Slavery

The condition of a human being who is the property of another. It may vary from the extreme 'rightlessness' of the Roman servus, whose labour could be exploited and his life taken by his master with impunity (although later, in the Christian era, this constituted murder), to the mitigated rigour of the ascripti glebae, or serfs of the soil of the later empire and the Middle Ages, who, though they passed with the soil and were bound to remain on it, had some of the position of freemen. Slavery may be a status to which a man was born, or thrust upon him by debt, capture in war, or his own crimes; or, as in America, it may be rather the condition of having to perform compulsory labour at the will of a conquering people.

In Rome the sentiments against slavery inspired by the Christian teaching, or expressed in language borrowed from the Stoic philosophy, produced penalties for ill treatment of slaves rather than a tendency to abolish the status itself. The Greeks of the pre-Stoic period were so habituated to slavery that their philosophers never objected to it, and seemed to suppose that it was founded on diversities in the races of mankind in almost every country until comparatively recent times. It probably still exists in parts of the world.

The practice among all ancient nations was to enslave prisoners of war. Another ancient source of slaves was kidnapping, especially among maritime peoples, such as the Phoenicians, Cretans, and Cilicians; and Herodotus states that some of the Thracian tribes sold their children to foreign dealers. Among the Greeks slavery existed from the heroic times. Agricultural labour was in some instances performed by poor freemen for hire, but in most places, especially in the Doric states, by a class of bond-men, the descendants of the older inhabitants, who lived upon and cultivated the lands appropriated by the conquering race. Sometimes indeed these bondmen paid rent; in Europe the evolution of the land-serf into the free agricultural tenant probably followed much the same lines.

Athens, Corinth, and other commercial states had a large number of purchased slaves, mostly natives of barbarous countries. In Attica there were private slaves belonging to families, and public slaves belonging to the state, who were employed in the fleet and on public buildings and roads. The number of slaves, domestic and rustic, possessed by the wealthy Romans were enormous; some had up to 10,000. The Roman slave had no rights, and was regarded as a chattel; he could acquire no property, and all the produce of his labour accrued to his master. He could not contract a Roman marriage; union with a person of his own rank was styled 'contubernium'. Public slaves in Rome belonged to the state or to public bodies, such as municipia and collegia, or to the emperor in his sovereign capacity; some were employed in public duties of a highly honourable nature, for example as keepers of public buildings, prisons or other state property, while others were employed as road repairers, watchmen, lictors or scavengers. Private slaves were either urban or rustic according to whether they served in town or on country estates.

The servi terrae of the later period of the empire reveal strong points of resemblance to the serfs and villeins of the Middle Ages, but there appears to be no evidence of any historical connection between the coloni, rustici, or ascripti glebae and the villani of the feudal system. The English villein or depressed ceorl must not be confused with the bondman or serf. The English serfs (thralls, theows, or slaves) were either hereditary slaves, i.e. descendants of the old Britons, or wite theows, persons reduced to servitude for crime or neglect to pay a fine, or by a voluntary sale. They soon disappeared as a class after the conquest. The villani were the cultivators of the land; each had a house and a certain quantity of arable land lying in scattered strips in the common fields of the village, and there were many ways by which a villein could buy his freedom, for example by residing in a town as a burbage tenant for a year and a day.

When the traffic in slaves ceased among the Christian nations of Europe it continued to be carried on in the age of the crusades by the Venetians, who supplied the markets of the Saracens with slaves purchased from the Slavonian tribes along the Adriatic. Christian captives taken by Muslims were sold in Asiatic and North African markets, and continued to be sold till the beginning of the 20th century, when the interference of the Christian powers, the conquest of Algiers by France, and the emancipation of Greece resulted in the abolition of the practice in Barbary, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire.

With the discovery of America, a new description of slavery arose. Christian nations purchased African Negroes for employment in mines and plantations of the New World, in substitution for the native Indians, who were thought too weak to perform the work exacted by their Spanish taskmasters. Again, the Portuguese, who were early possessed of a great part of the coast of Africa, obtained by force or barter a considerable number of slaves; and the demand for slaves by the Portuguese in the Atlantic harbours soon induced the tribal chiefs to make predatory incursions into each other's territories to take captives for the European market.

In the British colonies in the latter part of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century much was done by Parliament. Courts were established to hear the complaints of the slaves, flogging of females was forbidden, and the condition generally of the slave population was greatly ameliorated. Thomas Clarks and the Quakers prepared the ground for William Wilberforce, who brought the subject before Parliament in 1788. Owing to the lucrative nature of the slave trade opened up by the conquest of Dutch colonies, the traffic was not abolished by Parliament until 1807. In 1811 Brougham carried a bill for making slave trading a felony, punishable by transportation or hard labour, and in 1824 the slave trade was declared to be piracy and capitally punishable. The consequence of agitation by Britain after the Napoleonic wars was that long before the middle of the 19th century most of the European and American powers had passed similar laws, or entered into treaties for the prohibition of the traffic. For long, however, a considerable internal slave trade continued to flourish in the USA; and Negroes continued to be bred and sold in Maryland and Virginia, and some other of the slave-holding states, and carried to the more fertile lands of Alabama, Louisiana, and other southern states. The slavery question was a predominant cause of the American Civil War of 1861-65. The victory of the Union over the Southern Confederate States ended slavery for ever in the USA.

In the 20th century forced labour camps and concentration camps, particularly in Nazi Germany, reduced their inhabitants to conditions of slavery and it would be unwise to consider slavery as entirely a thing of the past.

© JM Dent/Historybookshop.com

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