Slavery
Slavery is the ownership of a person as property, especially in regards to their labour. It is an economic phenomenon and its history resides in economic history. Slavery typically involves compulsory work, with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by the party that holds them in bondage. Enslavement is the placement of a person into slavery, and the person is called a slave or an enslaved person.
Many historical cases of enslavement occurred as a result of breaking the law, becoming indebted, suffering a military defeat, or exploitation for cheaper labor; other forms of slavery were instituted along demographic lines such as race or sex. Slaves would be kept in bondage for life, or for a fixed period of time after which they would be granted freedom. Although slavery is usually involuntary and involves coercion, there are also cases where people voluntarily enter into slavery to pay a debt or earn money due to poverty. In the course of human history, slavery was a typical feature of civilization, and existed in most societies throughout history, but it is now outlawed in most countries of the world, except as a punishment for a crime. In general there were two types of slavery throughout human history: domestic and productive.
In chattel slavery, the slave is legally rendered the personal property of the slave owner. In economics, the term de facto slavery describes the conditions of unfree labour and forced labour that most slaves endure. In 2019, approximately 40 million people, of whom 26% were children, were still enslaved throughout the world despite slavery being illegal. In the modern world, more than 50% of slaves provide forced labour, usually in the factories and sweatshops of the private sector of a country's economy. In industrialised countries, human trafficking is a modern variety of slavery; in non-industrialised countries, people in debt bondage are common, others include captive domestic servants, people in forced marriages, and child soldiers.
Etymology
The word slave was borrowed into Middle English through the Old French esclave which ultimately derives from Byzantine Greek σκλάβος or εσκλαβήνος.According to the widespread view, which has been known since the 18th century, the Byzantine Σκλάβινοι, Έσκλαβηνοί, borrowed from a Slavic tribe self-name *Slověne, turned into σκλάβος, εσκλαβήνος in the meaning 'prisoner of war slave', 'slave' in the 8th/9th century, because they often became captured and enslaved. However this version has been disputed since the 19th century.
An alternative contemporary hypothesis suggests that Medieval Latin sclāvus via *scylāvus derives from Byzantine σκυλάω or σκυλεύω with the meaning "to strip the enemy " or "to make booty / extract spoils of war". This version has been criticized as well.
Terminology
There is no consensus among historians about whether terms such as "unfree labourer" or "enslaved person", rather than "slave", should be used when describing the victims of slavery. According to those proposing a change in terminology, slave perpetuates the crime of slavery in language by reducing its victims to a nonhuman noun instead of "carry them forward as people, not the property that they were". Other historians prefer slave because the term is familiar and shorter, or because it accurately reflects the inhumanity of slavery, with person implying a degree of autonomy that slavery does not allow.Chattel slavery
As a social institution, chattel slavery classes slaves as chattels owned by the enslaver; like livestock, they can be bought and sold at will. Chattel slavery was historically a widely accepted form of slavery in many parts of the world, and was practiced in places such as ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, where it was considered a keystone of society. Other examples include the institution of slavery in the Muslim world such as Medieval Egypt, as well as Sub-Saharan Africa, Brazil, the Antebellum United States, and parts of the Caribbean such as Cuba and Haiti. The Iroquois also enslaved others in ways that "looked very like chattel slavery."Beginning in the 18th century, a series of abolitionist movements in Europe and the Americas saw slavery as a violation of the slaves' rights as people, and sought to abolish it. Abolitionism encountered extreme resistance but was eventually successful. Several of the states of the United States began abolishing slavery during the American Revolutionary War.
After the French Revolution, the government of France abolished slavery in 1794, but Napoleon reintroduced it in 1802 and permanent abolition did not occur until 1848. In much of the British Empire, slavery was subject to abolition in 1833, throughout the United States it was abolished in 1865 as a result of the Civil War, which was fought after the attempted secession of the South in order to protect its "Peculiar Institution". In Cuba slavery was abolished in 1886. The last country in the Americas to abolish slavery was Brazil, in 1888.
Chattel slavery survived longest in the Middle East. After the trans-Atlantic slave trade had been suppressed, the ancient trans-Saharan slave trade, the Indian Ocean slave trade and the Red Sea slave trade continued to traffic slaves from the African continent to the Middle East.
During the 20th century, the issue of chattel slavery was addressed and investigated globally by international bodies created by the League of Nations and the United Nations, such as the Temporary Slavery Commission in 1924–1926, the Committee of Experts on Slavery in 1932, and the Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery in 1934–1939. By the time of the UN Ad Hoc Committee on Slavery in 1950–1951, legal chattel slavery still existed only in the Arabian Peninsula: in Oman, in Qatar, in Saudi Arabia, in the Trucial States and in Yemen. Legal chattel slavery was finally abolished in the Arabian Peninsula in the 1960s: Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, in Dubai in 1963, and Oman as the last in 1970.
The last country to abolish slavery, Mauritania, did so in 1981. While slavery had technically been banned by colonial France in French West Africa already in 1905, this had been a purely nominal ban. The 1981 ban on slavery was not enforced in practice, as legal mechanisms to prosecute those who used slaves were not implemented until 2007.
Bonded labour
Indenture, also known as bonded labour or debt bondage, is a form of unfree labour in which a person works to pay off a debt by pledging themself as collateral. The services required to repay the debt, and their duration, may be undefined. Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation, with children required to pay off their progenitors' debt. Debt bondage is most prevalent in South Asia, and is the most widespread form of slavery today.Money marriage refers to a marriage where a child, usually a girl, is married off to settle debts owed by their parents. The Chukri system is a debt bondage system found in parts of Bengal where a woman or girl can be coerced into prostitution in order to pay off debts.
Dependents
The word slavery has also been used to refer to a legal state of dependency to somebody else. For example, in Persia, the situations and lives of such slaves could be better than those of common citizens.Forced labour
Forced labour, or unfree labour, is sometimes used to describe an individual who is forced to work against their own will, under threat of violence or other punishment. This may also include institutions not commonly classified as slavery, such as serfdom, conscription and penal labour. As slavery has been legally outlawed in all countries, forced labour in the present day revolves around illegal control.Human trafficking primarily involves women and children forced into prostitution and is the fastest growing form of forced labour, with Thailand, Cambodia, India, Brazil and Mexico having been identified as leading hotspots of commercial sexual exploitation of children.
Child soldiers and child labour
In 2007, Human Rights Watch estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 children served as soldiers in then-current conflicts. More girls under 16 work as domestic workers than any other category of child labour, often sent to cities by parents living in rural poverty as with the Haitian restaveks.Forced marriage
s or early marriages are often considered types of slavery. Forced marriage continues to be practiced in parts of the world including some parts of Asia and Africa and in immigrant communities in the West. Marriage by abduction occurs in many places in the world today, with a 2003 study finding a national average of 69% of marriages in Ethiopia being through abduction.Other uses of the term
The word slavery is often used as a pejorative to describe any activity in which one is coerced into performing. Some argue that military drafts and other forms of coerced government labour constitute "state-operated slavery." Some libertarians and anarcho-capitalists view government taxation as a form of slavery."Slavery" has been used by some anti-psychiatry proponents to define involuntary psychiatric patients, claiming there are no unbiased physical tests for mental illness and yet the psychiatric patient must follow the orders of the psychiatrist. They assert that instead of chains to control the slave, the psychiatrist uses drugs to control the mind. Drapetomania was a pseudoscientific psychiatric diagnosis for a slave who desired freedom; "symptoms" included laziness and the tendency to flee captivity.
Some proponents of animal rights have applied the term slavery to the condition of some or all human-owned animals, arguing that their status is comparable to that of human slaves.
The labour market, as institutionalized under contemporary capitalist systems, has been criticized by mainstream socialists and by anarcho-syndicalists, who utilise the term wage slavery as a pejorative or dysphemism for wage labour. Socialists draw parallels between the trade of labour as a commodity and slavery. Cicero is also known to have suggested such parallels.