Op-Ed Article

Slavery Throughout History 

It’s a sad testimonial to the human race that slavery was practiced by virtually every tribe, empire or country since the beginning of recorded time.  To know the number of Europeans, Russians, Near, Middle or Far Easterners, Africans, North or South Americans, you name it, held in bondage over the last 10,000 years would be stunning. Almost all people on the earth today surely have slave ancestry.  Assuming a 50 year life span we are only 31 lives removed from the Roman Empire and less than 50 lives removed from Alexander The Great.  Much of the Egyptian, Greek, Roman and every other western and eastern empire in history were economically supported by their use of European, Middle Eastern, Eastern and African slaves.  Remember Spartacus’ slave revolt?  Caesar alone took hundreds of thousands of slaves when he conquered Gaul (France).  After Rome’s 1000 year slave driven reign ended in 476 AD, barbarian conquerors; the Huns, Anglo Saxons, Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Lombards, Avars, Francs, Vikings, the Islamic Caliphate and the Mongols to name a few, enslaved countless millions of Europeans.  This does not even consider the Eastern Roman and Byzantine Empire under Justinian and other emperors who practiced many of the slave habits of the Western Roman Empire until the Ottoman Empire conquests of the 1400’s.  And of course, the Ottomans captured and enslaved millions of people themselves.  In the 15^th and 16^th century slaves were imported from Europe to North Africa on a massive scale.  Again in the 18^th and early 19^th century it began again in earnest when the Barbary pirates enslaved up to 1.5 million Europeans after, among other things, their ships foundered along the North African shores and their crews captured.

In the 17^th century slavery was used as punishment by the conquering English parliament armies against the native Catholics in Ireland.  Between the years 1659 and 1663 Cromwell sent many thousands of Irish Catholics to the West Indies as slaves.  Some even became the property of the Anglican Church there used as slaves to work the large sugar cane and coffee plantations alongside the many African slaves. The majority of economies in the New World functioned using African and indigenous native slaves by the hundreds of thousands and even millions from the late 1500’s to the late 1800’s. The British formally outlawed slavery in 1834 as did the U.S. with the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.  Brazil officially abolished slavery in 1888, and Saudi Arabia and Mauritania did not do so until as late as 1962 and 1981 respectively.

Under European feudalism from the 9^th to the 16^th century serfs functioned as a slave labour force bound to the land with no rights and some countries in eastern Europe continued this practice until the last European country, Romania discontinued serf slavery in 1864.  And the peasants of Russia who lived under this same feudalistic slavery system endured their bondage for six hundred years until well into the 20^th century.  As recently as just 65 years ago the Nazis and Japanese in WW II enslaved and force worked tens of millions of people.

Slavery, genocide, subjugated labour, torture, mass murder, war, religious and political upheavals, inquisitions, mass starvations and forced relocations shamefully litter the history of our entire human species and are still practiced today. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery.

Mickey Moulder

Related Material

The Slave's Lamentation

The Vermont Anti-Slavery Society, formed in 1834 just one year after the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society, did not wish to interfere with slavery or encourage slaves to revolt.  Rather, the Society tried to accomplish its goals in a moral way.  They wished to “expose the guilt and danger of holding men as property” by publishing pamphlets, newspaper articles, and songs as well as lecturing in churches and at public meetings. This song, "The Slave's Lamentation," was written by Fairbank Bush of Norwich, Vermont. It was published as a broadside and circulated throughout the state.

 See http://www.vermonthistory.org/educate/antisl.htm for the complete article.

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