Slavery: what it is and what were its characteristics

Slavery was an economic system in which forced labor was used as a mode of production.i.e. slaves. This system, despite the fact that today it is believed to be extinct, was very common in many cultures and, in fact, it was the basis for them to function.

Next we will see how it originated, what it consists of, how slaves lived and were traded, as well as talking about the decline of this system and whether it still exists today.

• Related article: "The 5 ages of History (and their characteristics)"

What is slavery?

Slavery, also called the slave mode of production, is the system of economic production whose fundamental pillar is unpaid labor, that is, slaves.

These people were men, women and children, who were forced them to work, only receiving in exchange what was fair to subsist, and without having guarantees that they would live in the long term. Their legal status was that of their master's property, like someone who has goats and cows on the farm, and they could be bought like any object.

Despite the fact that today it may seem to us to be an unfair and oppressive system, which it is, throughout history slavery has been the fundamental pillar of all kinds of cultures. Civilizations such as ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt, pre-Columbian cultures such as the Inca and Maya and, also, Muslim countries were based, at some point in their history, on a production system pro-slavery.

origins

The origins of slavery can be found in prehistory, being considered one of the first economic systems of humanity.

When prehistoric humans developed agriculture, around 10,000 B.C. C., the primitive communities were changing, ceasing to be nomadic and starting to build sedentary towns. These towns exploited the nearby land and, having more food, they increased their population, at the same time that they were disintegrating and forming new towns.

Although the idea of ​​private property was very rare among ancient hunter-gatherers, when moving to agricultural cultures, the idea of ​​individual property began to clearly form. Farmers had their land, their crops, and their animals. With the advent of agriculture, basically, we went from a culture in which hunting and gathering were shared to one in which each individual or family was responsible for their production and having the right to consume what they had produced.

These communities, either due to territorial disputes or the need to obtain more goods, ended up waging wars among themselves. As a result of these conflicts, the losing villages were looted and their survivors taken prisoner.. These prisoners ended up working on the lands of the victorious tribes, forcing them to be the workforce under the threat of death or torture. In this way the first slaves in history were obtained.

However, the great slave systems were hand in hand with great civilizations such as Egypt, Greece and Rome. In fact, the slave-owning mode of production was the essential component in the formation of the economy and of the classical Mediterranean civilizations, configuring them as we know them today in day. Slavery in Greece and Rome was carried out en masse, almost comparable to how goods are manufactured in modern industrial societies.

How did the slave live?

Slaves were non-salaried workers, devoid of any rights, treated like animals or simply as objects. The vast majority of them lived in subhuman conditions.

They could not have any type of property, since they were property itself. In addition, they could not express their opinion or complain about how they were treated. Living was not a right for them either, since it was the master who decided if he wanted his property to live or not, and killing them did not imply any kind of remorse. In case a slave became pregnant, the baby could be sold in the slave market.. That is to say, they could not start a family on their own either, since having children was the master's decision.

The few things they had, such as rags to wear, poor food and poor housing, were things that their masters had allowed them to have. In order to continue having these things, they were forced to work day and night, having just enough to survive and not being able to go anywhere freely.

As properties that were, if a free person killed a master's slave, he had to compensate him with the value corresponding, but he did not receive the same legal consequences that he would have received if he had killed a free citizen. In the eyes of the legality of the different states that have been based on slavery, killing a slave is not the same as killing a person considered "normal".

Despite the fact that the one who had the last word over his life was the master, there have been cases of slaves who have obtained freedom, but not before paying a significant price for it. If the master allowed it, his slave could gain the status of a free man., that is, freedman, but he had to pay the price to compensate his master for losing him as a workforce. Paying compensation equal to the value of their freedom was extremely expensive, especially considering that slaves normally earned no wages.

How were slaves traded?

Slaves were usually people who had been free at some point in their lives but had been deprived of their freedom. It could also be the case that they had been born into a family of slaves and had inherited this condition.

The way to get slaves throughout history has followed the same patterns. In most cases, slaves were slaves because, after a war, one people had won over the other and the survivors were taken prisoner and forced to work. On other occasions, as was the case with the European colonization of Africa and America, there was an important business behind slavery.

Europeans would go to Africa to catch black people off guard, put them in chains, put them on a ship and take them either to Europe or to the American colonies. The conditions in which they traveled were subhuman and many of them died during the journey. However, and despite the fact that the slaveholders lost merchandise, little seemed to matter to them since, In the eyes of European slave traders, Africa was a very rich continent in this merchandise..

Upon reaching port, the slaves were auctioned off in public squares. This was not exclusive to Europe after the discovery of America, since selling slaves in the food market was also a well-established practice among the Romans. There, the buyers, owners of large estates and workshops, selected the individuals that they found to be the strongest and healthiest.

decline of slavery

Indeed, slavery has had its ups and downs throughout history, and indeed there have been periods when that it was forbidden happened during times in which the slave production system was an imperative necessity.

In the West, the first decline of slavery was after the fall of the Roman Empire.. Already before, the expansion of Christianity and the creation of the Catholic Church had brought great changes in the mentality from the Romans, who had once seen slavery as extremely necessary for society to continue to function.

Christianity promoted reforms in Roman law, making the idea of ​​slavery seen as something totally contrary to God's designs. This is why with the arrival of the Middle Ages slavery is apparently abolished. However, this, far from being eradicated, is transformed into a new system of oppression, characteristic of feudalism: serfdom.

Peasants who had practically nothing to live on went to the lands of feudal lords to be able to live on them in exchange for working and paying taxes. The feudal lord, while he was the owner of the land, was also the one who could demand that his new tenants offer him all kinds of services.

The conditions of the serfs of the gleba were subhuman, like that of slaves. However, and despite not being free people, they had recognized certain rights, such as being able to marry, the right to life as long as they did not commit crimes, in addition to being able to exploit and store part of the fruits of their job. They were, then, people who were halfway between slaves, seen as objects, and fully free citizens.

Once the Middle Ages were over with the (re)discovery of America, slavery re-emerged in Europe, with more force and brutality than ever. Several countries, such as Spain, Portugal, France and, in an especially cruel and heartless way, England, developed the entire slave system characteristic of the slave trade. In fact, It was this slave trade that laid the foundations for the ethnic configuration of several American countries.such as the United States, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Brazil.

The definitive decline of slavery would begin to take place in the 18th century and, in the 19th century, this practice would be fully abolished in the West, or at least legally. The reason that Europeans and American colonists chose to recognize that slaves were human beings and had the right to be free was thanks to the French Enlightenment, which would lay the foundations of the bourgeois revolutions. These revolutions would initiate a whole series of changes regarding the gain of human rights, which would be consolidated in modern human rights.

It should also be said that slavery continued to be practiced after it was abolished, especially in war situations. In Europe, during World War II, Germany used prisoners in its concentration camps as slaves, while the Soviet Union did so with its prisoners in the "gulags." The United States was not a great example either, since it used Japanese prisoners in the same way that it had used blacks just a century before.

Current status of slavery

Today, no country in the world would call itself a state with a slave production system. There are international treaties openly against slavery and there is even a day against slavery. slavery, established on December 2 of each year as the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery.

Despite all this, there are not a few countries in which the lowest levels of society are exploited in a subhuman way. Child slave labor from various textile companies, mass production in Asia, sexual exploitation and human trafficking They are modern businesses that have the characteristics of a slave production system.

So, although it is no longer legal to deprive someone of their freedom, it is still done today, at least on the black market. With all this, in the same way that the West clearly and emphatically abolished slavery, we can only hope that it can be eradicated at all levels of all societies on the planet.

Bibliographic references:

• Bales, K. (2004). New slavery: a reference handbook. ABC-CLIO. pp. 15–18. ISBN 978-1-85109-815-6.
• Anderson, P. (1979). Transitions from Antiquity to Feudalism. Madrid: XXI century. ISBN 84-323-0355-0.
• Gallego, J. TO. (2005). Slavery in Spanish America, Encounter. pp. 19.