History of slavery
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The history of slavery covers many different forms of human exploitation across many cultures throughout history. Slavery, generally defined, refers to the "systematic exploitation of labor without consent, and/or to the possession of human beings as property". There is no clear timeline for the formation of slavery in any formalized sense. Slavery can be traced back to the earliest records, such as the Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1760 BC), which refers to it as an established institution.[1]
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Gulag · Serfdom · Unfree labour · Debt bondage · Indentured servant · List of slaves · Legal status |
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[edit] The ancient Mediterranean civilizations
Slavery in ancient cultures was known to occur in civilizations as old as Sumer, and it was found in every civilization, including Ancient Egypt, the Akkadian Empire, Assyria, Ancient Greece, Rome and parts of its 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.[2] In the Roman Empire, probably over 25% of the population was enslaved.[3] Scholars believe that 30 to 40% of the total population of Italy was enslaved.[4]
An important exception occurred under the reign of King Cyrus who founded the Achaemenid Empire and liberated slaves in conquered territories. Indeed much of the architectural feats of this period came from the invention of coin currency which precipitated wage labor.
Slavery was an important element in the development of the ancient Greek city-states. Records of slavery in Ancient Greece go as far back as Mycenaean Greece. The treatment of Greek slaves could be said to be harsh, but not extremely brutal. The Spartans had earlier reduced an entire population to a pseudo-slavery called helots. In Ancient Greece about 30% of the population consisted of slaves.[5]
As the Roman Republic expanded outward, entire populations were enslaved, thus creating an ample supply. The people subjected to Roman slavery came from all over Europe and the Mediterranean. Such oppression by an elite minority eventually led to slave revolts (see Roman Servile Wars); the Third Servile War led by Spartacus was the most famous and severe. Greeks, Berbers, Germans, Britons, Thracians, Gauls (or Celts), Jews, Arabs, and many more were slaves used not only for labor, but also for amusement (e.g. gladiators and sex slaves). If a slave ran away, he was liable to be crucified. By the late Republican era, slavery had become a vital economic pillar in the wealth of Rome. Slavery was so common, and citizenship restricted so firmly (only to native-born adult males), that the slaves in Rome far outnumbered the citizens.[6]
Due to Biblical descriptions, the definitions of slavery in Ancient Egypt are hotly debated. Archaeological discoveries by Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass lead some to claim that the workers who built the pyramids were not enslaved. [5] As practiced in ancient Egypt, slavery was likely more akin to slavery in the medieval world rather than trans-Atlantic slavery: Persons generally became enslaved in ancient Egypt by virtue of being captives (or prisoners) of war, committing criminal or other indecent acts, or indebtedness. Slaves in ancient Egypt could be sold, inherited or offered as gifts, but they could sometimes achieve social rank and take other contracts. Hence under Greek, Roman and Ancient Egyptian slavery there was no segregation between slave and society, it was non-racial and slaves could be upwardly mobile.
[edit] Europe
[edit] The Vikings and Scandinavia
In the Viking era starting c. 793, the Norse raiders often captured and enslaved weaker peoples they encountered. In the Nordic countries the slaves were called thralls (Old Norse: Þræll).[7] The thralls were mostly from Western Europe, among them many Franks, Anglo-Saxons, and Celts. Many Irish slaves participated in the colonization of Iceland.[8] There is evidence of German, Baltic, Slavic and south European slaves as well. The slave trade was one of the pillars of Norse commerce during the 6th through 11th centuries.[9] The Persian traveller Ibn Rustah described how Swedish Vikings, the Varangians or Rus, terrorized and enslaved the Slavs. The slave raids came to an end when Catholicism became widespread throughout Scandinavia. As in the rest of Catholic Europe, the Scandinavian representatives for the church held that a Christian could not morally own another Christian. However, the moral aspect was not considered binding by church representatives in regards to the enslavement of Africans. When slavery resurfaced in the post-Viking era in overseas colonies held by the Scandinavian countries, representatives of the church defended it, arguing, among other things, that Africans lacked "humanity" and therefore were better off as slaves, especially if they were converted.[10] The thrall system was finally abolished in the mid-14th century in Scandinavia. Serfdom was never instituted in Norway, Iceland and Sweden.[11][12] An ordinance of 20 June 1788 abolished villenage in Denmark and completely transformed the much-abused hoveri system.[13] Serfdom remained the practice in Swedish Pomerania until July 4, 1806.
Although the thrall system had been abolished, slavery resurfaced again during the 17th century when Denmark-Norway[14] and Sweden established trade posts in Africa, including the minor Swedish and Danish overseas colonies called Swedish Gold Coast and Danish Gold Coast.[15][16] In the late 18th century, Denmark-Norway set up slave colonies on the Caribbean islands of Saint Croix, Saint Thomas and Saint John[17] and the Swedish King Gustav III established a Swedish slave trade colony on the Caribbean island Saint Barthelemy.[18] In 1803, Denmark-Norway banned export trade in slaves,,[19] the first nation to do so, and in 1813 Sweden followed suit.[20] Slavery in the colonies was finally abolished by Sweden (then in union with Norway) in 1847,[21] and by Denmark in 1848.[14]
[edit] Middle Ages
Chaos and invasion made the taking of slaves habitual throughout Europe in the early Middle Ages. St. Patrick, himself captured and sold as a slave, protested an attack that enslaved newly baptized Christians in his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus. In Carolingian Europe approximately 20% of the entire population consisted of slaves.[22] At that time, Europe was weak and disunited, and for more than half a century Magyar bands raided European lands as far away as Spain. The Magyars looted towns and took captives for labor, ransom, or sale on the slave market.[23][24] 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, for example, the Council of Koblenz in 922, the Council of London in 1102, and the Council of Armagh in 1171.[25] William the Conqueror, too, banned export of English slaves.
The early medieval slave trade was mainly to the 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.[26][27][28]
So many Slavs (called Saqaliba in the medieval Arab world ) were enslaved for so many centuries that the very name 'slave' arguably derived from their name, not only in English, but in other European languages.[29][30] In the 11th and 12th centuries, constant incursions and slave raids by nomadic Turkic tribes, such as the Pechenegs and the Kipchaks, caused a massive migration of Slavic populations to the safer, heavily forested regions of the north.[31][32]
The Mongol invasions and conquests in the 13th century made the situation worse.[33] The Mongols enslaved skilled individuals, women and children and marched them to Karakorum or Sarai, whence they were sold throughout Eurasia. Many of these slaves were shipped to slave market in Novgorod.[34][35][36]
Slave commerce during the Late Middle Ages was mainly in the hands of Venetian and Genoese merchants and cartels, who were involved in the slave trade with the Golden Horde. In 1382 the Golden Horde under Khan Tokhtamysh sacked Moscow, burning the city and carrying off thousands of inhabitants as slaves. Between 1414 and 1423, some 10,000 eastern European slaves were sold in Venice.[37] Genoese merchants organized the slave trade from the Crimea to Mamluk Egypt. For years the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan routinely made raids on Russian principalities for slaves and to plunder towns. Russian chronicles record about 40 raids of Kazan Khans on the Russian territories in the first half of the 16th century.[38] In 1521, the combined forces of Crimean Khan Mehmed Giray and his Kazan allies attacked Moscow and captured thousands of slaves.[39]
In 1441, Haci I Giray declared independence from the Golden Horde and established the Crimean Khanate. For a long time, until the early 18th century, the khanate maintained a massive slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. In a process called the "harvesting of the steppe", they enslaved many Slavic peasants. About 30 major Tatar raids were recorded into Muscovite territories between 1558-1596.[40] In 1571, the Crimean Tatars attacked and sacked Moscow, burning everything but the Kremlin and taking thousands of captives as slaves.[41] In Crimea, about 75% of the population consisted of slaves.[42]
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.[43]
The Byzantine-Ottoman wars and the Ottoman wars in Europe brought large numbers of Christian slaves into the Islamic world too.[44] After the battle of Lepanto approximately 12,000 Christian galley slaves were freed from the Ottoman Turks.[45] Christians were also selling Muslim slaves captured in war. The Knights of Malta attacked pirates and Muslim shipping, and their base became a centre for slave trading, selling captured North Africans and Turks. Malta remained a slave market until well into the late 18th century. It required a thousand slaves to equip merely the galleys (ships) of the Order.[46][47]
Slavery in Poland was forbidden in the 15th century; in Lithuania, slavery was formally abolished in 1588; they were replaced by the second enserfment. Slavery remained a major institution in Russia until the 1723, when the Peter the Great converted the household slaves into house serfs. Russian agricultural slaves were formally converted into serfs earlier in 1679.[48]
[edit] Portuguese and Spanish explorations
- See also: Portuguese Empire, Spanish Empire, Economic history of Portugal, Spanish colonization of the Americas, and Black ladino
The 15th century Portuguese exploration of the African coast is commonly regarded as the harbinger of European colonialism. 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 slave trade under catholic beliefs of that time. This approval of slavery was reaffirmed and extended in his Romanus Pontifex bull of 1455. These papal bulls came to serve as a justification for the subsequent era of slave trade and European colonialism. Although for a short period as in 1462, Pius II declared slavery to be "a great crime".[49] The followers of the church of England and Protestants did not use the papal bull as a justification. The position of the church was to condemn the slavery of Christians, but slavery was regarded as an old established and necessary institution which supplied Europe with the necessary workforce. In the 16th century African slaves had substituted almost all other ethnicities and religious enslaved groups in Europe.[50] Within the Portuguese territory of Brazil, and even beyond its original borders, the enslavement of native Americans was carried out by the Bandeirantes.
Among many other European slave markets, Genoa, Venice and Verdun-sur-Meuse were some well known markets, their importance and demand growing after the great plague of the XIII century which decimated much of the European work force.[51] 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.[52][53] In 1441, the first slaves were brought to Portugal from northern Mauritania.[53] Prince Henry the Navigator, major sponsor of the Portuguese African expeditions, as of any other merchandise, taxed one fifth of the selling price of the slaves imported to Portugal.[53] 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.[53] In the 15th century one third of the slaves were resold to the African market in exchange of gold.[54]
Spain had to fight against relatively powerful 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.[55] (like the Europeans that had lack of biological immunity to African diseases) Natives were used as forced labor (the Spanish employed the pre-Columbian draft system called the mita),[56] but the diseases caused a labor 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 laborers 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.[57]
[edit] Great Britain and Ireland
During and after Roman times, the practice of slavery was common in England. Anglo-Saxons continued and expanded their slave system, sometimes in league with Norse traders. Chattel slavery of English Christians was discontinued when William of Normandy conquered England in 1066, but according to the Domesday Book census in 1086, 10% of the country's population was enslaved.[58] The trade in serfs and slaves in England was abolished in 1102, although the legal force of the event is open to question. The Council of Westminster, a collection of nobles, issued a decree: "Let no one hereafter presume to engage in that nefarious trade in which hitherto in England men were usually sold like brute animals." However, the Council had no legislative powers, and no act of law was valid unless signed by the monarch.[citation needed]
The last form of enforced servitude in Britain (villeinage) had disappeared by the beginning of the 17th century. Slavery resurfaced in that century as a form of punishment against Catholics. Following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, as many as 100,000 men, women and children were enslaved and transported to the colonies in the British West Indies and British America[59][60] Over half of all white immigrants to Colonial America during the 17th and 18th centuries consisted of indentured servants.[61][62]
Britain played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade. The "slave triangle" was pioneered by Francis Drake and his associates. 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 Bold textBritish economy at the time of the Industrial Revolution.[63] He though was not, as some have claimed, the first white person to have been lawfully executed for the killing of a slave.[64][65]
[edit] Pre-industrial Europe
It became the custom among the Mediterranean powers to sentence condemned criminals to row in the war-galleys of the state (initially only in time of war).[66] The French Huguenots filled the galleys after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and Camisard rebellion.[67] Galley-slaves lived in unsavoury conditions, so even though some sentences prescribed a restricted number of years, most rowers would eventually die, even if they survived shipwreck and slaughter or torture at the hands of enemies or of pirates.[68] Naval forces often turned 'infidel' prisoners-of-war into galley-slaves. Several well-known historical figures served time as galley slaves after being captured by the enemy -- the Ottoman corsair and admiral Turgut Reis and the Knights Hospitaller Grand Master Jean Parisot de la Valette among them.[69]
The so-called second serfdom took place in Eastern Europe during this period (particularly in Austria-Hungary, Prussia, Russia and Poland). Only in 1768 was a law passed in Poland that discontinued the nobility's right of life or death over serfs. Serfdom remained the practice in most of Russia until February 19, 1861. Some of the Roma people were enslaved over five centuries in Romania until abolition in 1864 (see Slavery in Romania).[70]
Slavery in the French Republic was abolished on February 4, 1794. The Haitian Revolution established Haiti as a free republic ruled by blacks, the first of its kind.[71] At the time of the revolution, Haiti was known as Saint-Domingue and was a colony of France.[72]
[edit] Modern times
Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime created many Arbeitslager (labor camps) in Germany and Eastern Europe. Prisoners in Nazi labor camps were worked to death on short rations and in bad conditions, or killed if they became unable to work. Millions died as a direct result of forced labor under the Nazis. See for instance Eugen Kogon's publication The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them[73]
About 12 million forced laborers, most of whom were Eastern Europeans, were employed in the German war economy inside the Nazi Germany.[74][75] More than 2000 German companies profited from slave labor during the Nazi era, including Daimler-Benz, Deutsche Bank, Siemens, Volkswagen, Hoechst, Dresdner Bank, Krupp, Allianz, BASF, Bayer, BMW and Degussa.[76][77]
Between 1930 and 1960, the Soviet regime created many Lageria (labor camps) in Siberia.[78] There were at least 476 separate camp complexes, each one comprising hundreds, even thousands of individual camps.[79] It is estimated that there may have been 5-7 million people in these camps at any one time. In later years the camps also held victims of Stalin’s purges as well as World War II prisoners. It is possible that approximately 10% of prisoners died each year.[80] Out of the 91,000 Germans captured alive after the Battle of Stalingrad, only 6,000 survived the Gulag and returned home.[81] Many of these prisoners, however, had died of illness contracted during the siege of Stalingrad and in the forced march into captivity.[82]
Probably the worst of the camp complexes were the three built north of the Arctic circle at Kolyma, Norilsk and Vorkuta.[83][84] Prisoners in Soviet labor camps were worked to death on extreme production quotas, brutality, hunger and harsh elements.[85] In all, more than 18 million people passed through the Gulag,[86] with a further millions being deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union.[87] The fatality rate was as high as 80% during the first months in many camps. Immediately after the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, the NKVD massacred about 100,000 prisoners who awaited deportation either to NKVD prisons in Moscow or to the Gulag. Michael McFaul, in his New York Times article of June 11, 2003, entitled 'Books of the Times;Camps of Terror, Often Overlooked' [6], has this to say about the state of contemporary dialogue on Soviet slavery:
It should now be known to all serious scholars that the camps began under Lenin and not Stalin. It should be recognized by all that people were sent to the camps not because of what they did, but because of who they were. Some may be surprised to learn about the economic function that the camps were designed to perform. Under Stalin, the camps were simply a crueler but equally inefficient way to exploit labor in the cause of building socialism than the one practiced outside the camps in the Soviet Union. Yet, even this economic role of the camps has been exposed before. What is remarkable is that the facts about this monstrous system so well documented in Applebaum's book are still so poorly known and even, by some, contested. For decades, academic historians have gravitated away from event-focused history and toward social history. Yet, the social history of the gulag somehow has escaped notice. Compared with the volumes and volumes written about the Holocaust, the literature on the gulag is thin.
(The article draws attention to Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer Prize winning text GULAG : A History [7])
Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the impoverished former Eastern bloc countries such as Albania, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine have been identified as major trafficking source countries for women and children.[89] Young women and girls are often lured to wealthier countries by the promises of money and work and then reduced to sexual slavery.[90] It is estimated that 2/3 of women trafficked for prostitution worldwide annually come from Eastern Europe, three-quarters have never worked as prostitutes before.[91][92] The major destinations are Western Europe (Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, UK, Greece), the Middle East (Turkey, Israel, the United Arab Emirates), Asia, Russia and the United States.[93][94]
An estimated 500,000 women from Central and Eastern Europe are working in prostitution in the EU alone.[95] It is estimated that half million Ukrainian women were trafficked abroad since 1991 (80% of all unemployed in Ukraine are women).[96][97] Russia is a major source of women trafficked globally for the purpose of sexual exploitation, Russian women are in prostitution in over 50 countries.[98][99][100] In poverty-stricken Moldova, where the unemployment rate for women ranges as high as 68% and one-third of the workforce live and work abroad, experts estimate that since the collapse of the Soviet Union between 200,000 and 400,000 women have been sold into prostitution abroad — perhaps up to 10% of the female population.[101][102]
[edit] Slavery in Muslim World
Historians say the Arab slave trade lasted more than millennium.[103][104] The Arab or Middle Eastern slave trade is thought to have originated with trans-Saharan slavery.[105][106] Arab, Indian, and Oriental traders were involved in the capture and transport of slaves northward across the Sahara desert and the Indian Ocean region into Arabia and the Middle East, Persia, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.[107][108] The slave trade from East Africa to Arabia was dominated by Arab and African traders in the coastal cities of Zanzibar, Dar Es Salaam and Mombasa.[108][109] The Moors, starting in the 8th century, raided coastal areas of the Mediterranean, and became known as the Barbary pirates.
Male slaves were employed as servants, soldiers, or laborers, while female slaves were traded to Middle Eastern countries and kingdoms by Arab, Indian, or Oriental traders, some as domestic servants,.[110][111][112] Some historians estimate that between 11 and 17 million slaves crossed the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara Desert from 650 to 1900 AD.[113][114]
Racist opinions occurred in the works of some Persian and Arab-Muslim historians and geographers: so in the 14th century CE, the Tunisian Ibn Khaldun could write: - :"...the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals..."[115][116] In the same period, the Egyptian Al-Abshibi (1388-1446) wrote, "It is said that when the [black] slave is sated, he fornicates, when he is hungry, he steals."[117]
In 1400 Timur the Lame invaded Armenia and Georgia. More than 60,000 people from the Caucasus were captured as slaves, and many districts of Armenia were depopulated.[118]
From 1569 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth suffered a series of Tatar invasions, the goal of which was to loot, pillage and capture slaves into jasyr. The borderland area to the south-east was in a state of semi-permanent warfare until the 18th century. Some researchers estimate that altogether more than 3 million people, predominantly Ukrainians but also Circassians, Russians, Belarusians, Poles and Jews were captured and enslaved during the time of the Crimean Khanate.[119][120] Russian conquest of the Crimea led to the abolition of slavery by the 1780s.[121]
Slavery was an important part of Ottoman society. In Istanbul, about 1/5 of the population consisted of slaves.[42] As late as 1908 women slaves were still sold in the Ottoman Empire.[123] In the middle of the 14th century, Murad I built his own personal slave army called the Kapıkulu. The new force was based on the sultan's right to a fifth of the war booty, which he interpreted to include captives taken in battle. The captive slaves were converted to Islam and trained in the sultan's personal service. In the devşirme (translated "blood tax" or "child collection"), young Christian boys from the Balkans were taken away from their homes and families, converted to Islam and enlisted into special soldier classes of the Ottoman army. These soldier classes were named Janissaries, the most famous branch of the Kapıkulu. The Janissaries eventually became a decisive factor in the Ottoman invasions of Europe.[124] Most of the military commanders of the Ottoman forces, imperial administrators and de facto rulers of the Ottoman Empire, such as Pargalı İbrahim Pasha and Sokollu Mehmet Paşa, were recruited in this way.[125][126] By 1609 the Sultan's Kapıkulu forces increased to about 100,000.[127]
Mamluks were a slave soldiers who converted to Islam and served the Muslim caliphs and the Ayyubid sultans during the Middle Ages. The first mamluks served the Abbasid caliphs in 9th century Baghdad. Over time they became a powerful military caste, and on more than one occasion they seized power for themselves, for example, ruling Egypt in the from 1250-1517. From 1250 Egypt had been ruled by the Bahri dynasty of Kipchak Turk origin. White slaves from the Caucasus served in the army and formed an elite corp of troops eventually revolting in Egypt to form the Burgi dynasty. Mamluks were mainly responsible for the expulsion of the Crusaders from Palestine and preventing the Mongol Ilkhanate of Persia and Iraq from entering Egypt.[128]
The Moroccan Sultan Moulay Ismail "the Bloodthirsty" (1672-1727) raised a corps of 150,000 black slaves, called his Black Guard, who coerced the country into submission.[129]
Nautical traders from the United States became targets, and frequent victims, of the Barbary pirates, as soon as that nation began trading with Europe and refused to pay the required tribute to the North African states.[130][131]
In response to the Hazara uprising of 1892, the Afghan Emir Abdur Rahman declared a "Jihad" against the Shiites. The large army defeated the rebellion at its center, in Oruzgan, by 1892 and the local population was severely massacred. According to S. A. Mousavi, "thousands of Hazara men, women, and children were sold as slaves in the markets of Kabul and Qandahar, while numerous towers of human heads were made from the defeated rebels as a warning to others who might challenge the rule of the Amir". Until the 20th century, some Hazaras were still kept as slaves by the Pashtuns; although Amanullah Khan banned slavery in Afghanistan during his reign,[132] the tradition carried on unofficially for many more years.[133]
[edit] Modern times
It is estimated that as many as 200,000 Black south sudanese children and women ( mostly from dinka tribe who were sold by the sudanese arabs of the north) have been taken into slavery in Sudan during the Second Sudanese Civil War.[134][135] In Mauritania it is estimated that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are currently enslaved, many of them used as bonded labor.[136] Slavery in Mauritania was criminalized in August 2007.[137]
The Arab trade in slaves continued into the 20th century. Written travelogues and other historical works are replete with references to slaves owned by wealthy traders, nobility and heads of state in the Arabian Peninsula well into the 1920s. Slave owning and slave-like working conditions have been documented up to and including the present, in countries of the Middle East. Though the subject is considered taboo in the affected regions, a leading Saudi government cleric and author of the country's religious curriculum has called for the outright re-legalization of slavery[138][139].
Children as young as two years old are used for slavery as child camel jockeys across the Arab countries of the Middle East. Although strict laws have been introduced recently in Qatar and UAE, thanks to better awareness of the issue and lobbying by human rights organisations such as the Ansar Burney Trust, the use of children still continues in outlying areas and during secret night-time races.
Many of the Iraqi women fleeing the Iraq War are turning to prostitution, others are trafficked abroad, to countries like Syria, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Iran.[140] In Syria alone, an estimated 50,000 Iraqi refugee girls and women, many of them widows, are forced into prostitution.[141] Cheap Iraqi prostitutes have helped to make Syria a popular destination for sex tourists. The clients come from wealthier countries in the Middle East - many are Saudi men.[142] High prices are offered for virgins.[143]
[edit] Africa
In most African societies, there was very little difference between the free peasants and the feudal vassal peasants. Vassals of the Songhay Muslim Empire were used primarily in agriculture; they paid tribute to their masters in crop and service but they were slightly restricted in custom and convenience. These people were more an occupational caste, as their bondage was relative. In the Kanem Bornu Empire, vassals were three classes beneath the nobles. Marriage between captor and captive was far from rare, blurring the anticipated roles..[108]
French historian Fernand Braudel noted that slavery was endemic in Africa and part of the structure of everyday life. "Slavery came in different disguises 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" (Braudel 1984 p. 435). During the 16th century, Europe began to outpace the Arab world in the export traffic, with its slave traffic from Africa to the Americas. The Dutch imported slaves from Asia into their colony in South Africa. Later, the United Kingdom, which held vast colonial territories on the African continent (including southern Africa), made the practice of slavery illegal throughout its empire. The end of the slave trade and the decline of slavery was imposed upon Africa by its European conquerors.
The nature of the slave societies differed greatly across the continent. There were large plantations worked by slaves in Egypt, the Sudan and Zanzibar, but this was not a typical use of slaves in Africa as a whole. In most African slave societies, slaves were protected and incorporated into the slave-owning family.[citation needed]
In Senegambia, between 1300 and 1900, close to one-third of the population was enslaved. In early Islamic states of the western Sudan, including Ghana (750-1076), Mali (1235–1645), Segou (1712–1861), and Songhai (1275-1591), about a third of the population were slaves. In Sierra Leone in the 19th century about half of the population consisted of slaves. In the 19th century at least half the population was enslaved among the Duala of the Cameroon, the Igbo and other peoples of the lower Niger, the Kongo, and the Kasanje kingdom and Chokwe of Angola. Among the Ashanti and Yoruba a third of the population consisted of slaves. The population of the Kanem was about a third-slave. It was perhaps 40% in Bornu (1396–1893). Between 1750 and 1900 from one- to two-thirds of the entire population of the Fulani jihad states consisted of slaves. The population of the Sokoto caliphate formed by Hausas in the northern Nigeria and Cameroon was half-slave in the 19th century. It is estimated that up to 90% of the population of Arab-Swahili Zanzibar was enslaved. Roughly half the population of Madagascar was enslaved.[144][145][146][147][148][149][150]
The Anti-Slavery Society estimated that there were 2,000,000 slaves in the early 1930s Ethiopia, out of an estimated population of between 8 and 16 million.[151] Slavery continued in Ethiopia until the brief Second Italo-Abyssinian War in October 1935, when was abolished by order of the Italian occupying forces.[152] In response to pressure by Western Allies of World War II Ethiopia officially abolished slavery and serfdom after regaining its independence in 1942. On August 26, 1942 Haile Selassie issued a proclamation outlawing slavery.[153][154]
Elikia M’bokolo, April 1998, Le Monde diplomatique. Quote:"The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from the ninth to the nineteenth)." He continues: "Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean"[155]
[edit] North Africa
[edit] Barbary pirates
- See also: Arab slave trade
According to Robert Davis between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa and Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries.[156] The coastal villages and towns of Italy, Portugal, Spain and Mediterranean islands were frequently attacked by them and long stretches of the Italian, Portuguese and Spanish coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants; after 1600 Barbary pirates occasionally entered the Atlantic and struck as far north as Iceland.[157]
In 1544, Khair ad Din captured Ischia, taking 4,000 prisoners in the process, and deported to slavery some 9,000 inhabitants of Lipari, almost the entire population.[158] In 1551, Turgut Reis (known as Dragut in the West) enslaved the entire population of the Maltese island Gozo, between 5,000 and 6,000, sending them to Libya. When pirates sacked Vieste in southern Italy in 1554 they took an 7,000 slaves. In 1555, Turgut Reis sailed to Corsica and ransacked Bastia, taking 6000 prisoners. In 1558 Barbary corsairs captured the town of Ciutadella (Minorca), destroyed it, slaughtered the inhabitants and carried off 3,000 survivors to Istanbul as slaves.[159] In 1563 Turgut Reis landed at the shores of the province of Granada, Spain, and captured the coastal settlements in the area like Almuñécar, along with 4,000 prisoners. Barbary pirates frequently attacked the Balearic islands, resulting in many coastal watchtowers and fortified churches being erected. The threat was so severe that island of Formentera became uninhabited.[160][161][162]
In Portugal for instance, the coastal city of Nazaré was raided several times during until the 16th century when the local fortress was built (according to Pedro Penteado and his book based in the historical ecclesiastic diaries of Nazaré). The city of Lisbon built the Torre de Belém to defend the capital against these pirates.
Between 1609 and 1616 England alone had a staggering 466 merchant ships lost to Barbary pirates. Slave-taking persisted into the 19th century when Barbary pirates would capture ships and enslave the crew.[163][164] Even the United States was not immune. In 1783 the United States made peace with, and gained recognition from, the British monarchy, and in 1784 the first American ship was seized by pirates from Morocco. Payments in ransom and tribute to the Barbary states amounted to 20% of United States government annual revenues in 1800.[165] It was not until 1815 that naval victories in the Barbary Wars ended tribute payments by the U.S., although some European nations continued annual payments until the 1830s.[166]
Among the most important slave markets where Pirates operated in the Mediterranean Europe were the ports of Majorca, Toulon, Marseille, Genoa, Pisa, Leghorn and Malta. In Africa, the most important were the ports of Morrocos, Tripoli, Algiers and Tunis.[167]
[edit] Sub-Saharan Africa
David Livingstone wrote of the slave trade:
"To overdraw its evils is a simple impossibility.... We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path. [Onlookers] said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer. We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead.... We came upon a man dead from starvation.... The strangest disease I have seen in this country seems really to be broken heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves."
Livingstone estimated that 80,000 Africans died each year before ever reaching the slave markets of Zanzibar.[168][169][170][171] Zanzibar was once East Africa's main slave-trading port, and under Omani Arabs in the 19th century as many as 50,000 slaves were passing through the city each year.[172]
Prior to the 16th century, the bulk of slaves exported from Africa were shipped from East Africa to the Arabian peninsula. Zanzibar became a leading port on this trade. Arab slave traders differed from European ones in that they would often conduct raiding expeditions themselves, sometimes penetrating deep into the continent. They also differed in that their market greatly preferred the purchase of female slaves over male ones.
The increased presence of European rivals along the East coast led Arab traders to concentrate on the overland slave caravan routes across the Sahara from the Sahel to North Africa. The German explorer Gustav Nachtigal reported seeing slave caravans departing from Kukawa in Bornu bound for Tripoli and Egypt in 1870. The slave trade represented the major source of revenue for the state of Bornu as late as 1898. The eastern regions of the Central African Republic have never recovered demographically from the impact of nineteenth-century raids from the Sudan and still have a population density of less than 1 person/km.[174] During the 1870s, European initiatives against the slave trade caused an economic crisis in northern Sudan, precipitating the rise of Mahdist forces. Mahdi’s victory created an Islamic state, one that quickly reinstituted slavery.[175][176]
The Middle Passage, the crossing of the Atlantic to the Americas, endured by slaves laid out in rows in the holds of ships, was only one element of the well-known triangular trade engaged in by Portuguese, Dutch, French and British. Ships having landed slaves in Caribbean ports would take on sugar, indigo, raw cotton, and later coffee, and make for Liverpool, Nantes, Lisbon or Amsterdam. Ships leaving European ports for West Africa would carry printed cotton textiles, some originally from India, copper utensils and bangles, pewter plates and pots, iron bars more valued than gold, hats, trinkets, gunpowder and firearms and alcohol. Tropical shipworms were eliminated in the cold Atlantic waters, and at each unloading, a profit was made.
The 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 (Yoruba), Kong Empire, Kingdom of Benin, Kingdom of Fouta Djallon, Kingdom of Fouta Tooro, Kingdom of Koya, Kingdom of Khasso, Kingdom of Kaabu, Fante Confederacy, Ashanti Confederacy, Aro Confederacy and the kingdom of Dahomey.[177][178] 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. The people captured on these expeditions were shipped by European traders to the colonies of the New World. As a result of the War of Spanish Succession, the United Kingdom obtained the monopoly (asiento de negros) of transporting captive Africans to Spanish America. It is estimated that over the centuries, twelve to twenty million people were shipped as slaves from Africa by European traders, of whom some 15 percent died during the terrible voyage, many during the arduous journey through the Middle Passage. The great majority were shipped to the Americas, but some also went to Europe and the south of Africa.
Before the arrival of the Portuguese, slavery had already existed in Kingdom of Kongo. Despite its establishment within his kingdom, Afonso I of Kongo believed that the slave trade should be subject to Kongo law. When he suspected the Portuguese of receiving illegally enslaved persons to sell, he wrote letters to the King João III of Portugal in 1526 imploring him to put a stop to the practice.[179]
The kings of Dahomey sold their war captives into transatlantic slavery, who otherwise would have been killed in a ceremony known as the Annual Customs. As one of West Africa's principal slave states, Dahomey became extremely unpopular with neighbouring peoples.[180][181][182] Like the Bambara Empire to the east, the Khasso kingdoms depended heavily on the slave trade for their economy. A family's status was indicated by the number of slaves it owned, leading to wars for the sole purpose of taking more captives. This trade led the Khasso into increasing contact with the European settlements of Africa's west coast, particularly the French.[183] Benin grew increasingly rich during the 16th and 17th centuries on the slave trade with Europe; slaves from enemy states of the interior were sold, and carried to the Americas in Dutch and Portuguese ships. The Bight of Benin's shore soon came to be known as the "Slave Coast".[184]
In the 1840s, King Gezo of Dahomey said:[185]
"The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery…"