SLAVERY

condition in which one human being is owned by another. A slave was considered in law as property, or chattel, and was deprived of most of the rights ordinarily held by free persons. Slavery has existed in various forms throughout almost the whole of recorded history. Slaves were obtained in a number of ways. Most often enslavement was involuntary, being achieved by such procedures as capture in war, kidnapping, or slave raiding; punishment for criminal acts; payment for debt; direct sale by one's parent, guardian, or chieftain; or the transfer of ownership from one master to another. The children of slaves themselves usually, but not invariably, became slaves. Freedom from slavery could usually be gained only by the granting of manumission by the master, although in the 19th century there were several proclamations of mass emancipation by the governments of various Western nations. A distinction has been made between two major types of slavery: household (or domestic) slavery and productive slavery. Slaves of the first type served their owners primarily as menials in the household, while productive slaves were mostly employed to produce marketable commodities in mines or on plantations . Slavery probably developed after civilization reached a pastoral, as opposed to a hunting and gathering, stage. The slave helped the master tend the flocks and was treated as a member of the household. In somewhat more advanced civilizations such as those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, slaves in cities worked as domestics, while country slaves worked in large gangs in the fields and mines of the master. As a society's economy changed from one of subsistence-level agricultural production to that of a market type capable of producing surpluses, the status of slaves was lowered considerably. The slave was no longer a servant but instead became a commodity who was bought and sold for profit. Throughout most of Greek and Roman civilization, slavery was an accepted way of life, and slaves often assumed managerial and secretarial posts as well as their usual domestic and agricultural duties. Toward the end of the Roman Empire, however, groups of slaves could not be sold apart from the estate to which they belonged. Along the Arabian Peninsula, where Islam emerged, wars between Arabs, Turks, and Christians provided a large slave population. The Qur'an, however, taught that the freeing of a slave was a pious act, and freed slaves were readily absorbed into the community. Slavery was also a common practice among the native Indian tribes of South America. When the Spanish conquered a large part of the New World in the late 15th century, they put the Indians to work in their mines and fields. The Indians, however, died quickly because of exposure to European diseases and harsh working conditions. To remedy this problem, the Spaniards began importing slaves from Africa in 1517. The Africans were sent first to the West Indies and then to the mainland, where the sugar industry was flourishing. Thus began the harsh institution of black plantation slavery. The first African slaves in North America arrived at the English colony of Virginia aboard a Dutch ship in 1619. The English were then developing highly profitable plantations where tobacco, sugar, and, later, cotton were grown. As the number of slaves required to work the fields increased, trading in slaves became even more profitable than exporting crops, and an elaborate trade network was set up between North America, the West Indies, and West Africa. In 1681 there were about 2,000 slaves in Virginia, but by the mid-19th century, the slave population in America had risen to more than 4,000,000. As the Enlightenment developed in Europe during the 18th century, moral abhorrence of slavery began to spread. Societies were formed in Britain and the United States to end the slave trade. The Anti-Slavery Society, established in Britain in 1823, succeeded in freeing slaves in the British colonies in the Western Hemisphere by 1833. France abolished slavery in the West Indies in 1848, and slavery was permanently ended in the United States in 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. Slavery is no longer legally recognized by any government in the world; it lingered on in the Arabian Peninsula until its abolition there in 1962. In 1980 Mauritania became the last nation in the world to officially abolish slavery. The sociology of slavery is an important area of study. Generally, slaves were outsiders, being of a different race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion from that of their owners. In most cases a slave was taken against his will from his own society and transplanted in an enslaved condition to another society. Regardless of the slave's origin, he was usually a marginal person in the society in which he was enslaved, and he was often an object of contempt, neglect, abuse, or brutality. A society's attitude toward its slaves depended on various factors. Generally, the greater the difference between the racial, ethnic, or cultural characteristics of the slave and those of his owner, the worse the slave's condition was and the fewer rights he had. In Rome, for example, where both owners and slaves were white, manumission was frequent. Similarly, in Africa, where both owners and slaves were black, slaves in most societies were allowed to participate in many aspects of social life. In the American South, however, where the owners were mostly of white European stock and the slaves were of black African stock, the degree of social isolation and the contempt for slaves was extraordinary. See also forced labour; serfdom. condition in which one human being was owned by another. A slave was considered by law as property, or chattel, and was deprived of most of the rights ordinarily held by free persons. There is no consensus on what a slave was or on how the institution of slavery should be defined. Nevertheless, there is general agreement among historians, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and others who study slavery that most of the following characteristics should be present in order to term a person a slave. The slave was a species of property; thus, he belonged to someone else. In some societies slaves were considered movable property, in others immovable property, like real estate. They were objects of the law, not its subjects. Thus, like an ox or an ax, the slave was not ordinarily held responsible for what he did. He was not personally liable for torts or contracts. The slave usually had few rights and always fewer than his owner, but there were not many societies in which he had absolutely none. As there are limits in most societies on the extent to which animals may be abused, so there were limits in most societies on how much a slave could be abused. The slave was removed from lines of natal descent. Legally and often socially he had no kin. No relatives could stand up for his rights or get vengeance for him. As an outsider, marginal individual, or socially dead person in the society where he was enslaved, his rights to participate in political decision making and other social activities were fewer than those enjoyed by his owner. The product of a slave's labour could be claimed by someone else, who also frequently had the right to control his physical reproduction. Slavery was a form of dependent labour performed by a nonfamily member. The slave was deprived of personal liberty and the right to move about geographically as he desired. There were likely to be limits on his capacity to make choices with regard to his occupation and sexual partners as well. Slavery was usually, but not always, involuntary. If not all of these characterizations in their most restrictive forms applied to a slave, the slave regime in that place is likely to be characterized as mild; if almost all of them did, then it ordinarily would be characterized as severe. Slaves were generated in many ways. Probably the most frequent was capture in war, either by design, as a form of incentive to warriors, or as an accidental by-product, as a way of disposing of enemy troops or civilians. Others were kidnapped on slave-raiding or piracy expeditions. Many slaves were the offspring of slaves. Some people were enslaved as a punishment for crime or debt, others were sold into slavery by their parents, other relatives, or even spouses, sometimes to satisfy debts, sometimes to escape starvation. A variant on the selling of children was the exposure, either real or fictitious, of unwanted children, who were then rescued by others and made slaves. Another source of slavery was self-sale, undertaken sometimes to obtain an elite position, sometimes to escape destitution. Slavery existed in a large number of past societies whose general characteristics are well-known. It was rare among primitive peoples, such as the hunter-gatherer societies, because for slavery to flourish, social differentiation or stratification was essential. Also essential was an economic surplus, for slaves were often consumption goods who themselves had to be maintained rather than productive assets who generated income for their owner. Surplus was also essential in slave systems where the owners expected economic gain from slave ownership. Ordinarily there had to be a perceived labour shortage, for otherwise it is unlikely that most people would bother to acquire or to keep slaves. Free land, and more generally, open resources, were often a prerequisite for slavery; in most cases where there were no open resources, non-slaves could be found who would fulfill the same social functions at lower cost. Last, some centralized governmental institutions willing to enforce slave laws had to exist, or else the property aspects of slavery were likely to be chimerical. Most of these conditions had to be present in order for slavery to exist in a society; if they all were, until the abolition movement of the 19th century swept throughout most of the world, it was almost certain that slavery would be present. Although slavery existed almost everywhere, it seems to have been especially important in the development of two of the world's major civilizations, Western (including ancient Greece and Rome) and Islamic. There have been two basic types of slavery throughout recorded history. The most common has been what is called household, patriarchal, or domestic slavery. Although domestic slaves occasionally worked outside the household, for example, in haying or harvesting, their primary function was that of menials who served their owners in their homes or wherever else the owners might be, such as in military service. Slaves often were a consumption-oriented status symbol for their owners, who in many societies spent much of their surplus on slaves. Household slaves sometimes merged in varying degrees with the families of their owners, so that boys became adopted sons or women became concubines or wives who gave birth to heirs. Temple slavery, state slavery, and military slavery were relatively rare and distinct from domestic slavery, but in a very broad outline they can be categorized as the household slaves of a temple or the state. The other major type of slavery was productive slavery. It was relatively infrequent and occurred primarily in classical Athenian Greece and Rome and in the post-Columbian circum-Caribbean New World. It also was found in 9th-century Iraq, among the Kwakiutl Indians of the American Northwest, and in a few areas of sub-Saharan Africa in the 19th century. Although slaves also were employed in the household, slavery in all of those societies seems to have existed predominantly to produce marketable commodities in mines or on plantations. A major theoretical issue is the relationship between productive slavery and the status of a society as a slave or a slave-owning society. In a slave society, slaves composed a significant portion (at least 2030 percent) of the total population, and much of that society's energies were mobilized toward getting and keeping slaves. In addition the institution of slavery had a significant impact on the society's institutions, such as the family, and on its social thought, law, and economy. It seems clear that it was quite possible for a slave society to exist without productive slavery; the known historical examples were concentrated in Africa and Asia. It is also clear that most of the slave societies have been concentrated in Western (including Greece and Rome) and Islamic civilizations. In a slave-owning society slaves were present, but in smaller numbers, and they were much less the focus of the society's energies. Slavery was a species of dependent labour differentiated from other forms primarily by the fact that in any society it was the most degrading and most severe. Slavery was the prototype of a relationship defined by domination and power. But throughout the centuries man has invented other forms of dependent labour besides slavery, including serfdom, indentured labour, and peonage. The term serfdom is much overused, often where it is not appropriate (always as an appellation of opprobrium). In the past a serf usually was an agriculturalist, whereas, depending upon the society, a slave could be employed in almost any occupation. Canonically, serfdom was the dependent condition of much of the western and central European peasantry from the time of the decline of the Roman Empire until the era of the French Revolution. This included a second enserfment that swept over central and some of eastern Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. Russia did not know the first enserfment; serfdom began there gradually in the mid-15th century, was completed by 1649, and lasted until 1906. Whether the term serfdom appropriately describes the condition of the peasantry in other contexts is a matter of vigorous contention. Be that as it may, the serf was also distinguished from the slave by the fact that he was usually the subject of the lawi.e., he had some rights, whereas the slave, the object of the law, had significantly fewer rights. The serf, moreover, was usually bound to the land (the most significant exception was the Russian serf between about 1700 and 1861), whereas the slave was always bound to his owner; i.e., he had to live where his owner told him to, and he often could be sold by his owner at any time. The serf usually owned his means of production (grain, livestock, implements) except the land, whereas the slave owned nothing, often not even the clothes on his back. The serf's right to marry off his lord's estate often was restricted, but the master's interference in his reproductive and family life ordinarily was much less than was the case for the slave. Serfs could be called upon by the state to pay taxes, to perform corve labour on roads, and to serve in the army, but slaves usually were exempt from all of those obligations. A person became an indentured servant by borrowing money and then voluntarily agreeing to work off the debt during a specified term. In some societies indentured servants probably differed little from debt slaves (i.e., persons who initially were unable to pay off obligations and thus were forced to work them off at an amount per year specified by law). Debt slaves, however, were regarded as criminals (essentially thieves) and thus liable to harsher treatment. Perhaps as many as half of all the white settlers in North America were indentured servants, who agreed to work for someone (the purchaser of the indenture) upon arrival to pay for their passage. Some indentured servants alleged that they were treated worse than slaves; the economic logic of the situation was that slave owners thought of their slaves as a long-term investment whose value would drop if maltreated, whereas the short-term (typically four years) indentured servants could be abused almost to death because their masters had only a brief interest in them. Practices varied, but indenture contracts sometimes specified that the servants were to be set free with a sum of money, sometimes a plot of land, perhaps even a spouse, whereas for manumitted slaves the terms usually depended more on the generosity of the owner. Peons were either persons forced to work off debts or criminals. Peons, who were the Latin-American variant of debt slaves, were forced to work for their creditors to pay off what they owed. They tended to merge with felons because people in both categories were considered criminals, and that was especially true in societies where money fines were the main sanction and form of restitution for crimes. Thus, the felon who could not pay his fine was an insolvent debtor. The debt peon had to work for his creditor, and the labour of the criminal peon was sold by the state to a third party. Peons had even less recourse to the law for bad treatment than did indentured servants, and the terms of manumission for the former typically were less favourable than for the latter. Additional reading General works Theoretical works on slavery include H.J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches, 2nd rev. ed. (1910, reprinted 1971); and Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982). Several cultures are presented in David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966, reissued 1971), The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 17701823 (1975), and Slavery and Human Progress (1984). Slavery in early history On slavery in the ancient Middle East, see Muhammad A. Dandamaev, Slavery in Babylonia: From Nabopolassar to Alexander the Great (626331 BC), rev. ed. (1984; originally published in Russian, 1974); and Isaac Mendelsohn, Slavery in the Ancient Near East: A Comparative Study of Slavery in Babylonia, Assyria, Syria, and Palestine, from the Middle of the Third Millennium to the End of the First Millennium (1949, reprinted 1978).Central works on slavery in classical antiquity are Moses I. Finley , Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labor? in his Slavery in Classical Antiquity: Views and Controversies (1960); the same author's Ancient Economy, 2nd ed. (1985); and Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (1980). See also Moses I. Finley (ed.), Classical Slavery (1987). Other works of major interest include Keith R. Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control (1984, reissued 1987); William W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery: The Condition of the Slave in Private Law from Augustus to Justinian (1908, reprinted 1970); Yvon Garlan, Slavery in Ancient Greece (1988; originally published in French, 1982); Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (1978); Ramsay MacMullen, Late Roman Slavery, Historia: Zeitschrift fr alte Geschichte, 36(3):359382 (1987); Alan Watson, Roman Slave Law (1987); and William L. Westermann, The Slave System of Greek and Roman Antiquity (1955). Slavery in Europe The following works study slavery in Europe, including Russia, after the fall of the Roman Empire: Marc Bloch, Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages: Selected Essays (1975; originally published in French, 1963); Pierre Docks, Medieval Slavery and Liberation (1982; originally published in French, 1979); Peter Foote and David M. Wilson, The Viking Achievement: The Society and Culture of Early Medieval Scandinavia (1970, reprinted 1984); Anna Chatzenikolaou-Marava, Recherches sur la vie des esclaves dans le monde byzantyn (1950); Charles Verlinden, L'Esclavage dans l'Europe mdivale (1955); Agnes Mathilde Wergeland, Slavery in Germanic Society During the Middle Ages (1916); Carl O. Williams, Thraldom in Ancient Iceland (1937); Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia, 14501725 (1982); Richard Hellie (ed. and trans.), The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649 (1988); and, on the modern period, S. Swianiewicz, Forced Labour and Economic Development: An Enquiry into the Experience of Soviet Industrialization (1965, reprinted 1985); and David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (1947, reprinted 1974). Slavery in Africa and Asia James L. Watson (ed.), Asian and African Systems of Slavery (1980), is a collection of informative essays. Slavery in the non-African Islamic world is explored in David Ayalon, L'Esclavage du mamelouk (1951); R. Brunschvig, 'Abd, in The Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 1, pp. 2440 (1960); Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (1980); Halil Inalcik, Servile Labor in the Ottoman Empire, in The Mutual Effects of the Islamic and Judeo-Christian Worlds: The East European Pattern, ed. by Abraham Ascher, Tibor Halasi-Kun, and Bla K. Kirly (1979); Daniel Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981); and Ehud R. Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, 18401890 (1982).Important works on slavery in other parts of Asia are D.R. Banaji, Slavery in British India (1933); Benedicte Hjejle, Slavery and Agricultural Bondage in South India in the Nineteenth Century, The Scandinavian Economic History Review, 15:71126 (1967); Utsa Patnaik and Manjari Dingwaney (eds.), Chains of Servitude: Bondage and Slavery in India (1985); E.G. Pulleyblank, The Origins and Nature of Chattel Slavery in China, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 1:185220 (April 1958); James L. Watson, Chattel Slavery in Chinese Peasant Society: A Comparative Analysis, Ethnology, 15(4):361375 (October 1976); Marinus J. Meijer, Slavery at the End of the Ch'ing Dynasty, in Essays on China's Legal Tradition, ed. by Jerome Alan Cohen, R. Randle Edwards, and Fu-Mei Chang Chen (1980); C. Martin Wilbur, Slavery in China During the Former Han Dynasty, 206 BCAD 25 (1943, reprinted 1968); and Richard Hellie, Slavery Among the Early Modern Peoples on the Territory of the USSR, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 17:454465 (Winter 1983).For the study of slavery in sub-Saharan Africa, see the following collections: Paul E. Lovejoy (ed.), Africans in Bondage: Studies in Slavery and the Slave Trade (1986), and The Ideology of Slavery in Africa (1981); Claude Meillassoux (ed.), L'Esclavage en Afrique prcoloniale (1975); Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (eds.), Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (1977); and Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (eds.), Women and Slavery in Africa (1983). Also recommended are the following individual works: Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (1977); Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (1975); Allan G.B. Fisher and Humphrey J. Fisher, Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa: The Institution in Saharan and Sudanic Africa, and the Trans-Saharan Trade (1970); John Grace, Domestic Slavery in West Africa, with Particular Reference to the Sierra Leone Protectorate, 18961927 (1975); and Paul E. Lovejoy, Indigenous African Slavery, Historical Reflections, 6(1)1961 (1979), and his Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (1983). Slavery in the New World Three significant works that deal with the entire circum-Caribbean slave environment or that compare different New World countries in both North and South America are Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (1971, reprinted 1986); Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese (ed.), Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere (1975); and Vera Rubin and Arthur Tuden (eds.), Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies (1977).On slavery in the United States, see John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, rev. ed. (1979); Helen Tunnicliff Catterall (ed.), Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, 5 vol. (192637, reprinted 1968); Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (1981), and his Slavery in the Courtroom: An Annotated Bibliography of American Cases (1985); Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974); David W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (1981); Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy & Society of the Slave South (1965), Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), and The World the Slaveholders Made, rev. ed. with a new introduction (1988); Claudia Dale Goldin, Urban Slavery in the American South, 18201860 (1976); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 17501925 (1976); Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 15501812 (1968, reissued 1977); Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987); Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 16801800 (1986); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977); Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975); Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (1972); James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (1982); Ulrich Bonne Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Rgime (1918, reissued 1966); Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (1956, reprinted 1975); Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (1944, reissued 1980); and Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (1974).For information on slavery in the rest of the circum-Caribbean world and the transatlantic slave trade, see the following: Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 15241650 (1974); Roger Norman Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 17951815 (1979); Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 18501888 (1972); Michael Craton, Sinews of Empire: A Short History of British Slavery (1974); Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969); Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (eds.), The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1979); David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (1987); David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (1986); B.W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 18071834 (1976), and Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 18071834 (1984); Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (1978); Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba During the Nineteenth Century (1970, reprinted 1977); Rolando Mellafe, Negro Slavery in Latin America (1975; originally published in Spanish, 1974); Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (1967); Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 2nd ed. (1979); Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 15501835 (1985); Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 16231775 (1974); and Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras, a Brazilian Coffee County, 18501900: The Roles of Planter and Slave in a Plantation Society (1957, reprinted 1985). Richard Hellie