The last country to abolish slavery did so in 1981
Mauritania formally outlawed slavery in 1981, the last country in the world to do so. Colonial France had nominally banned it across French West Africa back in 1905, but that ban was empty, and even the 1981 law went largely unenforced until prosecution mechanisms were created in 2007.
Abolition was a long, uneven process. From the eighteenth century, movements in Europe and the Americas argued that slavery violated the principle that all people are created equal, and they met fierce resistance. Several American states began abolishing it during the Revolutionary War. Revolutionary France abolished slavery in 1794, Napoleon restored it in 1802, and permanent abolition came only in 1848. Much of the British Empire acted in 1833, and the United States ended it nationwide in 1865 after the Civil War. Chattel slavery lingered longest in the Middle East, fed by trans-Saharan, Indian Ocean and Red Sea trade routes after the Atlantic trade was suppressed.
International bodies took up the issue in the twentieth century. The League of Nations ran a Temporary Slavery Commission from 1924 to 1926, followed by expert committees in 1932 and from 1934 to 1939, and the United Nations continued the work with an ad hoc committee in 1950.
The word slave reached Middle English through Old French esclave from Byzantine Greek. A theory known since the eighteenth century links it to the Slavs, whose self-name became a Byzantine word for captive around the eighth or ninth century because so many were enslaved. That explanation has been disputed since the nineteenth century, and a rival idea deriving it from a Greek verb for stripping spoils from the enemy has drawn criticism too. Historians also debate whether enslaved person or unfree labourer should replace slave, to stress the victims' humanity.
Although no country now recognises it in law, slavery persists everywhere. In 2019 roughly 40 million people were enslaved, 26 percent of them children. About 60 percent are in Asia and the Pacific, 23 percent in Africa, 9 percent in Europe and Central Asia, 5 percent in the Americas and 1 percent in Arab states. Over half perform forced labour, often in private-sector factories. Debt bondage, in which people pledge themselves against a loan, can pass from parents to children.
Source: Slavery
