local cults and customs unaffected. City rights and usages were respected by kings and conquerors alike, when the ancient Semitic-speaking peoples settled in the cities of Mesopotamia, their tribal customs passed over into city law. The population of Babylonia was multi-ethnic from early times, and intercommunication between the cities was incessant, every city had a large number of resident aliens. This freedom of intercourse must have tended to assimilate custom and it was, however, reserved for the genius of Hammurabi to make Babylon his metropolis and weld together his vast empire by a uniform system of law. By Hammurabis time, almost all trace of tribal custom had already disappeared from the law of the Code, the king is a benevolent autocrat, easily accessible to all his subjects, both able and willing to protect the weak against the highest-placed oppressor. The royal power, however, can only pardon when private resentment is appeased, judges are strictly supervised, and appeal is allowed. The whole land is covered with feudal holdings, masters of the levy, police, there is a regular postal system. The pax Babylonica is so assured that private individuals do not hesitate to ride in their carriage from Babylon to the coast of the Mediterranean, the position of women is free and dignified. The Code did not merely embody contemporary custom or conserve ancient law, the universal habit of writing, and perpetual recourse to written contract, further modified primitive custom and ancient precedent. If the parties themselves could agree to the terms, the Code as a rule left them free to make contracts and their deed of agreement was drawn up in the temple by a notary public and confirmed with an oath by god and the king. It was publicly sealed and witnessed by professional witnesses, as well as by collaterally interested parties, the manner in which it was executed may have been sufficient guarantee that its stipulations were not impious or illegal
Babylonian law
14.
Slavery in ancient Greece
–
Slavery was a very common practice in Ancient Greece, as in other places of the time. Some ancient writers considered slavery natural and even necessary and this paradigm was notably questioned in Socratic dialogues, the Stoics produced the first recorded condemnation of slavery. Modern historiographical practice distinguishes chattel slavery from land-bonded groups such as the penestae of Thessaly or the Spartan helots, the chattel helot is an individual deprived of liberty and forced to submit to an owner, who may buy, sell, or lease them like any other chattel. The academic study of Slavery in Ancient Greece is beset by significant methodological problems, documentation is disjointed and very fragmented, focusing primarily on Athens. No treatises are specifically devoted to the subject, and jurisprudence was interested in slavery only inasmuch as it provided a source of revenue, comedies and tragedies represented stereotypes while iconography made no substantial differentiation between slaves and craftsmen. The ancient Greeks had several words for slaves, which leads to ambiguity when they are studied out of their proper context. In Homer, Hesiod and Theognis of Megara, the slave was called δμώς / dmōs, the term has a general meaning but refers particularly to war prisoners taken as booty. During the classical period, the Greeks frequently used ἀνδράποδον / andrapodon, as opposed to τετράποδον / tetrapodon, quadruped, or livestock. The most common word is δοῦλος / doulos, used in opposition to free man, the verb δουλεὐω can be used metaphorically for other forms of dominion, as of one city over another or parents over their children. Finally, the term οἰκέτης / oiketēs was used, meaning one who lives in house, other terms used were less precise and required context, θεράπων / therapōn – At the time of Homer, the word meant squire, during the classical age, it meant servant. ἀκόλουθος / akolouthos – literally, the follower or the one who accompanies, also, the diminutive ἀκολουθίσκος, used for page boys. παῖς / pais – literally child, used in the way as houseboy. σῶμα / sōma – literally body, used in the context of emancipation, slaves were present through the Mycenaean civilization, as documented in numerous tablets unearthed in Pylos 140. Two legal categories can be distinguished, slaves and slaves of the god, slaves of the god are always mentioned by name and own their own land, their legal status is close to that of freemen. The nature and origin of their bond to the divinity is unclear, the names of common slaves show that some of them came from Kythera, Chios, Lemnos or Halicarnassus and were probably enslaved as a result of piracy. The tablets indicate that unions between slaves and freemen were common and that slaves could work and own land and it appears that the major division in Mycenaean civilization was not between a free individual and a slave but rather if the individual was in the palace. · There is no continuity between the Mycenaean era and the time of Homer, where social structures reflected those of the Greek dark ages, the terminology differs, the slave is no longer do-e-ro but dmōs. In the Iliad, slaves are mainly women taken as booty of war, in the Odyssey, the slaves also seem to be mostly women
Slavery in ancient Greece
–
Funerary
stele of Mnesarete, son of Socrates; a young servant (left) is facing her dead mistress.
Attica, circa 380 BC. (
Glyptothek,
Munich,
Slavery in ancient Greece
–
A master (right) and his slave (left) in a
phlyax play, Silician red-figured calyx-krater, ca. 350 BC–340 BC.
Louvre Museum,
Paris.
Slavery in ancient Greece
–
Women as plunder of war:
Ajax the Lesser taking
Cassandra, tondo of a
red-figure kylix by the Kodros Painter, ca. 440-430 BC,
Louvre
Slavery in ancient Greece
–
Agriculture, a common use for slaves,
black-figure neck-amphora by the
Antimenes Painter,
British Museum
15.
Atlantic slave trade
–
The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade took place across the Atlantic Ocean from the 15th through the 19th centuries. This was crucial to those western European countries which, in the late 17th and 18th centuries, were vying with each other to create overseas empires, the Portuguese were the first to engage in the New World slave trade in the 16th century. In 1526, the Portuguese completed the first transatlantic voyage from Africa to the Americas. The first Africans imported to the English colonies were classified as indentured servants, like coming from England. By the middle of the 17th century, slavery had hardened as a caste, they and their offspring were legally the property of their owners. As property, the people were considered merchandise or units of labour, the major Atlantic slave trading nations, ordered by trade volume, were, the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch Empire. Several had established outposts on the African coast where they purchased slaves from local African leaders and these slaves were managed by a factor who was established on or near the coast to expedite the shipping of slaves to the New World. Slaves were kept in a factory while awaiting shipment, current estimates are that about 12 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic, although the number purchased by the traders is considerably higher, as the passage had a high death rate. Near the beginning of the century, various governments acted to ban the trade. In the early twenty-first century, several governments issued apologies for the slave trade. The Atlantic slave trade arose after trade contacts were first made between the continents of the Old World and those of the New World, between 1600 and 1800, approximately 300,000 sailors engaged in the slave trade visited West Africa. In doing so, they came into contact with societies living along the west African coast, historian John Thornton noted, A number of technical and geographical factors combined to make Europeans the most likely people to explore the Atlantic and develop its commerce. That leadership later gave rise to the myth that the Iberians were the leaders of the exploration. Slavery was practiced in parts of Africa, Europe, Asia. There is evidence that people from some African states were exported to other states in Africa, Europe. The African slave trade provided a number of slaves to Europeans. The Atlantic slave trade was not the slave trade from Africa, although it was the largest in volume. As Elikia M’bokolo wrote in Le Monde diplomatique, The African continent was bled of its resources via all possible routes
Atlantic slave trade
–
Reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave auction in
Charleston, South Carolina, in 1769.
Atlantic slave trade
–
Group of men, children, and women being taken to a slave market
Atlantic slave trade
–
The
Portuguese presenting themselves before the
Manikongo. The Portuguese initially fostered a good relationship with the
Kingdom of Kongo. Civil War within Kongo would lead to many of its subjects ending up as enslaved people in Portuguese and other European vessels.
Atlantic slave trade
–
Portrait of an African Slave Woman, probably painted by
Annibale Carracci in the 1580s
16.
Middle Passage
–
The Middle Passage was the stage of the triangular trade in which millions of Africans were shipped to the New World as part of the Atlantic slave trade. Voyages on the Middle Passage were large financial undertakings, generally organized by companies or groups of investors rather than individuals, the Middle Passage was considered a time of in-betweenness for those being traded from Africa to America. Traders from the Americas and Caribbean received the enslaved Africans, European powers such as Portugal, England, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Brandenburg, as well as traders from Brazil and North America, took part in this trade. The enslaved Africans came mostly from eight regions, Senegambia, Upper Guinea, Windward Coast, Gold Coast, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, West Central Africa and Southeastern Africa. An estimated 15% of the Africans died at sea, with mortality rates considerably higher in Africa itself in the process of capturing and transporting people to the ships. For two hundred years, 1440–1640, Portuguese slavers had a monopoly on the export of slaves from Africa. During the 18th century, when the slave trade transported about 6 million Africans, the duration of the transatlantic voyage varied widely, from one to six months depending on weather conditions. It is believed that African kings, warlords and private kidnappers sold captives to Europeans who held several coastal forts. The captives were usually force-marched to these ports along the western coast of Africa, typical slave ships contained several hundred slaves with about 30 crew members. The male captives were normally chained together in pairs to save space, the chains or hand and leg cuffs were known as bilboes, which were among the many tools of the slave trade, and which were always in short supply. Bilboes were mainly used on men, and they consisted of two iron shackles locked on a post and were usually fastened around the ankles of two men, at best, captives were fed beans, corn, yams, rice, and palm oil. Slaves were fed one meal a day with water, if at all, when food was scarce, slaveholders would get priority over the slaves. Sometimes captives were allowed to move around during the day, aboard certain French ships, slaves were brought on deck to periodically receive fresh air. While female slaves were permitted to be on deck more frequently. Slaves below the decks lived for months in conditions of squalor, disease spread and ill health was one of the biggest killers. Mortality rates were high, and death made these conditions below the decks even worse, even though the corpses were thrown overboard, many crew members avoided going to the hold. The slaves who had already been ill ridden were not always found immediately, many of the living slaves could have been shackled to someone that was dead for hours and sometimes days. Most contemporary historians estimate that between 9.4 and 12 million Africans arrived in the New World, disease and starvation due to the length of the passage were the main contributors to the death toll with amoebic dysentery and scurvy causing the majority of deaths
Middle Passage
–
Commercial goods from Europe were shipped to Africa for sale and traded for enslaved Africans. Africans were in turn brought to the regions depicted in blue, in what became known as the "Middle Passage". African slaves were thereafter traded for raw materials, which were returned to Europe to complete the "
Triangular Trade ".
17.
Arab slave trade
–
The Arab slave trade was the practice of slavery in the Arab world, mainly in Western Asia, North Africa, Southeast Africa, the Horn of Africa and Europe. This barter occurred chiefly between the era and the early 21st century. The trade was conducted through slave markets in areas, with the slaves captured mostly from Africas interior. These traders captured Bantu peoples from the interior in present-day Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania, there, the slaves gradually assimilated in the rural areas, particularly on the Unguja and Pemba islands. The captives were sold throughout the Middle East and this trade accelerated as superior ships led to more trade and greater demand for labour on plantations in the region. Eventually, tens of thousands of captives were being taken every year, the Indian Ocean slave trade was multi-directional and changed over time. Slave labor in East Africa was drawn from the Zanj, Bantu peoples that lived along the East African coast, the Zanj were for centuries shipped as slaves by Arab traders to all the countries bordering the Indian Ocean. The Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs recruited many Zanj slaves as soldiers and, as early as 696 and it grew to involve over 500,000 slaves and free men who were imported from across the Muslim empire and claimed over tens of thousands of lives in lower Iraq. The Zanj who were taken as slaves to the Middle East were often used in agricultural work. As the plantation economy boomed and the Arabs became richer, agriculture, the resulting labor shortage led to an increased slave market. To 5°S. to which the name was also applied, wealthy proprietors had received extensive grants of tidal land on the condition that they would make it arable. Sugar cane was prominent among the products of their plantations, particularly in Khūzestān Province, Zanj also worked the salt mines of Mesopotamia, especially around Basra. Their jobs were to clear away the topsoil that made the land arable. The working conditions were considered to be extremely harsh and miserable. Many other people were imported into the region, besides Zanj, historian M. A. Shaban has argued that rebellion was not a slave revolt, but a revolt of blacks. In his opinion, although a few runaway slaves did join the revolt, if the revolt had been led by slaves, they would have lacked the necessary resources to combat the Abbasid government for as long as they did. These slaves were captured mainly from seaside villages from Italy, Spain, Portugal and also more distant places like France or England. They were also taken from ships stopped by the pirates, the effects of these attacks were devastating, France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships
Arab slave trade
–
19th-century European engraving of Arab slave-trading caravan transporting African slaves across the
Sahara
Arab slave trade
–
The main slave routes in Africa during the
Middle Ages.
Arab slave trade
–
A female
Bantu slave in Mogadishu (1882–1883).
Arab slave trade
–
Arab captors and Zanzibar workers
18.
Mamluk
–
Mamluk is an Arabic designation for slaves. The term is most commonly used to refer to Muslim slave soldiers and these were mostly enslaved Turkic peoples, Egyptian Copts, Circassians, Abkhazians, and Georgians. Many Mamluks were also of Balkan origin, over time, the mamluks became a powerful military knightly caste in various societies that were controlled by Muslim rulers. Particularly in Egypt, but also in the Levant, Mesopotamia, in some cases, they attained the rank of sultan, while in others they held regional power as emirs or beys. Most notably, mamluk factions seized the sultanate centered on Egypt and Syria, the Mamluk Sultanate famously defeated the Ilkhanate at the Battle of Ain Jalut. They had earlier fought the western European Christian Crusaders in 1154-1169 and 1213-1221, effectively driving them out of Egypt, in 1302 the mamluks formally expelled the last Crusaders from the Levant, ending the era of the Crusades. While mamluks were purchased as property, their status was above ordinary slaves, in a sense they were like enslaved mercenaries. In the Middle Ages, the Mamlukes took up the practice of furusiyya chivalry although Mamluk knights were slaves until their service ended, the Arabic term for a knight was fāris, The faris and the notion of furusiyya originated in pre-Muslim Persian brotherhoods. Within the Muslim world, the fursān became prized as ideal warriors and they were also trained in wrestling, and their martial skills were honed first on foot as piéton and then perfected when as mounted warriors. They were popularly used as heavy knightly cavalry by a number of different Islamic kingdoms and empires, including the Ayyubid dynasty, the origins of the mamluk system are disputed. Historians agree that a military caste such as the mamluks appeared to develop in Islamic societies beginning with the ninth-century Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad. When in the century has not been determined. Up until the 1990s, it was believed that the earliest mamluks were known as ghilman and were bought by the Abbasid caliphs. By the end of the 9th century, such warrior slaves had become the dominant element in the military, conflict between these ghilman and the population of Baghdad prompted the caliph al-Mutasim to move his capital to the city of Samarra, but this did not succeed in calming tensions. The caliph al-Mutawakkil was assassinated by some of these slave-soldiers in 861, adult slaves and freemen both served as warriros. The mamluk system developed later, after the return of the caliphate to Baghdad in the 870s and it included the systematic training of young slaves in military and martial skills. The Mamluk system is considered to have been an experiment of al-Muwaffaq. This recent interpretation seems to have been accepted, after the fragmentation of the Abbasid Empire, military slaves, known as either mamluks or ghilman, were used throughout the Islamic world as the basis of military power
Mamluk
–
A Mamluk nobleman from
Aleppo
Mamluk
–
An Egyptian Mamluk warrior in full armor and armed with lance, shield, sabre and pistols
Mamluk
–
Mamluk lancers, early 16th century (etching by
Daniel Hopfer)
Mamluk
–
Ottoman Mamluk
heavy cavalry armour, circa 1550
19.
Saqaliba
–
Saqāliba refers to Slavic slaves, kidnapped from the coasts of Europe or in wars, as well as mercenaries in the medieval Muslim world, in the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily and Al-Andalus. It is generally thought that the Arabic term is a Byzantine loanword, saqlab, siklab, saqlabi etc. is a corruption of Greek Sklavinoi meaning Slavs (from which the English word slave is also derived. The word is often misused to refer only to slaves from Central and Eastern Europe, there were several major routes of the trade of Slav slaves into the Muslim world, through Central Asia, through the Mediterranean, through Central and Western Europe to Al-Andalus. The Volga trade route and other European routes, according to Ibrahim ibn Jakub, were serviced by Radanite Jewish merchants, theophanes mentions that the Umayyad caliph Muawiyah I settled a whole army of 5,000 Slavic mercenaries in Syria in the 660s. In the Muslim world, Saqaliba served or were forced to serve in a multitude of ways, servants, harem concubines, eunuchs, craftsmen, soldiers, and as Caliphs guards. In Iberia, Morocco, Damascus and Sicily, their role may be compared with that of mamluks in the Ottoman Empire. In Spain, Slavic eunuchs were so popular and widely distributed that they became synonymous with Saqāliba, some Saqāliba became rulers of taifas in Iberia after the collapse of the Caliphate of Cordoba. For example, Muyahid ibn Yusuf ibn Ali organized the Saqaliba in Dénia to rebel, seize control of the city, and establish the Taifa of Dénia, which extended its reach as far as the island of Majorca. Persian geographer Ibn Khordadbeh claimed that the Bulgar ruling title was King of the Saqāliba prior to the end of the Sasanian dynasty, Arab traveller Ibn Fadlan called the ruler of Volga Bulgaria the King of the Saqaliba. This may have been either because many Slavs, both slaves and ordinary settlers, lived in his domain at time, or a lack of ethnographic knowledge. Persian polymath Abu Zayd al-Balkhi described three main centers of the Saqaliba, Kuyaba, Slawiya, and Artania. Jewish traveller Abraham ben Jacob placed the Saqāliba, Slavs, west of Bulgaria and east from other Slavs, in a mountainous land and it is believed that these were situated in the Western Balkans. Arab slave trade Ghilman Mamluk Yegorov, K. L, the Saqaliba slaves in the Aghlabid state. Barry Hoberman, Treasures of the North Slavs in Muslim Spain
Saqaliba
–
Slavery
20.
Aztec slavery
–
Aztec slavery, within the structure of the Aztec or Mexica society, where slaves constituted an important class. Tlacotin were distinct from war captives, slavery in the Aztec Empire was very different from what Europeans of the same period established in their colonies. Aztec slavery was personal, not hereditary, the slave could have possessions and even own other slaves. Slaves could buy their liberty, and could be set if they were able to show they had been mistreated or if they had children with or were married to their masters. Typically, upon the death of their owner, slaves who had performed outstanding services were freed and they would then be washed, provided with new clothes not owned by the master, and declared free. As any person who was not a relative of the master could be declared a slave for trying to prevent a slaves escape, if, one slave was not behaving it would be considered death. Orozco y Berra also reports that a master could not sell a slave without the slaves consent, incorrigible slaves were made to wear a wooden collar, affixed by rings at the back. The collar was not merely a symbol of bad conduct, it was designed to make it harder to run away through a crowd or through narrow spaces, when buying a collared slave, one was informed of how many times that slave had been sold. A slave who was three times as incorrigible could be sold to be sacrificed, those slaves commanded a premium in price. However, if a collared slave managed to present him- or herself in the palace or in a temple. An Aztec could become a slave as a punishment, a murderer sentenced to death could instead, upon the request of the wife of his victim, be given to her as a slave. A father could sell his son into slavery if the son was declared incorrigible by an authority and those who did not pay their debts could also be sold as slaves. People could sell themselves as slaves and they could stay free long enough to enjoy the price of their liberty, about twenty blankets, usually enough for a year, after that time they went to their new master. Usually this was the destiny of gamblers and of old ahuini, motolinía reports that some war captives, future victims of human sacrifice, were treated as slaves with all the rights of an Aztec slave until the time of their sacrifice. It was not clear how they were kept running away. Genízaros La civilización azteca Thomas Ward “Expanding Ethnicity in Sixteenth-Century Anahuac, Ideologies of Ethnicity and Gender in the Nation-Building Process. ”
Aztec slavery
–
Wooden collar.
Aztec slavery
–
Slavery
21.
Blackbirding
–
Blackbirding is the coercion of people through trickery and kidnapping to work as labourers. From the 1860s, blackbirding ships in the Pacific sought workers to mine the deposits on the Chincha Islands in Peru. In the 1870s, the blackbirding trade focused on supplying labourers to plantations, particularly the sugar plantations of Queensland. The first documented practice of a major blackbirding industry for sugar cane labourers occurred between 1842 and 1904 and those blackbirded were recruited from the indigenous populations of nearby Pacific islands or northern Queensland. In the early days of the industry in Western Australia at Nickol Bay and Broome. Blackbirding has continued to the present day in developing countries, the term may have been formed directly as a contraction of blackbird catching, blackbird was a slang term for the local indigenous people. Byrne, an Irish speculator, persuaded countrymen to financially back a scheme to bring colonists from the New Hebrides to Peru as indentured agricultural workers, the first ship, Adelante, was fitted and on 15 June 1862 set out across the Pacific. Calling in at Tongareva in the northern Cook Islands, Byrne found the one island in the Pacific where the population was willing to leave because of a severe coconut famine. He took 253 recruits, by September, they were working in Peru as plantation workers, almost immediately speculators and ship owners fitted out ageing ships that went to Polynesia to bring willing colonists. From September 1862 to April 1863, no less than 30 ships set out, because profit was the main motive, many ship captains resorted to dishonest tactics and kidnapping to fill their ships. In June 1863 about 350 people were living on ʻAta atoll in Tonga, in a village called Kolomaile, but once almost half of the population was on board, the ships doors and rooms were locked, and the ship sailed away. The Grecian also tried to take slaves from the Lau group, from Niuafouʻou, McGrath captured only 30 people, this was the second island in Tonga to be affected. The Grecian never made it to Peru, probably near Pukapuka, it met another slaver, the General Prim, which had left Callao in March. Its captain was willing to take over the 174 Tongans to quickly return to port, meanwhile, the Peruvian government, under pressure from foreign powers and also shocked that its labour plan had turned into a slave trade, had on 28 April 1863 cancelled all licenses. The islanders on board General Prim, and other ships were not allowed to land and they were transferred to other ships chartered by the Peruvian government to return them to their homeland. By the time the Adelante finally left on 2 October 1863, captain Escurra of the Adelante, pocketed his fee of $30/head, but dumped them on uninhabited Cocos Island. He later claimed that the 426 kanakas were affected with smallpox, when the whaler Active visited the island on 21 October, its crew found some 200 Tongans still alive. A month later the Peruvian warship Tumbes went to rescue the remaining 38 survivors and took them to Paita, nowadays their descendants still live in Haʻatuʻa, of which a part has been named Kolomaile
Blackbirding
–
The blackbirding schooner Daphne was seized by
HMS Rosario in 1869, and its passengers freed
Blackbirding
–
Polynesia is the largest of three major cultural areas in the Pacific Ocean. Polynesia is generally defined as the islands within the
Polynesian triangle.
Blackbirding
–
Chemistry
22.
Slavery in the Byzantine Empire
–
Slavery in the Byzantine Empire was widespread and common throughout its history. Slavery was already common in Classical Greece and in the earlier Roman Empire, the military campaigns and expansion of the empire in the 10th century resulted in a large numbers of slaves. A main source of slaves were prisoners of war, of which there was a profit to be made. The Skylitzes Chronicle mentions that after the Battle of Adrassos many prisoners of war were sent to Constantinople and they were so numerous that they filled all the mansions and rural regions. Most of the menials in large Byzantine homes were slaves and were very numerous, danelis of Patras, a wealthy widow in the 9th century, gave a gift of 3,000 slaves to Emperor Basil I. The eunuch Basil, chancellor during the reign of Basil II, was said to have owned 3,000 slaves, some slaves worked the landed estates of their masters, which declined in later ages. A medieval Arab historian estimates that 200,000 women and children were taken as slaves after the Byzantine reconquest of Crete from the Muslims. Yet parents, living in the Byzantine empire, were forced to sell their children to pay their debts, after the 10th century the major source of slaves were often Slavs and Bulgars, which resulted from campaigns in the Balkans and lands north of the Black Sea. At the eastern shore of the Adriatic many Slav slaves were exported to parts of Europe. Slaves were one of the articles that Russian traders dealt in their yearly visit to Constantinople. After the 12th century, the old Greek word δοῦλος obtained a synonym in σκλάβος, slavery was mostly an urban phenomenon with most of the slaves working in households. The Farmers Law of the 7th/8th centuries and the 10th century Book of the Prefect deals with slavery, slaves were not allowed to marry until it was legalized by an emperor in 1095. However, they did not gain freedom if they did, the children of slaves remained slaves even if the father was their master. Many of the slaves became drafted in the army, eunuchs were a special group among the slaves. Young boys were castrated before or after puberty and used as eunuchs, castration was outlawed but the law was poorly enforced. They were imported and exported to the empire by traders, eunuchs became very popular at some times, could rise to high posts and fetch high prices. In rich Byzantine families they were accepted as part of the household, eunuchs played an important role in the Byzantine palace and court. Slave markets were present in many Byzantine cities and towns, the slave market of Constantinople was found in the valley of the Lamentations
Slavery in the Byzantine Empire
–
Slavery
23.
Coolie
–
Coolie, during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for an indentured servant indentured to a company, mainly from the South Asia or China. The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the Tamil word for a payment for work, an alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from Hindustani word qulī, which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, kul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India, in 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described coolies as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan. The Chinese word 苦 力 means bitterly hard and is translated as bitter labour. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the trade throughout the British Empire in 1807. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, as a consequence, a large-scale slavery-like trade in Asian indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. British companies were the first to experiment with this new form of cheap labour in 1807. The coolie trade was often compared to the slave trade. Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nations workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806, the trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction, the trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, however, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau. Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons or loading vessels in the ports of departure, in 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane. They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions, the duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period, the coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts, more than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands
Coolie
–
Coolie labourer in
Zhenjiang, China, with bamboo pole to hoist and carry heavy loads.C. 1900
Coolie
–
Illustration of the
port of Amoy, where many Chinese labourers were shipped to foreign lands, by Edwin Joshua Dukes.
Coolie
–
Chinese immigrant workers building the
Transcontinental Railroad.
Coolie
–
Royal Decree of Graces of 1815, a legal order approved by the
Spanish Crown to encourage foreign settlement of the colonies of
Cuba and
Puerto Rico.
24.
Field slaves in the United States
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Field hands were slaves who labored in the plantation fields. They commonly were used to plant, tend, and harvest cotton, sugar, rice, field slaves usually worked in the fields from sunrise to sundown, while being monitored by an overseer. The overseer was there to make sure that slaves did not slow down or cease their work until the day was over. Field slaves were given one outfit annually, during the winter time, field slaves were given additional clothing, or material to make additional clothing, in order to keep them warm. In general, slave children received little to no clothing until they reached the age of puberty, women were given long dresses to wear in the summer. During the winter they made themselves a shawl and pantalettes, women often wore turbans on the heads, covering their hair. Men were given pants to wear during the summer, while in the winter they were given long coats to wear. Slaves were usually crammed up together in rooms and sometimes slept uncomfortably in mud. Field slaves were given rations of food by their master. If permitted, the slaves could have a garden to grow fresh vegetables. Otherwise they would make a meal from their rations and anything else they could find and they had breakfast at daybreak, before going to work in the fields and had dinner at the end of the workday. This happened every day when they were on the fields or when they were under the rule of their masters
Field slaves in the United States
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Slavery
25.
House slave
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A house slave was a slave who worked, and often lived, in the house of the slave-owner. House slaves had many such as cooking, cleaning, serving meals. In classical antiquity, many civilizations had house slaves, Athens had various categories of slave, such as, House-slaves, living in their masters home and working at home, on the land or in a shop. Freelance slaves, who didnt live with their master but worked in their masters shop or fields, public slaves, who worked as police-officers, ushers, secretaries, street-sweepers, etc. War-captives who served primarily in unskilled tasks at which they could be chained, for example, rowers in commercial ships, houseborn slaves often constituted a privileged class. They were, for example, entrusted to take the children to school, some of them were the offspring of the master of the house, but in most cities, notably Athens, a child inherited the status of its mother. Sometimes the cause of this was natural, mines, for instance, were exclusively a male domain, on the other hand, there were many female domestic slaves. The example of the enslaved of the American South on the other hand demonstrates that slave populations can multiply, the explanation is perhaps economic, even a skilled slave was cheap, so it may have been cheaper to purchase a slave than to raise one. Additionally, childbirth placed the slave-mothers life at risk, and the baby was not guaranteed to survive to adulthood, a house slave appears in the Socratic dialogue, Meno, which was written by Plato. In the beginning of the dialogue, the master, Meno, fails to benefit from Socratic teaching. Socrates turns to the house-slave, who is a boy ignorant of geometry, the boy acknowledges his ignorance and learns from his mistakes and finally establishes a proof of the desired geometric theorem. This is another example of the slave appearing more clever than his master and we have most of these plays in translations by Plautus and Terence, suggesting that the Romans liked the same genre. And the same sort of tale has not yet extinct, as the popularity of Jeeves. House slaves existed in the New World, in Haiti, before leading the Haitian revolution, Toussaint Louverture had been a house slave. Toussaint is thought to have born on the plantation of Bréda at Haut de Cap in Saint-Domingue, owned by the Comte de Noé. Tradition says that he was driver and horse trainer on the plantation and his master freed him at age 33, when Toussaint married Suzanne. He was a fervent Catholic, and a member of degree of the Masonic Lodge of Saint-Domingue. In 1790 slaves in the Plaine du Flowera rose in rebellion, different forces coalesced under different leaders
House slave
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The leader of the
Haitian revolution,
Toussaint L'Ouverture, was a former house slave.
House slave
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Slavery
House slave
26.
Kholop
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A kholop was a feudally dependent person in Russia between the 10th and early 18th centuries. Their legal status was close to that of serfs, the word kholop was first mentioned in a chronicle for the year of 986. By one hypothesis, the word is cognate with Slavic words translated as boy, the Slavic word itself is derived from the hypothetical root *chol related to premarital state, unmarriedness, inability for reproduction. By another hypothesis, it is derived from a Germanic root, the Russkaya Pravda, a legal code of the late Kievan Rus, details the status and types of kholops of the time. In the 11th - 12th centuries, the referred to different categories of dependent people. A kholop’s master had unlimited power over his life, e. g. he could kill him, sell him, the master, however, was responsible for a kholop’s actions, such as insulting a freeman or stealing. A person could become a kholop as a result of capture, selling oneself, being sold for debts, after having committed crimes, until the late 15th century, the kholops represented a majority among the servants, who had been working lordly lands. Some kholops, mainly house serfs, replenished the ranks of the servants or engaged themselves in trades, farming. Throughout the 16th century, the role in the corvée economy had been diminishing due to the increasing involvement of peasant exploitation. At the turn of the 16th century, the service class kholops began to emerge, in the late 17th century, there were also kholops chained to their land, who took care of their own household and had to pay quitrent. Those kholops, who had been house serfs, were subject to tax in 1722-1724 and were thereafter treated as ordinary serfs. This article includes content derived from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1969–1978, which is partially in the public domain
Kholop
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Slavery
27.
Slavery in medieval Europe
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Slavery had mostly died out in western Europe about the year 1000, replaced by serfdom. It lingered longer in England and in areas linked to the Muslim world. Church rules suppressed slavery of Christians, most historians argue the transition was quite abrupt around 1000, but some see a gradual transition from about 300 to 1000. The major European languages, including English, used variations of the word slave, the chaos following the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire made the taking of slaves habitual throughout Europe in the early Middle Ages. Such criminals would become slaves to their victims, often with their property, as these peoples Christianized, the church worked more actively to reduce the practice of holding coreligionists in bondage. St. Patrick, who himself was captured and enslaved at one time, the restoration of order and growing power of the church slowly transmuted of the late Roman slave system of Diocletian into serfdom. Another major factor was the rise of Bathilde, queen of the Franks, when she became regent, her government outlawed slave-trading of Christians throughout the Merovingian empire, as well as purchasing and freeing existing slaves. About 10% of Englands population entered in the Domesday Book were slaves and it is difficult to be certain about slave numbers, however, since the old Roman word for slave continued to be applied to people with a status that was later to be called serf. Demand from the Islamic world dominated the trade in medieval Europe. For most of time, however, sale of Christian slaves to non-Christians was banned. In the pactum Lotharii of 840 between Venice and the Carolingian Empire, Venice promised not to buy Christian slaves in the Empire, and not to sell Christian slaves to Muslims. The Church prohibited the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands, for example in the Council of Koblenz in 922, the Council of London in 1102, and the Council of Armagh in 1171. Arabic silver dirhams, presumably exchanged for slaves, are plentiful in eastern Europe and Southern Sweden, by the reign of Pope Zacharias, Venice had established a thriving slave trade, buying in Italy, amongst other places, and selling to the Moors in Northern Africa. When the sale of Christians to Muslims was banned, the Venetians began to sell Slavs, caravans of slaves traveled from Eastern Europe, through Alpine passes in Austria, to reach Venice. A record of tolls paid in Raffelstetten, near St. Florian on the Danube, some are Slavic themselves, from Bohemia and the Kievan Rus. They had come from Kiev through Przemyśl, Kraków, Prague, the same record values female slaves at a tremissa and male slaves, who were more numerous, at a saiga. Eunuchs were especially valuable, and castration houses arose in Venice, as well as other prominent slave markets, Venice was far from the only slave trading hub in Italy. Southern Italy boasted slaves from distant regions, including Lombardy, Greece, Bulgaria, Armenia, during the 9th and 10th centuries, Amalfi was a major exporter of slaves to North Africa
Slavery in medieval Europe
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Slavery
28.
Panyarring
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Panyarring though is different from this practice as it involves the forced seizure of persons when a debt was not repaid. The practice was banned by a number of African kingdoms, notably by the Ashanti Empire in 1838, the British took a strong stance against panyarring when they established their administration on the coast and banned the practice in 1903. The prominence of the activity decreased and it has not been used in West Africa since that time. Pawnship was a form of collateral in West Africa, which involved the pledge of a person to service to a person providing credit. Pawnship was a practice prior to European contact throughout West Africa, including amongst the Akan people, the Ewe people, the Ga people, the Yoruba people. In contrast to pawnship, panyarring involved the seizure of persons in order to force repayment for a debt or to recoup the loss by selling the person into slavery. Panyarring was one of forms of debt repayment in the region. Panyarring could include the person who was provided credit, a member of that persons family, in addition to forcing debt repayment, panyarring could also be used to force a person to a palver or palaver, a court-like process for repayment of loss. Evidence of panyarring prior to European contact is scant and not well documented, the root of the word is based on the Portuguese words penhóràr and penhór. When the Portuguese came to the Gold Coast in the 16th century, gradually, the word became commonly used by Europeans to describe the practice of seizing a person for repayment of debt or to remedy an injury along the whole coast of Africa. Panyarring became an activity in West Africa largely with the increase in the Atlantic slave trade. The lengthy trade networks from hundreds of miles inland to the coast required similarly complex forms of credit relationships, however, it had different system and structure in each different area along the Atlantic coast. Along the Gold Coast, in present-day Ghana, panyarring became a used in the slave trade. Politically, in the 18th century, that area of Africa was populated by a number of fragmented Akan polities without a central power. It also regulated relationships between the different communities by bringing persons to palaver courts for settlement in front of a judge, panyarring became a means of securing people for sale into the Atlantic slave trade. Debts could be real or invented, persons would be seized, in one case in 1773, an Obutong chiefs sons who had been pawns in an arrangement were sold to a European slave ship. The chief, Robin John Ephraim, was left with little choice but to panyar the ships and release his sons, both Europeans and Africans began using panyarring as an extension of political and economic policies in the region and for a range of purported offenses. For example, in 1709 British slave traders were upset with an African slave trader who sold them a mad slave
Panyarring
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Cape Coast Slave Castle, the main British fort in the Gold Coast for the slave trade.
Panyarring
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Slavery
Panyarring
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The neighboring British and Dutch forts at Komenda, the sites of numerous hostilities and significant panyarring.
Panyarring
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The main historical cities of the Yoruba coast with modern national boundaries.
29.
Thrall
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A thrall was a slave or serf in Scandinavian lands during the Viking Age. The corresponding term in Old English was þēow, the status of slave contrasts with that of the freeman and the nobleman. The Middle Latin rendition of the term in early Germanic law is servus, the social system of serfdom is continued in medieval feudalism. Thrall is from the Old Norse þræll, meaning a person who is in bondage or serfdom, the Old Norse term was lent into late Old English, as þræl. The term is from a Common Germanic þragilaz, Old High German had a cognate, dregil, meaning servant, runner. The English derivation thraldom is of High Medieval date, the verb to enthrall is of Early Modern origin. Thralls were the lowest class of workers in Scandinavian society and they were Northern Europeans brought into slavery due to debt, the losers of wars, and the children of previous thralls. Thralls in Scandinavia had no rights and their conditions were variable depending on the master. The thrall trade as the prize of plunder was a key part of the Viking economy, while there are some estimates of as many as thirty slaves per household, most families only owned one or two slaves. In 1043, Hallvard Vebjørnsson, the son of a nobleman in the district of greater Lier, was killed while trying to defend a thrall woman from men who accused her of theft. The Church strongly approved of his action, recognizing him as a martyr and canonizing him as Saint Hallvard, despite the existence of a caste system, thralls could experience a level of social fluidity. Thralls could be freed by their masters at any time, be freed in a will, once a thrall was freed, he became a freedman—a member of an intermediary group between slaves and freemen. He still owed allegiance to his master and would have to vote according to his former masters wishes. It took at least two generations for freedmen to lose the allegiance to their masters and become full freemen. If a freedman had no descendants, his former master inherited his land, the Viking slave trade slowly ended in the 11th century, as a number of Vikings settled in the European territories they had once raided. They converted serfs to Christianity and merged with the local populace, the thrall system was finally abolished in the mid-14th century in Scandinavia
Thrall
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Slavery
listen)) is a form of unpaid, unfree labour, which is intermittent in nature and which lasts limited periods of time: typically only a certain number of days' work each year.
