Written by Classical Liberal
(Part 1 was published here yesterday)
Turning to my third point, a series of the most well-known historical examples of slavery demonstrate that slavery has occurred in almost every society at one time or another.
Three types of enslavement existed in Pharaonic Egypt: chattel slavery, bonded labour, and forced labour.
Records of slavery in Ancient Greece begin with Mycenaean Greece. Classical Athens had the largest slave population, with as many as 80,000 in the 6th and 5th centuries BC. The Roman Republic enslaved entire people across Europe and the Mediterranean as it expanded outward. Slaves provided labour and amusement (e.g., gladiators and sex slaves). By the late Republican era, slavery had become an economic pillar of Roman wealth, as well as Roman society. At least 25% of the population of Ancient Rome were slaves.
In Britain, slavery continued following the fall of Rome, and sections of Hywel the Good‘s laws dealt with slaves in medieval Wales. The trade notably picked up after the Viking invasions, with significant markets at Chester and Bristol supplied by Danish, Mercian, and Welsh raiding of one another’s borderlands. At the time of the Domesday Book, nearly 10% of the English population were slaves. William the Conqueror introduced a law preventing the sale of slaves overseas. According to historian John Gillingham, by 1200, Slavery in the British Isles was non-existent.
Slavery also existed throughout Asia in the early modern period. Slavery existed in ancient China as early as the Shang dynasty. Governments primarily employed slavery as a means of maintaining a public labour force. The Mongol invasion of China resulted in the enslavement of many Han Chinese. Later, during the Yuan dynasty, Han Chinese owned Mongolian slaves. The Tang dynasty in China purchased Western slaves from the Radhanite Jews. Tang Chinese soldiers and pirates enslaved Koreans, Turks, Persians, Indonesians, and people from Inner Mongolia, central Asia, and northern India. The most significant source of slaves came from southern tribes, including Thais and aboriginals from the southern provinces of Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, and Guizhou. Malays, Khmers, Indians, and ‘black skinned’ peoples (who were either Austronesian Negritos of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, or Africans, or both) also became slaves in the Tang dynasty.
Slavery in India was widespread by the 6th century BC, and perhaps even as far back as the Vedic period. Slavery intensified during the Muslim domination of northern India after the 11th-century. Slavery existed in Portuguese India after the 16th century. The Dutch, too, primarily dealt in Abyssian slaves, known in India as Habshis or Sheedes. Arakan/Bengal, Malabar, and Coromandel remained the largest sources of forced labour until the 1660s.
The hill tribe people in Indochina were ‘hunted incessantly and carried off as slaves by the Siamese (Thai), the Anamites (Vietnamese), and the Cambodians’. The census, taken in 1879, showed that 6% of the population in the Malay sultanate of Perak were slaves.
After the Portuguese first contacted Japan in 1543, a large-scale slave trade developed. Portuguese purchased Japanese as slaves in Japan and sold them to various locations overseas, including Portugal, throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. Some Korean slaves were also bought by the Portuguese and brought back to Portugal from Japan, where they had been among the tens of thousands of Korean prisoners of war transported to Japan during the Japanese invasions of Korea (1592–98).
Some of the Pacific Northwest Coast indigenous peoples, in what became Canada, such as the Haida and Tlingit, were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave traders, raiding as far as California.
It is possible to trace slavery in Mexico back to the Aztecs. Other Amerindians, such as the Inca of the Andes, Tupinambá of Brazil, Creek of Georgia, and Comanche of Texas, also practiced slavery.
Slavery in Brazil began long before the first Portuguese settlement was established in 1532, as members of one tribe would enslave captured members of another. During the Atlantic slave trade era, Brazil imported more African slaves than any other country. Nearly 5 million slaves were brought from Africa to Brazil during the period from 1501 to 1866. Forty percent of the total number of slaves brought to the Americas was sent to Brazil. For reference, the United States received 10 percent. Slavery also existed in Barbados, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Suriname.
Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of human chattel enslavement, primarily of Africans and African Americans, which existed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Following independence from the British and before the end of the American Civil War. Slavery had been practiced in British America from early colonial days and was legal in all Thirteen Colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Slavery had become institutionalized as a racial caste associated with African ancestry by the American Revolution. The United States became polarized over slavery, represented by the slave and free states divided by the Mason–Dixon Line, which separated free Pennsylvania from slave Maryland and Delaware.
During the Jefferson administration, Congress prohibited the importation of slaves, effective 1808, although smuggling (illegal importing) was not unusual. Domestic slave trading, however, continued at a rapid pace, driven by labour demands from the development of cotton plantations in the Deep South. Those states attempted to extend slavery into the new western territories to keep their share of political power in the nation. Such laws proposed to Congress to continue the spread of slavery into newly ratified states include the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
More than one million slaves were sold from the Upper South, which had a surplus of labour, and taken to the Deep South in forced migration, splitting up many families. The total slave population in the South eventually reached 4 million before liberation, as new communities of African-American culture developed in the Deep South.
When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election on a platform of halting the expansion of slavery, according to the 1860 US census, roughly 400,000 individuals, representing 8% of all US families, owned nearly 4,000,000 slaves. One-third of Southern families owned slaves. Slavery characterised the South. Upon Lincoln’s election, seven states broke away to form the Confederate States of America. The first six states to secede held the most significant number of slaves in the South. Shortly after, over the issue of slavery, the United States erupted into an all-out Civil War, with slavery legally ceasing as an institution following the war in December 1865.
Slavery also existed in Oceania in the early modern period. Slaves (he mōkai) had a recognised social role in traditional Māori society in New Zealand. Blackbirding occurred in the Pacific, especially in the 19th century. Blackbirding involves the coercion of people through deception or kidnapping to work as slaves or poorly paid labourers in countries distant from their native land. The large-scale enslavement of people indigenous to the numerous islands in the Pacific Ocean during the 19th and 20th centuries is an example of blackbirding.
In conclusion, we are all equally guilty of participating in slavery: black as much as white. And, our ancestors are all equally likely to have been enslaved: white as much as black. To suggest otherwise is either lazy scholarship or just downright disingenuous.
In 2019, approximately 40 million people, of whom 26 percent were children, were enslaved throughout the world despite it being illegal. More than 50 percent of enslaved people provide forced labour in the modern world, usually in the factories and sweatshops of the private sector of a country’s economy. Human trafficking is a modern variety of slavery; in the unindustrialised countries, enslavement by debt bondage is a common form of enslaving a person, such as captive domestic servants, forced marriage, and child soldiers.
BLM is so obsessed with the slavery in the USA that ended over 150 years ago, yet shows very little interest in the plight of black people who are still enslaved in Africa today. This suggests that BLM are cultural Marxists. They are more concerned with using the historical suffering of black people in the USA to beat the white patriarchy than to improve the lives of black people.
My ancestors might have been enslaved by Danish, Mercian, or Welsh raiding parties and sold at slave markets at Chester and Bristol. Yet, I don’t play on this as an excuse to demand preferential treatment. Equally, my ancestors might have been the slavers mentioned above. Nobody knows for sure. In which case, slavery should stay buried deep in the distant past.
Well done – an enlightening read.
An inconvenient truth which BLM and ‘Woke’ don’t want to admit, is that it was the combined power of ‘White’ capitalism, the British Empire and the Royal Navy that extinguished slavery in the 19th Century. Coastal settlements in Britain and Ireland had been scourged by Barbary pirates throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, with captives being carried off to inhumane treatment in the souks of Algiers and Istanbul; estimated to be at least 25,000 English and Irish during the 17thC alone, proportionally equivalent to a quarter of a million people today. South-western towns such as Plymouth suffered disproportionately. ‘Rule Britannia’ was written in the 1740’s as an ode to the growing power of the Royal Navy; the line ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’ reflected the public’s relief that their communities were no longer under threat.
Another inconvenient truth is that the trans-Atlantic slave trade would not have developed on the scale that it did without the willing complicity of local African chieftans and their Arab middlemen, who had been conducting slave trading for many centuries before the white man arrived. When Britain banned the practice in its colonies, local African chiefs protested and lobbied governments strenuously in an attempt to protect their lucrative trade.
Slavery is not just a historic issue, it is alive and flourishing in our present-day ‘gig’ economy. ‘It Still Happens Here: Fighting UK Slavery in the 2020’s’ (Modern Slavery Policy Unit), estimates 100,000 modern slaves here in the UK, mainly illegal migrants, the victims of human traffickers, sweatshop business owners and criminal gangs. The authorities don’t seem to want to do much about it and very few convictions are brought.
We can make a start by giving BLM the elbow rather than bending the knee.
Thanks John information that Barbary pirates once plundered our and Irish shores for slaves is news for me
The cultural Marxists certainly know how to play the white guilt card to further their toxic agenda.
For further reading on slavery, and particularly about the anti slave-trade campaigner, William Wilberforce, I suggest his biography by William Hague. I found the book informative, well balance and easy to read.
I would say that there is a clear distinction between “slave trading” and “enslaving”. The British may have at one time been very active slave traders but they had very little to do with the enslaving. If there had been no slave markets in West Africa there would have been no slaves to trade.
It is a while since I read the William Hague book, but as I recall there was much fighting between the tribes of Africa, and those on the loosing side were taken away as slaves or killed. Once it was known that instead of killing the defeated they could be sold to the Slave Market owners that was an attractive course of action. So, to some extent, it might be argued that the slave trade saved lives.
Alan I read much the same points in a different book. I’m sure that is correct that tribes fighting each other took prisoner the ones that could trek to the markets.
Classical Liberal, you might have mentioned this, but since Gaddafi was overthrown in Libya slave markets have returned there. Refugees who’ve got to Libya from south of the Sahara are being kidnapped and auctioned in outdoor slave markets there. I read about it in Newsweek, I think the headline was “Humans For Sale”.
Shouldn’t this excellent expose be sent on to David Lammy and Diane Abbott? If anyone finds their e mail addresses we could ensure that they receive multiple copies!! There must be many more political figures who could benefit from knowing that this information exists in the public domain. Pity the MSM won’t carry it. But of course they won’t! It would ruin their carefully cultivated narrative about the poor wronged and downtrodden ‘people of colour’!
As a detail I asked as a comment in the first chapter ( part one, I cannot believe this will be Classical Liberal’s last covering on ongoing slavery, which is just as necessary now as it was in Wilberforce’s day) whether Press Ganging naval seamen was a semi legal form of slavery.
I believe I found my answer in Classical Liberals definition of Blackbirding “the coercion and kidnapping of people………….) I don’t suppose it mattered what colour or other ethnicity the victims exhibited, I don’t suppose press ganging was essentially a night time operation.
Finally these two parts have been a wonderful addition to my education on the wider issues involved in slavery and I consider it is absolutely necessary that these writings are dispersed widely., ingested and ANSWERED by the MSM and politicians of the world.
We do, each of us, have a hand equally in the whole messy business, either as slave or slave owner or slave instigator or even all three
But there must also be the realisation that you must not visit the sins of the fathers on sons, nor daughters and you certainly are not at liberty to impute additional sins circumstantial evidence or any other garbled made up nonsense.such as BLM and their cohorts churn out
“…slavery should stay buried deep in the distant past. ”
Indeed it should; and some way must be found to publicly discredit the openly racist BLM rather than supporting it…
Agreed Jack Thomas.