Hacker News Reader

Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

> Pretty much every prior civilization

Incredibly broad claim here that frankly I don't think a global view of history anywhere near supports. Either extremely narrow view of "prior civilization" or just straight ignorant. Even the concept of personal property isn't near universal!

View on HN

> Slavery was already institutionalized by the time the first civilizations emerged (such as Sumer in Mesopotamia,[5] which dates back as far as 3500 BC). Slavery features in the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BC), which refers to it as an established institution.[6] Slavery was widespread in the ancient world in Europe, Asia, Middle East, and Africa.[7][8][4] It became less common throughout Europe during the Early Middle Ages, although it continued to be practiced in some areas. Both Christians and Muslims captured and enslaved each other during centuries of warfare in the Mediterranean and Europe.[9] Islamic slavery encompassed mainly Western and Central Asia, Northern and Eastern Africa, India, and Europe from the 7th to the 20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery

I'm curious as to the reasons people have for down-voting this comment.

I agree with the sentiment of your comment. Not only is the concept of property a recent construct, but so is binary gender, binary sexuality, and binary sex.

If sex wasn't historically seen as a binary the god Hermaphroditus would not have been a singular exception in his pantheon (created through the use of godly power).

The way people dress, behave, and who they have sex with are other matters entirely. And yes, those have long traditions of not being binary.

Sorry for going off-topic.

Oh please.

How were kids treated in Ancient Europe? The Ancient near east? Medieval Europe and the near east? What about ancient ancient China?

Specifics vary but generally speaking in all these cultures kids had rights on par with slaves, maybe with a little bit more protection from physical violence depending on the society and whoever the head of their household was had property rights over them. Women were generally treated a little better but not much. Only within the past couple hundred years did it stop being acceptable in the richest nations to sell a kid off as a quasi-indentured servant. Women were treated a little better but not much.

I'm sure there's some north American tribes that treated everyone much more equally but they are the exception not the rule.

Someone of your bent should know this.

> Children were accorded some special rights both in the medieval canon law and in English court practice. They were not treated as chattels belonging to their parents. In punishing infanticide and providing orders to secure their adequate support, the courts even enforced the children’s claims against the parents themselves. It may be, therefore, that a time has actually existed when children were entirely without legal rights; but the late Middle Ages in England was not one of them. This being said, it is equally important to note that recognition of the rights of children was restricted when compared with any list a modem lawyer might compile

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/610256/pdf

I'm not talking about how they were treated in humanitarian terms, but about whether they were considered property. These are obviously very entangled concepts but they are distinct.

And yes kids-as-property has been the norm, but again not close to universal. Many other conceptions of children have used. None of them necessarily leading to better overall treatment of children, but affecting people's understanding of the boundaries of rights and responsibilities around them. Which is the part that's relevant to this conversation.

To argue that children were not historically considered property requires a level of hair splitting that will necessarily be able to be turned right back around and used to argue that slaves and serfs in other contexts were not property.

>affecting people's understanding of the boundaries of rights and responsibilities around them.

Civilizations in ancient southern generally outlawed gratuitous violence toward enslaved or indentured people and/or obliged their owners to feed and cloth them. Does that make slaves not property?

In medieval and early modern central Europe landowners were legally responsible for productively working their land or a subset thereof (this was a large part of the legal doctrine used by the English settlers to justify taking of native lands). Does that make land not property?

(obviously the specifics of the above two examples vary by culture and exact time period but that's not the point.)

I'd be interested to see you cite a preindustrial civilization where kids are treated as second class citizens rather than de-facto property of either the individual or the tribe/state/other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com