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Abolitionism
Jesusi.com
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Slavery
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노예제도
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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. |
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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." |
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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. (see also sale) |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 20-30 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. |
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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 law--i.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 corvée labour
on roads, and to serve in the army, but slaves usually were exempt from all of
those obligations. |
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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. (see also indentured
labour) |
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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. (see also peonage) |
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The origins of slavery are lost to human
memory. It is sometimes hypothesized that at some moment it was decided that
persons detained for a crime or as a result of warfare would be more useful if
put to work in some way rather than if killed outright and discarded or eaten.
But both if and when that first occurred is unknown. |
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Slavery is known to have existed as
early as the Shang dynasty (18th-12th century BC) in China.
It has been studied thoroughly in ancient Han China (206 BC-AD 25), where
perhaps 5 percent of the population was enslaved. Slavery continued to be a
feature of Chinese society down to the 20th century. For most of that period it
appears that slaves were generated in the same ways they were elsewhere,
including capture in war, slave raiding, and the sale of insolvent debtors. In
addition, the Chinese practiced self-sale into slavery, the sale of women and
children (to satisfy debts or because the seller could not feed them), and the
sale of the relatives of executed criminals. Finally, kidnapping seems to have
produced a regular flow of slaves at some times. The go-between or middleman was
an important figure in the sale of local people into slavery; he provided the
distance that made such slaves into outsiders, for the purchasers did not know
their origins. Chinese family boundaries were relatively permeable, and some
owners established kinlike relations with their slaves; male slaves were
appointed as heirs when no natural offspring existed. As was also the case in
other slave-owning societies, slaves in China were often luxury consumption
items who constituted a drain on the economy. The reasons China never developed
into a slave society are many and complex, but certainly an abundance of
non-slave labour at low prices was one of the major ones. |
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Korea
had a very large slave population, ranging from a third to half of the entire
population for most of the millennium between the Silla period and the mid-18th
century. Most of the Korean slaves were indigenously generated. In spite of
their numbers, slaves seem to have had little impact on other institutions, and
thus the society can be categorized as a slave-owning one. |
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Slavery existed in ancient India,
where it is recorded in the Sanskrit Laws of Manu of the 1st century BC. The
institution was little documented until the British colonials in the 19th
century made it an object of study because of their desire to abolish it. In
1841 there were an estimated 8,000,000 or 9,000,000 slaves in India, many of
whom were agrestic or predial slaves, that is, slaves who were attached to the
land they worked on but who nevertheless could be alienated from it. Malabar had
the largest proportion of slaves, about 15 percent of the total population. The
agrestic slaves initially were subjugated communities. The remainder of the
slaves was recruited individually by purchase from dealers or parents or by
self-sale of the starving, and they can be classified as household slaves.
Slavery in Hindu India was complicated by the slave owners' ritual need to know
the origins of their slaves, which explains why most of them were of indigenous
origin. Although there were exceptions, slaves were owned primarily for
prestige. |
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Slavery was widely practiced in other
areas of Asia as well. A quarter to a third of
the population of some areas of Thailand and Burma were slaves in the 17th
through the 19th centuries and in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
respectively. But not enough is known about them to say that they definitely
were slave societies. |
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Other societies in the Philippines,
Nepal, Malaya, Indonesia, and Japan are known to have had slavery from ancient
until fairly recent times. The same was true among the various peoples
inhabiting the regions of Central Asia: the peoples of Sogdiana, Khorezm, and
other advanced civilizations; the Mongols, the Kalmyks, the Kazaks; and the
numerous Turkic peoples, most of whom converted to Islam. |
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In the New World some of the
best-documented slave-owning societies were the Klamath and Pawnee and the
fishing societies, such as the Yurok, that lived along the coast from what is
now Alaska to California. Life was easy in many of those societies, and slaves
are known to have sometimes been consumption goods that were simply killed in
potlatches. |
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Other Amerindians, such as the Creek of
Georgia, the Comanche of Texas, the Callinago of Dominica, the Tupinambá
of Brazil, the Inca of the Andes, and the Tehuelche of Patagonia, also owned
slaves. Among the Aztecs of Mexico, slavery generally seems to have been
relatively mild. People got into the institution through self-sale and capture
and could buy their way out relatively easily. Slaves were often used as porters
in the absence of draft animals in Mesoamerica. The fate of other slaves was
less pleasant: chattels purchased from the Mayans and others were sacrificed in
massive numbers. Some of the sacrifices may have been eaten by the social elite. |
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In England
about 10 percent of the population entered in the Domesday Book in 1086 were
slaves, with the proportion reaching as much as 20 percent in some places.
Slaves were also prominent in Scandinavia during
the Viking era, AD 800-1050, when slaves for use at home and for sale in the
international slave markets were a major object of raids. Slaves also were
present in significant numbers in Scandinavia both before and after the Viking
era. |
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Continental Europe--France, Germany,
Poland, Lithuania, and Russia--all knew slavery. Russia
was essentially founded as a by-product of slave raiding by the Vikings passing
from Scandinavia to Byzantium in the 9th century, and slavery remained a major
institution there until the early 1720s, when the state converted the household
slaves into house serfs in order to put them on the tax rolls. House serfs were
freed from their lords by an edict of Tsar Alexander II in 1861. Many scholars
argue that the Soviets reinstituted a form of state slavery in the Gulag camps
that flourished until 1956. |
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Slavery was much in evidence in the
Middle East from the beginning of recorded history. It was treated as a
prominent institution in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi of c. 1750 BC. Slaves were present in ancient Egypt and are known to
have been murdered to accompany their deceased owners into the afterlife. It
once was believed that slaves built the great pyramids, but contemporary
scholarly opinion is that the pyramids were constructed by peasants when they
were not occupied by agriculture. Slaves also are mentioned prominently in the
Bible among the Hebrews in Palestine and their neighbours. |
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Slaves were owned in all Islamic
societies, both sedentary and nomadic, ranging from Arabia in the centre to
North Africa in the west and to what is now Pakistan and Indonesia in the east.
Some Islamic states, such as the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Khanate, and
the Sokoto caliphate, must be termed slave societies because slaves there were
very important numerically as well as a focus of the polities' energies. (see
also Islamic
world) |
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Slaves have been owned in black Africa
throughout recorded history. In many areas there were large-scale slave
societies, while in others there were slave-owning societies. Slavery was
practiced everywhere even before the rise of Islam, and black slaves
exported from Africa were widely traded throughout the Islamic world.
Approximately 18,000,000 Africans were delivered into the Islamic
trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades between 650 and 1905. In the second
half of the 15th century Europeans began to trade along the west coast of
Africa, and by 1867 between 7,000,000 and 10,000,000 Africans had been shipped
as slaves to the New World. Although some areas of Africa were depleted by slave
raiding, on balance the African population grew after the establishment of the
transatlantic slave trade because of new food crops introduced from the New
World, particularly manioc, corn (maize), and possibly peanuts (groundnuts). The
relationship between African and New World slavery was highly complementary.
African slave owners demanded primarily women and children for labour and
lineage incorporation and tended to kill males because they were troublesome and
likely to flee. The transatlantic trade, on the other hand, demanded primarily
adult males for labour and thus saved from certain death many adult males who
otherwise would have been slaughtered outright by their African captors. After
the end of the transatlantic trade, a few African societies at the end of the
19th century put captured males to productive work as slaves, but this usually
was not the case before that time. |
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The first known major slave society was
that of Athens. In the early Archaic period the
elite worked its estates with the labour of fellow citizens in bondage (often
for debt). After the lawgiver Solon abolished citizen slavery about 594 BC,
wealthy Athenians came to rely on enslaved peoples from outside Attica. The
prolonged wars with the Persians and other peoples provided many slaves, but the
majority of slaves were acquired through regular trade with non-Greek peoples
around the Aegean. At the time of classical Athens (the 5th through the 3rd
centuries BC) slaves constituted about a third of the population. A particularly
noteworthy locus of slave employment was the Laurium silver mines, where private
individuals could pick out a lode and put their slaves to mining it. As in all
other slave societies, it was the profitability of slavery that determined its
preeminence in Athens. (Also important were political conditions that made the
gross exploitation of citizens impossible.) Slaves were responsible for the
prosperity of Athens and the leisure of the aristocrats, who had time to create
the high culture now considered the beginning of Western civilization. The
existence of large-scale slavery was also responsible, it seems logical to
believe, for the Athenians' thoughts on freedom that are considered a central
part of the Western heritage. Athenian slave society was finally destroyed by
Philip II of Macedonia at the battle of Chaeronea (338 BC), when, on the motion
of Lycurgus, many (but not all) slaves were freed. (see also Greece,
ancient) |
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The next major slave society was Roman
Italy between about the 2nd century BC and the 4th century AD. Initially, Rome
was a polity consisting primarily of small farmers. But the process of creating
the empire took them away from their farms for extended periods, and the
prolonged wars of conquest in Spain and the eastern Mediterranean during the 3rd
and 2nd centuries BC created a great flood of captives. Nothing was more logical
than to put the captives to work farming, especially the olives and grapes that
created much of the prosperity of the late republic and the principate. Slaves
and freedmen were responsible for much of the empire's commodity production, and
in the early principate they ran its governmental bureaus as well. The
conditions were right to put the captives to work: private ownership of land;
developed commodity production and markets; a perceived shortage of internal
labour supply; and an appropriate moral, political, and legal climate. Roughly
30 percent of the population was enslaved. Roman slave society ended as the
slaves were legally converted into coloni, or serfs, and the lands became
populated and the frontiers so remote that finding great numbers of outsider
slaves was increasingly difficult. (see also Roman
Republic and Empire) |
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Some lesser Islamic slave
societies are also of interest. One is the Baghdad caliphate founded in the 7th
and lasting through the 10th century. Many tens of thousands of military
captives were imported from Sogdiana, Khazaria, and other Central Asian locales.
In the 9th and 10th centuries several tens of thousands of black Zanj slaves
were imported from Zanzibar to Lower Iraq, where they constituted more than half
the total population and were put to work to clear saline lands for irrigation
and to cultivate sugar. More long-term was the slavery practiced in the Crimean
Khanate between roughly 1475 and its liquidation by the Russian empress
Catherine the Great in 1783. The Crimean Tatar society was based on raiding the
neighbouring Slavic and Caucasian sedentary societies and selling the captives
into the slave markets of Eurasia. Approximately 75 percent of the Crimean
population consisted of slaves or freedmen, and much of the free population was
highly predatory, engaged either in the gathering of slaves or in the selling of
them. It is known that for every slave the Crimeans sold in the market, they
killed outright several other people during their raids, and a couple more died
on the way to the slave market. The reasons for the transition of the Crimean
Khanate from a slave-owning society to a slave society have not been studied in
detail. Probable reasons, however, include the combination of high demand for
slaves throughout the Islamic world, the defenselessness of the sedentary
agricultural Slavs and others, and the existence of a relatively poor class of
Crimean horsemen, who were led by a predatory elite that got rich by slave
raiding. Crimean Tatar slave raids into Muscovy were greatly curtailed by the
building of a series of walls along the frontier in the years 1636-53 and
ultimately by the liquidation of the khanate in 1783. |
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It is probable that the Ottoman
Empire, and especially its centre in Turkey, should be termed a slave
society. Slaves from both the white Slavic north and the black African south
flowed into Turkish cities for half a millennium after the Turks seized control
of much of the Balkans in the 14th century. The proportion of the population
that was slave ranged from about one-fifth in Istanbul, the capital, to much
less in remoter provincial areas. Perhaps only people such as the slave owners
of the circum-Caribbean sugar islands and the American South were as preoccupied
with slaves as were the Ottomans. |
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Slaves in the Ottoman Empire served in
various capacities. They were janissary soldiers (see below), and they ran the
empire, manned its ships, generated much of its handicraft product, and served
as domestic servants and in harems. Contemporaries believed that the absolute
power of the ruler was based on his military and administrative slaves. The Tanzimat
enlightenment movement of the mid-19th century initiated the abolition of
slavery; by the 1890s only a few slaves were being smuggled illegally into the
empire, and the slave population was greatly reduced. |
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Other prominent Islamic slave
societies were on the east coast of Africa in the 19th century. The Arab-Swahili
slave systems have been well-studied, and it is known that, depending on the
date, 65 to 90 percent of the population of Zanzibar
was enslaved. Close to 90 percent of the population on the Kenya coast was also
enslaved, and in Madagascar half the population was enslaved. It may be assumed
that similar situations prevailed elsewhere in the vicinity and also earlier,
but studies to verify the proposition have not been undertaken. |
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Another notable Islamic slave
society was that of the Sokoto caliphate formed
by Hausas in sub-Saharan Africa (northern Nigeria and Cameroon) in the 19th
century. At least half the population was enslaved. That was only the most
notable of the Fulani jihad states of the western and central Sudan, where
between 1750 and 1900 from one- to two-thirds of the entire population consisted
of slaves. In Islamic Ghana, between 1076 and 1600, about a third of the
population were slaves. The same was true among other early states of the
western Sudan, including Mali (1200-1500), Segou (1720-1861), and Songhai
(1464-1720). It should be noted that slavery was prominent in Ghana and Mali,
and presumably elsewhere in Africa in areas for which information is not
available, long before the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade. The
population of the notorious slave-trading state of the central Sudan, Ouidah
(Whydah), was half-slave in the 19th century. It was about a third in Kanem
(1600-1800) and perhaps 40 percent in Bornu (1580-1890). Most slaves probably
were acquired by raiding neighbouring peoples, but others entered slavery
because of criminal convictions or defaulting on debts (often not their own);
subsequently, many of those people were sold into the international slave trade.
After the limiting and then abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, a number
of these African societies put slaves to work in activities such as mining gold
and raising peanuts, coconuts (palm oil), sesame, and millet for the market.
(see also western
Africa, Fulani Empire) |
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Among some of the various Islamic
Berber Tuareg peoples of the Sahara and Sahel,
slavery persisted at least until 1975. The proportions of slaves ranged from
around 15 percent among the Adrar to perhaps 75 percent among the Gurma. In
Senegambia, between 1300 and 1900, about a third of the population consisted of
slaves. In Sierra Leone in the 19th century close to half the population was
enslaved. In the Vai Paramount chiefdoms in the 19th century as much as
three-quarters of the population consisted of slaves. Among the Ashanti and
Yoruba a third were enslaved. In the 19th century over half the population
consisted of slaves among the Duala of the Cameroon, the Ibo and other peoples
of the lower Niger, the Kongo, and the Kasanje kingdom and Chokwe of Angola. |
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The best-known slave societies were
those of the circum-Caribbean world. Slave imports to the islands of the
Caribbean began in the early 16th century. Initially the islands often were
settled as well by numerous indentured labourers and other Europeans, but
following the triumph after 1645 of the sugar revolution (initially undertaken
because superior Virginia tobacco had left the Barbadian planters with nothing
to sell) and after the nature of the disease climate became known to Europeans,
they came to be inhabited almost exclusively by imported African slaves. In time
the estate owners moved to England, and the sugar plantations were managed by
sometimes unstable and unsavoury Europeans who, with the aid of black overseers
and drivers, controlled masses of slaves. About two-thirds of all slaves shipped
across the Atlantic ended up in sugar colonies. By 1680 in Barbados the average
plantation had about 60 slaves, and in Jamaica in 1832 about 150. The sugar
plantations were among the contemporary world's largest and most profitable
enterprises, paying about 10 percent on invested capital and on some occasions,
such as in Barbados in the 1650s, as much as 40 to 50 percent. The proportions
of slaves on the islands ranged from more than a third in Cuba, which went into
the sugar and gang-labour business on a large scale only after the local
planters had gained control in 1789, to 90 percent and more on Jamaica in 1730,
Antigua in 1775, and Grenada up to 1834. (see also West
Indies) |
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Slaves were of varying importance in
Mesoamerica and on the South American continent. Initially slaves were imported
because of a labour shortage, aggravated by the high death rate of the
indigenous population after the introduction of European diseases in the early
16th century. They were brought in at first to mine gold, and they were shifted
to silver mining or simply let go when gold was exhausted in the mid-16th
century. In Brazil, where sugar had been tried
even before its planting in the Caribbean, the coffee bush was imported from
Arabia or Ethiopia via Indonesia, and it had an impact similar to that of sugar
in the Caribbean. Around 1800 about half the population of Brazil consisted of
slaves, but that percentage declined to about 33 percent in 1850 and to 15
percent after the shutting off of imports around 1850 combined with free
immigration to raise the proportion of Europeans. In some parts of Brazil, such
as Pernambuco, some two-thirds of the population consisted of Africans and their
offspring. |
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The final circum-Caribbean slave society
was what became the southern United
States. Slaves first were brought to Virginia in 1619. Subsequently,
Africans were transshipped to North America from the Caribbean in increasing
numbers. Initially, however, the English relied for their dependent labour
primarily on indentured servants from the mother country. But in the two decades
of the 1660s and 1670s the laws of slave ownership were clarified (for example,
Africans who converted to Christianity did no longer have to be manumitted), and
the price of servants may have increased because of rising wage rates in
prospering England; soon thereafter African slaves replaced English indentured
labourers. Tobacco initially was the profitable crop that occupied most slaves
in the Chesapeake. The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793
changed the situation, and thereafter cotton culture created a huge demand for
slaves, especially after the opening of the New South (Alabama, Mississippi,
Louisiana, and Texas). By 1850 nearly two-thirds of the plantation slaves were
engaged in the production of cotton. Cotton could be grown profitably on smaller
plots than could sugar, with the result that in 1860 the average cotton
plantation had only about 35 slaves, not all of whom produced cotton. During the
reign of "King Cotton," about 40 percent of the Southern population
consisted of black slaves; the percentage of slaves rose as high as 64 percent
in South Carolina in 1720 and 55 percent in Mississippi in 1810 and 1860. More
than 36 percent of all the New World slaves in 1825 were in the southern United
States. Like Rome and the Sokoto caliphate, the South was totally transformed by
the presence of slavery. Slavery generated profits comparable to those from
other investments and was only ended as a consequence of the War Between the
States. |
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Organized commerce began in the
Neolithic Period, and it may be assumed that slaves were not far behind
high-value items such as amber and salt in becoming commodities. Even among
relatively simple peoples one can trace the international slave
trade. Thus such a trade was going on among the peoples of Siberia before
the arrival of the Russians in the 16th and 17th centuries. The slaves so traded
were neighbouring people captured in warfare, who were then shipped to distant
points where they would be without kin and whence they would be unlikely to
flee. Similar commerce in slaves occurred on nearly all continents and provided
the bulk of household slaves throughout the world. |
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The international slave trades that
provided much of the chattel for the slave societies flowed out of the great
"population reservoirs." Two such reservoirs were the Slavs and
contiguous agriculturalist Iranians from antiquity to the 19th century and the
sub-Saharan Africans from around the beginning of the Christian Era to the
middle of the 20th century. A third such reservoir probably was the Germanic,
Celtic, and Romance peoples who lived north of the Roman Republic and Empire and
who half a millennium later became the victims of the Vikings'
slave raids. The dynamics of these raids were as follows: A large demand for
slave labour prompted neighbouring peoples (typically migratory or nomadic in
habit) to prey on the sedentary agriculturalists living in the reservoir. The
raiders developed techniques, of which surprise was perhaps the major one, that
put the settled peoples at a disadvantage, for they never knew when and where
the raiders might strike. Populations in the reservoir could be completely
depleted, as happened to the East Slavs living in the steppe south of the Oka
and between the Volga and the Dnepr rivers from 1240 to the 1590s, or they could
migrate half a continent away to escape the slave raiders, as did the Ndembu in
Africa. Ruthenians, frontier Poles, Caucasians, and numerous African peoples
were sorely depleted by slave raids. One alternative was to fight back, as did
the Muscovite Russians and the Baya of Adamawa
(now northern Cameroon in West Africa), and the consequence in both instances
was the creation of an authoritarian garrison state. |
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The international slave trades developed
into elaborate networks. For example, in the 9th and 10th centuries Vikings and
Russian merchants took East Slavic slaves into the Baltic. They were then
gathered in Denmark for further transshipment and sold to Jewish and Arabic
slave traders, who took them to Verdun and León. There some of the males
were castrated. From those places the slaves were sold to harems throughout
Moorish Spain and North Africa. In the 9th century the Baghdad caliphate got
slaves from western Europe via Marseille, Venice, and Prague; Slavic and Turkic
slaves from eastern Europe and Central Asia via Derbent, Itil, Khorezm, and
Samarkand; and African slaves via Mombasa, Zanzibar, the Sudan, and the Sahara.
The Mongols in the 13th century brought their slaves first to Karakorum, whence
they were sold throughout Asia, and then later to Sarai on the Lower Volga,
whence they were retailed throughout much of Eurasia. Following the breakup of
the Golden Horde, the Crimean Tatars took their chattel to Kefe (Feodosiya) in
the Crimea, whence it was transported across the Black Sea and sold throughout
the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere. Arabs developed similar supply networks out of
black Africa across the Sahara, across the Red Sea (from Ethiopia and Somalia),
and out of East Africa, which supplied the Islamic world and the Indian
Ocean region with human chattel. |
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Beginning around 1500 a similar process
occurred along the coast of West Africa to supply the transatlantic slave trade.
The Africans were captured by other Africans in raids and then transported to
the coast; one may assume that the number of casualties of African slave raiding
was nearly as high as that of Crimean Tatar slave raiding. The captives,
primarily adult males, were assembled on the coast by African rulers and kept in
holding pens until wholesaled to European ship captains who sailed up and down
the coast looking for slave cargo. (As stated above, the women and children
often were not sent to the coast for export but were kept by the Africans
themselves, often for incorporation into their lineages.) African rulers, who
did not allow the Europeans to move inland, often conducted their wholesale
business on the coast, such as at Ouidah in Dahomey (now Benin). (Because of the
disease climate the Europeans also were reluctant, even unable, to move inland
until the mid-19th century.) But African rulers did everything they could to
encourage the European sea captains to come to their port. |
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Once a ship was loaded, the trip, known
as "the Middle Passage," usually to
Brazil or an island in the Caribbean, was a matter of a few weeks to several
months. Between 1500 and the end of the 19th century the time of the voyage
diminished considerably. That change was important, because death rates, which
ranged from around 10 to more than 20 percent on the Middle Passage, were
directly proportional to the length of the voyage. The ship captains had every
interest in the health of their cargo, for they were paid only for slaves
delivered alive. The death rates among the European captains and crew engaged in
the slave trade were at least as high as those among their cargo on the Middle
Passage. Of the slave-ship crews that embarked from Liverpool in 1787, less than
half returned alive. (see also United
Kingdom) |
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Arriving in Brazil or the Caribbean
islands, the slaves were sold at auction. The slave auctions were elaborate
markets in which the prices of the slaves were determined. The auctions told the
captains and their superiors what kind of cargo was in demand, usually adult
males. Credit almost always was part of the transaction, and inability to
collect was one of the major reasons companies went bankrupt. After the auction
the slave was delivered to the new owner, who then put him to work. That also
began the period of "seasoning" for the slave, the period of about a
year or so when he either succumbed to the disease environment of the New World
or survived it. Many slaves landed on the North American mainland before the
early 18th century had already survived the seasoning process in the Caribbean. |
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It can be assumed that the other
international slave trades were comparable in many respects to the transatlantic
one, but they have not been adequately studied. |
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Slavery came to an end in numerous ways.
Household slavery ended because of an exhaustion of supplies, because slavery
evolved into some other system of dependent labour, because it withered away, or
because it was formally abolished. Productive slavery came to an end for the
additional reasons that it ceased to be profitable or that it was abolished by
warfare or the threat of warfare. |
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Throughout history there have been
people who in one way or another believed that slavery was not a good or natural
condition. Jean Bodin (1530-96), the French
founder of antislavery thought, for example, condemned the institution as
immoral and counterproductive and advocated that no group of men should be
excluded from the body politic. Nevertheless, remarkably few people found the
institution of slavery to be unnatural or immoral until the second half of the
18th century. Until that time Christians commonly thought of sin as a kind of
slavery rather than slavery itself as a sin. When concern was expressed for
slaves, it was for their good care, not for their unfree status. |
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Frequently, when slavery passed from the
scene, it did so with little fanfare. In most societies, such as ancient
Babylonia, Israel, Egypt, or Athens, the institution of slavery had little or no
connection with the society's rise or demise. In Rome, on the other hand,
slavery began to yield to tenancy and the antecedents of serfdom before the fall
of the empire, as the diminishing supply of slaves and the rise of their price
coincided with the disintegration of the olive oil- and wine-producing
plantations of southern Italy and loss of markets in the face of competition
from Spain, Gaul, and North Africa. (This standard interpretation has been
challenged, however.) In the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) serfdom was the
predominant form of dependent labour, and slavery was definitely secondary.
Manumitting slaves became much easier, according to the laws, and the Ecloga and
the Procheiron Nomos (see below) prescribed that the slaves of persons who died
without testament had to be freed. Throughout most of Europe household slavery
persisted well into the late Middle Ages and even later and only gradually died
out. Slavic slaves were plentiful, for example, in the Italian city-states as
late as the 14th century, and African slaves could be found in Spain and
Portugal in the 16th century. Serfdom replaced slavery in medieval Germany. By
the end of the Middle Ages slavery no longer existed in England,
and the famous Cartwright decision of the reign of Elizabeth I (1569) held that
"England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in." |
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Slavery persisted longer in eastern
Europe. In Poland it was replaced by the second enserfment; the sale and
purchase of slaves were forbidden in the 15th century. A similar process
occurred in Lithuania, where slavery was formally abolished in 1588. In Russia
it came to an end with the first enserfment: agricultural slaves were formally
converted into serfs in 1679, and household slaves were converted into house
serfs in 1723. In the Caucasus and in Central Asia slavery persisted until the
second half of the 19th century. As the Russian Empire grew and its hegemony
spread, it adopted the tendency of 19th-century imperialist powers to enforce
abolition when embarking upon colonization. Thus the conquest of the Caucasus
led to the abolition of slavery by the 1860s and the conquest in Central Asia of
the Islamic khanates of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Khiva by the 1870s. |
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The reexportation of slaves from England
was challenged by a group of humanitarians led by Granville Sharpe. Chief
Justice Mansfield ruled in 1772 that James Somerset, a fugitive slave from
Virginia, could not be forcibly returned to the colonies by his master. The fate
of slavery in most of the rest of the world depended on the British abolition
movement, which was initiated by the English Quakers
in 1783 when they presented the first important antislavery petition to
Parliament. They were following the Pennsylvania Quakers, who had voiced
opposition to slavery in 1688. The Vermont
constitution of 1777 was the first document in the United States to abolish
slavery. Another sign of the spread of antislavery feeling was the declaration
in the U.S. Constitution that the importation of slaves could be forbidden after
20 years (in 1808). An act of March 2, 1807, forbade trading in slaves with
Africa. Well before the rise of cotton some people hoped that natural processes
combined with a prohibition on infusions would put an end to slavery. (see also Constitution of the United States of
America ) |
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In 1807 the British abolished the slave
trade with their colonies. In the Caribbean, slavery was abolished by British
Parliamentary fiat, effective July 31, 1834, when 776,000 slaves in the British
plantation colonies were freed. The British imperial emancipation can be
attributed to the growing power of the philanthropic movement and a double
switch in the focus of the British Empire, geographically from west (the
Caribbean) to east (India) and economically from protectionism to laissez-faire. |
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The British move in 1807 to abolish the
slave trade had an immediate impact on the juntas struggling for independence in
Spanish America. The slave trade was declared illegal in Venezuela and Mexico in
1810, in Chile in 1811, and in Argentina in 1812. In 1817 Spain signed a treaty
with Britain agreeing to abolish the slave trade in 1820, but the trade
continued to the remaining Spanish colonies until 1880. Chile freed its black
slaves in 1823; Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, and Peru in 1854. |
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The American antislavery movement,
linked to the "Second Great Awakening," succeeded in arousing immense
hostility between the non-slave North, where most states had voluntarily
abolished slavery by 1804, and the slaveholding South, where the "peculiar
institution" became even further entrenched because of the spread of cotton
cultivation. By the 1850s, however, the old abolition movement had flagged. It
took political developments and forces (especially the emergence of the
Free-Soil movement and the conflict over the expansion of slavery), the South's
secession, the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation on
Jan. 1, 1863, to put slavery on the road to extinction in the United States. The
proclamation was confirmed by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution,
which put an end to slavery. |
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Puerto Rico abolished slavery (with
provisions for periods of apprenticeship) in 1873 and Cuba in 1880. Brazil was
the last Western Hemisphere nation to abolish slavery. The British antislavery
movement of the 1810s had almost put an end to the institution, but a thriving
world market for coffee revitalized it in the 1820s. In 1850 Britain declared
that a squadron would enter Brazilian territorial waters to seize vessels
carrying slaves, and later that year Brazil responded by equating the slave
trade with piracy. On May 13, 1888, all Brazilian slaves were manumitted.
Initially there was some opposition by the coffee growers, but their resistance
crumbled immediately. |
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The European colonization movement of
the second half of the 19th century put an end to slavery in many parts of
Africa, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. The abolition of slavery in both Hindu
and Muslim India by Act V of 1843 meant only
that the British courts would not enforce claims to a slave, but the Penal Code
of 1861 made holding a slave a crime. Having seen to the abolition of slavery in
most of Latin America and South Asia, the British turned their attention back to
Africa. They moved onto the continent, took control of those governments that
were thriving on slavery, and attempted to abolish the institution. Lagos was
annexed in 1861, and all of Nigeria followed. In the 1870s British missionaries
moved into Malawi, the place of origin of the Indian Ocean Islamic
slave trade, in an attempt to interdict it at its very source. In 1890 Zanzibar
was made a British protectorate after the
sultan's authority had been destroyed by the struggle over the slave trade. In
Dahomey the French abolition of slavery resulted in the cessation of ceremonial
human sacrifice. |
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The Imperial government formally
abolished slavery in China in 1906, and the law became effective on Jan. 31,
1910, when all adult slaves were converted into hired labourers and the young
were freed upon reaching age 25. Slavery was legally abolished in Korea
in the Gap-o reform of 1894 but remained extant in reality until 1930. |
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Some parts of Africa and much of the Islamic
world retained slavery at the end of World War I. For this reason the League
of Nations and later the United Nations
took the final extinction of slavery to be one of their obligations. The league
had considerable success in Africa, with the assistance of the colonial powers,
and by the late 1930s slavery was abolished in Liberia and Ethiopia. After World
War II the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European
Convention of Human Rights proclaimed the immorality and the illegality of
slavery. Slavery was abolished in most Islamic countries, although it
persisted in Saudi Arabia into the 1960s. It finally was made illegal in the
Arabian Peninsula in 1962. It is probable that slavery no longer exists as a
legal phenomenon recognized by a political authority or government any place in
the world. |
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By definition slavery must be sanctioned
by the society in which it exists, and such approval is most easily expressed in
written norms or laws. Thus it is not accidental that even the briefest code of
a relatively uncomplicated slave-owning society was likely to contain at least a
few articles on slavery. |
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Both slave-owning and slave societies
that were part of the major cultural traditions borrowed some of their laws
about slavery from the religious texts of their respective civilizations.
Principles regarding slavery that proved to be either unprofitable or unworkable
were among the first to be discarded. An obvious example is provided by the Old
Testament law that Hebrew slaves were to be manumitted after six years
(Exodus 21:2; Deuteronomy 15:12). A similar general recommendation that slaves
be freed after six years in bondage was adhered to by many Islamic
slave-owning societies; it helps to account for the ferocity and frequency of
their slave raids, for they had a need for constant replenishment of their slave
supplies. In Christian slave societies, on the other hand, the principle that
the tenure of slavery should be limited was almost completely ignored. (see also
Christianity) |
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Practically every society that possessed
slaves wrote about them in its laws, and thus only a few codes can be mentioned
here. The ancient Mesopotamian laws of Eshnunna (c. 1900 BC) and the Code of Hammurabi had a number of articles
devoted to slavery, as did the Pentateuch. In ancient India
the Laws of Manu of the 1st century BC contained numerous laws on slaves. |
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Little is known about the Athenian law
of slavery, but the Roman law of slavery was
extraordinarily elaborate. Roman law was summed up in the great Pandects of
Justinian of AD 533, and some of its slave norms later found their way into the
Byzantine Ecloga (which incorporated Syrian norms as well) of AD 726 and, more
deliberately, into the Procheiron Nomos of AD 867-879. Romano-Byzantine norms
also found their way into the Bulgarian Court Law for the People ("Zakon
Sudnyi Liudem") of the end of the 9th century and the 13th-century
Ethiopian Fetha Nagast. (see also Justinian,
Code of) |
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The European "barbarian"
(Germanic) codes, which first appeared in the 5th century AD and remained in
effect for about half a millennium, were derived from customary law influenced
by Roman law. The slave statutes of the Russian Russkaya Pravda of the 11th-13th
century were all clearly of native East Slavic origin. The same was true of the
Muscovite court handbooks (Sudebniki) of 1497, 1550, 1589, and 1606. The
Muscovite Russians had a special government office to deal with slavery matters,
the Slavery Chancellery (1571-1704), and its practice became the basis of
chapter 20 of the great Ulozhenie of 1649, which constituted 119 of the 967
articles of the code; other articles dealt with slavery as well. |
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The Qur`an was the fundamental
starting point for Islamic law (Shari'ah), including the law of
slavery. It was supplemented by the ijma',
the scholarly legal consensus, and the qiyas,
juristic reasoning by analogy. Islamic law regulated in detail every part
of the institution of slavery, from the jihad (holy war) and the distribution of
booty to the treatment of slaves and emancipation. The last Islamic slave
law was promulgated in 1936 by King Ibn Sa'ud of Saudi Arabia, which
restated the teachings of the Qur`an. It also required owners to register
slaves with the government and licensed slave traders. (see also Shari'ah) |
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Some sub-Saharan African societies
followed Islamic law; others had their own. The latter ordinarily were
not systematized until the European colonization movement, and so their law of
slavery was oral common law. |
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Slavery was a relatively prominent
institution in the Chinese T'ang Code of the 7th century AD. Subsequently it was
mentioned in every Chinese law down to the 20th century and was also important
in the Korean legal system. The slavery norms of the Mongol Great Yassa of
Genghis Khan were locally generated, but subsequent Mongol law reveals
considerable influence of the T'ang Code. |
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The circum-Caribbean world had several
basic laws of slavery. The slave law of the Spanish-speaking colonies and then
independent countries was based on the Siete Partidas of 1263-65 of Alfonso X of
Castile and Léon and the Spanish Slave Code of 1789. Another important
code in Latin America was Louis XIV's Code Noir of 1685. The Louisiana Slave
Code of 1824 was based on the Siete Partidas and the Code Napoléon. |
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The Danish Virgin Islands had two
largely locally generated codes of 1733 and 1755, although they were approved by
the colonial administration of Denmark. The English colonies were completely
autonomous, for England had no law of slavery from which to borrow. The first
code was that of Barbados of 1688, whose origins are unknown. It was imitated by
the South Carolina code of 1740. Beginning with Virginia in 1662, each colony in
North America worked out its own ex post facto law of slavery before
independence, a process that continued after the creation of the United
States and until the Civil War. Slavery is mentioned only three times and
referred to at most 10 times (and then only indirectly) in the U.S.
Constitution, and, except for a handful of measures on fugitives, there was no
federal slave law. The basic protection for the institution of slavery was the
Tenth Amendment of 1791, the reserved powers clause, which left the issue of
slavery and other matters to the states. (see also Constitution
of the United States of America ) |
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Some of the definitions of slavery
discussed above were legal, but the majority were not. This section focuses
exclusively on legal definitions of slavery. Most groups, whether national or
religious, forbade the enslavement of their fellows; thus, the Spanish could not
enslave Spaniards, Arabs could not enslave Arabs, and Christians and Muslims
could not enslave their coreligionists. Legally the slave ordinarily had to be
an outsider. In law the slave was usually defined as property, and the question
then was whether he was movable property (chattel) or real property. In most
societies he was movable property but in some, real property. |
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Some societies, such as Muscovy in the
16th and 17th centuries, had different legal categories of slaves. There some
slaves were inherited, others were purchased forever, others for a limited time
could become perpetual slaves, and still others for specific functions such as
estate managers. Different varieties or gradations of slaves were found
elsewhere as well, as in China and in certain African societies. |
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The master-slave relationship was the
cornerstone of the law of slavery, and yet it was an area about which the law
often said very little. In many societies the subordination of the slave to his
owner was supposed to be complete; in general, the more complete an owner's
control over his slave, the less the law was likely to say about it. |
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A major touchstone of the nature of a
slave society was whether or not the owner had the right to kill his slave. In
most Neolithic and Bronze Age societies slaves had no such right, for slaves
from ancient Egypt and the Eurasian steppes were buried alive or killed to
accompany their deceased owners into the next world. Among the Northwest Coast
Tlingit, slave owners killed their slaves in potlatches to demonstrate their
contempt for property and wealth; they also killed old or unwanted slaves and
threw their bodies into the Pacific Ocean. An owner could kill his slave with
impunity in Homeric Greece, ancient India, the Roman Republic, Han China, Islamic
countries, Anglo-Saxon England, medieval Russia, and many parts of the American
South before 1830. |
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That was not the case in other
societies. The Hebrews, the Athenians, and the Romans under the principate
restricted the right of slave owners to kill their human chattel. The Code of
Justinian changed the definition of the slave from a thing to a person and
prescribed the death penalty for an owner who killed his slave by torture,
poison, or fire. Spanish law of the 1260s and 1270s denied owners the right to
kill their slaves. Lithuanian and Muscovite law forbade the killing, maiming, or
starving of a returned fugitive slave. Ch'ing Chinese law punished a master who
killed his slave, and that punishment was more severe if the slave had done no
wrong. The Aztecs under some circumstances put to death a slave owner who killed
his slave. No society, on the other hand, had the slightest sympathy for the
slave who killed his owner. Roman law even prescribed that all other slaves
living under the same roof were to be put to death along with the slave who had
committed the homicide. |
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Assault and general brutality were other
concerns of the law of slavery. In antiquity slaves often had the right to take
refuge in a temple to escape cruel owners, but that sometimes afforded little
protection. The ancient Franks and the Germans warned owners against cruelty.
The Code of Justinian and the Spanish Siete Partidas deprived cruel owners of
their slaves, and that tradition went into the Louisiana Black Code of 1806,
which made cruel punishment of slaves a crime. In modern societies brutality and
sadistic murder of slaves by their owners were rarely condoned on the grounds
that such episodes demoralized other slaves and made them rebellious, but few
slave owners were actually punished for maltreating their slaves. In the
American South 10 codes prescribed forced sale to another owner or emancipation
for maltreated slaves. Nevertheless, cases such as State
v. Hoover (North Carolina, 1839) and State v. Jones (Alabama,
1843) were considered sensational because slave owners were punished for
savagely "correcting" their slaves to death. |
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It was not an axiom of the master-slave
relationship that the former automatically had sexual access to the latter. That
was indeed the case in most societies, ranging from the ancient Middle East,
Athens, and Rome to Africa, all Islamic countries, and the American
South. Places such as Muscovy, however, forbade owners to rape their female
slaves, while the Chinese and the Lombards forbade the raping of married slave
women. More problematic were sexual relations between mistresses and male
slaves. Athens and Rome both put the slave to death, and Byzantine law
prescribed that the mistress was to be executed and the slave to be burned
alive. The Danish Virgin Islands' laws of 1741, 1755, and 1783, in an attempt to
protect northern Europeans from African "contamination," prescribed a
fine of 2,000 pounds of sugar for a man who raped a black slave, and a white
woman who had sexual relations with a black slave was to be fined, imprisoned,
and then deported. |
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The labour and food regimes were central
to almost every slave's life. In societies where the owner's control over his
slave was total, such as the Roman Empire or the pre-1830 American South, the
law said little or nothing about how long he could work him and whether his
slave had a right to food and clothing. In South India the slave owner had an
absolute right to whatever labour his slave was capable of rendering. In
Muscovy, on the other hand, a slave owner was jailed for forcing his slaves to
labour on Sunday. In Judea in 200 BC, in Sicily in 135-32 BC, and on the Nile in
AD 46 regulations prescribed the food rations a slave could expect. The
Lithuanian Statute of 1588 and the Russians in 1603 and 1649 decreed that slaves
had a right to be fed. The Danish Virgin Islands in 1755 prescribed adequate
food rations. The Alabama Slave Code of 1852 mandated that the owner had to
provide slaves of working age a sufficiency of healthy food, clothing, attention
during illness, and necessities in old age. |
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A major issue was whether the master had
to allow the slave to marry and what rights the owner had over slave offspring.
In general, a slave had far fewer rights to his offspring than to his spouse.
Babylonian, Hebrew, Tibetan-speaking Nepalese Nyinba, Siamese, and American
Southern slave owners thought nothing of breaking up both the conjugal unit and
the nuclear family. Unexpectedly the 1755 Danish Virgin Islands Reglement
prohibited separating minors from their parents. In Muscovy and China, slave
owners could sell or will children apart from their parents, but marriages were
inviolable. |
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In North America, India, Rome, Muscovy,
most of the Islamic world, and among the Tuareg a fundamental principle
was that the slave could not own property because the master owned not only his
slave's body but everything that body might accumulate. This did not mean,
however, that slaves could not possess and accumulate property but only that
their owners had legal title to whatever the slaves had. In a host of other
societies, such as ancient and Roman Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Talmudic
Palestine, Gortyn, much of medieval Germany, Thailand, Mongol and Ch'ing China,
medieval Spain, and the northern Nigerian emirates, slaves had the right of
property ownership. Some places, such as Rome, allowed slaves to accumulate,
manage, and use property in a peculium that was
legally revocable but could be used to purchase their freedom. This provision
gave slaves an incentive to work as well as the hope of eventual manumission. |
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Considerable research has been done on
the treatment of slaves, and the consensus is that, while the law may have
spelled out the desired social standards of master-slave relations, it did not
necessarily define the reality for any particular situation. Sadists, even
psychopaths, who could not cope with their right of total dominance over another
human being, might appear anywhere, as might kindly masters. More determining
than the law were the conditions of the society itself. At one extreme, among
the Tuareg of North Africa, the slave owners themselves often lived badly, and
so, of course, did their slaves. At the other extreme, in the American South
material conditions were sufficiently favourable to provide comparative comfort
for both masters and slaves. Moreover, slaves born of already enslaved parents
usually were treated much better than those purchased or captured from foreign
groups. The treatment of slaves in expansive, dynamic societies was likely to be
worse than in more stable ones. |
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There was more uniformity across systems
regarding legal relationships between slave owners. All societies had provisions
for the recovery of runaways, and most imposed sanctions on owners who stole
others' slaves (a capital offense in some systems) or helped them to flee. There
also were relatively uniform laws about passing slaves from one generation to
another. |
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There was considerable variability among
societies in the law of slave transactions. Whereas Roman-law societies had
elaborate norms on contracts, Muscovy had essentially none. Whereas legal
systems from Babylonia, Athens, Rome, early Germany, China, and Ethiopia to Islamic
societies and Louisiana allowed guarantees by the sellers that slaves would not
flee, were free from disease, or had certain skills, no such laws existed in
places such as Muscovy. |
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Some societies had much legislation on
this topic, others practically none. Where the slave was completely dependent on
his owner, few laws existed beyond the normal rules governing any form of
property; it was the owner's responsibility to recover damages if a third party
killed or assaulted either his cow or his slave. The owner, moreover, was held
equally or even more responsible for the slave's actions, ranging from homicide
to theft, than was the slave himself, for the society desired that the former
control his property and there was no assurance that sanctions, especially money
fines, could be enforced against slaves. |
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Homicide of a slave by a stranger was a
revealing test of a society's attitude toward the slave. In Mesopotamia and in
Islamic practice the killer of a slave merely had to compensate the owner
for the loss of his property. Elsewhere, however, it was different. Roman law
introduced the idea in the Lex Cornelia de Sicariis et Veneficis (the dictator
Sulla's enactment on murders and poisoners of 81 BC) that a slave was a person
and thus that killing a slave could be a crime. That provision found its way
into the Code of Justinian. In North America in
the period from 1770 to 1830 the killing of a slave was equated in common law
with the murder of a white person. Laws were uniformly harsh when a slave killed
a stranger who was a freeman. |
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Some societies did not allow third
parties to assault slaves with impunity. In Muscovy, for example, a slave might
have honour and could recover from a third party who injured his honour.
Societies elsewhere, however, such as the North American Yurok, Tlingit, and
other neighbouring Indians, as well as in the American South, explicitly stated
that slaves could have no honour, personal status, or prestige. South Carolina
law noted that the slave was not "within the peace of the state, and
therefore the peace of the state [was] not broken by an assault and battery on
him." Conversely, when a slave assaulted a freeman, the latter often
recovered from the slave's owner. Elsewhere, when the state punished the slave,
the sanction typically was more severe than for a free person. For example, in
Ch'ing China a slave was punished one degree more severely than free citizens
for offenses against a freeman. |
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Most societies, such as those in Athens,
Rome, Kievan Rus, Thailand, and Louisiana, did not allow slaves to contract
independently with third parties, although some allowed the slave to make a
contract on his owner's behalf. The brutal deprivation of rights was expressed
in the Alabama case Creswell's Executor
v. Walter (1860); the slave, said the
court, had "no legal mind, no will which the law can recognize. . . .
Because they are slaves, they are incapable of performing civil acts." On
the other hand, in a few societies, as in the ancient Middle East, slaves were
allowed to contract with third parties. Roman slaves were allowed to make
contracts in regard to third peculium. |
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A few societies, such as late Assyria
and Muscovy, allowed slaves to testify in court, but most did not. It was a rare
society that permitted a slave to serve as a witness against his owner, but some
societies, such as ancient Nuzi and Muscovy, allowed slaves to testify against,
even to sue, third parties. That was particularly likely to be the case when
slaves played a major role in the society, because disputes could not be
resolved by the freemen alone without resort to evidence provided by slaves. |
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Laws of manumission
varied widely from society to society and within societies across time. They are
often viewed as the litmus test of a particular society's views of the slave,
that is, of the capacities the slave was likely to exhibit as a free human
being. Many Islamic societies, broadly interpreting the Hebrew
prescription, generally prescribed that slave owners had to free their slaves
after the passage of a number of years, essentially the length of time they
considered it took for an "outsider" to become an "insider."
Most other societies allowed masters to free their slaves whenever they wished,
although there were exceptions. Some legal systems prescribed manumission when
the slave adopted the religion of his owner. It is hardly surprising that
manumission was more frequent in systems of household slavery, for intimate
relations between master and slave soon converted the outsider into an insider.
With notable exceptions, such as Athens, Rome, Muscovy, and some
circum-Caribbean societies, many societies required manumission after three
generations. |
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Birth was occasionally a route to
manumission. In thriving slave systems such as those of the New World, in harsh
systems such as those among the Northwest Coast Indians and the medieval
Germanic peoples, or even in milder systems such as those of the Chinese and the
Muscovites, a slave's offspring simply added to the slave population. But that
was not universally the case; African slave societies, such as the Dahomeans of
West Africa, the Ashanti of Ghana, or the Azande living between the Congo and
the Nile, prescribed that the offspring of slaves should be free, as part of the
process of incorporation into a new lineage. Although Islamic law did not
require manumission upon birth, the Qur`an recommended it, and slave
owners were often inclined to follow the religious tenet. The Aztecs freed all
children born in slavery except the offspring of traitors. In Thailand
emancipation was considered a pious act, and at their death many owners freed
their slaves. |
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The rate of manumission did not
necessarily correspond to the legal ease of manumission. It should be noted,
however, that in Rome manumission was relatively easy and was widely practiced,
even though there was a 5 percent tax on manumission in the Republic, and the
Lex Fufia Caninia of 2 BC forbade manumission by testament of more than a fifth
to a half of one's slaves, depending on the number owned. In much of sub-Saharan
Africa, manumission was common in most periods, and the freed person typically
became a kind of relative in a process of assimilation. In Neo-Babylonia, in
Late and Middle Assyria, and in Muscovy manumission was easy but rare; in the
American South manumission was comparatively difficult and almost never happened
after the prohibition on importing new slaves. The factors of institutional
dynamism, expansionism, and profitability, as well as race (see below), may have
been the most crucial variants for the South, where manumission was even
forbidden in South Carolina in 1820, Mississippi in 1822, Arkansas in 1858, and
Maryland and Alabama in 1860; other factors were at work in the ancient Middle
East and Muscovy. |
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There was considerable variation among
societies as to whether a slave was allowed to accumulate property that he might
keep after manumission. One form of such accumulation was the Roman peculium,
which legally belonged to the master. One of its heirs was called coartación,
the self-purchase system, widely used 1,500 years later in Latin America. |
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After manumission, most societies
prescribed a period of legal transition to freedom. In the Roman Empire, China,
and elsewhere, this period took three generations and might mean that the
grandchild of a slave owner (the "patron") was legally responsible for
the grandchild of a slave (his "client"). Thereafter the descendants
of the freedman became full members of society,
although perhaps still despised. The reason for the legally mandated period of
transition to freedom was clear: the slave initially was not a member of the
society but an outsider (see below), and it took time to become integrated into
the new society. Equally important, the slave was dependent on his owner, and it
took time for the freedman and his heirs to become fully self-reliant members of
society. If the slave owner and his heirs were not responsible for the freedmen,
the fear was, as expressed in the Louisiana Slave Code of 1824, that the latter
might otherwise become public wards. (see also Roman
law) |
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The slave generally was an outsider. He
ordinarily was of a different race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion from
his owner. The general rule, as enunciated by the specialist on classical
slavery Moses I. Finley, was that "no society could withstand the tension
inherent in enslaving its own members." In most cases, the slave was an
outsider because he was enslaved against his will in one society and then taken
by force to another. |
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As with nearly all rules, there were
exceptions, however. Korea, for reasons that are
not understood, was one. India was another exception, because of ritual
requirements that the social origins of intimate associates be known; there
slaves were ritually distanced from their owners. Muscovite Russia, which had
outsider slaves as well, was yet another exception, perhaps because the
boundaries between insiders and outsiders were blurred. A number of scholars
have pointed out that, although the status of the slaves was uniformly lower
than that of comparable free people in every society, the material and sometimes
other conditions of slaves were frequently better than those of free people;
thus it is not surprising that free people occasionally volunteered to be
slaves. What is somewhat more surprising is that so few societies found that
form of social welfare to be acceptable; most took measures to prohibit or
inhibit it. Solon in 594 BC, for example, forbade enslavement for debt in
Athens, and the Lex Poetelia Papiria did the same for Rome, c.
326 BC. Muscovy in 1597 prevented self- sale
into slavery from becoming hereditary by mandating manumission of such slaves on
their owners' deaths. |
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Regardless of the slave's origin, he was
nearly always a marginal person in the society in which he was enslaved. In
Africa slaves were despised, and their low status, which was passed on to
freedmen, persists to the present time. In most societies most slaves were at
the very bottom of society. |
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Slaves in most societies were despised.
This is best seen in the homology for slaves. The favourite homology was the
woman or wife, then the minor child or an animal. Other terms for slaves were
the apprentice, the pauper, the harlot, the felon, the actor, and the complex
image of the Southern "Sambo" or Caribbean "Quashee."
Throughout history slaves have often been considered to be stupid, uneducable,
childlike, lazy, untruthful, untrustworthy, prone to drunkenness, idle, boorish,
lascivious, licentious, and cowardly. In China slaves were considered to be
"mean" and "base"; in India they were fed table scraps. |
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The attitudes of the world's great
religions toward slavery are of special interest. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic
tradition has been the most tolerant of slavery. Judaic and Islamic
canonical texts refer frequently to slavery and treat it as a natural condition
that might befall anyone. But they view it as a condition that should be gotten
over quickly. Islamic practice was based on the assumption that the
outsider rapidly became an insider and consequently had to be manumitted after
six years. New Testament Christianity, on the
other hand, had no prescriptions that slaves be manumitted. Canon law sanctioned
slavery. This was attributable at least partially to Christianity's primary
focus on spiritual values and salvation after death rather than on temporal
conditions and the present life. Under such a regime it mattered little whether
someone was a slave or a free person while living on earth. |
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A major issue in the topic of attitudes
toward slavery is that of race. Although slaves were usually outsiders and often
despised, there nevertheless were different kinds of outsiders and different
degrees of contempt. Studies have shown that race made a difference. In Rome,
where most owners and slaves were white, manumission was frequent. In Africa,
where most owners and slaves were black, lineage incorporation was the primary
purpose of slavery, and in most societies slaves were allowed to participate in
many aspects of social life. In the American South, however, where the owners
were of northern European stock and the slaves of African stock, the degree of
social isolation of and contempt for slaves was extraordinary. Southern slaves
were forbidden to engage in occupations that might demonstrate their capacities,
intermarriage almost never occurred, and manumission was almost unheard of as
the reigning publicists proclaimed ever more loudly that blacks lacked any
capacity to maintain themselves as free individuals. (see also racism) |
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Throughout history the range of
occupations held by slaves has been nearly as broad as that held by free
persons, but it varied greatly from society to society. The actual range did not
depend upon whether the slave lived in a slave-owning or a slave society,
although the greatest restrictions appeared in the latter. (see also employment) |
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To start at the top, the highest
position slaves ever attained was that of slave minister, or ministerialis. Ministeriales existed in the Byzantine Empire,
Merovingian France, 11th-century Germany during the Salian dynasty, medieval
Muscovy, and throughout the Ottoman Empire. A few slaves even rose to be
monarchs, such as the slaves who became sultans and founded dynasties in Islam. |
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At a level lower than that of slave
ministers were other slaves, such as those in the Roman Empire, the Central
Asian Samanid domains, Ch'ing China, and elsewhere, who worked in government
offices and administered provinces. Some of those slaves were government
property, whereas others belonged to private individuals who employed them for
government work. |
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On a level similar to that of slaves
working in government were the so-called temple slaves. They were employed by
religious institutions in Babylonia, Rome, and elsewhere. Unless they were
ultimately destined for sacrifice to the gods, temple slaves usually enjoyed a
much easier life than other slaves. They served in occupations ranging from
priestess to janitor. |
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Slaves fought as soldiers and usually
were considered of high status. In some societies military slaves belonged to
private individuals, in others to the government. In 16th-century Muscovy, for
example, cavalrymen purchased slaves who fought alongside them on horseback; in
the later 17th century Muscovite slaves were relegated to guarding the baggage
train. A special type of slave soldier was the Ottoman janissary.
The Islamic Ottoman Turks confiscated Christian children (called
"the tribute children"), took them to Istanbul, and raised them to be
professional soldiers, or janissaries. Some janissaries served as members of the
palace guard and became involved in the succession struggles of the Ottoman
Empire. The Egyptian Mamluks were also professional soldiers of
slave origin who rose to run the entire country. The African Hausa of Zaria and
most Sudanic regimes included slaves in all ranks of the soldiery and command.
The canoe crews of the West African coast were usually slaves. The British even
had detachments of slave soldiers in the Caribbean. |
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Societies that explicitly refused to
employ slaves in combat, such as Athens in its fleet, Rome in its infantry
legions, or the American South in the Civil War, were rare. They took such
action because fighting was done by freemen, and it was feared that it would be
necessary to free the slaves if they could fight. In fact, all of those slave
societies occasionally resorted to using slave soldiers when their military
situations became desperate. |
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In many societies slaves were employed
as estate managers or bailiffs. This was especially likely to be the case when
it was deemed unfitting for freemen to take or give orders involving other
freemen. Where such cultural taboos existed, managers were almost always either
real outsiders (imported foreigners) or fictive outsiders (slaves). In Muscovy
estate managers were a special category of slave, and they were the first whose
registration with the central authorities was required. |
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Still other high-status slaves worked as
merchants. Before the invention of the corporation, using slaves was one way to
expand the family firm. The practice seems to have begun in Babylonia and was
perpetuated in Rome, Spain, the Islamic world,
China, and Africa. Slaves were entrusted with large sums of money and were given
charge of long-distance caravans. A few slaves in Muscovy were similarly
employed in the Siberian fur trade. Other societies, particularly in the
American South, forbade slaves to engage in commerce out of fear that they would
sell stolen goods. |
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In nearly all societies possessing
slaves, some slaves were found in what might be termed urban occupations ranging
from petty shopkeepers to craftsmen. In the Tredegar Iron Works of Richmond,
Va., much of the labour force consisted of slaves. In the American South,
ancient Rome, Muscovy, and many other societies, slaves worked as carpenters,
tailors, and masons. In Bursa, Tur., some of the finest weaving ever done was by
slave craftsmen, who often contracted to fulfill a certain amount of work in
exchange for emancipation. The stereotype that slaves were careless and could
only be trusted to do the crudest forms of manual labour was disproved countless
times in societies that had different expectations and proper incentives. |
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Only a small portion of slaves
throughout history were fortunate enough to be employed in elite or prestige
occupations. Most were assigned to strictly physical labour, sometimes the most
degrading a society had to offer. |
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Among the worst forms of slave
employment were prostitution and occupations demanding hard physical labour.
Mining, often conducted in dangerous conditions causing high death rates, seems
to have been the worst. The silver mines at Laurium employed as many as 30,000
slaves, who contributed to the prosperity on which Athenian democracy was based.
Slaves were also used in gold mining in Africa and in gold and silver mining in
Latin America. Gold and coal mining employed (and killed) millions of state
slaves of the Gulag in the Soviet Union between the 1920s and 1956. Slaves have
been used on great construction projects such as military fortifications, roads,
irrigation projects, and temples from Babylonian to Soviet times. Timber felling
for lumber and firewood was another form of hard slave labour, as in the Gulag.
Yet another form of brutal slave labour was rowing in the galleys, particularly
those that belonged to the Ottoman Empire and sailed the Mediterranean. Tens of
thousands of Slavs, victims of Crimean Tatar slave raids, first suffered a
hellish existence in the Crimea itself and then ended their days rowing on
Ottoman triremes. |
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Large numbers of slaves were employed in
agriculture. As a general rule, slaves were considered suitable for working some
crops but not others. Slaves rarely were employed in growing grains such as rye,
oats, wheat, millet, and barley, although at one time or another slaves sowed
and especially harvested all of these crops. Most favoured by slave owners were
commercial crops such as olives, grapes, sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, and
certain forms of rice that demanded intense labour to plant, considerable
tending throughout the growing season, and significant labour for harvesting.
The presence or absence of such crops and their relative profitability were
among the major determinants of whether or not a slave-owning society became a
slave society. In the Roman Empire employment in olive groves and vineyards
occupied many slaves. Sugar cultivation made 9th-century Iraq into a slave
society. Rice, coconut, coffee, clove, kola nut, peanut, and sesame cultivation
were central occupations in some African societies. |
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The great discovery in Brazil
in the second half of the 16th century was the gang labour system, which was so
cost-effective that it made Brazilian sugar cheaper in Europe than the sugar
produced in the islands off Africa. A plantation using gang labour could
produce, on average, 39 percent more output from comparable inputs than could
free farms or farms employing non-gang slave labour. The secret of success was
that slaves could be driven, whereas free labour could not; this led to the
creation of very profitable gangs of slaves supervised by white overseers and
black drivers. Tobacco and coffee cultivation also used gang labour, but
cultivation of these crops was less physically demanding than that of sugar and
cotton and led to much lower mortality rates than did sugar and rice. |
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Throughout history domestic service was
probably the major slave occupation. Drawing water, hewing wood, cleaning,
cooking, waiting on table, taking out the garbage, shopping, child-tending, and
similar domestic occupations were the major functions of slaves in all
slave-owning societies. In a major productive slave system, the Roman Empire at
the time of Augustus and later, the richest 5 percent of Italy's population
owned 1,000,000 house slaves (another 2,000,000 were employed elsewhere, out of
a total population of about 7,500,000 people). In yet another productive slave
system, the American South, large numbers of slaves also worked in their owners'
houses. A related function was concubinage,
unquestionably one of the major uses of female slaves since the beginning of the
institution and particularly prevalent in China. Some societies prescribed that
a concubine who bore her owner children was to be freed; others, ranging from
the ancient Middle East to the European Middle Ages, specified that the
offspring of free-slave unions were to be freed. Rome and the American South
were unusual in believing that all concubines and offspring should remain
enslaved. Added to this in Africa was the function of lineage expansion, one of
the major purposes of slavery in the sub-Saharan region. |
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It is sometimes alleged that slavery and
marriage were totally incompatible, for recognition of the husband-wife bond
would have limited intolerably the slave owner's authority and his right to
dispose of his property. Historically, however, such a view is incorrect.
Limitations on the right to dispose of property have been frequent throughout
history, and slaves were no exception. Thus, slave marriages
were recognized in a number of slave-owning societies, including Carthage,
Hellenistic Greece, late Byzantium, most of the Roman Catholic medieval world,
Ch'ing China, Hindu India, Thailand, the Tlingit
and Kwakiutl, and Oregon coast tribes. Hanbali Muslims stated that
a slave could insist that his master provide him with a spouse, and Ming Chinese
masters were obliged to choose mates for their female slaves when the latter
were in their teens and for males around the age of 20. In Russia marriage
between a free person and a slave was recognized legally, but according to one
of the oldest Russian laws the free person became enslaved by marrying a slave.
In Muscovy if a married slave fled, remarried, and was subsequently apprehended,
he was to be rejoined to the first spouse. (see also Greece,
ancient) |
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In the majority of slave societies (the
Danish Virgin Islands excepted), on the other hand, slave marriages were not
recognized in law and were not something that slave owners had to think about
legally when disposing of slaves. For example, the Louisiana Code of 1824
explicitly stated that a slave had no right to be married. Nevertheless, even in
these societies, including Rome, the American South, and West Indian Barbuda,
slaves formed what they considered marriages and had children. Southern slave
owners often recognized such marriages (even across estate boundaries) and their
offspring because to have done otherwise would have interfered with production.
In Brazil slave marriages were recognized by the Roman Catholic Church and
recognized by law in 1869, but in 1875 only one-sixth of the slaves of
marriageable age were recorded as married or widowed. |
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Slave demography was frequently
determined by the occupational employment of the slaves. Consequently, sexual
imbalance was not at all unusual. In 9th-century France on the Abbey of Saint
Germain des Prés' territory there were nearly three male slaves for every
female, presumably because of the demand for agricultural labourers. In late
medieval Europe, on the other hand, there was a great demand for female slaves
as domestics and concubines. The same was true in China, where by the end of the
Ch'ing era the institution of slavery had become primarily a female one. In
early modern Russia there were two male slaves for every female because of a
market demand for cavalrymen, military body servants, and domestics who could
perform heavy labour. Concubinage, moreover, was illegal, and those who sold
themselves into slavery practiced female infanticide before selling themselves.
In many parts of Africa the demand was primarily for women and children for the
purpose of incorporation into and expansion of lineages. Adult males were often
killed unless they could be exported abroad. Such export conveniently fit into
the circum-Caribbean demand for productive slaves to work in sugar, tobacco, and
cotton production. Consequently, twice as many males as females and relatively
few children under age 10 were shipped to the New World. |
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One of the notions about slavery has
been that slaves rarely reproduced themselves in bondage. Given the skewed
demographic profile of many slave societies, it is not surprising that they
failed to do so. The slaves of the Athenian Laurium silver mines or the Cuban
sugar plantations, for example, lived in largely male societies. In Islamic
slave-owning societies, castration and infibulation curtailed slave
reproduction. |
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The major exception to the rule was
North America, where slaves began to procreate in significant numbers in the
mid-18th century. This fact helped the slave owners survive the cutting off of
imports in 1808. Between the censuses of 1790 and 1860 the slave population of
the South expanded enormously--from 657,327 to 3,838,765--one of the fastest
rates of population growth ever recorded prior to the advent of modern medicine.
Paradoxically, although the Southern slave regime was one of the most
dehumanizing ever recorded, it was one of the most favourable on record
demographically, because the nutritional and general living environments were
highly conducive to explosive population growth. Without significant imports the
Southern slave population increased fourfold between the early 1800s and 1860. |
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The ages of slave populations also were
determined partially by productive requirements. As mentioned above, in Africa
children were preferred for incorporation into lineages, whereas in much of the
circum-Caribbean world adults were demanded for production. As a consequence,
the age pyramids of both societies were skewed; in Africa children predominated,
in much of the New World people over age 15. In Muscovy, to take another
example, the age structure was skewed toward young adults, for it was primarily
young adult males (aged 15-25) who sold themselves into slavery. |
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Throughout history human beings have
objected to being enslaved and have responded in myriad ways ranging from
individual shirking, alcoholism, flight, and suicide to arson, murdering owners,
and mass rebellion. Perhaps the most common individual response to enslavement
was sluggishness, passivity, and indifference. A nearly universal stereotype of
the slave was of a lying, lazy, dull brute who had to be kicked or whipped.
There probably were three mutually reinforcing factors at work: an unconscious
response to overcontrol and absence of freedom, a conscious effort to sabotage
the master's desires, and a conditioned response to the expectation of
stereotypical behaviour. Some owners tried to overcome such behaviour by a
system of incentives or by strict regimentation, such as the gang system, but
historically they were in a minority. Less frequent was suicide. A number of
slaves are known to have jumped overboard during the Middle Passage because they
feared that the transatlantic voyage was taking them to be eaten by witches or
barbarians, a fate that seemed worse than drowning. |
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Flight, either individually or in
groups, was one of the most visible forms of protest against enslavement. The
rates of flight, which varied greatly from society to society throughout
history, usually depended less on individual slave-owner conduct than on the
likelihood of success. Immediate conditions, such as the brutality of an
overseer or master or a temporary lapse of supervision, often precipitated slave
flight, but willingness to undertake such a form of rebellion against the system
was usually determined by such factors as the accessibility of refuge or the
ability to blend in with the free population (some societies marked slaves to
inhibit such blending). Slave flight was infrequent in societies such as the
peacetime American South or in West Africa, where a refuge of freedom was very
distant. In East Africa, where flight was curtailed by slave owners united in
their desire to prevent it in spite of a high demand for labour, runaways joined
neighbouring communities and then raided their former masters. For more than two
centuries fugitive slaves in Brazil known as maroons set up independent
polities, or quilombos,
that lasted for years. Maroon communities were found in many other places in
Latin America and the Caribbean as well. In Muscovy, where most of the slaves
were natives or of similar origin (Poles and Swedes), where there was an open
frontier, and where masters had no compunction about taking in other owners'
slaves, the rate of flight was very high; and as many as a quarter to a third of
the slaves ran away. In China flight by male slaves was also common. During the
American Revolution, when the slave owners were occupied with fighting the
British, fugitive slaves numbered in the tens of thousands. |
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Direct, personal attacks on slave owners
often were determined by the nature of the slave regime. Where owners believed
they enjoyed automatic sexual access to female slaves, both the women and their
"husbands" were prone to respond by assaulting the owners or their
agents. In Hausaland, killings by concubines instilled great fear in slave
owners. Where slaves were driven, assault on the drivers was not an uncommon
response. As a result, overseers in the Mississippi Valley feared for their
lives and constantly carried arms. |
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The most dramatic form of slave protest
was outright rebellion. Slave uprisings varied enormously in frequency, s | | | |
