Slavery is one of the oldest institutions of human society dating to the earliest civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia and is also one of the least understood institutions in human history. Lydia Marshall, author of The Archaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion notes that the term “slavery” is applied to a variety of distinct social forms, from chattel slavery of the antebellum United States to the more indigenous systems practiced in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. This widespread application of the term slavery indicates historians, sociologists, archeologists and other academics struggle to delineate the meaning of enslavement. There is no universal consensus of what constitutes slavery as there is no single criterion or attribute is likely to be shared by all slave systems.
Defining slavery is made more difficult by the shifting interpretations of liberty and freedoms between periods and regions which reduce their significance to slavery as the absence of liberty and liberty as the absence of slavery. This simplified analysis limits understanding of what characterizes the differences between slavery, servitude, and captivity as well as how we define freedom and liberty in societies. Contemporary scholarship centers around the Atlantic-slave trade of African cargo concentrated on economics, religion and civil rights confining analysis to a single manifestation and marginalizing slavery to one time and region conceptualized and politicized as the brutal oppression of Africans.
Long before the arrival of Europeans slavers, there were well-established trading links between coastal peoples and African societies in the interior. James Walvin in Atlas of Slavery acknowledges that slavery was commonplace in a host of ancient and traditional societies from ancient Egypt to the urban fabric of ancient Greece. Both Greek and Roman societies chose their slaves from among outsiders (‘barbarians’) though, unlike slavery later in the Americas, it was not defined in racial terms. In those societies, slaves were recruited from outside: by warfare, by raids and kidnapping and by trade and barter in humanity. To have a clearer understanding of slavery, freedom or lack of freedom scholars must consider the complete history of human bondage, it’s definitions and meanings within the larger social implications of individual slave states.
Joseph Miller in his work The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach best illustrates this when he states, “The Problem of Slavery is a sweeping survey of the idea of slavery in Western culture over two millennia, from Greek antiquity to its abolition in the nineteenth century.” Query the term “slavery” in any library or media platform, and the results will include works related to abolitionism, antebellum south, and the African Plight. Very few results will return with a focus on Greco-Roman slavery, Slavery in Africa, or the Indian ocean World slave systems.
A survey of the intellectual, political and cultural elements of slavery outside the ethos of American slaving serves to reinvigorate studies into the fundamental, political and social climates that cultivated slavery. The purpose of this research is first to demonstrate that human bondage is multifaceted beyond racial assumptions. Second to bring to light historical contexts that illuminate slave systems as complex cultural and social phenomenon. The importance of the study is to evolve scholarship outside racial implications to open discourse on the question of what defines slavery, causes and consequences and the process by which slavery defined societies.
Routledge History of Slavery records the first major slave societies as developing in ancient Greece and Rome. Within the Greek language, there are several words referenced to the state of being enslaved, all with different distinctions that could be applied to both free and unfree. These terms were used to distinguish between purchased slave, captive slave, inherited slave, gender, function, and place of origin. The most common terms used to describe labor of non-free citizens including debt-bondsman were doulos and douleia. In Homer, the terms doulos and doulosyne (slave), along with other terms denoting slaves appear to signify the social status of individuals. Slaves then were not determined by race but instead were defined as persons who performed work under compulsion and were dependent on others. Greeks perceived slavery not only as relations of ownership but also, and chiefly, regarding social relations and philia. The term Philia both sheds light and confuses the state of servitude as Philia denotes reciprocity between slave and Master. Philia involves the grant of favor and the obligation to show gratitude and return the favor. Thus, through deed debt, moral enslavement is created that revolves around a relationship that is fundamentally different than indebted servitude or forced labor.
In the study of Greco Roman slavery, Moses Finley has contributed significantly to modern knowledge of the Greco-Roman institution of slavery. In his work, The Ancient Economy Finley concentrates on the social and political organization of antiquity and their influence on economic behaviors, status, and laws. With a detailed study of writings such as the recording of his reign by Emperor Augustus and Homers fictional Odysseus Finley draws attention to the duality of wealth as an absolute requisite for the good life, and overall, all that there was to it. For the Greeks, wealth was defined by both moral character and property. Status was achieved through contributions to public life and depended almost in its entirety on wealth. Personal independence and leisure, obtainable only through wealth defined freedom. Finley references the Rhetoric of Aristotle, “The condition of the free man, is that he not live under the constraint of another.” Finley interprets this to mean from the context that Aristotle’s notion of living under restraint was not restricted to slaves but was extended to wage labor and to others who were economically dependent. In this sense, a free man is not free and may be indebted to service, yet they differ from slaves in that they are not property. This interpretation differs from modern conceptions of freedom that do not consider economics as determining degrees of freedom but rather that wealth is the precursor to the enslavement of others.
Finley notes the ambiguity of the Greco-Roman institutions of slavery citing the Helots of Sparta who worked in many forms of servitude and were referred to as “Slaves” by the Greeks. Finley explains that the Helots were not a freeman, nor were they deemed property and therefore could not be sold or freed as chattel might, except by the state. Additionally, the Helots, unlike chattel retained their families, their possessions, religions, and, in general, all the normal human institutions except their freedom. More interestingly the Helots were enlisted into the Spartan army as proper, heavy-armed soldiers, not merely as orderlies and clerks. The status of the Helots with the ability to provide a benefit to the public outside of labor as an equal in warfare further complicates their social position. The cultural freedoms of the Helots and their military use separates them from the accepted roles of slaves creating a division of what constitutes enslaved.
Finley then addresses the institution of the peculium, property (in whatever form) assigned for use, management, and, within limits, disposal to someone who in law lacked the right of property, either a slave or someone in patria potestas. Under this system which constituted a substantial part of the urban commercial, financial and industrial activity both slaves and freedmen worked independently not only for their owners but also for themselves. In this way freedmen could increase both their wealth and status and slaves could purchase freedom with the profits. Once free the former slaves could continue the business as a freedman possessing property with all rights of transference to heirs. Slavery or servitude of both Greek and foreign individuals was defined by economics and incorporated into a status society of order independent from modern ideas of capitalism and race. Finley successfully illustrates with an in-depth social examination of ancient economics that Greco-Roman slaves consisted of freemen, dependent labor, debt-bondage, and chattel.
In Conquerers and Slaves British Historian and sociologist Keith Hopkins, claims that “Only a handful of human societies can properly be called ‘slave societies’, if by slave society we mean a society in which slaves play an important part in production and form a high proportion (say over 20 %) of the population.” Hopkins identifies five slave societies, classical Athens and Roman from antiquity, the West Indian Islands, Brazil and the southern states of America. Most of Hopkins work centers around Roman culture stating that Roman imperial expansionism resulted in the growth of slavery in Rome following a cycle of seven factors: “continuous war, the influx of booty, its investment in land, the formation of large estates, the impoverishment of peasants, their emigration to towns and the provinces, the growth of urban markets.” Hopkins further stresses that slavery in Rome was also a product of Roman politics which depended on status and power. Ownership of slaves displayed wealth, amplified the discrepancy between the living-styles of rich and poor, and preserved the traditional independence of the citizens. The presence of a substantial number of slaves in a Roman society defined free citizens, even if they were poor, as superior.
Finley and Hopkins have primarily viewed slavery as an economic institution resulting from wealth ideology, Roman politics, and social order. Most interesting that both Finley and Hopkins concentrate on economics but succeed most in revealing the social institution of slavery in a society defined by status and wealth. Ancient Greek and Roman culture were polarized with the notion that man was either wealthy or poor and free or slave similar as one would say Male or Female in modern times. These notions were absolute but not definite, meaning that a slave could become free just as a freeman could become slave either through acts of conquest or debt. From the scholarship of these two authors among others, it becomes clear that expansionism, wealth, status and politics, not ethnicity, controlled much of the slave philosophies in the Greco-Roman world. These same foundations are found in other cultures with strict social hierarchies influenced by both wealth and control such as was exhibited in the African slave trade.
Slavery dominated the African political economy and was fundamental in control of people and land from ancient times. In most ancient civilizations, the practice of slavery began as a natural extension of the social hierarchy or because of conflict. At first, most slaves were outsiders, those taken from other peoples, but over time slavery became an acceptable status even among one’s own people. Slaves were often obtained in warfare, military raids and kidnapping while others became religious and judicial prisoners of servitude. For centuries, humans were part of the cargo in trade conducted between Africa and Eurasia, along with ivory, gold, and other commodities of legitimate trade. A common perversion of the African slave trade is the representation of Europeans invading and violently trapping Africans in a culture of violence and human trade. Despite Africa’s long history of slave trade modern historians argue that Africans were not experienced traders and were forced or coerced into the involuntary sale of labor by European merchants.
John Thornton author of Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400-1800 argues that the slave trade should not be seen as an autonomous “impact” brought in from outside but was instead rooted in deep-seated legal and institutional structures of African societies, and functioned quite differently from the way it functioned in European societies. Thornton asserts slavery was in many ways the functional equivalent of the landlord-tenant relationship in Europe as slaves in Africa were the only form of private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law in comparison to European legal systems, in which land was the primary form of private, revenue-producing property. Alongside J.D. Fage and David Eltis Thornton contests historians such as Walter Rodney and Paul Lovejoy that profess that external forced slave trade caused social disruption, adversely altered judicial systems, or increased inequality on unwilling African participants. Instead, Thornton and colleagues stress that slavery was widespread and indigenous in African society, Europeans simply tapped this existing market. Thornton establishes concrete evidence that Africans were not coerced, forced or economically manipulated to traffic in human slaves.
Thornton offers an alternative explanation that economic and political warfare motivated the practice of military enslavement and the spread of slavery. The institution of slavery in Africa following this line of interpretation becomes very clouded in terminology again. In acts of warfare, the capture of enemies for political and economic growth does not constitute slavery as understood in European terms. It also does not represent an ethnic bias but rather a social organization of weeding out or controlling individuals that posed a threat to social organization and desired expansions. As noted earlier, slavery is a term used so loosely in European languages and Christian societies that only by careful examination of cultures, languages, laws and social organizations can slavery as a term be correctly identified and applied.
Consider for example the Chikunda of South Africa in Portuguese-run estates called Prazos along the Zambezi River. The Chikunda were slaves both captive and voluntary used by Portuguese settlers to collect taxes from peasants, patrol the borders, and police the estates. Over time these slaves developed a collective identity that shared behaviors and beliefs, a patrilineal system of kinship and inheritance that celebrated their prowess as warriors and hunters distinguishing them from the indigenous peasant population. This formation of cultural identity is very complex as it was comprised of slaves from distant regions divided by language and ancestry. Issacman and Peterson in “Making the Chikunda: Military Slavery and Ethnicity in Southern Africa, 1750-1900,” document the diversity of slaves, with a detailed list of 659 male slaves freed in the Tete area in 1856 from 21 different ethnic groups. Among the Chikunda were also voluntary slaves who sold themselves into military slavery as an economical means of survival. One eighteenth-century chronicler observed, “The greatest part came to be captives from the times of famine, pestilence, and locusts and because of their urgent necessity, they had no alternative but to come and offer themselves as captives.” Unlike most slave systems the Chikunda were frequently gifted highly valued imported goods, including cloth, beads, and guns and granted land, wives, and the right to hunt on the estates. Chikunda were not confined to the estates but were housed on regimental villages called butaka, each with a clearly defined political hierarchy, with a slave chief, mukazambo, exercising authority over his soldiers’ lives. Along with their independent social structuring the Chikunda owned slaves of their own captured in warfare and military campaigns. The Chikunda differ greatly from traditional conceptions of slave societies in that the members consist of both voluntary and involuntary slaves highly diversified yet organized into communities with shared identities and power above the indigenous groups. The Chikunda were endowed with both economic and political privileges that mirror very closely the status of freemen in Grec,o-Roman society.
Slavery in the Indian Ocean world spawned from economies based on irrigated agriculture that required massive labor. Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley and later China wealthy from agriculture engaged in military expansion. Gwyn Campbell in “Enslavement in the Indian Ocean World” notes the expansion resulted in two broad systems of enslavement maintained to the end of the nineteenth century. The first system believed to be the origin of slavery in Mesopotamia in the, third millennia B.C. enslaved only women and children and executed most adult males to reduce the cost of enslaving and to prevent rebellion. Unlike the Atlantic slave-trade which consisted mostly of males, many slaves traded in the Indian Ocean World were female valued particularly for their sexual attractiveness and reproductive capacity. With the exceptions of eunuchs (‘males made female’), who were universally highly prized, and boys in China; there, patriarchal ideology restricted the supply of boy slaves whose price was often four to five times that of a girl slave. In the second system, adult male captives from advanced and settled agricultural regions were commonly maintained alongside captive women and children in a state of community bondage. However, most slaves in the Indian Ocean world were enslaved legally, for defaulting debtors and their relatives. Enslavement for indebtedness in this system is distinguished from debt bondage as involuntary in comparison to later samples of debt bondage that is voluntary. A common and not often considered practice in slavery was also voluntary slavery in which individuals were willingly sold to ensure survival following natural disasters that brought death and disease. In addition to war slaves, indebted slaves and voluntary slave the Indian Ocean trades also exported Indonesians, people of Turk and Slavic origin, Indians and others along the Makran coast of Iran, Western India, Indonesia and China making the industry of slavery ethnically diverse.
The Indian Ocean institution of slavery was just as diverse in meaning as it was in ethnicities of the slaves. In nineteenth-century Somalia terms such as Jareer, Bantu, Mjikenda, Adoon, Habash, Bidde, Sankadhuudhe, Boon, Meddo, and Oogi were all applied to different states of slavehood. Each of these terms, like the Greco-Roman language considered earlier, had different meanings, depending on context and the meanings could change over time. The terms nubi or sishu (slave) appears repeatedly in Chinese sources over the last 2000 years but has been largely ignored by sinologists prior to the Han and Tang eras as lacking importance in the Chinese economy. Most scholarship in slave trafficking in China begins with the Han dynasty and the Nubi or Nu-pi defined as property which could be bought and sold, legally distinct from free men. In China, most slaves originated as indentured servants, who could regain their freedom if able to repay to their master the sum stipulated in their contract. In addition to the indebted servant Angela Schottenhammer in her research article “Slaves and Forms of Slavery in Late Imperial China” distinguishes three other basic sources of enslavement. The first, males seized by the victorious Manchu invaders and forced to serve in the Manchu army in the period 1645 to 1647. The second peasants, craftsman, small merchants and artisans forced to sell themselves or family members as slaves. And the third major category comprised of kidnap victims, chiefly women, young girls, and children, officially registered as slaves (nuji), and sold as concubines, wives or prostitutes. In these earliest forms of slavery warfare, politics, social order, and economics was a greater influence on servitude than the race itself. The definition of slavery, therefore, changes according to how one was enslaved, became indebted or voluntarily agreed to contract into a servitude debt, and the meaning of slavery lies instead on conditions and treatment as determinants between enslaved and free. Research so far has indicated that slavery loosely defined was intrinsically an institution socially and politically complex influenced by both economics and expansionism. The European expansion into the Americas as well dependent on labor forces, labor that originated at home but quickly evolved into the forced migration of Africans to the new colonies.
Harry S. Truman once said “America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.” Truman’s words are powerful and motivational however they credit more to national identity than to the true nature of “doing the job at hand” in colonial America. Building America depended on an immense labor force that was not created entirely of free people but was comprised of human capital that included convicts, indentured servants, native captives and forcefully migrated slaves.
Indentured servitude was a common institution in the 17th and I8th century British colonies and constituted a major portion of the colonial labor force. Abbot Emerson Smith, a leading historian of indentured servitude in the colonial period estimated that between one-half and two-thirds of all white immigrants to the British colonies between the Puritan migration of the 1630s and the Revolution came under indentured servitude. In addition to European transports, labor needs were augmented by the enslavements of native Americans during the major New England Indian wars, including the Pequot War of 1637, King Philip’s War of 1675–76, and the northeastern Wabanaki conflicts of 1676–1749. Historian Brett Rushforth has calculated that from the late fifteenth through the mid-nineteenth century, two to four million Native American slaves were traded by colonizers in the Americas. Both European indentured servants and captive natives endured many hardships like that of trans-Atlantic slaves, yet their plight is lost in the shadows of abolitionism and civil rights. Historians have committed volumes of literature to the case of the trans-Atlantic slave trade but have presented only a limited view of the Imperial influence and social history of indentured servitude in the growth of the American colonies.
Most research and scholarship to date has been concentrated on economic history primarily focused on labor and market complexities. Among the most notable contributors to the modern understanding of the institution of indentured servitude is historian Abbot Emerson Smith. His works include The Indentured Servant and Land Speculation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland, “The Transportation of Convicts to the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,” and Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607-1776. Scholarship of Smith provides in-depth knowledge of the conditions of Britain society that led to bondage, trader profitability within the industry trade in servants, and public policy toward the trade and its abuses. While Smith explores economic elements, he adds to social interpretation by exploring three groups of emigration to the Americas he describes as the redemptioners, the indentured or indebted servants and those of the state consisting of political and military prisoners, vagabonds, and convicts. Of the last he states that while “America was a haven for the godly, a refuge for the oppressed, a challenge to the adventurous . . . it was also the last resort of scoundrel.” Smith expresses a certain disdain for the convicts as a detriment to the social growth of American society and runs a bit short on the experiences of the redemptioners. However, Smith illuminates the experiences of those migrated in servitude with detailed documentation of their experiences, legal status, treatment and life after servitude.
On this same line of research David Galenson an Associate Professor of Economics, University of Chicago and Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research draws parallels between indentured servitude and older systems of British bound labor. In doing this, he moves against traditional servitude views to the interpretation of voluntary choice in a developing competitive market. Galenson argues that servitude is fundamentally different than slavery existing as a labor market free of coercive elements and comprised of all social classes. In this work, Galenson proposes that the rising cost of white servitude wages and improved economics in Britain directly influenced the introduction of slavery to the West Indies and America. Galensons reinterpretation of servitude contributes immensely to understanding market volatility and human capitalism but falls short in social exploration to living and work conditions in servitude contracts or the labor hardships that followed in the developing nation.
The labor forces of the American colonies went through a series of identifiable periods based on systematic changes in the relative costs of white and black labor over time. As small agricultural evolved into large agricultural staples the demand for labor rose and therefore tended to raise the level of immigration to the colony. Initially, the annual cost of indentured servants was below that of slaves, and planters continued to rely on indentured laborers. However, as the cost of indentured labor rose, the colonies began to transition to slave labor which was a considerably less expensive form of unskilled labor.
Black slave labor had other advantages in social control, distinguishable by the color they were easier to identify, they were unarmed and had no legal protection in conditions of labor or the levels of brutality that could be applied to ensure control. This shift in labor restructured the class system, elevating the indentured servant from the bottom to a new class with social privileges and protection of both property and human rights. The image of the African became associated with savagery, paganism, immorality, ignorance, and primitiveness. In short, racism materialized.
Research to this point has established trends in the slave trade to be multifaceted beyond racial assumptions including warfare, economics, debt and even sexual in nature but none specific to a single ethnicity. Racism is correlated to the institution of slavery in America as a product of the systems political and social climates cultivated within the institution of slavery. However, this does not conclusively correlate racism to acts of enslavement but instead to a collective reaction to social restructuring both of class and within labor divisions.
The American expansion from labor slavery to racial slavery does not imply ethnically derived systems nor establishes a consistent presence of ethnically driven motivators in human bondage. Consider again the Chikunda, ethnically diversified captives, soldier slaves endowed with both economic and political privileges. Both Greek and Roman societies chose their slaves from among outsiders (‘barbarians’) though, it was not defined in racial terms and during the Han and Song periods gender defined slave preference and Tang literature refers to Kunlun or Black African slaves pointedly elevating African slaves as rare luxury items. None of the systems, including that of colonial America exhibit definitive racial influencers in origination, the divide comes as a social justification for inhumane acts. Further scholarship needs to be applied to distinguish between racially motivated systems of enslavement and institutions of slavery that promoted racial division as a means of controlling social order.
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