Image of shackle ring by ‘aitoff’ on Pixabay — Image of shackle ring by ‘***aitoff***’ on Pixabay

How long has slavery existed? Did the concept take shape following the birth of towns and cities? Did it – for want of a better word – flourish alongside civilisation?

Slavery was present in almost every ancient civilisation, from Sumer to Ancient Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, ancient India and China, the pre-Columbian civilisations of the Americas through to Greece, the Roman Empire and the Arab Caliphates and Sultanates.

There were various ways in which people would find themselves enslaved – as prisoners of war, through punishment for crimes, debt-slavery, or born as the child of slaves. Also, poor people sometimes found themselves in the unenviable position of having to sell their children, especially in times of famine.

In ancient Greece and similar societies, slaves were mainly used in agriculture, and in quarries and mines. Many were also domestic servants. In the 5th and 6th centuries BC, Athens had the largest slave population, as many as 80,000.

Slaves working in a mine of Laurium (‘Huesca’ on Wikipedia)

Slaves were important to the growth of ancient Rome. Highly educated slaves, like those from Greece, had a good chance at a better life as they were usually employed as accountants and physicians. Life for unskilled slaves, including those sentenced to slavery, was usually harsh as they were the ones who worked on farms and in mines.

Under Roman law, slaves were considered property and had no legal rights; many would never be freed. They were subjected to corporal punishment, torture, sexual exploitation and execution. But, over time, they gained increased legal protection.

In the years of the Republic, before the establishment of the Roman Empire, military expansion was a major source of slaves, capturing the able-bodied of conquered cities including enemy soldiers. This inevitably led to a number of armed rebellions, known as the Servile Wars, the last of which was led by Spartacus.

The early days of the Roman Empire focussed more on maintaining stability, which meant dwindling new conquests, which meant a dwindling slave supply.

To preserve the enslaved workforce, increased legal restrictions on freeing slaves were implemented. The offer of a reward meant that escaped slaves would be hunted down and returned.

Slavery also existed across the sea, in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. The most common form of slavery there came from prisoners of war and debtors. But slavery wasn’t hereditary, and children of slaves were born free.

Some of the indigenous people of North America were slave-traders with their slaves being prisoners of war. Here, slavery was hereditary.

Back in Europe, the concept of slavery underwent a transformation into the Middle Ages. As more regions converted to Christianity, the church played an active role in reducing the practice of holding those of the same religion in bondage.

Bathild, queen of the Franks, also played a major role in prohibiting enslaving Christians. Intelligent, modest and beautiful, she’d been sold into slavery as a young girl into the household of the mayor, or majordomo, of the palace of Neustria to Clovis II, the king of Neustria and Burgundy.

In time, she came to the attention of Clovis and became his queen. After his death (between 655 and 658), Bathild became regent and outlawed the trading of Christians as slaves throughout the Merovingian Empire. She also worked tirelessly to free children who had been sold into slavery.

Although the topic is still widely debated, generally speaking, by the 10th century, slaves were seen more as subjects as opposed to objects. As serfdom became more common by the 11th century, slavery became less so.

The Church prohibited the sale of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands. But there was still demand for slaves, mainly from the Islamic lands, and that is where many Christian slave merchants turned their focus.

Following the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, the Umayyad Caliphate, with its constant need for mamelukes, proved to be a ready market for slaves, especially men of fighting age. Mameluke was the term usually used for non-Muslim slave soldiers and freed slaves.

‘Three Mamelukes with lances on horseback’ - etching by Daniel Hopfer (Wikipedia)

Apart from importing large numbers of slaves, Muslim Spain was a staging point for slaves to be marketed to the rest of the Islamic world. By the mid-900s, the number of Slavic slaves at Cordoba, the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate, numbered over 13,000.

Viking raiders captured and enslaved those who were militarily weaker than them, mostly from Western Europe.

Captured monks from raided monasteries were usually sold in Venice and Byzantium where their education demanded higher prices.

Apart from trading captives further north as they founded more trade centres and settlements, the Vikings also took German, Baltic and Slavic slaves to be sold south, to Byzantine and Muslim buyers. They also traded them as far as central Asia.

The 13th century saw a new force enter the slave trade as the Mongols invaded and conquered large parts of Eurasia. They enslaved skilled men, women and children and sold them throughout Eurasia.

Christians, too, acquired slaves, including Muslim ones. There are records of Saracen slave girls being sold in Marseilles in 1248.

During this time, Seville and the surrounding area fell to raiding Christian crusaders and many Muslim women were captured as the spoils of war.

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, around 1500, the slave industry started to pick up again, mainly due to a series of wars, which saw the capture of especially large numbers of Christian slaves.

‘Religieux liberant des esclaves turcs’ - Giovanni Maria Morandi (‘the ransoming of Christian slaves held by Turks’)

The Byzantine-Ottoman wars, from 1265-1479, between the Ottoman Turks and Byzantines culminated in the destruction of the Byzantine Empire and the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

These wars were followed by the Ottoman wars in Europe, a series of military conflicts between the Ottoman Empire and various European states and lasted until the early 20th century.

The slave markets of the Barbary slave trade ran along the Barbary Coast (also known as Berber Coast) of North Africa and was inhabited by Berber people. It included the Ottoman provinces of Algeria, Tunisia, Tripolitania and the independent sultanate of Morocco.

Piracy was rife in Ottoman eastern Mediterranean. From their bases on the Barbary Coast, Barbary pirates raided ships travelling through the Mediterranean, and along the northern and western coasts of Africa. They seized cargo and people who they sold as slaves.

From about 1500, maybe earlier, the pirates raided coastal towns from Italy to the Netherlands, Ireland and southwest Britain, even as far north as Iceland, capturing men, women and children.

Their raids were so devastating, whole settlements, like Baltimore in Ireland, were abandoned following continuous raids.

Between 1609 and 1616, England lost as many as 466 merchant ships to Barbary pirates.

Although the Ottoman authorities kept no official records, observers in the late 1500s and early 1600s estimated around 35,000 European slaves were held on the Barbary Coast. Although many were sailors, there were also fishermen and villagers from coastal towns.

Those who had family who might pay their ransom were held captive, the most famous of these was the author Miguel de Cervantes; he was held for almost 5 years.

Captives who converted to Islam were usually freed as the enslavement of Muslims was prohibited. However, conversion meant they would never return to their native countries.

Slavery in Africa was endemic according to Fernand Braudel, a 20th-century French historian; it was part of the structure of everyday life. In his book, ‘Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: The Perspective of the World’, he states, “Slavery came in different guises in different societies: there were court slaves, slaves incorporated into princely armies, domestic and household slaves, slaves working on the land, in industry, as couriers and intermediaries, even as traders.”

Slave trading among the Sub-Saharan Africans was already common before the involvement of the Arabs, Berbers and Europeans. Chieftains bartered their slaves in exchange for goods including spices, rum and cloth.

The arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century heralded the start of European colonialism.

In 1452, Pope Nicholas V granted Afonso V of Portugal the right to reduce any “Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers” to hereditary slavery, thereby legitimising the slave trade under Catholic beliefs of that time.

Before the advent of the transatlantic slave trade, the war captives of the kings of Dahomey (present-day Benin) were killed in the annual celebrations known as the Annual Customs. After the slave trade began, they were sold into transatlantic slavery instead.

Lagos, a maritime town in southern Portugal, became the first slave market created in the country in 1444 for the sale of imported African slaves. By 1552, African slaves made up 10% of the population of Lisbon.

When the Crown gave up the monopoly on the slave trade in the second half of the 16th century, the focus shifted so that, instead of importing to Europe, slaves were sent to the colonies in the Americas; in Portugal’s case, this was concentrated in Brazil.

This added to Benin’s riches during the 16th and 17th centuries. Slaves from enemy states in the interior of the country were sold to be taken to the Americas by the Dutch and Portuguese. This earned the Bight of Benin’s shore the moniker of the ‘Slave Coast’.

The increased demand for slaves brought about by the Atlantic slave trade ultimately undermined local economies and political stability. Local systems depended on indentured servitude, but their vital labour forces were, instead, being shipped overseas. This led to raids for more slaves, which led to civil wars. Also, the punishment for a range of crimes became enslavement.

Portugal abolished slavery on its mainland and in its territories in India in 1761, finally abolishing it in all its colonies in 1869.

Spain’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade was a gradual one. Spaniards were the first to bring African slaves to the islands of the New World, such as Cuba and Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti), with the first arriving in Hispaniola in 1501. Their main reason for doing so was a shortage of labour brought about by large numbers of indigenous people succumbing to diseases.

Interestingly, the Spanish Crown was troubled by the justness of the indigenous people’s slavery. As a result of arguments presented by Spanish theologists and jurists who unanimously condemned such slavery as unjust, declaring it illegitimate, Emperor Charles V abolished slavery. This made Spain the first country to officially abolish slavery.

Not only was the slavery of Spaniards over the natives outlawed, so was the slavery practised among the natives.

Despite this, because of the profitable production of sugarcane, African slavery continued in the Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico (until 1873) and Cuba (until 1886).

In the Netherlands itself, slavery was illegal. However, it flourished throughout the Dutch Empire in the Americas, Africa, Ceylon and Indonesia.

In Africa, the Dutch West India Company had trading posts on what was referred to as the Dutch Slave Coast, which stretched along modern-day Ghana, Benin, Togo and Nigeria.

The Netherlands abolished slavery in 1863, one of the last countries to do so.

In Britain, slavery was normal from before the Roman occupation and the exporting of slaves was common. Under the Roman Empire, slavery continued until the Norman Conquest.

Under William the Conqueror, chattel slavery was no longer allowed and former slaves became serfs. He also banned the exporting of slaves thereby limiting the country’s participation in the slave trade.

In the mid-17th century, Britain started to play a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade. At first, many of their slaves were white Britons or Irish, enslaved as indentured labour to work the profitable sugar cane plantations in the West Indies. They would most likely have been criminals, political rebels or poor people.

In the Thirteen American Colonies, which were part of Britain, slavery was legal. This was, most likely, due to the need for labour, especially in the sugar plantations in the Caribbean, which were operated by Britain, France, Spain and the Dutch Republic.

The slaves who were brought to the Thirteen Colonies didn’t come from Africa but were imported from the Caribbean where they’d been taken as part of the Atlantic slave trade.

Although the indigenous people were also enslaved, that ended in the late 18th century. They also were freed from enslavement in the Southern states as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862.

In the mid-17th century, slave status for Africans became hereditary through colonial laws that defined children born in the colonies as taking the status of the mother, regardless of the ancestry or citizenship of the father. This had the added effect of eliminating the father’s financial responsibility for children born into slavery.

‘The Slave Trade (Slaves on the West Coast of Africa')’ by Francois-Auguste Biard (Wikipedia)

In Britain, movements to abolish the slave trade were gaining ground. Although slavery in Britain was not supported, it remained legal in most of the British Empire.

According to the historian, Martin Meredith, “In the decade between 1791 and 1800, British ships made about 1,340 voyages across the Atlantic, landing nearly 400,000 slaves. Between 1801 and 1807, they took a further 266,000. The slave trade remained one of Britain’s most profitable businesses.” (‘The Fortunes of Africa’)

The official medallion of the British Anti-Slavery Society

In 1787, a group of Evangelical English Protestants and Quakers formed the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

By 1807, abolitionist groups had significant support in Parliament.

One of the best known anti-slave trade campaigners was William Wilberforce who had taken on the cause after reading the evidence Thomas Clarkson, a leading abolitionist, had amassed against the trade.

William Wilberforce by Anton Hickel (Wikipedia)

The Slave Trade Act 1807 (the official title – ‘An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade’) prohibited the slave trade in the British Empire. Although it didn’t abolish slavery, it imposed a fine of £100 for every slave found aboard a British ship.

The Royal Navy established the West Africa Squadron in 1808 to suppress the Atlantic slave trade by patrolling the coast of West Africa. Between 1808 and 1860, the squadron seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans.

In 1833 the Slavery Abolition Act was passed, abolishing slavery in parts of the British Empire, making the purchase or ownership of slaves illegal within the Empire, with the exception of “the Territories in the Possession of the East India Company”.

The abolition of the British slave trade had a major impact on the global trade of slaves. Because of the magnitude of its empire, the British Empire was the biggest slave-trade contributor in the world.

The other side of that coin was the influence Britain had on other nations. It used that influence to diplomatically press more nations into treaties to ban their slave trade and to give the Royal Navy the right to intercept and search ships of other nations.

With the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, slavery was outlawed throughout the British Empire, with the exception of India; that came about 10 years later with the Indian Slavery Act 1843.

By the time the United States was formed in 1776, slavery was already legal in the country. Slaves were treated as property, to be bought, sold or given away.

During the American Revolution, individual states had already begun to outlaw the Atlantic slave trade.

Although all Northern states had abolished slavery in some way by 1805, it was a gradual process and hundreds remained enslaved.

Some slaveowners, mostly in the Upper South, freed their slaves, while philanthropists and charitable groups bought slaves for the sole purpose of freeing them.

In 1808, Congress banned the importing of slaves. Unfortunately, the smuggling of slaves became common.

The rapid expansion of the cotton industry in the Deep South increased demand for labour in the form of slaves. The continuation of these states as slave societies deepened the divide between them and the free states where slavery was illegal.

As the United States expanded, the Southern states wanted to extend slavery into the new western territories, leading to major political crises.

By 1850, tensions showed no signs of abating as the South threatened to secede from the Union.

In the 1860 election, Abraham Lincoln won on a platform of halting the expansion of slavery. And Southern states broke away to form the Confederate States of America.

Barely 5 months later, in April 1861, the Civil War began.

In the summer of 1861, Congress passed the first Confiscation Act, which authorised the confiscation of any Confederate property by Union forces. This included slaves, who were considered property.

The second Confiscation Act of 1862 went further. Among other provisions, captured fugitive slaves were forfeit to the Union Army and were not to be returned to their owners. The Act essentially banned all members of the military from returning escaped slaves.

The war was still being fought when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in September 1862. It changed the legal status under federal law of more than 3.5 million slaves in the Confederate states from slave to free.

‘First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln’ - Francis Bicknell Carpenter (Wikipedia)

Following the Union victory in May 1865, slavery was abolished in the United States, ratified by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in December of the same year.

Slavery was also practised in countries that don’t come to mind when I, personally, think of where slavery existed.

Like Japan, which had an official slave system from the 3rd century until it was abolished in 1590 by the country’s de facto leader, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Peasants, though, were still bound to the land. During the Second World War, Japanese prisoners of war were used as slaves, and the government enabled the use of women in their captured territories as ‘comfort women’, a euphemism for sex slaves.

Korea also practised slavery from antiquity to the present day. It’s now illegal in South Korea. Technically, it’s also illegal in North Korea but it’s still practised by the country’s regime.

With all the work that went into abolishing the slave trade, why does slavery still exist?

Could it be because its not actually called ‘slavery’? The terms we’re familiar with now – forced/bonded labour, human trafficking, child labour, forced/child marriage, domestic work in some countries – these are all forms of slavery. And it doesn’t only exist in eastern or third world countries; it can also be found in the West.

Instead of exerting so much energy and, I would say, misplaced passion in demanding restitution for slavery that existed in the leadup to the abolition of the slave trade, why not protest against the many forms of slavery that are happening right now?

While writing up this blog post, one of the pieces of music I was listening to was ‘Vanquish’ by Two Steps from Hell. I shall finish with a couple of very apt lines, which I would direct to those vehemently insistent on tearing down statues and historical monuments as if that will, somehow, erase past pain and magically improve lives…
‘We cannot rewrite history's pain
But we can learn from our mistakes’

A Brief History of Slavery