Horrifying read. I recently read a book about a girl who was pressed into prostitution, and this reads much the same. [1] Before I was convinced that slavery was mostly a thing of the past, how awful to find out this isn't true.
Slaves are the least motivated and least productive form of workers. Slaves who know they're slaves are worse still. Shooting for maximum extraction of labor doesn't actually get you the best ROI. Don't get me wrong, they'll still treat you like shit. But they maximize their "take home" by not going too far with it.
I get that we all want to turn off our brains and hand wring because "criminals" or whatever but the dynamics of human organizations are unchanged regardless of what side of the law they're operating on.
Quasi-slave status persisted in many situations for a long time, being a local maxima for various management situations. Penal slaves in the postwar American South were in many cases treated worse than their chattel slave parents/grandparents partially because they were rented out by their owners, who didn't pay for them, to managers who rented and didn't have any stake in their survival.
In densely populated areas, that meant systems like serfdom. Agricultural land was a scarce resource mostly owned by the elite. Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with it.
It disappeared because it was replaced by indentured servitude on the low end and restriction and tax on who could do what trades on the high end. Because the lords own a huge fraction of all the farmland. So this is very much a "you're nominally free but you're gonna be share-cropping your old master's land" situation for the former serfs. An improvement, sure. But not nearly as big of one as the history books tout.
Lucky for them that didn't last very long until the black death made labor way more valuable so a lot of the rules got eased up and once that unleashed a bunch more productivity at the margin, well there was no going back.
>Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with i
I'm not saying they're equivalent, but there's a very good comparison to most professional licensure to be made here.
I think the Church had a lot less to do with the end of _serfdom_ than the Black Death. The sudden population drop mandated that lords who wanted to maintain production had to steal peasants from other lords, and improve their own compensation/conditions to retain their own labor force. And so on for the rest of the economy as well.
This represented a massive transfer of power and rights downwards... for a while. The late 1300's and 1400's have some of the best conditions for the laboring class for the previous 400 years or the next 400 years. You can hear about some of the dark days to follow in England specifically in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs
This requires a very bold, 115 font asterisk. Or rather it’s plain wrong. Mass slavery in Europe didn’t really end until serfdom was abolished (1800s). And let’s not even get started on the African slave trade which was managed and prospered off of from Europeans, both from direct sales and indirectly from slave labor. Also, many of those slaves converted to Christianity, so it wasn’t based on any religious affiliation.
The African slave trade happened between west Africa and the Americas, and Africa and west Asia. Not with Europe.
Slave owners refused to free slves who converted, and tired to prevent them being converted : https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/protestant-slavery
1. slavery in Western Europe had been abolished long before the transatlantic slave trade - the Europeans were intermediaries, but there was little to no slavery in their home countries. There were many court rulings in England against slavery.
2. not enslaving Christians played a role in abolishing slavery in medieval Europe
3. serfdom was a far better condition that being a slave
4. Slave owners in the Americas opposed the conversion of slaves to Christianity. they also censored the version of the Bible available to slaves very heavily.
5. The claim about mass slavery within Europe is misleading on two counts: serfs are not just chattel slaves (they had rights), and Western Europe was very different from Eastern Europe.
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/blog/bl...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Judicial_de...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Select_Parts_of_the_Holy_Bible...
Is the argument that it would have come back if it were really cheaper? Or is the argument just so above the fray that the political turmoil is part of the supposed “costs” that were saved by abolition?
I’m not trying to directly engage the question whether slavery was more profitable than wage labor. It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.
There was use of military force to suppress the slave trade but not actual war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron
"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves."
There were thousands of years of efforts to end slavery, some countries would occasionally succeed at such only to see it spring right back. Yet following the industrial revolution it began rapidly disappearing everywhere that had gone through industrialization + urbanization. The issue in your mental model is that you're only considering local effects over very immediate time frames. Think about the bigger picture.
Industrialization drove big money away from farms and into factories, away from rural scarcely populated rural areas into densely populated urban areas packed with very poor potential workers. As soon as the necessity argument for slavery became plainly absurd, to say nothing of the issue of industrialization also reducing the need for so many workers even on plantations, slavery wasn't long for this world. This says nothing about actual slave holders who, as you said, did not just go quietly into the night. But as their economic might relatively waned, so did their influence.
These sorts of ignorant narratives about how humanity abolished slavery out of the goodness of its heart can be so frustrating.
If slavery was so much more profitable that those engaging in it were the dominant economic force in society it never would have been abolished, at the very least because so much other economic activity would have depended upon that surplus (stolen from the slaves).
This isn't so say that moral factors didn't matter, they absolutely did but if we couldn't afford abolish slavery or or if we did despite not being able to afford to or if free workers were substantially worse than slaves at the margin we'd have been out competed by some other society that didn't make that choice.
>Or is the argument just so above the fray that the political turmoil is part of the supposed “costs” that were saved by abolition?
That's certainly part of it. It takes a lot of constant violence to keep people enslaved. You can shit-can all that administrative overhead if you make people "free" (well not all of it, but a lot).
>It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.
It annoys me when people think we can just do what we want. We are fundamentally tied to what we can afford, in the most general sense of that word. Our freedom of action is limited.
Edit: We'd all be better off if everyone stopped thinking of slavery as a binary and instead as the fraction of a worker's surplus that is taken by threat of violence. Even if where one draws the line of "taken by violence" varies, this at least enables one to make better comparisons across centuries and locations. But that leads to some deeply uncomfortable questions for many so of course we won't do that.
Or digital transaction cancel-sanction-kill switch tied to biometric identity of fugitive human assets.
Paper passport hostages are crude approximation.
Why? The economics of oil, cotton and silver, for example, are undeniably important forces in moving the history of many regions.
According to the 2023 Global Slavery Index, 7-8 of the top 10 countries in the world with the highest prevalence of modern slavery have a majority religion of Islam (Mauritania has disputed figures about religious prevalence with Christianity and Islam at similar levels). And none of the countries in the top 10 lowest prevalence have a majority religion of Islam. Prevalence here is used to mean estimated number of people in slavery per 1000 population.
However, the absolute figures for total people affected are proportional to the size of the country, as you would expect, with North Korea and Russia topping the list.
And if you look at driving factors, the US is the leading importer of products at risk of being produced by slavery by an order of magnitude.
Approximately two-thirds (about 61% to over 65%) of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in US state and federal prisons are employed in prison labor, totaling around 800,000 workers. These workers often perform maintenance tasks for, on average, 13 to 52 cents per hour, with many facing forced labor conditions https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/#...
One of the side effects of a society tolerating thousands of people living in nylon tarps with no real safety net.
There's also a very long history in America of laws and law enforcement being targeted against poor people and minorities. Vagrancy laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrancy#Post-Civil_War) and modern anti-homeless laws effectively criminalize homelessness, and the War on Drugs has had a major negative impact on poor people and minorities. Yes, in this situation those who have been imprisoned due to such laws did violate the law, but such laws, in my opinion, serve the function of kicking people while they are down rather than addressing the root causes of their poverty.
There's a good argument that having a system of convict labor creates a perverse incentive to fill that labor pipeline, similar to how well-meaning traffic laws (such as speed limits) can be abused (for example, "speed traps").
After USA destabilized Libya, it turned horrible. In Libya there are open slave markets. Adults. Africans trying to who travel a great deal trying to get to Europe are often kidnapped and kept as slaves in Libya.
https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/the-scandal-of-a-sl...
Unfortunately, it's the opposite. There's more people in enslaved situations now than ever before in all of human history.