Slavery

Self-sale or the sale of children to pay debts was recorded in Egypt in 2600 BC. Debt slavery and slavery from prisoners of war was widespread in all the near-Eastern cultures of that era. In the Greek and Roman civilizations slavery became a formal institution, but debt slavery ceased to be legal. After the fall of the Roman Empire slavery declined in western and central Europe, but persisted in southern Europe and the Middle East where it was given new impetus by Islam. With the colonization of the New World and the opening up of plantations, slave trade in negroes flourished and persisted until the advent of the anti-slavery movements in the 19th century. The liberation of these slaves did little to change attitudes in society towards them which still persist today.

The system flourished even among the most civilized peoples, among the Greeks and among the Romans, with whom the few imposed their will upon the many; and this power was exercised so unjustly and with such haughtiness that a crowd of slaves was regarded merely as so many chattels--not as persons, but as things. They were held to be outside the sphere of law, and without even the claim to retain and enjoy life. "Slaves are in the power of their masters, and this power is derived from the law of nations; for we find that among all nations masters have the power of life and death over their slaves, and whatever a slave earns belongs to his master." Owing to this state of moral confusion it became lawful for men to sell their slaves, to give them in exchange, to dispose of them by will, to beat them, to kill them, to abuse them by forcing them to serve for the gratification of evil passions and cruel superstitions; these things could be done, legally, with impunity, and in the light of heaven. Even those who were wisest in the pagan world, illustrious philosophers and learned jurisconsults, outraging the common feeling of humanity, succeeded in persuading themselves and others that slavery was simply a necessary condition of nature. Nor did they hesitate to assert that the slave class was very inferior to the freemen both in intelligence and perfection of bodily development, and therefore that slaves, as things wanting in reason and sense, ought in all things to be the instruments of the will, however rash and unworthy, of their masters. Such inhuman and wicked doctrines are to be specially detested; for, when once they are accepted, there is no form of oppression so wicked but that it will defend itself beneath some color of legality and justice. History is full of examples showing what a seedbed of crime, what a pest and calamity, this system has been for states. Hatreds are excited in the breasts of the slaves, and the masters are kept in a state of suspicion and perpetual dread; the slaves prepare to avenge themselves with the torches of the incendiary, and the masters continue the task of oppression with greater cruelty. States are disturbed alternately by the number of the slaves and by the violence of the masters, and so are easily overthrown; hence, in a word, come riots and seditions, pillage and fire. (Papal Writings, In Plurimis, 1888).

Slavery was therefore not a new phenomenon in the fourteenth century. It had been practised by other civilizations on other peoples. However, the massive and systematic way in which it was applied in Africa, on African peoples, was out of all proportion to what may have happened elsewhere. Carried out in the most inhuman ways, it was more costly in human lives, more destructive of the social fabric and the source of greater economic and cultural looting than humanity had every known. It was systematized and generalized to the point of being called the "black-slave trade".