The Slave Ship

[brtmchl]

The reality is, slavery has only changed its name over time. Even in today's Politically Correct, modern, Human Rights sensitive world, examples of slavery surround us everywhere. First World Nations are not as affected as the rest of the World, and their populous are considerably hidden from the evils that lurk in the less fortunate corners of the Globe. However, it wasn't long ago that Americans were hearing on the news of kidnappings from border towns and colleges where females were being sold into the sex slave trade. I believe Arizona gained attention of being the second highest kidnapping area in the Americas only being out done by Mexico City.
Every Crime Drama on television has an episode of the sex slave trade. Or of people coming to a new country, freeing themselves from the poverty in their homeland of the Philippines at the price of being an indentured servant . Having to pay their way through slavery so that the family left behind can join them.
Cable News speaks of Radical Muslim factions beheading people unless they convert and join their cause. While Children in Africa are snatched from their families by the Warlords that plague those territories.
Even sports documentaries chronicle the young men who escape the poor streets of Santo Domingo to play baseball in America at the price of their "sponsor" who receives the bulk of their signing bonus.
There are many examples of these things happening throughout the World and yet, when the topic of slavery is brought up we immediately reflect solely on America's History and their role condoning it not the War we fought that lead to its end.
I apologize, I am writing from my iPhone.

[L Verge]

Thank you, Mike, for a great post with great observations. The purpose of history is to learn from it

[HerbS]

I agree with both of you.Some times PC makes me very frustrated.

[Eva Elisabeth]

Mike - RE: "...when the topic of slavery is brought up we immediately reflect solely on America's History" - the Wiki article does by far not, and it's absolutely worth reading:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

[HerbS]

Eva-Great research!

[brtmchl]

Thanks Eva it was definitely worth the read.

[Eva Elisabeth]

Thanks, Herb and Mike - it's a long article, and at least on the smartphone I find Wiki less convenient to read than the forum (the mobile version lacks overview). I put a summary together to post here - it's still long, but I feel Mike's statement "when the topic of slavery is brought up we immediately reflect solely on America's History" represents many previous discussions on this forum, and to show the dimensions of the entire history of slavery, I consider this a "must-read" now.

This in advance: During WWII, the Nazis, thus the Germans, effectively enslaved about 12 million people, both those considered undesirable and citizens of countries they conquered - and I have already mentioned our medieval serfdom.

Slavery has existed in many cultures, in one form or another, through the whole of recorded human history, and was institutionally recognized by most societies. It is officially illegal in all countries, but there are still an estimated 20 million to 30 million slaves worldwide. It continues through the practices of debt bondage, serfdom, domestic servants kept in captiv, child labor, child soldiers, and forced marriage. Human trafficking is primarily used for forcing women and children into sex industries. Mauritania was the last jurisdiction to officially outlaw slavery (in 1981/2007), but about 10% to 20% of its population is estimated to live in slavery. Most slaves today are debt slaves, largely in South Asia, who are under debt bondage incurred by lenders, sometimes even for generations.

1. Early history

Evidence of slavery predates written records and has existed in many cultures. Graves dating to 8000 BC in Egypt may show the enslavement of a San-like tribe.
Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations as mass slavery also requires economic surpluses and a high population density to be viable, thus would have only proliferated after the invention of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution about 11,000 years ago.

One of the earliest known records where slavery is treated as an established institution is the Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1760 BC), which prescribed death for anyone who helped a slave to escape or who sheltered a fugitive. The Bible mentions slavery as an established institution.

Slavery was known in almost every ancient civilization, and society: Sumer, Ancient Egypt, Ancient China, the Akkadian Empire, Assyria, Ancient India, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Islamic Caliphate, the Hebrew kingdoms in Palestine, and the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas, including debt-slavery, punishment for crime, the enslavement of prisoners of war, child abandonment, and the birth of slave children to slaves.

2. Classical Antiquity

Records of slavery in Ancient Greece go as far back as Mycenaean Greece. It is certain that Classical Athens had the largest slave population, with as many as 80,000 in the 6th and 5th centuries BC; two to four-fifths of the population were slaves.

As the Roman Republic expanded outward, entire populations were enslaved, thus creating an ample supply from all over Europe and the Mediterranean. Greeks, Illyrians, Berbers, Germans, Britons, Thracians, Gauls, Jews, Arabs, and many more were slaves used not only for labour, but also for amusement (e. g. gladiators and sex slaves).

By the late Republican era, slavery had become a vital economic pillar in the wealth of Rome, as well as a very significant part of Roman society. At the least, some 25% of the population of Ancient Rome was enslaved, probably slaves represented 35% or more of Italy's population. Estimates of the number of slaves in the Roman Empire range from 60 million to 100 million, with 400,000 in the city of Rome.

3. Middle Ages

Large-scale trading in slaves was mainly confined to the South and East of early medieval Europe: the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim world were the destinations, while pagan Central and Eastern Europe (along with the Caucasus and Tartary) were important sources. Viking, Arab, Greek, and Radhanite Jewish merchants were all involved in the slave trade during the Early Middle Ages. The trade in European slaves reached a peak in the 10th century following the Zanj rebellion which dampened the use of African slaves in the Arab world.Approximately 10-20% of the rural population of Carolingian Europe consisted of slaves.

Medieval Spain and Portugal were constantly invaded by Muslims, periodic raiding expeditions were sent from Al-Andalus to ravage the Iberian Christian kingdoms, bringing back booty and slaves. In raid against Lisbon, Portugal in 1189, for example, the Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur took 3,000 female and child captives, while his governor of Córdoba, in a subsequent attack upon Silves, Portugal in 1191, took 3,000 Christian slaves. From the 11th to the 19th century, North African Barbary Pirates engaged in Razzias, raids on European coastal towns, to capture Christian slaves to sell at slave markets in places such as Algeria and Morocco.

In Britain, slavery continued to be practiced following the fall of Rome and sections of Hywel the Good's laws dealt with slaves in medieval Wales. The trade particularly picked up after the Viking invasions, with major markets at Chester and Bristol, supplied by Danish, Mercian, and Welsh raiding of one another's borderlands. At the time of the Domesday Book (1086), nearly 10% of the English population were slaves.

Slavery in early medieval Europe was so common that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly prohibited it — or at least the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands was prohibited at e. g. the Council of Koblenz (922), the Council of London (1102), and the Council of Armagh (1171).

In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, granting the kings of Spain and Portugal the right to reduce any "Saracens (antiquated term referring to Muslims), pagans and any other unbelievers" to perpetual slavery, legitimizing the slave trade as a result of war.

The approval of slavery under these conditions was reaffirmed and extended in his Romanus Pontifex bull of 1455. However, Pope Paul III forbade enslavement of the native Americans in 1537 in his papal bull Sublimus Dei. Dominican friars who arrived at the Spanish settlement at Santo Domingo strongly denounced the enslavement of the local native Americans, and, with other priests, opposed their treatment as unjust and illegal in an audience with the Spanish king and in the subsequent royal commission.

Crimean Tatar raiders enslaved more than 1 million Eastern Europeans. To staff its bureaucracy the Ottoman Empire about 1365 established a janissary system which seized hundreds of thousands of Christian boys through the devşirme system. They were well cared for but were legally slaves owned by the government and were not allowed to marry. There were 135,000 janissaries in 1826, when the system ended.

In early Islamic states of the Western Sudan (present-day West Africa), including Ghana (750–1076), Mali (1235–1645), Segou (1712–1861), and Songhai (1275–1591), about a third of the population were enslaved. In the "Thousand and One Nights" there are mentions of white slaves.

Slavery largely disappeared from Western Europe by the later Middle Ages, but persisted longer in Eastern Europe. The slave trade became illegal in England in 1102, but England went on to become very active in the lucrative Atlantic slave trade from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.

4. Modern history

4.1. Europe
In 1649, up to three-quarters of Muscovy's peasants, or 13 to 14 million people, were serfs whose material lives were barely distinguishable from slaves. Perhaps another 1.5 million were formally enslaved. Agricultural slaves were formally converted into serfs in 1679, household slaves into house serfs in 1723. Over 23 million privately held serfs were freed by the Emancipation reform of 1861, state-owned serfs were emancipated in 1866.

Until the late 18th century, the Crimean Khanate (a Muslim Tatar state) maintained a massive slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, exporting about 2 million slaves from Poland-Lithuania and Russia over the period 1500–170

4.2. Africa
According to the Encyclopedia of African History, "It is estimated that by the 1890s the largest slave population of the world, about 2 million people, was concentrated in the territories of the Sokoto Caliphate."

The Swahili-Arab slave trade reached its height about 150 years ago, when, for example, approximately 20,000 slaves were considered to be carried yearly from Nkhotakota on Lake Malawi to Kilwa. Roughly half the population of Madagascar was enslaved. The German doctor Gustav Nachtigal, an eye-witness, believed that for every slave who arrived at a market three or four died on the way ... Keltie (The Partition of Africa, London, 1920) believes that for every slave the Arabs brought to the coast at least six died on the way or during the slavers' raid. Livingstone puts the figure as high as ten to one.

4.3. Asia
Estimatedly some 200,000 slaves—mainly Circassians—were imported into the Ottoman Empire between 1800 and 1909. The population of the Uzbek states of Bukhara and Khiva included about 900,000 slaves in the early 1840s .

There were an estimated 8 or 9 million slaves in India in 1841. Slavery was abolished in British India by the Indian Slavery Act V. of 1843. Slavery existed in almost all parts of East Asia (China, Japan, Indochina, etc.), one further "impressive" figure: in Korea, during the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910), about 30% to 50% of the Korean population were slaves.

4.4. Americas
The Aztecs and other Amerindians, such as the Inca of the Andes, the Tupinambá of Brazil, the Creek of Georgia, and the Comanche of Texas, owned slaves.

The maritime town of Lagos was the first slave market (one of the earliest colonizers of the Americas) for the sale of imported African slaves—the Mercado de Escravos, opened in 1444. In 1441, the first slaves were brought to Portugal from northern Mauritania.

By 1552, black African slaves made up 10% of the population of Lisbon. In the second half of the 16th century, the Crown gave up the monopoly on slave trade and the focus of European trade in African slaves shifted from import to Europe to slave transports directly to tropical colonies in the Americas—in the case of Portugal, especially Brazil. In the 15th century one-third of the slaves were resold to the African market in exchange of gold.

The first African slaves arrived in Hispaniola in 1501. In 1518, Charles I of Spain agreed to ship slaves directly from Africa. England played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade. The "slave triangle" was pioneered by Francis Drake and his associates. In 1640 a Virginia court sentenced John Punch to slavery, forcing him to serve his master,Hugh Gwyn, for the remainder of his life. This was the fist legal sanctioning of slavery in the English colonies. In 1655, A black man, Anthony Johnson of Virginia, was granted ownership of John Casor as the result of a civil case. By 1750, slavery was a legal institution in all of the 13 American colonies,and the profits of the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to 5% of the British economy at the time of the Industrial Revolution.

The Transatlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of slaves were captured on raiding expeditions into the interior of West Africa. These expeditions were typically carried out by African kingdoms, such as the Oyo empire (Yoruba), the Ashanti Empire, the kingdom of Dahomey, and the Aro Confederacy. Europeans rarely entered the interior of Africa, due to fierce African resistance. The slaves were brought to coastal outposts where they were traded for goods.

An estimated 12 million Africans arrived in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Of these, an estimated 645,000 were brought to what is now the United States. The usual estimate is that about 15% of slaves died during the voyage [Wild Bill set the limit at 20%], with mortality rates considerably higher in Africa itself in the process of capturing and transporting indigenous peoples to the ships.

The largest number of slaves were shipped to Brazil. As for the US, according to the 1860 census, 393,975 individuals, representing 8% of all US families, owned 3,950,528 slaves. One-third of Southern families owned slaves.


4.5. Middle East/Arab slave trade
Ottoman wars in Europe resulted in many captive Christians being carried deep into Muslim territory. Between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa and Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries.
There was also an extensive trade in Christian slaves in the Black Sea region for several centuries. It's estimated that during the time of the Crimean Khanate, altogether more than 3 million people were captured and enslaved in southern Russia, Poland-Lithuania, Moldavia, Wallachia, and Circassia by Tatar horsemen .

The Moors, starting in the 8th century, also raided coastal areas around the Mediterranean and Atlantic Ocean, and became known as the Barbary pirates. It is estimated that they captured 1.25 million white slaves from Western Europe and North America between the 16th and 19th centuries.

The Arab slave trade lasted more than a millennium. As recently as the early 1960s, Saudi Arabia's slave population was estimated at 300,000. Along with Yemen, the Saudis abolished slavery only in 1962.

5. Present day

Even though slavery is now outlawed in every country, the number of slaves today remains as high as 12 million to 29.8 million, mainly divided in these three categories: bonded labour/debt bondage, forced labour, and trafficked slaves. (Estimates from the Walk Free Foundation, estimates by other sources may be higher.)

Thousands of children work as bonded labourers in Asia, particularly in the Indian subcontinent.

A report by the Walk Free Foundation in 2013, found India had the highest number of slaves, nearly 14 million, followed by China (2.9 million), Pakistan (2.1 million), Nigeria, Ethiopia, Russia, Thailand, Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar and Bangladesh; while the countries with the highest of proportion of slaves were Mauritania, Haiti, Pakistan, India and Nepal.

In June 2013, U.S. State Department released a report on slavery, it placed Russia, China, Uzbekistan in the worst offenders category, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and Zimbabwe were also at the lowest level. List also included Algeria, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait among a total of 21 countries.

For more info, please go here: http://newint.org/features/2001/08/05/facts/

This is what has happened so far. We can't erase history, and IMO we shouldn't try to hide from it. (And as for mine - I think nothing compares to the evils of the Holocaust. Actually we do talk, teach and remind of the evils the German people did as thoroughly as possible as we never want to allow similar develop and happen again.) We are new generations, we don't have inherited the Original Sin - but we have inherited a responsibility (IMO). I agree with Laurie who said the purpose of history is to learn from it. So, what now?

[Eva Elisabeth]

Finally some pics (credit Wiki):

Slaves in chains, relief found at Smyrna (present day İzmir, Turkey), 200 AD:
   
Slaves working in a mine. Ancient Greece:
   
A contract from the Tang dynasty (618-907) that records the purchase of a 15 year-old slave for six bolts of plain silk and five Chinese coins:
   
13th century slave market in Yemen. Yemen officially abolished slavery in 1962:
   
Depiction of socage on the royal demesne in feudal England, ca. 1310. Socage is an aspect of serfdom, not usually included under the term "slavery" (but practically pretty much the same):
   
The work of the Mercedarians was in ransoming Christian slaves held in Muslim hands (1637):
   
Crimean Tatar raiders enslaved more than 1 million Eastern Europeans:
   
The main routes that were used to transport slaves across medieval Africa:
   
An 1852 Wallachian poster advertising an auction of Roma slaves in Bucharestm
   
British captain witnessing the miseries of the Christian slaves in Algiers, 1815:
   

[HerbS]

Eva,Thanks for being so forthright about your history,but,in Japan,they say in thier history that they were basicly angels.

[Eva Elisabeth]

In Japan they also will never acknowledge they don't know when you ask them the way. They will always send you in some direction, even if they have no idea. It's considered impolite not to help.

(11-16-2014 06:30 AM)HerbS Wrote:  Eva,Thanks for being so forthright about your history.

Herb - that's just the way it was (and it was uttermost evil).

As for wars - the time that has passed since WWII has for long been the longest period of peace (almost 70 years now) in German history.

The second longest peaceful period before (63 years) lasted from the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 to 1618, when the Thirty Years' War began.

Former chancellor Willy Brandt (who was a Lincoln expert and main speaker at the 1959 sesquicentennial banquet of the A. Lincoln Society in Springfield) pledged that "a war must never again begin from German soil " - and I hope so it will be.

[HerbS]

Eva,I was next to a man from Japan on my flight to Orlando and he new nothing about WW2!Suprise,suprise.My family is from Germany[Black Forest area]and my uncle was killed over Germany in a bomber in WW2.My grandfather never spoke German [in the house]again.My friends from Germany[Nueremburg-sp]admit the history of Germany[Hitler+WW2].

[Linda Anderson]

(11-14-2014 06:30 PM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:  Mike - RE: "...when the topic of slavery is brought up we immediately reflect solely on America's History" - the Wiki article does by far not, and it's absolutely worth reading:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

Thank you, Eva, for your wonderful research on this appalling topic. I think the reason Americans think solely of American slavery is because the history of slavery is part of our culture as well as our history.

Books and films like Gone with the Wind, Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom's Cabin (people may not read the book nowadays but the term "Uncle Tom" has come to mean a subservient black person), Beloved, Amistad, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (I still remember Cicely Tyson drinking from the "white" drinking fountain), Speilberg's Lincoln, and especially Roots, which was a huge bestseller and acclaimed miniseries in the 1970s, are works of art that most people are familiar with. More recent works about slavery are 12 Years a Slave, Django Unchained and Laurie Halse Anderson's middle grade novel Chains.

---

[Eva Elisabeth]

(11-16-2014 08:13 AM)HerbS Wrote:  My friends from Germany[Nueremburg-sp]admit the history of Germany[Hitler+WW2].

If they didn't they could face imprisonment for up to five years. Holocaust denial is not just a moral, but also a legal crime.

§ 130 "Public incitement" in German criminal law reads:
(...)(3) Whoever publicly or in a meeting approves of, denies or belittles an act committed under the rule of National Socialism...in a manner capable of disturbing the public peace shall be punished with imprisonment for not more than five years or a fine.
(4) Whoever publicly or in a meeting disturbs the public peace in a manner that assaults the human dignity of the victims by approving of, denying or rendering harmless the violent and arbitrary National Socialist rule shall be punished with imprisonment for not more than three years or a fine. (...)

There are some more relevant sections, and in addition, § 86a outlaws various symbols of "unconstitutional organisations", such as the Swastika and the SS runes.

Similar laws exist in several other European countries, and many of these also ban elements associated with Nazism, such as Nazi symbols.

Mike and Linda, perhaps I read too many Asterix comics in my youth, but the first that would come to my mind about slavery was the Romans & Co. #2 was the British slave trade, and #3, I admit, the USA/CW.

[L Verge]

"Mike and Linda, perhaps I read too many Asterix comics in my youth, but the first that would come to my mind about slavery was the Romans & Co. #2 was the British slave trade, and #3, I admit, the USA/CW."

Eva - I'm thirty years older than you, but I cut my teeth on historical comic books also. And, I was young and impressionable when Ben Hur and Spartacus (and a number of others) were major movie hits. I think I knew about Old World slavery before I did American slavery.

I doubt that we will ever see some people stop being 21st-century abolitionists and throwing so much blame on America. Our society is especially set on finding fault with itself nowadays. However, since we are all part of the global society now, I sincerely hope that we become educated enough to know that Americans were not the first and will not be the last to practice and profit from human bondage. Wouldn't it be nice if some of the talkers became doers in the fight? Just belaboring the past isn't going to do it.

[Rsmyth]

I don’t see it as throwing blame on America as much as pointing out past mistakes and making sure they do not occur again. This is what is termed continual improvement. This country was built on anarchy and revolution; the ability to change and adapt. When all the anarchists disappear from this land we will become a land of sheep being led to slaughter. Checks and measures, the 21st century abolitionists remind us of what can happen when one group becomes too powerful and exploits that power.