Slavery has been abolished in every nation on Earth, the last being Mauritania in 2007 (!) and is outlawed by internal treaties. However, according to wikipedia;
The word ‘possibly’ is doing a lot of work there. Are there really more slaves - we’ll define slave as ‘a person who is considered property of another person’ - today than at any other point of human history, when it was not only legal but in some cases positively encouraged? More than the height of the antebellum South, or classical Rome?
There are 7 billion people in the world today. There were 1 billion people in 1800. Before Black death epidemic estimates for world population was 450 million. It is easily believable that there are more slaves now than every before because there are just so many more people now than ever before. The ratio of slaves to total population is a somewhat more interesting number.
There were far more than 27 million serfs in Europe at some points. Serfdom is outlawed today by the same laws that outlaw slavery.
I’m afraid your definition doesn’t fully disambiguate. Long-term indentured servants are almost like “property” (and some are bound, with offspring, for a lifetime or more). Serfs who were not allowed to emigrate had status similar to indentured servant or slave. I suppose if they had emigration rights (though emigration might be impractical) they could be considered to be just poor tenants.
In some countries, only allodial landowners were allowed to free their own serfs! Surely such serfs should be considered “slaves.”
Furthermore, “slaves” in ancient cultures may have had specific rights. Slaves today, being illegal, are often more like captives or hostages.
I just had a realization the other day that there seems to be an “acceptable” level of slavery thoughtout history, and beyond a certain percentage there are pressures to minimize it. The anomalous situation was the US South between the slave rebellions and the civil war. but you could say that the Civil War was the result of this pressure to relieve the absolute yoke placed on such a significant percentage of American population.
Previous to the rebellions there were a lot more rights given to ostensibly enslaved blacks, certainly as much or more freedom than most prisoners in the American prison system, even those who are convicted of victimless crimes. My theory is that Americans aren’t more het up about the prison industrial complex because we haven’t hit the breaking point as far as percentages go, because we have so few other folks in other forms of effective slavery.
In the first census in 1790, slaves made up 17.8% of the total population. The percentage declined in every census thereafter, falling to 12.6% by 1860.
I would argue that slavery being legal (or at least socially accepted) is inherent to the definition of slavery. In places where it’s illegal, what you have is kidnapping, not slavery. Which is also a bad thing, of course, but it’s a different bad thing.
What would you think of forced convict labor where the worker was either not guilty of the crime or was sentenced disproportionately to the crime (such as 5 years hard labor for mopery?)
Also, you could have slavery even in situations where the sovereign laws do not hold. You could argue that slavery is then legal under the new practical regime (i.e. the rebels), but at what point does a small rebellion become a large group of kidnappers?
I think I would draw the line at the point where the captor can admit it publicly without fear of reprisals from his neighbors. If an insurgency or whatever is holding strong enough to make that possible, then they count as “the law”.
World population was about 250 million around 0 AD. Global population climbed to half a billion in the 17th century, then to 1 billion in the early 19th century.
However according to this there were 3.9 million slaves in the US alone in 1860, out of a population of 31 million. So that works out to about 12-13% of the population.
I don’t know if you can extrapolate that in any way, but if in the early 19th century only 5% of the human race was enslaved that works out to 50 million people.
I’d image these numbers include all people coerced into various forms of labor or sexual services. The captures may or may not consider the victims “property”, but the threat of harm or withholding of all but the most essential nourishment create an effective form of slavery.
The definition of slavery he is using is “We’re talking about people forced to work held through fraud, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence.”
Which is arguably broader than the international legal definition of slavery under the 1926 Slavery Convention: “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised”. Of course the broader the definition you use, the more “slaves” you’re going to identify.