100-464: A slavocracy (from slave + -ocracy ) is a society primarily ruled by a class of slaveholders , such as those in the southern United States and their confederacy during the American Civil War . The term was initially coined in the 1830s by northern abolitionists as a term of disparagement and subsequently used in wider senses, including as a term for the planter class of such
200-499: A company store , owned by their employers. A specific kind of truck system, in which credit advances are made against future work, is known in the U.S. as debt bondage . Many scholars have suggested that employers use such systems to exploit workers and/or indebt them. This could occur, for example, if employers were able to pay workers with goods which had a market value below the level of subsistence , or by selling items to workers at inflated prices. Others argue that truck wages were
300-663: A convenient way for isolated communities, such as during the early colonial settlement of North America, to operate when official currency was scarce. By the early 20th century, truck systems were widely seen, in industrialised countries, as exploitative; perhaps the most well-known example of this view was a 1947 U.S. hit song " Sixteen Tons ". Many countries have Truck Act legislation that outlaws truck systems and requires payment in cash. Though most closely associated with Medieval Europe, governments throughout human history have imposed regular short stints of unpaid labour upon lower social classes. These might be annual obligations of
400-412: A debt or earn money due to poverty . In the course of human history , slavery was a typical feature of civilization , and was legal in most societies, but it is now outlawed in most countries of the world, except as a punishment for a crime . In chattel slavery , the slave is legally rendered the personal property (chattel) of the slave owner. In economics, the term de facto slavery describes
500-719: A debt, or transportation to a desired country. While historically unfree labour was frequently sanctioned by law, in the present day most unfree labour now revolves around illegal control rather than legal ownership, as all countries have made slavery illegal. As mentioned above, there are several exceptions of unfree or forced labour recognised by the International Labour Organization : Some countries practise forms of civil conscription for different major occupational groups or inhabitants under different denominations like civil conscription , civil mobilization , political mobilisation etc. This obligatory service on
600-648: A few weeks or something similarly regular that lasted for the labourer's entire working life. As the system developed in the Philippines and elsewhere, the labourer could pay an appropriate fee and be exempted from the obligation. A form of forced labour in which peasants and members of lower castes were required to work for free existed in India before independence. This form of labour was known by several names, including veth , vethi , vetti-chakiri and begar . Another historically significant example of forced labour
700-831: A joint study of historians featuring Zhifen Ju, Mark Peattie , Toru Kubo, and Mitsuyoshi Himeta, more than 10 million Chinese were mobilised by the Japanese army and enslaved by the Kōa-in for slave labour in Manchukuo and north China. The U.S. Library of Congress estimates that in Java , between 4 and 10 million romusha ( Japanese : "manual labourer") were forced to work by the Japanese military. About 270,000 of these Javanese labourers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in South East Asia. Only 52,000 were repatriated to Java, meaning that there
800-499: A kinship group and those related to the master. Slavery was practiced in many different forms: debt slavery, enslavement of war captives, military slavery, and criminal slavery were all practiced in various parts of Africa. Slavery for domestic and court purposes was widespread throughout Africa. When the Atlantic slave trade began, many of the local slave systems began supplying captives for chattel slave markets outside Africa. Although
900-517: A legal right to counsel, freedom from double jeopardy , a right to trial by jury in graver cases, and the right to grand jury indictment, but they lacked many other rights such as white adults' ability to control their own lives. Slavery predates written records and has existed in many cultures. Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations because it requires economic surpluses and a substantial population density. Thus, although it has existed among unusually resource-rich hunter gatherers, such as
1000-567: A limited set of legal rights. For example, in the Province of New York , people who deliberately killed slaves were punishable under a 1686 statute. And, as already mentioned, certain legal rights attached to the nobi in Korea, to slaves in various African societies, and to black female slaves in the French colony of Louisiana . Giving slaves legal rights has sometimes been a matter of morality, but also sometimes
1100-544: A marriage where a girl, usually, is married off to a man to settle debts owed by her parents. The Chukri system is a debt bondage system found in parts of Bengal where a female can be coerced into prostitution in order to pay off debts. The word slavery has also been used to refer to a legal state of dependency to somebody else. For example, in Persia , the situations and lives of such slaves could be better than those of common citizens. Forced labour, or unfree labour,
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#17328632305281200-420: A matter of self-interest. For example, in ancient Athens , protecting slaves from mistreatment simultaneously protected people who might be mistaken for slaves, and giving slaves limited property rights incentivized slaves to work harder to get more property. In the southern United States prior to the extirpation of slavery in 1865 , a proslavery legal treatise reported that slaves accused of crimes typically had
1300-462: A number of British slavocracies was the " West India Interest ", which lobbied the British parliament on behalf of planters. It is credited with delaying the abolition of the slave trade from the 1790s until 1806–1808 and then delaying emancipation into the 1820s and 1830s, extracting reparations for the lost "property" in a policy known as "amelioration". Slavery Slavery is the ownership of
1400-413: A permanent part of a master's lineage and the children of slaves could become closely connected with the larger family ties. Children of slaves born into families could be integrated into the master's kinship group and rise to prominent positions within society, even to the level of chief in some instances. However, stigma often remained attached and there could be strict separations between slave members of
1500-400: A person as property , especially in regards to their labour. Slavery typically involves compulsory work, with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by the party that holds them in bondage. Enslavement is the placement of a person into slavery, and the person is called a slave or an enslaved person (see § Terminology ). Many historical cases of enslavement occurred as
1600-453: A result of breaking the law, becoming indebted, suffering a military defeat, or exploitation for cheaper labor; other forms of slavery were instituted along demographic lines such as race or sex . Slaves may be kept in bondage for life, or for a fixed period of time after which they would be granted freedom . Although slavery is usually involuntary and involves coercion, there are also cases where people voluntarily enter into slavery to pay
1700-495: A society itself. Slavocracies are also sometimes known as plantocracies , after " planter " used as a term for the owners of plantations . A number of European colonies in the New World were largely slavocracies, usually consisting of a small European settler population relying on a predominantly West African chattel slave population as well as smaller numbers of indentured servants , both European and non-European in origin. In
1800-579: A voluntary basis. Although personal benefits may be realised, it may be performed for a variety of reasons including citizenship requirements, a substitution of criminal justice sanctions, requirements of a school or class, and requisites for the receipt of certain benefits. During the Cold War in some communist countries like Czechoslovakia , the German Democratic Republic or the Soviet Union
1900-491: Is a form of unfree labour in which a person works to pay off a debt by pledging himself or herself as collateral. The services required to repay the debt, and their duration, may be undefined. Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation, with children required to pay off their progenitors' debt. It is the most widespread form of slavery today. Debt bondage is most prevalent in South Asia. Money marriage refers to
2000-577: Is a term to define the recruiting, harbouring, obtaining and transportation of a person by use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjecting them to involuntary acts, such as acts related to commercial sexual exploitation (including forced prostitution ) or involuntary labour. The archetypal and best-known form of unfree labour is chattel slavery , in which individual workers are legally owned throughout their lives, and may be bought, sold or otherwise exchanged by owners, while never or rarely receiving any personal benefit from their labour. Slavery
2100-624: Is defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as all involuntary work or service exacted under the menace of a penalty. However, under the ILO Forced Labour Convention of 1930, the term forced or compulsory labour does not include: If payment occurs, it may be in one or more of the following forms: Unfree labour is often more easily instituted and enforced on migrant workers, who have travelled far from their homelands and who are easily identified because of their physical, ethnic, linguistic, or cultural differences from
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#17328632305282200-578: 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 use of slave labour was extensive, especially in agriculture." The Anti-Slavery Society estimated there were 2 million slaves in Ethiopia in the early 1930s out of an estimated population of 8 to 16 million. Slave labour in East Africa
2300-401: Is estimated that in the last 50 years more than 50 million people have been sent to Chinese laogai camps. A more common form in modern society is indenture, or bonded labour , under which workers sign contracts to work for a specific period of time, for which they are paid only with accommodation and sustenance, or these essentials in addition to limited benefits such as cancellation of
2400-585: Is executed only in a handful of communities in Germany and currently none in Austria. Beside the conscription for military services, some countries draft citizens for paramilitary or security forces , like internal troops , border guards or police forces . While sometimes paid, conscripts are not free to decline enlistment. Draft dodging or desertion are often met with severe punishment. Even in countries which prohibit other forms of unfree labour, conscription
2500-481: Is generally justified as being necessary in the national interest and therefore is one of the five exceptions to the Forced Labour Convention , signed by the most countries in the world. Community service is a paying job performed by one person or a group of people for the benefit of their community or its institutions. Community service is distinct from volunteering, since it is not always performed on
2600-626: Is mandatory to join the so-called Militia Fire Brigades , as well as the obligatory service in Swiss civil defence and protection force. Conscripts in Singapore are providing the personnel of the country's fire service as part of the national service in the Civil Defence Force . In Austria and Germany citizens have to join a compulsory fire brigade if a volunteer fire service can not be provided, due to lack of volunteers. In 2018 this regulation
2700-487: Is often used as a pejorative to describe any activity in which one is coerced into performing. Some argue that military drafts and other forms of coerced government labour constitute "state-operated slavery." Some libertarians and anarcho-capitalists view government taxation as a form of slavery. "Slavery" has been used by some anti-psychiatry proponents to define involuntary psychiatric patients, claiming there are no unbiased physical tests for mental illness and yet
2800-517: Is sometimes used to describe an individual who is forced to work against their own will, under threat of violence or other punishment. This may also include institutions not commonly classified as slavery, such as serfdom , conscription and penal labour . As slavery has been legally outlawed in all countries, forced labour in the present day (frequently referred to as " modern slavery ") revolves around illegal control. Human trafficking primarily involves women and children forced into prostitution and
2900-463: Is the fastest growing form of forced labour, with Thailand, Cambodia, India, Brazil and Mexico having been identified as leading hotspots of commercial sexual exploitation of children . In 2007, Human Rights Watch estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 children served as soldiers in then-current conflicts. More girls under 16 work as domestic workers than any other category of child labour, often sent to cities by parents living in rural poverty as with
3000-583: The American Indian peoples of the salmon -rich rivers of the Pacific Northwest coast, slavery became widespread only with the invention of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution about 11,000 years ago. Slavery was practiced in almost every ancient civilization. Such institutions included debt bondage, punishment for crime, the enslavement of prisoners of war , child abandonment , and
3100-513: The Caribbean , the slaves were primarily used to produce sugar , while in North America the slaves were primarily used to produce cotton . These proslavery societies attempted to resist the abolitionist movement and subsequently relied on freed black and poor white sharecroppers for labor following abolition . One prominent organization largely representing and collectively funded by
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3200-529: The Congo Free State and French ruled Ubangi-Shari , labour was demanded as taxation; private companies were conceded areas within which they were allowed to use any measures to increase rubber production. Convict leasing was common in the Southern United States where the state would lease prisoners for their free labour to companies. Depending upon the era and the country, slaves sometimes had
3300-509: The Indian subcontinent , and later to the Americas. These traders captured Bantu peoples ( Zanj ) from the interior in present-day Kenya , Mozambique and Tanzania and brought them to the coast. There, the slaves gradually assimilated in rural areas, particularly on Unguja and Pemba islands. Some historians assert that as many as 17 million people were sold into slavery on the coast of
3400-549: The Muslim empire and claimed over "tens of thousands of lives in lower Iraq". The Zanj who were taken as slaves to the Middle East were often used in strenuous agricultural work. As the plantation economy boomed and the Arabs became richer, agriculture and other manual labour work was thought to be demeaning. The resulting labour shortage led to an increased slave market. In Algiers ,
3500-778: The Pacific War (such as the Burma Railway ). Roughly 4,000,000 German POWs were used as "reparations labour" by the Allies for several years after the German surrender; this was permitted under the Third Geneva Convention provided they were accorded proper treatment. China's laogai ("labour reform") system and North Korea 's kwalliso camps are current examples. About 12 million forced labourers, most of whom were Poles and Soviet citizens ( Ost-Arbeiter ) were employed in
3600-700: The Sahara desert to North Africa to be sold to Mediterranean and Middle eastern civilizations. During the Red Sea slave trade , slaves were transported from Africa across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula. The Indian Ocean slave trade , sometimes known as the east African slave trade, was multi-directional. Africans were sent as slaves to the Arabian Peninsula , to Indian Ocean islands (including Madagascar ), to
3700-528: The Spanish Empire , or the work of Indigenous Australians in northern Australia on sheep or cattle stations ( ranches ), from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. In the latter case, workers were rarely or never paid, and were restricted by regulations and/or police intervention to regions around their places of work. In late 16th century Japan, "unfree labour" or slavery was officially banned; but forms of contract and indentured labour persisted alongside
3800-610: The United Kingdom , the so-called Bevin Boys , had been conscripted for the work in coal mines . In Belgium in 1964, in Portugal and in Greece from 2010 to 2014 due to the severe economic crisis , a system of civil mobilisation was implemented to provide public services as a national interest. In Switzerland in most communities for all inhabitants, no matter if they are Swiss or not, it
3900-405: The bombardment of Algiers by an Anglo-Dutch fleet in 1816. Under Omani Arabs, Zanzibar became East Africa's main slave port , with as many as 50,000 African slaves passing through every year during the 19th century. Some historians estimate that between 11 and 18 million African slaves crossed the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara Desert from 650 to 1900 AD. Eduard Rüppell described
4000-511: The separation of powers , or what Comte called the "separation of the spiritual and the temporal" during the Middle Ages and the end of slavery, and Smith's criticism of masters, past and present. As Smith stated in the Lectures on Jurisprudence , "The great power of the clergy thus concurring with that of the king set the slaves at liberty. But it was absolutely necessary both that the authority of
4100-539: The 19th century. An alternative contemporary hypothesis states that Medieval Latin sclāvus via * scylāvus derives from Byzantine σκυλάω ( skūláō , skyláō ) or σκυλεύω ( skūleúō , skyleúō ) with the meaning "to strip the enemy (killed in a battle)" or "to make booty / extract spoils of war". This version has been criticized as well. There is a dispute among historians about whether terms such as " unfree labourer " or "enslaved person", rather than "slave", should be used when describing
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4200-646: The Abolition of Forced Labour Convention (C105), one of the fundamental conventions of the ILO. According to the ILO Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour (SAP-FL), global profits from forced trafficked labour exploited by private agents are estimated at US$ 44.3 billion per year. About 70% of this value (US$ 31.6 billion) comes from trafficked victims. At least the half of this sum (more than US$ 15 billion) comes from industrialised countries. Trafficking
4300-563: The Americas to abolish slavery was Brazil, in 1888 . Chattel slavery survived longest in the Middle East . After the Trans-Atlantic slave trade had been suppressed, the ancient Trans-Saharan slave trade , the Indian Ocean slave trade and the Red Sea slave trade continued to traffic slaves from the African continent to the Middle East. During the 20th century, the issue of chattel slavery
4400-481: The Americas, Asia, or Europe, where their status as slaves was almost always inherited by their descendants. The term "slavery" is often applied to situations which do not meet the above definitions, but which are other, closely related forms of unfree labour, such as debt slavery or debt-bondage (although not all repayment of debts through labour constitutes unfree labour). Examples are the Repartimiento system in
4500-913: The Arabian Peninsula: in Oman , in Qatar , in Saudi Arabia , in the Trucial States and in Yemen . Legal chattel slavery was finally abolished in the Arabian Peninsula in the 1960s: Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, in Dubai in 1963, and Oman as the last in 1970. The last country to abolish slavery, Mauritania , did so in 1981 . The 1981 ban on slavery was not enforced in practice, as there were no legal mechanisms to prosecute those who used slaves, these only came in 2007. Indenture, also known as bonded labour or debt bondage,
4600-626: The Atlantic slave trade was not the only slave trade from Africa, it was the largest in volume and intensity. As Elikia M'bokolo wrote in Le Monde diplomatique : The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from
4700-451: The German war economy inside Nazi Germany. More than 2000 German companies profited from slave labour during the Nazi era, including Daimler , Deutsche Bank , Siemens , Volkswagen , Hoechst , Dresdner Bank , Krupp , Allianz , BASF , Bayer , BMW , and Degussa . In particular, Germany's Jewish population was subject to slave labour prior to their extermination. In Asia, according to
4800-670: The Global Economy (1999), there are now an estimated 27 million slaves in the world. Blackbirding involves kidnapping or trickery to transport people to another country or far away from home, to work as a slave or low-paid involuntary worker. In some cases, workers were returned home after a period of time. Serfdom bonds labourers to the land they farm, typically in a feudal society. Serfs typically have no legal right to leave, change employers, or seek paid work, though depending on economic conditions many did so anyway. Unlike chattel slaves, they typically cannot be sold separately from
4900-540: The Haitian restaveks . Forced marriages or early marriages are often considered types of slavery. Forced marriage continues to be practiced in parts of the world including some parts of Asia and Africa and in immigrant communities in the West. Marriage by abduction occurs in many places in the world today, with a 2003 study finding a national average of 69% of marriages in Ethiopia being through abduction. The word slavery
5000-509: The Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa, and approximately 5 million African slaves were bought by Muslim slave traders and taken from Africa across the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara Desert between 1500 and 1900. The captives were sold throughout the Middle East. This trade accelerated as superior ships led to more trade and greater demand for labour on plantations in the region. Eventually, tens of thousands of captives were being taken every year. The Indian Ocean slave trade
5100-559: The Nazis and the Soviet Union placed increasing importance on the labor provided in those camps, leading to a growing tendency among historians to designate such systems as slavery. A combination of these include the encomienda where the Spanish Crown granted private individuals the right to the free labour of a specified number of natives in a given area. In the "Red Rubber System" of both
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#17328632305285200-746: The Umayyad Caliphate in Iraq. The Zanj Rebellion , a series of uprisings that took place between 869 and 883 near Basra (also known as Basara), against the slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate situated in present-day Iraq, is believed to have involved enslaved Zanj that had originally been captured from the African Great Lakes region and areas further south in East Africa . It grew to involve over 500,000 slaves and free men who were imported from across
5300-466: The aristocracy. In the 2020s, in North Korea , Kippumjo ("Pleasure Brigades") are made up of women selected from the general population to serve as entertainers and as concubines to the rulers of North Korea. "Tribute labor" is compulsory labor for the state and has been used in various iterations such as corvée , mit'a and repartimiento . The internment camps of totalitarian regimes such as
5400-491: The capital of Algeria, captured Christians and Europeans were forced into slavery. In about 1650, there were as many as 35,000 Christian slaves in Algiers. By one estimate, raids by Barbary slave traders on coastal villages and ships extending from Italy to Iceland, enslaved an estimated 1 to 1.25 million Europeans between the 16th and 19th centuries. However, this estimate is the result of an extrapolation which assumes that
5500-401: The century from 1580 to 1680. By extension, for the 250 years between 1530 and 1780, the figure could easily have been as high as 1,250,000. Davis' numbers have been refuted by other historians, such as David Earle, who cautions that true picture of Europeans slaves is clouded by the fact the corsairs also seized non-Christian whites from eastern Europe. In addition, the number of slaves traded
5600-400: The condition of some or all human-owned animals, arguing that their status is comparable to that of human slaves. The labour market, as institutionalized under contemporary capitalist systems, has been criticized by mainstream socialists and by anarcho-syndicalists , who utilise the term wage slavery as a pejorative or dysphemism for wage labour . Socialists draw parallels between
5700-458: The conditions of unfree labour and forced labour that most slaves endure. Mauritania was the last country in the world to officially ban slavery, in 1981, with legal prosecution of slaveholders established in 2007. However, in 2019, approximately 40 million people, of whom 26% were children, were still enslaved throughout the world despite slavery being illegal. In the modern world, more than 50% of slaves provide forced labour , usually in
5800-483: The debate is thus unwarranted. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that at least 12.3 million people are victims of forced labour worldwide; of these, 9.8 million are exploited by private agents and more than 2.4 million are trafficked . Another 2.5 million are forced to work by the state or by rebel military groups. From an international law perspective, countries that allow forced labour are violating international labour standards as set forth in
5900-407: The discussion. These contributions maintain that, because Marxist theory failed to understand the centrality of unfreedom to modern capitalism, a new explanation of this link is needed. This claim has been questioned by Tom Brass . He argues that many of these new characteristics are in fact no different from those identified earlier by Marxist theory and that the exclusion of the latter approach from
6000-594: The enslavement of slaves' offspring. Slavery was widespread in Africa, which pursued both internal and external slave trade. In the Senegambia region, between 1300 and 1900, close to one-third of the population was enslaved. In early Islamic states of the western Sahel , including Ghana , Mali , Segou , and Songhai , about a third of the population were enslaved. In European courtly society, and European aristocracy, black African slaves and their children became visible in
6100-763: The ensuing discussion concerned the extent to which different relational forms constituted obstacles to capitalist development, and why. During the 1960s and 1970s, unfree labour was regarded as incompatible with capitalist accumulation, and thus an obstacle to economic growth, an interpretation advanced by exponents of the then-dominant semi-feudal thesis. From the 1980s onwards, however, another and very different Marxist view emerged, arguing that evidence from Latin America and India suggested agribusiness enterprises, commercial farmers and rich peasants reproduced, introduced or reintroduced unfree relations. However, recent contributions to this debate have attempted to exclude Marxism from
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#17328632305286200-600: The factories and sweatshops of the private sector of a country's economy. In industrialised countries, human trafficking is a modern variety of slavery; in non-industrialised countries, people in debt bondage are common, others include captive domestic servants , people in forced marriages , and child soldiers . The word slave was borrowed into Middle English through the Old French esclave which ultimately derives from Byzantine Greek σκλάβος ( sklábos ) or εσκλαβήνος ( ésklabḗnos ). According to
6300-498: The focus is on increasing the number of slaves doing simple tasks rather than upgrading their efficiency. For example, it is sometimes argued that, because of this narrow focus, technology in Greece – and later in Rome – was not applied to ease physical labour or improve manufacturing. Scottish economist Adam Smith stated that free labour was economically better than slave labour, and that it
6400-444: The gang to a task and made each worker's performance dependent on the actions of the others. The slaves chopped out the weeds that surrounded the cotton plants as well as excess sprouts. Plow gangs followed behind, stirring the soil near the plants and tossing it back around the plants. Thus, the gang system worked like an assembly line . Since the 18th century, critics have argued that slavery hinders technological advancement because
6500-543: The general population, since they are unable or unlikely to report their conditions to the authorities. Unfree labour re-emerged as an issue in the debate about rural development during the years following the end of the Second World War, when a political concern of Keynesian theory was not just economic reconstruction (mainly in Europe and Asia) but also planning (in developing "Third World" nations ). A crucial aspect of
6600-473: The inhumanity of slavery, with person implying a degree of autonomy that slavery does not allow. As a social institution, chattel slavery classes slaves as chattels ( personal property ) owned by the enslaver; like livestock, they can be bought and sold at will. Chattel slavery was historically the normal form of slavery and was practiced in places such as the Roman Empire and classical Greece , where it
6700-412: 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 . It is estimated that about 15 percent of slaves died during the voyage , with mortality rates considerably higher in Africa itself in the process of capturing and transporting indigenous peoples to
6800-415: The king and of the clergy should be great. Where ever any one of these was wanting, slavery still continues..." Even after slavery became a criminal offense, slave owners could get high returns. According to researcher Siddharth Kara , the profits generated worldwide by all forms of slavery in 2007 were $ 91.2 billion. That was second only to drug trafficking, in terms of global criminal enterprises. At
6900-471: The land, and have rights such as the military protection of the lord. A truck system, in the specific sense in which the term is used by labour historians , refers to an unpopular or even exploitative form of payment associated with small, isolated and/or rural communities, in which workers or self-employed small producers are paid in either: goods, a form of payment known as truck wages , or tokens, private currency ("scrip") or direct credit, to be used at
7000-470: The late 1300s and 1400s. Starting with Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor , black Africans were included in the retinue . In 1402 an Ethiopian embassy reached Venice . In the 1470s black Africans were painted as court attendants in wall paintings that were displayed in Mantua and Ferrara . In the 1490s black Africans were included on the emblem of the Duke of Milan . During the trans-Saharan slave trade , slaves from West Africa were transported across
7100-459: The late 16th and early 17th century observers, account for around 35,000 European Christian slaves held throughout this period on the Barbary Coast, across Tripoli, Tunis, but mostly in Algiers. The majority were sailors (particularly those who were English), taken with their ships, but others were fishermen and coastal villagers. However, most of these captives were people from lands close to Africa, particularly Spain and Italy. This eventually led to
7200-471: The losses of Sudanese slaves being transported on foot to Egypt: "after the Daftardar bey's 1822 campaign in the southern Nuba mountains, nearly 40,000 slaves were captured. However, through bad treatment, disease and desert travel barely 5,000 made it to Egypt." W.A. Veenhoven wrote: "The German doctor, Gustav Nachtigal , an eye-witness, believed that for every slave who arrived at a market three or four died on
7300-562: The ninth to the nineteenth).... Four million enslaved people exported via the Red Sea , another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean. The trans-Atlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of slaves were captured on raiding expeditions into
7400-502: The number of European slaves captured by Barbary pirates was constant for a 250-year period: There are no records of how many men, women and children were enslaved, but it is possible to calculate roughly the number of fresh captives that would have been needed to keep populations steady and replace those slaves who died, escaped, were ransomed, or converted to Islam. On this basis it is thought that around 8,500 new slaves were needed annually to replenish numbers – about 850,000 captives over
7500-411: The one hand has been implemented due to long-lasting labour strikes , during wartime or economic crisis, to provide basic services like medical care, food supply or supply of the defence industry. On the other hand, this service can be obligatory to provide recurring and inevitable services to the population, like fire services, due to lack of volunteers. Between December 1943 and March 1948 young men in
7600-465: The opposite holds true, then it is more costly for landowners to guard the slaves than to employ paid workers who can demand only low wages because of the degree of competition. Thus, first slavery and then serfdom gradually decreased in Europe as the population grew. They were reintroduced in the Americas and in Russia as large areas of land with few inhabitants became available. Slavery is more common when
7700-701: The period's penal codes' forced labour. Somewhat later, the Edo period 's penal laws prescribed "non-free labour" for the immediate families of executed criminals in Article 17 of the Gotōke reijō (Tokugawa House Laws), but the practice never became common. The 1711 Gotōke reijō was compiled from over 600 statutes that were promulgated between 1597 and 1696. According to Kevin Bales in Disposable People: New Slavery in
7800-406: The psychiatric patient must follow the orders of the psychiatrist. They assert that instead of chains to control the slave, the psychiatrist uses drugs to control the mind. Drapetomania was a pseudoscientific psychiatric diagnosis for a slave who desired freedom; "symptoms" included laziness and the tendency to flee captivity. Some proponents of animal rights have applied the term slavery to
7900-755: The ships. Slavery in Mexico can be traced back to the Aztecs . Other Amerindians , such as the Inca of the Andes, the Tupinambá of Brazil, the Creek of Georgia, and the Comanche of Texas, also practiced slavery. Forced labour Forced labour , or unfree labour , is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with
8000-412: The slaves were not treated as chattel slaves and were given certain rights in a system similar to indentured servitude elsewhere in the world. The forms of slavery in Africa were closely related to kinship structures. In many African communities, where land could not be owned, enslavement of individuals was used as a means to increase the influence a person had and expand connections. This made slaves
8100-760: The state use of convict labour. Australia received thousands of convict labourers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were given sentences for crimes ranging from those now considered to be minor misdemeanours to such serious offences as murder, rape and incest. A considerable number of Irish convicts were sentenced to transportation for treason while fighting against British rule in Ireland . More than 165,000 convicts were transported to Australian colonies from 1788 to 1868. Most British or Irish convicts who were sentenced to transportation, however, completed their sentences in British jails and were not transported at all. It
8200-501: The tasks are relatively simple and thus easy to supervise, such as large-scale monocrops such as sugarcane and cotton , in which output depended on economies of scale . This enables systems of labour, such as the gang system in the United States, to become prominent on large plantations where field hands toiled with factory-like precision. Then, each work gang was based on an internal division of labour that assigned every member of
8300-406: The threat of destitution , detention , or violence , including death or other forms of extreme hardship to either themselves or members of their families. Unfree labour includes all forms of slavery , penal labour , and the corresponding institutions, such as debt slavery , serfdom , corvée and labour camps . Many forms of unfree labour are also covered by the term forced labour , which
8400-524: The time the weighted average global sales price of a slave was estimated to be approximately $ 340, with a high of $ 1,895 for the average trafficked sex slave, and a low of $ 40 to $ 50 for debt bondage slaves in part of Asia and Africa. The weighted average annual profits generated by a slave in 2007 was $ 3,175, with a low of an average $ 950 for bonded labour and $ 29,210 for a trafficked sex slave. Approximately 40% of slave profits each year were generated by trafficked sex slaves, representing slightly more than 4% of
8500-419: The trade of labour as a commodity and slavery. Cicero is also known to have suggested such parallels. Economists have modeled the circumstances under which slavery (and variants such as serfdom ) appear and disappear. One theoretical model is that slavery becomes more desirable for landowners where land is abundant, but labour is scarce, such that rent is depressed and paid workers can demand high wages. If
8600-399: The victims of slavery. According to those proposing a change in terminology, slave perpetuates the crime of slavery in language by reducing its victims to a nonhuman noun instead of "carry[ing] them forward as people, not the property that they were" (see also People-first language ). Other historians prefer slave because the term is familiar and shorter, or because it accurately reflects
8700-408: 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." Systems of servitude and slavery were common in parts of Africa, as they were in much of the ancient world . In many African societies where slavery was prevalent,
8800-475: The widespread view, which has been known since the 18th century, the Byzantine Σκλάβινοι ( Sklábinoi ), Έσκλαβηνοί ( Ésklabēnoí ), borrowed from a Slavic tribe self-name *Slověne, turned into σκλάβος , εσκλαβήνος ( Late Latin sclāvus) in the meaning 'prisoner of war slave', 'slave' in the 8th/9th century, because they often became captured and enslaved. However this version has been disputed since
8900-433: The world's 29 million slaves. A widespread practice was branding , either to explicitly mark slaves as property or as punishment. Slaves have been owned privately by individuals but have also been under state ownership. For example, the kisaeng were women from low castes in pre modern Korea, who were owned by the state under government officials known as hojang and were required to provide entertainment to
9000-511: Was a death rate of 80%. Also, 6.87 million Koreans were forcefully put into slave labour from 1939 to 1945 in both Japan and Japanese-occupied Korea. Kerja rodi ( Heerendiensten ) , was the term for forced labour in Indonesia under Dutch colonial rule . The Khmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population ("New People") into agricultural communes . The entire population
9100-750: Was addressed and investigated globally by international bodies created by the League of Nations and the United Nations, such as the Temporary Slavery Commission in 1924–1926, the Committee of Experts on Slavery in 1932, and the Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery in 1934–1939. By the time of the UN Ad Hoc Committee on Slavery in 1950–1951, legal chattel slavery still existed only in
9200-515: Was common in many ancient societies , including ancient Egypt , Babylon , Persia , ancient Greece , Rome , ancient China , the pre-modern Muslim world , as well as many societies in Africa and the Americas . Being sold into slavery was a common fate of populations that were conquered in wars. Perhaps the most prominent example of chattel slavery was the enslavement of many millions of black people in Africa, as well as their forced transportation to
9300-583: Was considered a keystone of society. Other places where it was extensively practiced include Medieval Egypt , Subsaharan Africa, Brazil, the United States, and parts of the Caribbean such as Cuba and Haiti. The Iroquois enslaved others in ways that "looked very like chattel slavery." Beginning in the 18th century, a series of abolitionist movements saw slavery as a violation of the slaves' rights as people (" all men are created equal "), and sought to abolish it. Abolitionism encountered extreme resistance but
9400-564: Was drawn from the Zanj , Bantu peoples that lived along the East African coast. The Zanj were for centuries shipped as slaves by Arab traders to all the countries bordering the Indian Ocean during the Indian Ocean slave trade . The Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs recruited many Zanj slaves as soldiers and, as early as 696, there were slave revolts of the Zanj against their Arab enslavers during their slavery in
9500-582: Was eventually successful. Several of the states of the United States began abolishing slavery during the American Revolutionary War. The French Revolution tried to abolish slavery in 1794, but a permanent abolition did not occur until 1848. In much of the British Empire, slavery was subject to abolition in 1833, throughout the United States it was abolished in 1865 and in Cuba in 1886. The last country in
9600-451: Was forced to become farmers in labour camps . Convict or prison labour is another classic form of unfree labour. The forced labour of convicts has often been regarded with lack of sympathy, because of the social stigma attached to people regarded as common criminals. Three British colonies in Australia – New South Wales , Van Diemen's Land and Western Australia – are examples of
9700-469: Was hyperactive, with exaggerated estimates relying on peak years to calculate averages for entire centuries, or millennia. Hence, there were wide fluctuations year-to-year, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, given slave imports, and also given the fact that, prior to the 1840s, there are no consistent records. Middle East expert, John Wright, cautions that modern estimates are based on back-calculations from human observation. Such observations, across
9800-625: Was multi-directional and changed over time. To meet the demand for menial labour, Bantu slaves bought by east African slave traders from southeastern Africa were sold in cumulatively large numbers over the centuries to customers in Egypt, Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India, European colonies in the Far East, the Indian Ocean islands , Ethiopia and Somalia. According to the Encyclopedia of African History , "It
9900-446: Was nearly impossible to end slavery in a free, democratic, or republican form of government since many of its legislators or political figures were slave owners and would not punish themselves. He further stated that slaves would be better able to gain their freedom under centralized government, or a central authority like a king or church. Similar arguments appeared later in the works of Auguste Comte , especially given Smith's belief in
10000-523: Was that of political prisoners , people from conquered or occupied countries, members of persecuted minorities, and prisoners of war , especially during the 20th century. The best-known example of this are the concentration camp system run by Nazi Germany in Europe during World War II, the Gulag camps run by the Soviet Union , and the forced labour used by the military of the Empire of Japan , especially during
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