Slavery | PBS

A A World . Reference Room . Articles . Slavery | PBS: "The first known major slave society was that of Athens. In the early Archaic period the elite worked its estates with the labour of fellow citizens in bondage (often for debt). After the lawgiver Solon abolished citizen slavery about 594 BC, wealthy Athenians came to rely on enslaved peoples from outside Attica. The prolonged wars with the Persians and other peoples provided many slaves, but the majority of slaves were acquired through regular trade with non-Greek peoples around the Aegean. At the time of classical Athens (the 5th through the 3rd centuries BC) slaves constituted about a third of the population. A particularly noteworthy locus of slave employment was the Laurium silver mines, where private individuals could pick out a lode and put their slaves to mining it. As in all other slave societies, it was the profitability of slavery that determined its preeminence in Athens. (Also important were political conditions that made the gross exploitation of citizens impossible.) Slaves were responsible for the prosperity of Athens and the leisure of the aristocrats, who had time to create the high culture now considered the beginning of Western civilization. The existence of large-scale slavery was also responsible, it seems logical to believe, for the Athenians' thoughts on freedom that are considered a central part of the Western heritage. Athenian slave society was finally destroyed by Philip II of Macedonia at the battle of Chaeronea (338 BC), when, on the motion of Lycurgus, many (but not all) slaves were freed.

The next major slave society was Roman Italy between about the 2nd century BC and the 4th century AD. Initially, Rome was a polity consisting primarily of small farmers. But the process of creating the empire took them away from their farms for extended periods, and the prolonged wars of conquest in Spain and the eastern Mediterranean during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC created a great flood of captives. Nothing was more logical than to put the captives to work farming, especially the olives and grapes that created much of the prosperity of the late republic and the principate. Slaves and freedmen were responsible for much of the empire's commodity production, and in the early principate they ran its governmental bureaus as well. The conditions were right to put the captives to work: private ownership of land; developed commodity production and markets; a perceived shortage of internal labour supply; and an appropriate moral, political, and legal climate. Roughly 30 percent of the population was enslaved. Roman slave society ended as the slaves were legally converted into coloni, or serfs, and the lands became populated and the frontiers so remote that finding great numbers of outsider slaves was increasingly difficult.

Some lesser Islamic slave societies are also of interest. One is the Baghdad caliphate founded in the 7th and lasting through the 10th century. Many tens of thousands of military captives were imported from Sogdiana, Khazaria, and other Central Asian locales. In the 9th and 10th centuries several tens of thousands of black Zanj slaves were imported from Zanzibar to Lower Iraq, where they constituted more than half the total population and were put to work to clear saline lands for irrigation and to cultivate sugar. More long-term was the slavery practiced in the Crimean Khanate between roughly 1475 and its liquidation by the Russian empress Catherine the Great in 1783. The Crimean Tatar society was based on raiding the neighbouring Slavic and Caucasian sedentary societies and selling the captives into the slave markets of Eurasia. Approximately 75 percent of the Crimean population consisted of slaves or freedmen, and much of the free population was highly predatory, engaged either in the gathering of slaves or in the selling of them. It is known that for every slave the Crimeans sold in the market, they killed outright several other people during their raids, and a couple more died on the way to the slave market. The reasons for the transition of the Crimean Khanate from a slave-owning society to a slave society have not been studied in detail. Probable reasons, however, include the combination of high demand for slaves throughout the Islamic world, the defenselessness of the sedentary agricultural Slavs and others, and the existence of a relatively poor class of Crimean horsemen, who were led by a predatory elite that got rich by slave raiding. Crimean Tatar slave raids into Muscovy were greatly curtailed by the building of a series of walls along the frontier in the years 1636–53 and ultimately by the liquidation of the khanate in 1783.

It is probable that the Ottoman Empire, and especially its centre in Turkey, should be termed a slave society. Slaves from both the white Slavic north and the black African south flowed into Turkish cities for half a millennium after the Turks seized control of much of the Balkans in the 14th century. The proportion of the population that was slave ranged from about one-fifth in Istanbul, the capital, to much less in remoter provincial areas. Perhaps only people such as the slave owners of the circum-Caribbean sugar islands and the American South were as preoccupied with slaves as were the Ottomans.

Slaves have been owned in black Africa throughout recorded history. In many areas there were large-scale slave societies, while in others there were slave-owning societies. Slavery was practiced everywhere even before the rise of Islam, and black slaves exported from Africa were widely traded throughout the Islamic world. Approximately 18,000,000 Africans were delivered into the Islamic trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades between 650 and 1905. In the second half of the 15th century Europeans began to trade along the west coast of Africa, and by 1867 between 7,000,000 and 10,000,000 Africans had been shipped as slaves to the New World. Although some areas of Africa were depleted by slave raiding, on balance the African population grew after the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade because of new food crops introduced from the New World, particularly manioc, corn (maize), and possibly peanuts (groundnuts). The relationship between African and New World slavery was highly complementary. African slave owners demanded primarily women and children for labour and lineage incorporation and tended to kill males because they were troublesome and likely to flee. The transatlantic trade, on the other hand, demanded primarily adult males for labour and thus saved from certain death many adult males who otherwise would have been slaughtered outright by their African captors. After the end of the transatlantic trade, a few African societies at the end of the 19th century put captured males to productive work as slaves, but this usually was not the case before that time."