Slavery is a form of forced labor in which people are considered to be the property of others. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive compensation (such as wages). Evidence of slavery predates written records, and has existed to varying extents, forms and periods in almost all cultures and continents. In some societies, slavery existed as a legal institution or socio-economic system, but today it is formally outlawed in nearly all countries and condemned by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nevertheless, the practice continues in various forms around the world.
The English word slave derives - through Old French and Medieval Latin - from the medieval word for Slavic people of Central and Eastern Europe, who were the last ethnic group to be captured and enslaved in Central Europe. For thousands of years, according to Adam Smith and Auguste Comte, a slave was principally defined as a captive or prisoner of war.
History of slavery and the slave trade
Main article: History of slaverySlavery is rare among Hunter gatherer populations, as slavery depends on a system of social stratification. Slavery also requires economic surpluses and a high 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. The earliest records of slavery can be traced to the Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1760 BC), and the Bible refers to it as an established institution. Slavery was known to occur in civilizations as old as Sumer, as well as almost every other ancient civilization, including Ancient Egypt, the Akkadian Empire, Assyria, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire and the Islamic Caliphate. Such institutions were a mixture of debt-slavery, punishment for crime, the enslavement of prisoners of war, child abandonment, and the birth of slave children to slaves. Records of slavery in Ancient Greece go as far back as Mycenaean Greece. Two-fifths (some authorities say four-fifths) of the population of Classical Athens were slaves. Greek philosophers such as Aristotle accepted the theory of natural slavery, that is, that some men are slaves by nature.
As the Roman Republic expanded outward, entire populations were enslaved, thus creating an ample supply from all over Europe and the Mediterranean. Greeks, Illyrians, Berbers, Germans, Britons, Thracians, Gauls, Jews, Arabs, and many more were slaves used not only for labour, but also for amusement (e.g. gladiators and sex slaves). This oppression by an elite minority eventually led to slave revolts (see Roman Servile Wars); the Third Servile War led by Spartacus being the most famous and severe. By the late Republican era, slavery had become a vital economic pillar in the wealth of Rome, as well as a very significant part of Roman society. It is estimated that over 25% of the population of Ancient Rome was enslaved. According to some scholars, slaves represented 35% or more of Italy's population. In the city of Rome alone, under the Roman Empire, there were about 400,000 slaves. During the millennium from the emergence of the Roman Empire to its eventual decline, at least 100 million people were captured or sold as slaves throughout the Mediterranean and its hinterlands.
The early medieval slave trade was mainly confined to the South and East: the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim world were the destinations, pagan Central and Eastern Europe, along with the Caucasus and Tartary, were important sources. Viking, Arab, Greek and Jewish merchants (known as Radhanites) were all involved in the slave trade during the Early Middle Ages.
Medieval Spain and Portugal were the scene of almost constant warfare between Muslims and Christians. Periodic raiding expeditions were sent from Al-Andalus to ravage the Iberian Christian kingdoms, bringing back booty and slaves. In raid against Lisbon, Portugal in 1189, for example, the Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur took 3,000 female and child captives, while his governor of Córdoba, in a subsequent attack upon Silves, Portugal in 1191, took 3,000 Christian slaves. From the 11th to the 19th century, North African Barbary Pirates engaged in Razzias , raids on European coastal towns, to capture Christian slaves to sell at slave markets in places such as Algeria and Morocco.
At the time of the Domesday Book , compiled in 1086, nearly 10% of the English population were slaves. Slavery in early medieval Europe was so common that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly prohibited it — or at least the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands was prohibited at e.g. the Council of Koblenz in 922, the Council of London (1102), and the Council of Armagh (1171). In the 15th century, the Catholic Church legitimised enslavement of non-Christians in overseas territories. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, granting Afonso V of Portugal the right to reduce any "Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers" to hereditary slavery which legitimized the slave trade, at least as a result of war. The approval of slavery under these conditions was reaffirmed and extended in his Romanus Pontifex bull of 1455. However, the Dominican friars who arrived at the Spanish settlement at Santo Domingo strongly denounced the enslavement of the local Indians. Along with other priests, they opposed their treatment as unjust and illegal in an audience with the Spanish king and in the subsequent royal commission.
The Byzantine-Ottoman wars and the Ottoman wars in Europe brought large numbers of Christian slaves into the Islamic world too. After the Battle of Lepanto approximately 12,000 Christian galley slaves were freed from the Ottoman Turks. Eastern Europe suffered a series of Tatar invasions, the goal of which was to loot and capture slaves into jasyr . Seventy-five Crimean Tatar raids were recorded into Poland–Lithuania between 1474-1569. There were more than 100,000 Russian captives in the Kazan Khanate alone in 1551.
The transatlantic slave trade
Main article: Atlantic slave tradeSlavery was prominent presumably elsewhere in Africa long before the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade. The maritime town of Lagos, Portugal, was the first slave market created in Portugal for the sale of imported African slaves - the Mercado de Escravos , opened in 1444. In 1441, the first slaves were brought to Portugal from northern Mauritania. By the year 1552 black African slaves made up 10 percent of the population of Lisbon. In the second half of the 16th century, the Crown gave up the monopoly on slave trade and the focus of European trade in African slaves shifted from import to Europe to slave transports directly to tropical colonies in the Americas - in the case of Portugal, especially Brazil. In the 15th century one third of the slaves were resold to the African market in exchange of gold.
Spain had to fight against relatively powerful and hardy civilizations of the New World. However, the Spanish conquest of the indigenous peoples in the Americas was also facilitated by the spread of diseases (e.g. smallpox) due to lack of biological immunity. (although diseases such as syphilis were spread to the Europeans from first nations origins.) Natives were used as forced labour (the Spanish employed the pre-Columbian draft system called the mita), but the diseases caused a labour shortage and so the Spanish colonists were gradually involved in the Atlantic slave trade. The first Europeans to use African slaves in the New World were the Spaniards who labourers on islands such as Cuba and Hispaniola, where the alarming decline in the native population had spurred the first royal laws protecting the native population (Laws of Burgos, 1512-1513). The first African slaves arrived in Hispaniola in 1501. England played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade. The "slave triangle" was pioneered by Francis Drake and his associates. By 1750, slavery was a legal institution in all of the 13 American colonies, and the profits of the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to 5% of the British economy at the time of the Industrial Revolution.
The Transatlantic 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 (Yoruba), the Ashanti Empire, the kingdom of Dahomey, and the Aro Confederacy. Europeans rarely entered the interior of Africa, due to fear of disease and moreover fierce African resistance. The slaves were brought to coastal outposts where they were traded for goods. An estimated 12 million Africans were shipped to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Of these, an estimated 645,000 were brought to what is now the United States. The white citizens of Virginia decided to treat the first Africans in Virginia as indentured servants. Over half of all European immigrants to Colonial America during the