urk. Gangetic Plain.
- Tamerlane
No sarcasm, no sneer. I just felt that it was important to point out that not all European contact with Africa has been detrimental to the health of Africans.
And my comment about the health of the people in the Congo basin was purely in support of your effort to correct the erroneous belief that “the jungles of the Congo and thereabouts [are] one of planet’s major disease factories.”
Although I’ve never been to Calcutta, which may be the “gold standard” for hellholes, I have been to Kinshasa and (in between wars at least) it is certainly no hellhole.
Sorry for misunderstanding :).
Way back in misty banks of time when I was in school, one of my professors was a fellow who had done a post-doc ( or maybe even got his doctorate? ) at the University of Kinshasa in the 1970’s and he loved it. However I hear it is in pretty miserable shape these days.
- Tamerlane
My understanding is that by the 16th and 17th centuries, chattel slavery, as practised in the Americas, did not exist in western Europe. Instead, there were various conditions of forced feudal servitude, ranging from serfs who were tied to the land owned by the feudal lord, to various obligations of labour which tenants were required to provide to their feudal lord. In some countries, even those were falling into disuse or were being abolished.
For example, if my memory serves me correctly in England all remnants of feudal service were abolished in the Restoration period (1660 onwards), and if a slave was brought to England he became free. There was a major case on this point in the late 18th century; can’t remember the name of it now. (Rather ironic than an American colonial could lose his “rights” to a slave by bringing him to the mother country.)
Feudal servitudes were one of the major grievances in France, and were a contributing factor to the French Revolution, when all aspects of feudalism were abolished. Serfdom continued in other countries - for example it wasn’t abolished in Russia until the mid-19th century.
Some of these feudal servitudes were pretty grim and likely not much different in result from chattel slavery, at least from the perspective of the serf. Other servitudes may have been less onerous, and more of an example of a hierarchical society with grossly uneven distribution of wealth and power than an example of slavery per se.