What percentage of the population had ancestors who were slaves? I often hear it said that if you go back far enough, most people had ancestors who were slaves or serfs or peasants or whatever. Is this true?
Thanks,
Rob
If you go back far enough, everybody still living has at least one ancestor in common. That makes “going back far enough” be meaningless as a criterion.
You need to narrow down your time span or there can’t be any answer to this question. Even in narrow terms, interbreeding among owners and slaves increase the percentage of slave ancestors tremendously.
If you want to add serfs and peasants to slaves, then again the question becomes meaningless because the answer is “everyone.”
OK, how about direct ancestors in the last 3000 years?
Thanks,
Rob
Still probably damn near everyone. There might possibly be one or two such people in the world, but how you could prove they had slave/serf-free ancestry for the last 3000 years is beyond me. Even royal families where bloodlines are carefully tracked don’t stretch back that far, and even then while maternal identity is probably highly accurate, paternal identity is a matter of law and custom, not biology. In other words, that such and such a queen gave birth to such and such a child is almost certainly accurate, the person listed as the “father” may or may not have contributed the sperm to conceive that child.
Add to that, when you go back 1000 years the royal families of Europe were more like barbarian chieftans than royalty. Even the Japanese royal family doesn’t go back accurately more than 1500 years.
Cecil says that a person will have about 2 million distinct ancestors if you look back to 1200 AD. I would say that the odds are good that one of those grandparents was a slave or in a similar such arrangement.