Huh? Europeans definitely had slavery up through the Middle ages, and then it waned in favor of other patently unfree systems like serfdom, peonage, and indentured servitude. Maybe it wasn’t strict chattel slavery, but it wasn’t far off.
What tends to set the US slavery experience apart is that it was kept up until 1865, far after pretty much all other developed nations (for the time) had abolished it, and took a hugely bloody war to do it. That, and the slavery was very race-based. I don’t think that the slavery of say… ancient Rome, or eighth-century Europe was race-based; it was white people enslaving other white people.
I was not confusing you and @GreenWyvern. I was addressing the “discovered it” phrase you used here:
Except there were thousands of slaves in Iberian Christian Kingdoms when Columbus set sail for the New World, and Genoa and Venice were still participants in the (by then more limited by Papal decrees) slave trade at that same time. However even just a hundred years before Venice was a thriving slave port.
It should also be firmly recognized that the move away from widespread chattel slavery for regular farming needs, which arguably started a good 1100 years prior with reforms implemented by Emperor Diocletian–who introduced a system in which peasants were “bound to a hereditary calling”, but received some form of recompense for their work and could not be bought and sold. While at the time Diocletian’s reforms only affected a small subset of people who had previously been slaves (the Roman Empire’s agricultural economy in particular was maintained by immense scale chattel slavery), it can be seen as sort of the legal and traditional founding of serfdom. Even that wasn’t Diocletian being a “good guy” by modern standards, it was more a way to try and find a workable system that didn’t require a huge influx of slaves from wars of conquest, which was understood to at some point not be endlessly sustainable.
As early as Emperor Justinian you had some official pronouncements against slavery’s morality, but that followed a common trend for the next 1000 years or so–statements against it, but often the practice continued.
It is true that by and large by the time of Columbus, Christians had ceased enslaving Christians, and a few states had gone even further–slavery was functional prohibited in England and France. France had gone so far as to issue a decree in the 1300s that any slave who set foot in France, was a free man (possibly the earliest state to issue such a decree.) But showing the “practicality” pre-dominant in European attitudes about slavery, several of France’s Mediterranean ports received exemptions to this ruling and were able to continue as participants in the slave trade for hundreds of years after. Unsurprisingly–the portions of France that still directly profited from slavery, were allowed to continue to do so, the portions of France where custom had mostly shifted to free peasantry and tenancy with land lords, slavery was “wrong and not practiced.”
The reality is Europeans had no deep seated moral issues with slavery (evidenced by the fact that they proceeded to enslave millions of people and transport them across the Atlantic Ocean.) The Pope had some issues with ways in which the slave trade were seen to be benefitting Muslim enemies of Christendom, and wanted to stop Christians from participating in that business.
What sets the U.S. apart is we actually still talk about our participation in slavery extensively. The popular take is somehow we try to ignore it, but the reality is we do a lot more soul searching than most countries do, the argument is more about “do we do enough.” Turkey for example does about 0.0% soul searching about how it maintained slavery until the end of WWI, or for example the Armenian Genocide.
In historical terms the gap between when the U.S. abolished slavery and when other Western powers did so, is not really that big. A few decades. Note that not a single one of the other western powers that abolished all types of slavery a few decades before the United States had slaves as a major component of their domestic economy. So, it’s much easier to abolish something that you don’t have domestic stakeholders who will fight tooth and nail to keep it going, abolishing it in overseas territories is a much lighter lift.
I don’t really consider any human society to have been particularly impressive in terms of slavery. In fact if I want to really upset some people, I’d say the United States has the “record” for abolishing slavery–by force in a war waged against the slavers, when slavery was still a very significant % of its population and its economy. The history of slavery ending in most the rest of the world is the history of slavery for various cultural and economic reasons becoming less and less common, and then suddenly when it was practiced by very few, morality-based decrees would come out condemning it. Almost like what really drove abolition in those countries was economics and self-interest, not any sort of principled stand.
Slaving by the Ottomans and North African Muslim states was actually vast in scale, involving millions of people, both Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans. It shouldn’t really be discounted in any way, it was vast and quite terrible. This is one reason why I frankly get quite frustrated at times about “American exceptionalism” in which we try to sermonize our participation in slavery was unique and terrible beyond any scale ever seen in history. The reality is human participation in slavery was virtually universal until about 200 years ago, and only receded since then. In fact it is still practiced in some parts of the world at fairly large scale, just illegally.
This isn’t “excuse-making”, it is truth-telling, that people need to understand slavery was not uniquely a Western thing, or uniquely an American thing. It was a practice near-universal in scope. Indigenous peoples of North and South America had been practicing slavery long before they ever encountered Europeans, for example.
True, although the Nazis were something of an aberration in terms of what they espoused, relative to the general trajectory of Western European thought over the last 1000 years.
Oh I’m all with you there. See my remark that African society was destroyed by both European and Arab slavers. Recall that 60 years ago, intellectuals were begging a moment of Malcolm X’s time with “um, about that changing your names to Arab to shed the slaver name…”
At least that myth that the white supremasochists were retailing 10-15 years ago has been debunked: “Irish displaced by the English were sent to the West Indies as slaves where the white was forcefully bred out of them. Poor Colleens mated with menacing Black brutes (fap fap)”
An awesome book on African American History is To Make Our World Anew - there are two volumes, the first covers from colonialization of the Americas to 1860(?).
Romania didn’t free its Roma slaves until the 1860s - about the same time the U.S. did. And, of course, the Nazi’s used slave labor - Jews, Slavs, Roma, prisoners of war and political prisoners.
Not “Canada the nation-state founded in 1867,” but “‘Canada’ the British colonies” did. Without an economy based on labour-intensive industries such as cotton, tobacco, and sugar, however, slaves were not used in nearly the same numbers or purposes as in the US, more often enslaved to work as artisans or household servants.
An interestingly contrarian book is “Debt: The First 5000 Years” by David Graeber. While it’s more about money than about slavery, he has an interesting thesis that debt was more about human bondage in assorted forms than about precious metals or other physical mediums. Indeed, his point is that in much of the history of enterprises, exchange mediums were rare and debts were simply book-keeping entries.
If I recall (It’s been a while) he points out that the African cultures typically used a form of slavery as a means of enforcing debt. It was when Europeans came along to west Africa and started exchanging valuable tangible goods for slaves that the local shore kingdoms began raiding the interior for more an more slaves. Nobody comes out of this smelling good.
As others have mentioned, you can see the same process in east Africa - you can to this day visit the remains of the slave market on Zanzibar, where captives from the interior were auctioned off to Middle Eastern masters (and others from further afield). Again nobody comes out of this smelling good.
But the idea that Europeans pulled up to the shore and sent out raiding parties to collect a boatload of unaware locals is rubbish. The locals had an economy - like much of the world - that was built on enslavement of war captives and debtors, and the Europeans just used this and took this to a far higher order of magnitude.
The other issue that makes slavery of Africans so much more reprehensible is also the one touched on in earlier posts. By making a racial/religious distinction between the enslavers and the enslaved - one that was rare in other settings - they have given the Americas a legacy that will take a much longer time to undo. Acts that were reprehensible applied to fellow man were apparently “justified” when done to these “others”. Justifications were that the enslaved were less than human, that being heathens enslaving them to teach them the true religion was a good thing, etc. - all the while treating them worse than animals. A millennia or more of the church trying to undo the evils of slavery in Europe was reversed by state, church, and society for the expediency and profit of plantation labour.
And as long as we are talking…one of the - as far as I know - unique features of the American system of slavery was the livestock aspect. After we forbid the import of slaves (1806?), in order to get more slaves, you needed to breed them. Breeding people for sale. Enslaved women that were fertile were worth more than ones that weren’t. And slave owners generally didn’t care how a female slave got pregnant, just that she was - and regularly.
The thing was, breeding slaves was a slow process at best - it was more profitable for much of history to simply go out and gather up more. There was always a source - due to poverty, war, and piracy. I suppose America was unique in halting wholesale slave trade and importation while still allowing slavery to continue.
Of course that definition of slavery to get to the 400,000 is a not really the same as the slavery of the past is it? It is a grossly inflated number. Even the article admits said. The 400,000 is eye catching and practically click bait.
Even the clickbait article does not equate it with classical slavery (though certain countries— not the US— were mentioned as still having, or as having had until recently— various forms of slave markets). Unfortunately a Guardian-type article does not carefully explain the methodology used to count straight-up slaves versus the merely “exploited”; to their credit the article does acknowledge that.
Ditto Russia. Although it was called “serfdom”, it was slavery in pretty much all but name. There were some technical differences, but the life of a serf in Russia really wasn’t much different from that of a slave in the US.
Funny how the heads of state for both the US and Russia who’d freed the slaves/serfs were each murdered for his efforts; the first by agents of reaction, the second by agents of (“not good enough, dammit”) reform.
Article I, section 9 of the Constitution forbade banning the importation of slaves before then. The Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves was passed in 1807 and took effect in 1808.