Abstract
Slavery, which entails dehumanization and commodification of humans for creating wealth, has existed in almost all societies in almost all regions around the world since the ancient times. Slavery, civilization, and urbanization have indeed progressed hand in hand since the time when human societies learned to domesticate animals and develop extensive agriculture. Historical records suggest that more often than not those who bore the brunt of the whip of slavery and those who did the whipping often belonged to the same tribal, racial, religious, or cultural groups. Unfortunately, slavery also received ringing philosophical and religious validations throughout human history. This chapter provides the conceptual background and evolution of slavery as an institution and the actual practice of various forms of slavery beginning from the ancient civilizations to the medieval period.
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Notes
- 1.
One study suggests that at least 15,000 books have been written on African slavery alone (Resendez 2016, 8).
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Subsequently, the UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery (1956) defined the concept of ‘slavery-like practices,’ covering a wide range of institutions and practices similar to slavery, such as debt bondage, serfdom, forced labor, and forced marriage. It also criminalized many slavery-like practices making them prosecutable offences.
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Vogt (1975, 26–38) argues that both Plato’s political utopia, that insisted on life without marriage and private property for the Philosopher Kings, and Aristotle’s practical handbook of addressing issues of organizing state and running statecraft, revolved around their extreme insistence on the value of intellectual and social activity—a leisurely life of reflection for the ruling class, which they thought would be impossible in a slave-free society.
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For further details on the religious and philosophical validation of slavery, see Chapter 5.
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Controversy surrounding the issue remains unresolved although pyramids were built about 4500 years ago. Available literature suggests that it took 10,000 workers more than 30 years to build just one single pyramid—a total of 80 pyramids were built. The largest of all, built for the Pharaoh Khufu, was the biggest building on the planet. To build such a mammoth structure, workers moved six and a half million tons of stone—some in blocks as large as nine tons, and they moved these with nothing but wood and rope (Shaw 2003). Ancient Greek historian Herodotus claimed that the pyramids were built by slaves. The Old Testament also says that the Egyptians enslaved the children of Israel and that Pharaoh put them to the construction of buildings. Later, Hollywood films propagated that ancient Israelite slaves—ancestors of the Jewish people—built the pyramids. Even former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, during his visit to Egypt in 1977, claimed that Jews built the pyramids. Recent archeological discoveries found some tombs of workers, who were thought to have built the pyramids, positioned next to the pyramids—if workers were slaves they would not have been buried next to powerful Pharaohs. The findings also suggest that workers were well-fed and well-treated—also suggesting that workers might not have been slaves. For recent reports see “Egypt: New Find Shows Slaves Didn’t Build Pyramids,” US News, January 12, 2010, and “Egypt Tombs Suggest Free Men Built Pyramids, Not Slaves,” BBC News, January 11, 2010.
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The Hammurabi tablet provides the first written reference—the first legal code of slavery—and the first record of the sale of slaves around 2300 BC (Goody 1980, 18).
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As discussed in further detail in Chapter 6, all Abrahamic religions validated slavery, although not uniformly. Pointing to slavery, Muslim scholar Ibne Sina (980–1037) remarked, “God in his providential wisdom had placed, in regions of great heat or great cold, peoples who were by their very nature slaves, and incapable of higher things—for there must be masters and slaves” (cited in Davis 2006, 43)—an almost verbatim reproduction of Plato’s position approximately 1000 years earlier.
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Moslem societies however generally treated slaves with an absence of race hatred and were relatively lenient. Moreover, often slaves were accepted as members of a master’s family, their children were trained for harems in music and dancing, some harem children even became queen mothers, and some of the slaves became military generals and established their own dynasties (Goody 1980, 29–35).
- 13.
Some studies available on the internet suggest that between 1450 and 1700, the Crimean Tatars exported about 2.5 million slaves to the Ottoman Empire https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-africa/white-slaves-barbary-002171, accessed on July 24, 2018. See also http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_01.shtml; http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/mar/11/highereducation.books; and http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/whtslav.htm.
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Some of the Corsair fleets of Algiers were seventy vessels strong, and like the galley fleets of France, Spain, and Italy, they used slaves in the galleys. It is believed that in 1580, between 25,000 and 35,000 of Algeria’s total population of 100,000 were slaves (Patterson 1982, 460). See also Clissold (1977).
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Clarence-Smith (2006, 2–4) however maintains that only a small percentage of them could be richer than their masters, but the vast majority suffered from manual drudges, condemned to slave status, and used as cannon fodder.
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In the 1670s, the parents and wives of almost a thousand English captives in Algiers petitioned to the British Parliament against inhuman treatment of their relatives in the Mediterranean. Barbary slavery was so severe for the Europeans that many European nations officially set aside allocations for releasing their captives. Even a relatively remote state like Denmark at one point devoted 15 percent of its profits from Mediterranean trade for releasing captives (Colley 2004, 47–57). Enslavement of Western Europeans also helped them to see the horrors of slavery, and as a payback for the re-conquest of the Iberian Peninsula (Quirk 2011, 25).
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Famously, Emperor Masa Musa, who took Mali to its zenith as one of the richest empires in the world, made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1337 escorted by more than 10,000 slaves (Manning 1990).
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The English word ‘slave’ is however believed to have originated from the medieval Latin world ‘sclavus,’ and its western European counterparts—‘sclave’ in French, ‘esclavo’ in Spanish, and ‘sklave’ in German—commonly meant a person of Slavic descent (Davis 2006, 49).
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Many of these slaves were used for sugar production. Remnants of this white slave trade include details of (in 1600) a few Greek and Slavic slaves in Spanish Havana, and in the 1580s, there were many freed Turks, North African Moors, and even Frenchmen and Germans among the Spanish galley slaves in Santo Domingo and Cartagena of Colombia (Davis 2006, 49).
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By the time Christopher Columbus sailed for the first expedition to the Americas, the number of black slaves in the Old World numbered more than 25,000 (Fogel and Engerman 1974, 15).
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By this time sugar had already emerged as the greatest of slave crops, and between 60 and 70 percent of all slaves ended up in one or another of Europe’s sugar colonies. Sugar was introduced into the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean—from Syria to Greece to Cyrenaica and the eastern coast of Libya) in the seventh century by the Arabs. During the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, the Normans (French from Normandy) and Venetians (Italians from the state of Venice) took over the Arab sugar industry in Palestine and promoted the production of sugar in the Mediterranean islands of Cypress, Crete, and Sicily, from where sugar was exported to all parts of Europe. The institutional apparatus of plantations that was developed in these islands for the production of sugar by using primarily white slaves was eventually applied to blacks in the New World in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. For further details, see Chapter 1 of Fogel (1989).
- 22.
The incidence of cutting off of major sources of slaves to European markets by the Ottomans might have played a role in the opening of the transatlantic slave trade. Portuguese traders, who began the transatlantic slave trade, established their trading posts along the West African coast at this time, around the 1440s. Soon after trading posts were established, average imports of slaves into to Iberian Peninsula and the Iberian controlled islands off the coast of Africa (the Canaries, the Madeira and Sao Thome) rose to about 1,000 per year. See Chapter 1 of Fogel (1989) for further details.
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Dowlah, C. (2020). Slavery During Ancient and Medieval Periods. In: Cross-Border Labor Mobility . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36506-6_3
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