1.
Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin in 1945, the territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged by 1947 as the Soviet bloc confronted the Western states that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following Stalins death in 1953, a period of political and economic liberalization, known as de-Stalinization and Khrushchevs Thaw, the country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took a lead in the Space Race with Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite, and Vostok 1. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, the war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost. The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing the economic stagnation, the Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989 Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist regimes. This led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR as well, in August 1991, a coup détat was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a role in facing down the coup. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states
2.
Gulag
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The Gulag was the government agency that administered and controlled the Soviet forced-labor camp system during Joseph Stalins rule from the 1930s up until the 1950s. The term is commonly used to reference any forced-labor camp in the Soviet Union. The camps housed a range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners. Large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas, the Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. The agencys full name was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and it was administered first by the State Political Administration, later by the NKVD and in the final years by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s, the author likened the scattered camps to a chain of islands and as an eyewitness he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. Natalya Reshetovskaya, the wife of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, said in her memoirs that The Gulag Archipelago was based on folklore as opposed to objective facts. In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates and 423 labor colonies in the USSR, todays major industrial cities of the Russian Arctic, such as Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Magadan, were originally camps built by prisoners and run by ex-prisoners. About 14 million people were imprisoned in the Gulag labor camps from 1929 to 1953, according to some estimates, the total population of the camps varied from 510,307 in 1934 to 1,727,970 in 1953. According with other estimates, at the beginning of 1953 the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of more than 465,000 were political prisoners. The institutional analysis of the Soviet concentration system is complicated by the distinction between GULAG and GUPVI. In many ways the GUPVI system was similar to GULAG and its major function was the organization of foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union. The top management of GUPVI came from the GULAG system, the major noted distinction from GULAG was the absence of convicted criminals in the GUPVI camps. Otherwise the conditions in both systems were similar, hard labor, poor nutrition and living conditions, and high mortality rate. According with the estimates, in total, during the period of the existence of GUPVI there were over 500 POW camps. According to a 1993 study of archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934–53. Some independent estimates are as low as 1.6 million deaths during the period from 1929 to 1953. Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although significant numbers of prisoners could be found in the camps at any one time
3.
Slavery
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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 by 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
4.
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
5.
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
6.
Children in the military
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Throughout history and in many cultures, children have been extensively involved in military campaigns even when such practices were against cultural morals. In World War I, in Great Britain 250,000 boys under 18 managed to join the army, in World War II, child soldiers fought throughout Europe, in the Warsaw Uprising, in the Jewish resistance, and in the Soviet Army. According to one study, children have been used militarily across the globe, Children are easy targets to recruit for military purposes because of their vulnerability to influence. Many are seized and recruited by force whereas others join to escape their reality, research shows that child soldiering prolongs the duration of civil wars, as it increases the strength of rebel organizations vis-a-vis the government. This reduction in both the calibre of infantry rifles and the mass of many items of equipment makes it easier for children to carry. However, children who are over the age of 15 but under the age of 18 are still able to take part in combat as soldiers. The United Nations Security Council convenes regularly to debate, receive reports, the most recent meeting was on 17 July 2008. The first resolution on the issue, Resolution 1261, was passed in 1999, in 2014, more than 17 cases were covered about children in armed conflict. Many children in different countries are involved in such illegal conflicts and these children are detained with no real evidence, or in massive sweeps. Some of them are captured with their families, or by the activity of one of their family members, lawyers and relatives are banded to the court. They can be detained without sufficient food, medical care, or under other inhumane conditions, some of these children live with physical and sexual torture. Refraining from recruiting children under fifteen does not exclude children who volunteer for armed service, non-state actors and guerrilla forces are forbidden from recruiting anyone under the age of 18 for any purpose. Opinion is currently divided over whether children should be prosecuted for committing war crimes, many child soldiers fought in the Sierra Leone Civil War. In its wake, the UN sanctioned the Special Court for Sierra Leone to try the participants for war crimes, if found guilty under US law such a crime carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. This was agreed as part of a bargain, which would see Khadr deported to Canada after one year to serve the remaining seven years there. In a letter to the U. S. Omar Khadr remained in Guantanamo Bay, Khadr was transferred to the Canadian prison system in September 2012, and was freed on bail by a judge in the province of Alberta in May 2015. He is appealing his American conviction as a war criminal, in March 2012 Thomas Lubanga Dyilo was convicted by the International Criminal Court for military use of children. P. W. Singer of the Brookings Institution estimated in January 2003 that child soldiers participate in three quarters of all the ongoing conflicts in the world
7.
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
8.
Debt bondage
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Debt bondage, also known as debt slavery or bonded labour, is a persons pledge of labour 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 labour 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 labourers 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
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Forced marriage
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Forced marriage is a marriage in which one or more of the parties is married without his or her consent or against his or her will. A forced marriage differs from a marriage, in which both parties consent to the assistance of their parents or a third party in identifying a spouse. There is often a continuum of coercion used to compel a marriage, Forced marriage is still practised in various cultures across the world, particularly in parts of South Asia and Africa. Some scholars object to use of the forced marriage because it invokes the consensual legitimating language of marriage for an experience that is precisely the opposite. A variety of alternatives exist, including forced conjugal association, the United Nations views forced marriage as a form of human rights abuse, since it violates the principle of the freedom and autonomy of individuals. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that a right to choose a spouse and enter freely into marriage is central to her life and dignity. The Roman Catholic Church deems forced marriage grounds for granting an annulment — for a marriage to be valid both parties must give their consent freely. In 1969, the Special Court for Sierra Leones Appeals Chamber found the abduction, the SCSL Trial Chamber in the Charles Taylor decision found that the term forced marriage should be avoided and rather described the practice in war as conjugal slavery. Marriages throughout history were arranged between families, especially before the 18th century, the practices varied by culture, but usually involved the legal transfer of dependency of the woman from her father to the groom. The emancipation of women in the 19th and 20th centuries changed marriage laws dramatically, especially in regard to property, by the mid-20th century, many Western countries had enacted legislation establishing legal equality between spouses in family law. The period of 1975-1979 saw an overhaul of family laws in countries such as Italy, Spain, Austria, West Germany. In 1978, the Council of Europe passed the Resolution 37 on equality of spouses in civil law, among the last European countries to establish full gender equality in marriage were Switzerland, Greece, Spain, the Netherlands, and France in the 1980s. An arranged marriage is not the same as a marriage, in the former the spouse has the possibility to reject the offer. The line between arranged and forced marriage is often difficult to draw, due to the implied familial and social pressure to accept the marriage. In the 19th century, marriage practices varied across Europe, but in general, arranged marriages were the norm in Russia before early 20th century, most of which were endogamous. Child marriages were common historically, but began to be questioned in the 19th and 20th century, child marriages are often considered to be forced marriages, because children are not able to make a fully informed choice whether or not to marry, being influenced by their families. Historically, forced marriage was used to require a captive to integrate with the host community. One example is the English blacksmith John R. Jewitt, who spent three years as a captive of the Nootka people on the Pacific Northwest Coast in 1802–1805
10.
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
11.
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
12.
Peon
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A peon is a person subject to peonage, a type of involuntary servitude of laborers having little control over their employment conditions. Peonage existed historically during the period, especially in Latin America. The English words peon and peonage were derived from the Spanish word, in this sense, peon can be used in either a derogatory or self-effacing context. However, the term has a basis and usage related to much more severe conditions of forced labor. American English, in a historical and legal sense, peon generally referred to someone working in a labor system. The word often implied debt bondage or indentured servitude, there are other usages in contemporary cultures, English language varieties spoken in South Asian countries, a peon is an office boy, an attendant, or an orderly, a person kept around for odd jobs. Computing slang, a peon is an unprivileged user—a person without special privileges on a computer system The other extreme is superuser, financial trading slang, a peon is a market participant who trades in small quantities or a small account. The origin of form of involuntary servitude goes back to the Spanish conquest of Mexico when conquistadors forced natives to work for Spanish planters. Peonage was prevalent in Latin America especially in the countries of Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador and it remains an important part of social life, as among the Urarina of the Peruvian Amazon. After the American Civil War of 1861–1865, peonage developed in the Southern United States, poor white farmers and formerly enslaved African Americans known as freedmen who could not afford their own land would farm another persons land, exchanging labor for a share of the crops. This was called sharecropping and initially the benefits were mutual, the land owner would pay for the seeds and tools in exchange for a percentage of the money earned from the crop and a portion of the crop. As time passed, many began to abuse this system. The landowner would force the tenant farmer or sharecropper to buy seeds and tools from the land owner’s store, as sharecroppers were often illiterate, they had to depend on the books and accounting by the landowner and his staff. Since the tenant farmers could not offset the costs, they were forced into labor due to the debts they owed the land owner. After the U. S. Civil War, the South passed Black Codes, vagrancy laws were included in these Black Codes. Homeless or even unemployed African Americans who were between jobs, most of whom were slaves were arrested and fined as vagrants. Usually lacking the resources to pay the fine, the vagrant was sent to county labor or hired out to a private employer, the authorities also tried to restrict the movement of freedmen between rural areas and cities, to between towns. Under such laws, local officials arbitrarily arrested tens of thousands of freedmen and charged them with fines, white merchants, farmers, and business owners could pay their debts and the prisoner had to work off the debt
13.
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
14.
Wage slavery
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Wage slavery refers to a situation where a persons livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. It is a term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person. Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, before the American Civil War, Southern defenders of African American slavery invoked the concept of wage slavery to favorably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North. The United States abolished slavery after the Civil War, but labor union activists found the metaphor useful, according to Lawrence Glickman, in the Gilded Age, References abounded in the labor press, and it is hard to find a speech by a labor leader without the phrase. The introduction of labor in 18th century Britain was met with resistance. Historically, some organizations and individual social activists have espoused workers self-management or worker cooperatives as possible alternatives to wage labor. The view that working for wages is akin to slavery dates back to the ancient world, in 1763, the French journalist Simon Linguet published a description of wage slavery, The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him. They were worth at least as much as they could be sold for in the market. It is the impossibility of living by any means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the man in order to get from him permission to enrich him. What effective gain the suppression of slavery brought He is free, the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger, the view that wage work has substantial similarities with chattel slavery was actively put forward in the late 18th and 19th centuries by defenders of chattel slavery, and by opponents of capitalism. Some defenders of slavery, mainly from the Southern slave states argued that Northern workers were free but in name – the slaves of endless toil, and that their slaves were better off. In this period, Henry David Thoreau wrote that t is hard to have a Southern overseer, it is worse to have a Northern one, some abolitionists in the United States regarded the analogy as spurious. They believed that workers were neither wronged nor oppressed. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared, now I am my own master, no more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner, self-employment became less common as the artisan tradition slowly disappeared in the later part of the 19th century. In 1869 The New York Times described the system of labor as a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South
15.
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
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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
17.
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
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Babylonian law
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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
19.
Slavery in ancient Greece
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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
20.
Atlantic slave trade
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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
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Middle Passage
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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
22.
Arab slave trade
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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
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Ghilman
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Ghilman were slave-soldiers and/or mercenaries in the armies of the Abbasid, Ottoman, and Persian Safavid, Afsharid and Qajar empires. Ghilman were introduced to the Abbasid Caliphate during the reign of al-Mutasim, the ghilman were slave-soldiers taken as prisoners of war from conquered regions or frontier zones, especially from among the Turkic people of Central Asia and the Caucasian peoples. They fought in bands, and demanded high pay for their services and they were opposed by the native Arab population, and riots against the ghilman in Baghdad in 836 forced Mutasim to relocate his capital to Samarra. A Ghulam was trained and educated at his masters expense and could earn his freedom through his dedicated service, ghilman were required to marry Turkic slave-women, who were chosen for them by their masters. Some ghilman seem to have lived celibate lives, the absence of family life and offspring was possibly one of the reasons why ghilman, even when attaining power, generally failed to start dynasties or proclaim their independence. The only exception to this was the Ghaznavid dynasty of Afghanistan, the Ottomans and various Iranian dynasties drew its peoples generally from the Balkans and the Caucasus. Mamluk Janissaries Ghulam Saqaliba Muslim Slave System in Medieval India, Ghilmans and Eunuchs
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Mamluk
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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
25.
Saqaliba
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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
26.
Aztec slavery
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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. ”
27.
Blackbirding
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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
28.
Slavery in the Byzantine Empire
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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
29.
Coolie
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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
30.
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
31.
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
32.
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
33.
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
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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
35.
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
36.
Serfdom
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Serfdom is the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism. It was a condition of bondage, which developed primarily during the High Middle Ages in Europe, serfs were often required not only to work on the lords fields, but also his mines, forests and roads. The decline of serfdom in Western Europe has sometimes been attributed to the Black Death, Serfdom became increasingly rare in most of Western Europe after the Renaissance, but conversely, it grew strong in Central and Eastern Europe, where it had previously been less common. In Eastern Europe the institution persisted until the mid-19th century, in the Austrian Empire serfdom was abolished by the 1781 Serfdom Patent, corvée continued to exist until 1848. Serfdom was abolished in Russia in the 1860s, in Finland, Norway and Sweden, feudalism was never fully established, and serfdom did not exist, however, serfdom-like institutions did exist in both Denmark and its vassal Iceland. According to Joseph R. Strayer, the concept of feudalism can also be applied to the societies of ancient Persia, ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Muslim India, China, james Lee and Cameron Campbell describe the Chinese Qing dynasty as also maintaining a form of serfdom. Tibet is described by Melvyn Goldstein to have had serfdom until 1959, bhutan is described by Tashi Wangchuk, a Bhutanese civil servant, as abolishing serfdom officially by 1959, but Wangchuk believes less than or about 10% of poor peasants were in copyhold situations. The United Nations 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery also prohibits serfdom as a form of slavery, the word serf originated from the Middle French serf and can be traced further back to the Latin servus. In Late Antiquity and most of the Middle Ages, what are now called serfs were usually designated in Latin as coloni. As slavery gradually disappeared and the status of servi became nearly identical to that of the coloni. Serfs had a place in feudal society, as did barons and knights, in return for protection. Thus the manorial system exhibited a degree of reciprocity, one rationale held that a serf worked for all while a knight or baron fought for all and a churchman prayed for all, thus everyone had a place. The serf was the worst fed and rewarded, but at least he had his place and, unlike slaves, had rights in land. A lord of the manor could not sell his serfs as a Roman might sell his slaves and this unified system preserved for the lord long-acquired knowledge of practices suited to the land. Further, a serf could not abandon his lands without permission, a freeman became a serf usually through force or necessity. Sometimes the greater physical and legal force of a local magnate intimidated freeholders or allodial owners into dependency, often a few years of crop failure, a war, or brigandage might leave a person unable to make his own way. In such a case he could strike a bargain with a lord of a manor, in exchange for protection, service was required, in cash, produce or labour, or a combination of all. These oaths bound the lord and his new serf in a feudal contract, to become a serf was a commitment that encompassed all aspects of the serfs life
37.
History of serfdom
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Like slavery, serfdom has a long history, dating to the Ancient Times. Social institutions similar to serfdom occurred in the ancient world, the status of the helots in the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta resembled that of medieval serfs. By the 3rd century AD, the Roman Empire faced a labour shortage, large Roman landowners increasingly relied on Roman freemen, acting as tenant farmers, to provide labour. The status of these tenant farmers, eventually known as coloni, in 332 AD Emperor Constantine issued legislation that greatly restricted the rights of the coloni and tied them to the land. Some see these laws as the beginning of medieval serfdom in Europe, however, medieval serfdom really began with the breakup of the Carolingian Empire around the 10th century. The demise of this empire, which had ruled much of western Europe for more than 200 years, during this period, powerful feudal lords encouraged the establishment of serfdom as a source of agricultural labor. Serfdom as a system provided most of the agricultural labour throughout the Middle Ages, Slavery persisted right through the Middle Ages, but it was rare, diminishing and largely confined to the use of household slaves. Parts of Europe, including much of Scandinavia, never adopted serfdom, in the later Middle Ages serfdom began to disappear west of the Rhine even as it spread through much of the rest of Europe. This was one important cause for the differences between the societies and economies of eastern and western Europe. In Western Europe, the rise of powerful monarchs, towns, Serfdom in Western Europe came largely to an end in the 15th and 16th centuries, because of changes in the economy, population, and laws governing lord-tenant relations in Western European nations. The enclosure of fields for livestock grazing and for larger arable plots made the economy of serfs small strips of land in open fields less attractive to landowners. Paid labour was more flexible, since workers could be hired only when they were needed. At the same time, increasing unrest and uprisings by serfs and peasants, like Tyler’s Rebellion in England in 1381, put pressure on the nobility and the clergy to reform the system. As a result, the establishment of new forms of land leases and increased personal liberties accommodated serf. An important factor in the decline of serfdom was industrial development—especially the Industrial Revolution and this also led to the growing process of urbanization. Serfdom reached Eastern Europe centuries later than Western Europe—it became dominant around the 15th century, before that time, Eastern Europe had been much more sparsely populated than Western Europe, and the lords of Eastern Europe created a peasantry-friendly environment to encourage migration east. Serfdom developed in Eastern Europe after the Black Death epidemics of the mid-14th century, the resulting high land-to-labour ratio - combined with Eastern Europes vast, sparsely populated areas - gave the lords an incentive to bind the remaining peasantry to their land. This pattern applied in Central and Eastern European countries, including Prussia, Austria, Hungary, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and this also led to the slower industrial development and urbanisation of those regions
38.
Emancipation reform of 1861
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The Emancipation Reform of 1861 in Russia was the first and most important of liberal reforms effected during the reign of Emperor Alexander II of Russia. The reform effectively abolished serfdom throughout the Russian Empire, the 1861 Emancipation Manifesto proclaimed the emancipation of the serfs on private estates and of the domestic serfs. By this edict more than 23 million people received their liberty, serfs gained the full rights of free citizens, including rights to marry without having to gain consent, to own property and to own a business. The Manifesto prescribed that peasants would be able to buy the land from the landlords, household serfs were the least affected, they gained only their freedom and no land. In Georgia the emancipation took place later, in 1864, the serfs were emancipated in 1861, following a speech given by Tsar Alexander II on 30 March 1856. State owned serfs, i. e. the serfs living on Imperial lands, were emancipated later in 1866 and they comprised an estimated 38% of the population. As well as having obligations to the state, they also were obliged to the landowner, by the mid-nineteenth century, less than half of Russian peasants were serfs. The rural population lived in households, gathered as villages, run by a mir —isolated, conservative, largely self-sufficient, Imperial Russia had around 20 million dvory, forty percent of them containing six to ten people. Intensely insular, the mir assembly, the skhod, appointed an elder, peasants within a mir shared land and resources. The fields were divided among the families as nadel —a complex of strip plots, the strips were periodically redistributed within the villages to produce level economic conditions. The peasants were duty-bound to make payments in labor and goods. It has been estimated that landowners took at least one third of income, the need for urgent reform was well understood in 19th-century Russia. Much support for it emanated from universities, authors and other intellectual circles, various projects of emancipation reforms were prepared by Mikhail Speransky, Nikolay Mordvinov, and Pavel Kiselyov. However, conservative or reactionary nobility thwarted their efforts, in Western guberniyas serfdom was abolished early in the century. In Congress Poland, serfdom had been abolished before it became Russian, Serfdom was abolished in the Governorate of Estonia in 1816, in Courland in 1817, and in Livonia in 1819. In 1797, Paul I of Russia decreed that corvee labor was limited to 3 days a week, but his law was not enforced. Beginning in 1801, Alexander I of Russia appointed a committee to study possible emancipation and my intention is to abolish serfdom. You can yourself understand that the present order of owning souls cannot remain unchanged and it is better to abolish serfdom from above, than to wait for that time when it starts to abolish itself from below
39.
Slave raiding
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Slave raiding is a military raid for the purpose of capturing people and bringing them out of the raid area to serve as slaves. Sometimes seen as a part of warfare, it is nowadays widely considered a crime. Slave raiding has occurred since antiquity, some of the earliest surviving written records of slave raiding come from Sumer. The act of slave raiding involves an organized and concerted attack on a settlement with the purpose of taking the areas people, the collected new slaves are often kept in some form of slave pen or depot. From there, the slave takers will transport them to a distant place by means such as a ship or camel caravan. When conquered people are enslaved and remain in their place, it is not raiding, slave raiding was a violent method of economic development where a resource shortage was addressed with the acquisition by force of the desired resource, in this case human labor. Other than the element of slavery being present, such violent seizure of a resource does not differ from similar raids to gain food or any other desired commodity. Slave raiding was a large and lucrative trade on the coasts of Africa, in ancient Europe, Mesoamerica, the Crimean-Nogai raids into East Slavic lands provided some two or three million slaves to the Ottoman Empire over the course of four centuries. The many alternative methods of obtaining human beings to work in indentured or other conditions, as well as cultural changes, have made slavery rare. Abduction Bride kidnapping Blackbirding Crimean-Nogai raids into East Slavic lands Turkish Abductions Shanghaiing
40.
Impressment
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Impressment, colloquially, the press or the press gang, refers to the act of taking men into a military or naval force by compulsion, with or without notice. Navies of several nations used forced recruitment by various means, the large size of the British Royal Navy in the Age of Sail meant impressment was most commonly associated with Britain. The Royal Navy impressed many merchant sailors, as well as some sailors from other nations, people liable to impressment were eligible men of seafaring habits between the ages of 18 and 55 years. Non-seamen were impressed as well, though rarely, though the public opposed conscription in general, impressment was repeatedly upheld by the courts, as it was deemed vital to the strength of the navy and, by extension, to the survival of the realm. Impressment was essentially a Royal Navy practice, reflecting the size of the British fleet, Continental Navy did however apply a form of impressment during the American War of Independence. The impressment of seamen from American ships caused serious tensions between Britain and the United States in the leading up to the War of 1812. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1814, Britain ended the practice, later conscription was not limited to the Royal Navy, working and living conditions for the average sailor in the Royal Navy in the 18th century were harsh by modern standards. Naval pay was attractive in the 1750s, but towards the end of the century its value had been eroded by rising prices, sailors pay on merchant ships was somewhat higher during peacetime, and could increase to double naval pay during wartime. Until 19th century reforms improved conditions, the Royal Navy was additionally known to pay wages up to two years in arrears, and it always withheld six months pay to discourage desertion. Naval wages had been set in 1653, and were not increased until April 1797 after sailors on 80 ships of the Channel Fleet based at Spithead mutinied, despite this, there were many volunteers for naval service. Also the food supplied by the Navy was plentiful and good by the standards of the day. The main problem with recruitment, though, was a shortage of qualified seamen during wartime, privateers, the Royal Navy, and the Merchant Navy all competed for a small pool of ordinary and able seamen in wartime, and all three groups were usually short-handed. Volunteering also protected the sailor from creditors, as the law forbade collecting debts accrued before enlistment, the main disadvantage was that enlisted deserters who were recaptured would be hanged, whereas pressed men would simply be returned to service. Other records confirm similar percentages throughout the 18th century, average annual recruitment 1736–1783 All three groups also suffered high levels of desertion. In the 18th century, British desertion rates on naval ships averaged 25% annually, if a naval ship had taken a prize, a deserting seaman would also forfeit his share of the prize money. In a report on proposed changes to the RN written by Admiral Nelson in 1803, the Impress Service was formed to force sailors to serve on naval vessels. There was no concept of joining the navy as a fixed career-path for non-officers at the time since seamen remained attached to a ship only for the duration of its commission. They were encouraged to stay in the Navy after the commission, Impressment relied on the legal power of the King to call men to military service, as well as to recruit volunteers
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Barbary pirates
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This area was known in Europe as the Barbary Coast, a term derived from the name of its Berber inhabitants. The main purpose of their attacks was to capture Christian slaves for the Ottoman slave trade as well as the general Muslim slavery market in North Africa and the Middle East. In that period Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli came under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire, similar raids were undertaken from Salé and other ports in Morocco. Corsairs captured thousands of ships and repeatedly raided coastal towns, as a result, residents abandoned their former villages of long stretches of coast in Spain and Italy. The raids were such a problem coastal settlements were seldom undertaken until the 19th century, from the 16th to 19th century, corsairs captured an estimated 800,000 to 1.25 million people as slaves. Some corsairs were European outcasts and converts such as John Ward, Hayreddin Barbarossa and Oruç Reis, Turkish Barbarossa Brothers, who took control of Algiers on behalf of the Ottomans in the early 16th century, were also notorious corsairs. The European pirates brought advanced sailing and shipbuilding techniques to the Barbary Coast around 1600, the effects of the Barbary raids peaked in the early to mid-17th century. However, the ships and coasts of Christian states without such effective protection continued to suffer until the early 19th century. Following the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, European powers agreed upon the need to suppress the Barbary corsairs entirely and the threat was largely subdued. Occasional incidents occurred, including two Barbary wars between the United States and the Barbary States, until terminated by the French conquest of Algiers in 1830. Piracy by Muslim populations had been known in the Mediterranean since at least the 9th century, in the 14th century Tunisian corsairs became enough of a threat to provoke a Franco-Genoese attack on Mahdia in 1390, also known as the Barbary Crusade. The Barbary pirates had long attacked English and other European shipping along the North Coast of Africa and they had been attacking English merchant and passengers ships since the 1600s. Regular fundraising for ransoms was undertaken generally by families and local church groups, the government did not ransom ordinary persons. The English became familiar with captivity narratives written by Barbary pirates prisoners and ransomed captives, during the American Revolution the pirates attacked American ships. The Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship stands as the U. S. s oldest non-broken friendship treaty with a foreign power, in 1778 Morocco became the first nation to recognize the new United States. As late as 1798, an islet near Sardinia was attacked by the Tunisians, throughout history, geography was on the pirates side on the Northern coast of Africa. The coast was ideal for their wants and needs, with natural harbours often backed by lagoons, it provided a haven for guerrilla warfare, such as attacks on shipping vessels venturing through their territory. On the coast, mountainous areas provided ample reconnaissance for the corsairs as well, ships were spotted from afar, the pirates had time to prepare their attacks and surprise the ships
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Shanghaiing
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Shanghaiing or crimping is the practice of kidnapping people to serve as sailors by coercive techniques such as trickery, intimidation, or violence. Those engaged in this form of kidnapping were known as crimps, the related term press gang refers specifically to impressment practices in Great Britains Royal Navy. Crimps flourished in cities like London, Bristol and Hull in England and in San Francisco in California, Portland and Astoria in Oregon. On the West Coast, Portland eventually surpassed San Francisco for shanghaiing, on the East Coast, New York easily led the way, followed by Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. First, once a sailor signed on board a vessel for a voyage, the penalty was imprisonment, the result of federal legislation enacted in 1790. This factor was weakened by the Maguire Act of 1895 and the White Act of 1898, second, the practice was driven by a shortage of labor, particularly of skilled labor on ships on the West Coast. With crews abandoning ships en masse because of the California Gold Rush, finally, shanghaiing was made possible by the existence of boarding masters, whose job it was to find crews for ships. Boarding masters were paid by the body, and thus had an incentive to place as many seamen on ships as possible. This pay was called blood money, and was just one of the revenue streams available and these factors set the stage for the crimp, a boarding master who uses trickery, intimidation, or violence to put a sailor on a ship. The most straightforward method for a crimp to shanghai a sailor was to render him unconscious, forge his signature on the ships articles and this approach was widely used, but there were more profitable methods. In some situations, the master could receive the first two, three, or four months of wages of a man he shipped out. Instead, those to whom money was owed could claim it directly from the ships captain. An enterprising crimp, already dealing with a seaman, could supplement his income by supplying goods and services to the seaman at an inflated price, some crimps made as much as $9,500 per year in 1890s dollars, equivalent to about $260,000 in 2012 dollars. The crimps were well positioned politically to protect their lucrative trade, the keepers of boardinghouses for sailors supplied men on election day to go from one polling place to another, voting early and often for the candidate who would vote in their interest. Some examples included Jim Shanghai Kelly and Johnny Shanghai Chicken Devine of San Francisco, stories of their ruthlessness are innumerable, and some have survived into print. Before 1865, maritime labor laws primarily enforced stricter discipline onboard ships, however, after 1865, this began to change. In 1868, New York State started cracking down on sailors boardinghouses and they declined in number from 169 in 1863 to 90 in 1872. Then in 1871, Congress passed legislation to license of officers guilty of mistreating seamen
