Neolithic farms made mass chattel slavery likelier
Slavery’s history crosses cultures and faiths from antiquity to now, with victims of many ethnicities and statuses that varied wildly by system. Hunter-gatherers sometimes held hereditary slaves, yet Neolithic agriculture after about 10,000 BC in Western Asia enabled mass chattel scale. Ancient worlds from Europe to the Americas practised it widely.
Early medieval Europe saw decline in some regions while Mediterranean wars enslaved Christians and Muslims reciprocally; Islamic slavery networks spanned Asia and Africa. From the sixteenth century Portuguese and other Europeans drove the transatlantic trade, usually buying captives at the coast rather than marching inland.
In the twenty-first century slavery persists, generating an estimated 150 billion dollars in profit each year; people in war zones are especially exposed, and modern transport has made trafficking easier.
Evidence reaches back about 11,000 years, to the surpluses and dense populations that farming created. Slavery existed in ancient Egypt and China, Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Israel, Greece, India and Rome, in the Islamic caliphates and sultanates, in Nubia and Aksum, and in pre-Columbian America. The historian Fernand Braudel described it in 1984 as woven into everyday African life from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, in guises ranging from court and army slaves to household servants. In Senegambia between 1300 and 1900 close to a third of people were enslaved, and similar proportions held in the West African states of Ghana, Mali, Segou and Songhai.
Abolition came late in places. Ethiopia held an estimated two million slaves in the early 1930s and ended the practice only when Emperor Haile Selassie decreed it on 26 August 1942; northern Nigeria, where some two million or more were enslaved when British rule arrived, outlawed it in 1936. Before the sixteenth century most captives leaving Africa went from the east coast to Arabia, and under Omani rule in the nineteenth century as many as 50,000 a year passed through Zanzibar. Unlike most European buyers, Arab traders often led raids deep inland themselves. The Atlantic trade peaked in the late eighteenth century, fed largely by raids into the West African interior carried out by states such as Oyo and Benin, with captives shipped across the Middle Passage as one leg of a triangular trade run by Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, American and Danish-Norwegian merchants.
Source: History of slavery
