Are slave owners in the US the only ones to have engaged in selective slave breeding, or is there historical evidence of this having been done elsewhere?
I recall reading about the Romans who owned gladiator slaves breeding those who won many contests. Some were even retired to ‘stud’ eventually.
But I’m not sure this reading was from reliable sources.
What evidence is there that American slave masters engaged in selective slave breeding?
Honestly, I’ve kind of always just assumed they did.
I’ve read descriptions of slave weddings with at least the indication that wedding partners were picked by the participants themselves.
Of course slave masters certainly did practice selective breeding by breeding with the slaves themselves, but I don’t think this is what the OP meant.
The article does not indicate that it happened at all.
Indeed, I thought that Cecil dealt with it one time, refuting a common “pulpit notion” that white slavers ran huge breeding farms of blacks in the Olde South. I can’t find it on the website, however.
But even if they did, you’d be talking maybe one or two generations, max. There would have been little or no incentive to do this prior to the banning of importing new slaves in 1808, and that would’ve given them only ~50 years to set up a execute a breeding program. If it was done at all, and I haven’t seen any evidence that it was, it would have been a drop in the bucket and there wouldn’t be any vestiges left today.
Researchers have extensively studied the subject and found… nothing. The closest you can come is that many eastern plantation owners couldn’t actually turn a profit effectively, and often had to sell their slaves west. But they weren’t breeding them deliberately.
The reality is, most American slave labor didn’t require a perfectly chiseled athlete. Massa was happy to see his female slaves pop out as many kids as possible, even if they weren’t perfect genetic specimens.
Why not? Because the slave buyers could have bought imported slaves to match their desired criteria instead of breeding them? But that cost money, while a slave mother’s children belonged to the master free of charge. I think there still would have been an incentive.
Nevertheless, what oldguy said matches my knowledge; AFAIK, slaves were usually allowed to pick their spouses, though always subject to the risk of one spouse being sold away. Even if there was an incentive to breed, I know of no evidence that it led to an actual breeding program.
I think we can say pretty confidently that in most of West Africa, there would have been no selective breeding, because in most of those societies slavery wasn’t heritable. I also wouldn’t expect to find it in the Barbary states, because the children of slaves were free if they converted to Islam (indeed, a slave himself was supposed to be freed if he converted, though I understand in practice a lot of slave owners resisted this requirement).
How about Roman slavery? Greek? Egyptian? Chinese? Any evidence of selective breeding there?
Well it depends on what your definition of breeding program is. Certainly American slavers, because slaves were so valuable and died quickly, had to keep slaves reproducing and this was a selling point of slaves. In that sense there were a "breeding program"s
Like others have already said though, I am not sure that there was ever a Jimmy the Greek style long term operation of breeding slaves to make bigger/stronger slaves.
I believe that the plantations were unusual; most of the south was small family farms – subsistence farming. They had few, if any, slaves. I seem to recall that the average slave-owner had 3 or less slaves.
It would be hard to do much of a breeding program with that!
If there were breeding programs, they would have had to have been confined to the few large plantations.
For what it’s worth, Darwin mentioned a tribe named the Jollofs that systematically sold ugly female slaves to other tribes, breeding them for beauty.
I met some slaves on a boat in Mali once. Their master said that he had approval of all marriages. It may not be selective breeding, but it’s just a step away.
It seems to me that there would be very little incentive to practice selective breeding in a species with the same reproductive cycle and life expectancy as yourself.
How long ago was this?
Uhhhh last July.
Everyone tells me that it isn’t the same thing that we think of when we think of slavery, and that it is more like a caste system, but what I saw was pretty disturbing.
The slaves I saw do crappy work with no pay (ours spent 24 hours a day scooping water out of the boat with a plastic bowl, with occassional breaks to stand in the knee high water cooking rotten goat meat…man that was a great vacation). They had seggregated places to live, their choice of work and marriage was controlled by their masters. They even had to ask permission to have kids. Normal people (like me) arn’t supposed to greet them or even acknowledge their existence. Several people proudly pointed out their slaves or their slave’s living spaces to me, and I shared a boat with a slave family for several days.
In my research, I’ve found that sexual abuse is pretty common, as younger slave girls are the least likely to run away or know how to contact the authorities. People can buy their freedom, but often they are passed down through the generations.
Slavery was only recently outlawed in Niger, and is still pretty widespread in Niger and Mali- the law doesn’t mean much outside of the cities. There are also child-slave coacoa plantation in Cote D’Ivoire- I met a little kid who ran away from one of those. Even here in relatively progressive Cameroon, there are certain people who are promised into certain occupations by heridity or given to religious authorities or traditional leaders as youth. There is also a fair amount of trafficing youth to act as domestic servents in the cities or overseas.
I think it’s been pretty well documented that what you’re describing can be considered as a form of slavery. It might not be identical to the chattel slavery system of the pre-Civil War USA, but it’s still a form of slavery. Maybe the particular people you saw weren’t in that type of situation, but I think we can be pretty sure that it does exist in that general area, and there is probably a continuum of slavery to virtual slavery to situations that are just damn hard to get out of.