Peter, a slave from Louisiana, stood in 1863 with scars etched into his back, the permanent record of a whipping by his overseer. This image captures the brutal reality of chattel slavery, where human beings were legally rendered as property, bought and sold like livestock. The scars on Peter's body were not merely physical wounds but a testament to a system designed to strip individuals of their autonomy and reduce them to economic assets. Slavery was an economic phenomenon rooted in the history of civilization, existing in almost every society throughout human history. It involved compulsory work, with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by the party holding them in bondage. While often involuntary and involving coercion, there were cases where people voluntarily entered into slavery to pay a debt or earn money due to poverty. In the modern world, more than 50% of slaves provide forced labor, usually in the factories and sweatshops of the private sector of a country's economy. In 2019, approximately 40 million people, of whom 26% were children, were still enslaved throughout the world despite slavery being illegal. The word slavery was borrowed into Middle English through the Old French, which ultimately derives from Byzantine Greek or, according to the widespread view known since the 18th century, from a Slavic tribe self-name *Slověne, turned into sclāvus in the meaning 'prisoner of war slave' in the 8th or 9th century. However, this version has been disputed since the 19th century, with alternative hypotheses suggesting it derives from Byzantine words meaning 'to strip the enemy' or 'to make booty.' There is no consensus among historians about whether terms such as 'unfree laborer' or 'enslaved person' should be used when describing the victims of slavery, as the term 'slave' perpetuates the crime by reducing its victims to a nonhuman noun.
The Atlantic Trade
The trans-Atlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of slaves were captured on raiding expeditions into the interior of West Africa. These expeditions were typically carried out by African kingdoms, such as the Oyo Empire, the Ashanti Empire, the kingdom of Dahomey, and the Aro Confederacy. It is estimated that about 15 percent of slaves died during the voyage, with mortality rates considerably higher in Africa itself in the process of capturing and transporting indigenous peoples to the ships. The countries that controlled most of the transatlantic slave market in terms of number of slaves shipped were the UK, Portugal, and France. The Spanish colonies were the first Europeans to use African slaves in the New World on islands such as Cuba and Hispaniola. The first African slaves arrived in Hispaniola in 1501. This era saw a growth in race-based slavery. Bartolomé de las Casas, a 16th-century Dominican friar and Spanish historian, participated in campaigns in Cuba and was present at the massacre of Hatuey; his observation of that massacre led him to fight for a social movement away from the use of natives as slaves. The earliest legal documentation of a shift from indentured servitude to slavery in the Thirteen Colonies was in 1640, where a black man, John Punch, was sentenced to lifetime slavery for attempting to run away. This case was significant because it established the disparity between his sentence as a black man and that of the two white indentured servants who escaped with him. After 1640, planters started to ignore the expiration of indentured contracts and keep their servants as slaves for life. This was demonstrated by the 1655 case Johnson v. Parker, where the court ruled that a black man, Anthony Johnson of Virginia, was granted ownership of another black man, John Casor, as the result of a civil case. This was the first instance of a judicial determination in the Thirteen Colonies holding that a person who had committed no crime could be held in servitude for life. In the 19th century, proponents of slavery often defended the institution as a 'necessary evil.' White people of that time feared that emancipation of black slaves would have more harmful social and economic consequences than the continuation of slavery. The French writer and traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America (1835), expressed opposition to slavery while observing its effects on American society. He felt that a multiracial society without slavery was untenable, as he believed that prejudice against black people increased as they were granted more rights. Others, like James Henry Hammond argued that slavery was a 'positive good' stating: 'Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.' The Southern state governments wanted to keep a balance between the number of slave and free states to maintain a political balance of power in Congress. By 1850, the newly rich cotton-growing South was threatening to secede from the Union, and tensions continued to rise. When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election on a platform of halting the expansion of slavery, roughly 400,000 individuals, representing 8% of all U.S. families, owned nearly 4,000,000 slaves. One-third of Southern families owned slaves. The South was heavily invested in slavery. As such, upon Lincoln's election, seven states broke away to form the Confederate States of America. The first six states to secede held the greatest number of slaves in the South. Shortly after, over the issue of slavery, the United States erupted into an all-out Civil War, with slavery legally ceasing as an institution following the war in December 1865. In 1865, the United States ratified the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which banned slavery and involuntary servitude 'except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,' providing a legal basis for forced labor to continue in the country.
Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue, was one of the most brutally efficient slave colonies in the world. Following the French colonial period beginning in 1625, the economy of the island was based on slavery, and the practice there was regarded as the most brutal in the world. Sugar was a lucrative commodity crop throughout the 18th century. By 1789, approximately 40,000 white colonists lived in Saint-Domingue. The whites were vastly outnumbered by the tens of thousands of African slaves they had imported to work on their plantations, which were primarily devoted to the production of sugarcane. Blacks outnumbered whites by about ten to one. The French-enacted Black Code, prepared by Jean-Baptiste Colbert and ratified by Louis XIV, had established rules on slave treatment and permissible freedoms. Saint-Domingue has been described as one of the most brutally efficient slave colonies; one-third of newly imported Africans died within a few years. Many slaves died from diseases such as smallpox and typhoid fever. They had birth rates around 3 percent, and there is evidence that some women aborted fetuses, or committed infanticide, rather than allow their children to live within the bonds of slavery. The Haitian Revolution of 1804, the only successful slave revolt in human history, precipitated the end of slavery in all French colonies, which came in 1848. The revolution was a response to the brutal conditions and the desire for freedom. The free people of color, the mixed-race descendants of white male colonists and black female slaves, established a separate social class. White French Creole fathers frequently sent their mixed-race sons to France for their education. Some men of color were admitted into the military. More of the free people of color lived in the south of the island, near Port-au-Prince, and many intermarried within their community. They frequently worked as artisans and tradesmen, and began to own some property. Some became slave holders. The free people of color petitioned the colonial government to expand their rights. Slaves that made it to Haiti from the trans-Atlantic journey and slaves born in Haiti were first documented in Haiti's archives and transferred to France's Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These records are in The National Archives of France. According to the 1788 Census, Haiti's population consisted of nearly 40,000 whites, 30,000 free coloureds and 450,000 slaves. The revolution was a pivotal moment in history, as it was the only successful slave revolt in human history, leading to the establishment of the first black republic in the world.
The Global Web
Slavery was practiced in almost every ancient civilization, including ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, where it was considered a keystone of society. Other examples include the institution of slavery in the Muslim world such as Medieval Egypt, as well as Sub-Saharan Africa, Brazil, the Antebellum United States, and parts of the Caribbean such as Cuba and Haiti. The Iroquois also enslaved others in ways that 'looked very like chattel slavery.' In the Middle East, the Red Sea slave trade still provided enslaved people from Africa to the Arabian Peninsula after World War II. As recently as the 1960s, Saudi Arabia's slave population was estimated at 300,000. Along with Yemen, the Saudis abolished slavery in 1962. In the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, about one-fifth of the population consisted of slaves. The city was a major center of the slave trade in the 15th and later centuries. Eastern European slaves were provided for slavery in the Ottoman Empire via the Crimean slave trade by Tatar raids on Slavic villages but also by conquest and the suppression of rebellions, in the aftermath of which entire populations were sometimes enslaved and sold across the Empire, reducing the risk of future rebellion. The Ottomans also purchased slaves from traders who brought slaves into the Empire from Europe and Africa. It has been estimated that some 200,000 slaves , mainly Circassians , were imported into the Ottoman Empire between 1800 and 1909. In 1908, women slaves were still sold in the Ottoman Empire. German orientalist, Gustaf Dalman, reported seeing slaves in Muslim houses in Aleppo, belonging to Ottoman Syria, in 1899, and that boys could be bought as slaves in Damascus and Cairo in as late as 1909. A major center of slave trade to the Middle East was Central Asia, where the Bukhara slave trade had supplied slaves to the Middle East for thousands of years from antiquity until the 1870s. A slave market for captured Russian and Persian slaves was the Khivan slave trade centered in the Central Asian khanate of Khiva. In the early 1840s, the population of the Uzbek states of Bukhara and Khiva included about 900,000 slaves. By 1870, chattel slavery had been at least formally banned in most areas of the world, with the exception of Muslim lands in Caucasus, Africa, and the Persian Gulf. While slavery was by the 1870s viewed as morally unacceptable in the West, slavery was not considered to be immoral in the Muslim world since it was an institution recognized (halal) in the Quran and morally justified under the guise of warfare against non-Muslims. Chattel slavery lasted in most of the Middle East until the 20th century. The Red Sea slave trade still provided enslaved people from Africa to the Arabian Peninsula after World War II. As recently as the 1960s, Saudi Arabia's slave population was estimated at 300,000. Along with Yemen, the Saudis abolished slavery in 1962. In the 19th century, the Sultan of Morocco stated to Western diplomats that it was impossible for him to ban slavery because such a ban would not be enforceable, but the British asked him to ensure that the slave trade in Morocco would at least be handled discreetly and away from the eyes of foreign witnesses. The last country to abolish slavery, Mauritania, did so in 1981. While slavery had technically been banned by colonial France in French West Africa (including Mauritania) already in 1905, this had been a purely nominal ban. The 1981 ban on slavery was not enforced in practice, as legal mechanisms to prosecute those who used slaves were not implemented until 2007.
The Modern Shadow
In the modern world, more than 50% of slaves provide forced labor, usually in the factories and sweatshops of the private sector of a country's economy. In industrialized countries, human trafficking is a modern variety of slavery; in non-industrialized countries, people in debt bondage are common, others include captive domestic servants, people in forced marriages, and child soldiers. In 2007, Human Rights Watch estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 children served as soldiers in then-current conflicts. More girls under 16 work as domestic workers than any other category of child labor, often sent to cities by parents living in rural poverty as with the Haitian restaveks. Forced marriages or early marriages are often considered types of slavery. Forced marriage continues to be practiced in parts of the world including some parts of Asia and Africa and in immigrant communities in the West. Marriage by abduction occurs in many places in the world today, with a 2003 study finding a national average of 69% of marriages in Ethiopia being through abduction. According to researcher Siddharth Kara, the profits generated worldwide by all forms of slavery in 2007 were $91.2 billion. That was second only to drug trafficking, in terms of global criminal enterprises. At the time the weighted average global sales price of a slave was estimated to be approximately $340, with a high of $1,895 for the average trafficked sex slave, and a low of $40 to $50 for debt bondage slaves in part of Asia and Africa. The weighted average annual profits generated by a slave in 2007 was $3,175, with a low of an average $950 for bonded labor and $29,210 for a trafficked sex slave. Approximately 40% of slave profits each year were generated by trafficked sex slaves, representing slightly more than 4% of the world's 29 million slaves. In the 2020s, in North Korea, 'Pleasure Brigades' are made up of women selected from the general population to serve as entertainers and as concubines to the rulers of North Korea. The internment camps of totalitarian regimes such as the Nazis and the Soviet Union placed increasing importance on the labor provided in those camps, leading to a growing tendency among historians to designate such systems as slavery. A combination of these include the encomienda where the Spanish Crown granted private individuals the right to the free labor of a specified number of natives in a given area. In the 'Red Rubber System' of both the Congo Free State and French ruled Ubangi-Shari, labor was demanded as taxation; private companies were conceded areas within which they were allowed to use any measures to increase rubber production. Convict leasing was common in the Southern United States where the state would lease prisoners for their free labor to companies. The Prison Policy Initiative, an American criminal justice think tank, cites the 2020 US prison population as 2.3 million, and nearly all able-bodied inmates work in some fashion. In Texas, Georgia, Alabama and Arkansas, prisoners are not paid at all for their work. In other states, prisoners are paid between $0.12 and $1.15 per hour. Federal Prison Industries paid inmates an average of $0.90 per hour in 2017. Inmates who refuse to work may be indefinitely remanded into solitary confinement or have family visitation revoked. From 2010 to 2015 and again in 2016 and in 2018, some prisoners in the US refused to work, protesting for better pay, better conditions, and for the end of forced labor. Strike leaders were punished with indefinite solitary confinement. Forced prison labor occurs in both government-run prisons and private prisons. CoreCivic and GEO Group constitute half the market share of private prisons, and they made a combined revenue of $3.5 billion in 2015. The value of all labor by inmates in the United States is estimated to be in the billions. In California, 2,500 incarcerated workers fought wildfires for only $1 per hour through the CDCR's Conservation Camp Program, which saves the state as much as $100 million a year.