Invisible Slaves

The Victims and Perpetrators of Modern-Day Slavery

W. Kurt Hauser

• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780817921064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Schiavitù

In Invisible Slaves, W. Kurt Hauser discusses slavery around the world, with research and firsthand stories that reframe slavery as a modern-day crisis, not a historical phenomenon or third-world issue. Identifying four types of slavery—chattel slavery, debt bondage, forced labor, and sex slavery—he examines the efforts and failures of governments to address them. He explores the political, economic, geographic, and cultural factors that shape slavery today, illustrating the tragic human toll with individual stories. Country by country, the author illuminates the harsh realities of modern-day slavery. He explores slavery's effects on victims, including violence, isolation, humiliation, and the master-slave relationship, and discusses the methods traffickers use to lure the vulnerable, especially children, into slavery. He assesses nations based on their levels of slavery and efforts to combat the problem, citing the rankings of the United States' Trafficking Victims Protection Act. He concludes with an appeal to governments and ordinary citizens alike to meet this humanitarian crisis with awareness and action.

CHAPTER ONE

An Ancient Institution

WAR AND RELIGION. TRADE AND COMMERCE. DRAWING AND PAINTING. A few practices and institutions date to the oldest records of the human experience. With the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry at the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 BC, another ancient institution arose: slavery. Slavery wove itself into the fabric of virtually every society, culture, and civilization.

Slavery was ubiquitous in Asia, India, Europe, China, the Middle East, Africa, and the pre-colonial Americas as far back as the records of each region can be traced. The practice and spread of slavery catalyzed the regionalization, and eventually the globalization, of the world’s labor markets. For four centuries, slavery was the world’s largest commerce. From AD 1500 to 1900, at least 26 million Sub-Saharan Africans were captured and sold into slavery: upwards of twelve million Sub-Saharan Africans were transported to the New World, six million to the Middle East and Islamic Mediterranean region, and eight million enslaved and retained within Africa.¹ Millions of other humans were subjected to slavery in the near and far east as Islam spread to these regions and conflicts occurred between the Ottoman Empire, Russia, the Tartars, and the Mongols.

Slavery has never been a standalone industry. Indeed, the Atlantic and Middle Eastern slave trades formed the basis for a “triangle of trade” that jumpstarted the world economy and, at its peak, dwarfed today’s globalization of world trade in both magnitude and scope. In this “triangle of trade,” Europeans shipped their products to Africa, the Africans sold their captives to the Europeans for transport and sale to the plantations of the New World, and New World plantation owners shipped their commodities back across the Atlantic to the Europeans. Similar transactions involving slaves, commodities and finished goods took place between and among the Middle East, Eurasia, Asia and other areas of the globe. The demand for slaves, and the economic system that would develop to support it, provided the infrastructure for 400 years of international commerce.

The demographic impact of the Atlantic slave trade was enormous. In the 300 years after the “discovery” of the New World in 1492, five African slaves were transported to the Americas for every one European settler. As late as 1840, the annual number of African slaves coming to the Americas exceeded the number of Europeans. However, of the approximate 9.5 to 11 million African slaves transported to the New World during the Atlantic slave trade, less than 5 percent of those African slaves came to what would eventually be the United States. Approximately 80 percent came to Brazil and the Caribbean Islands, and the remainder was distributed throughout Latin and South America. An equal if not greater number of black African slaves were sold into the markets of the Middle East, Eurasia, and Asia over a longer period of time.

Slavery, at its root, is an economic phenomenon. Its origin was driven by the demand for (and eventual division of) labor following the development of agriculture. The practice of slavery over time has ebbed and flowed with the health and scope of the world economy—levels of trade, commerce, and industry, and the resulting impact on demands for labor worldwide. In Western Civilization, the practice reached its zenith during the economically prosperous era of ancient Greece (fifth century BC) and the Roman Empire that followed. Slavery also flourished in other powerful ancient civilizations, including India, China, Korea, Egypt, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Nearly all of the world’s major religions endorsed and accepted slavery, including Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, paganism, and animism. The ancient codes and laws of antiquity, including the Bible, Talmud, and Quran, direct many pages to the recognition, acceptance and regulation of slavery.² The surviving primary documents of both Western and Eastern Civilizations, derived from oral traditions of the prehistoric past, all reference slavery. For instance, in Genesis Chapter 9, Noah curses his grandson Canaan (son of Ham) and makes him a “servant of servants” in one of many references to slavery in the Old Testament. There are numerous references in both the Iliad and the Odyssey to both male and female slaves. The Phoenicians and Taphians are mentioned as slave traders in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Slavery is also mentioned repeatedly in the Code of Hammurabi, the Hebrew Bible, the Gortyn Code of Ancient Greece, and India’s Rigveda. Among the oldest records of slavery are those passed down from Ancient Egypt. Texts from the reign of the Pharaoh Ramses II (1291–1224 BC) allude to slave labor; however, Hebrew enslavement in Egypt is not confirmed in Egyptian texts but rather in the Bible. In his writings in Deuteronomy, Moses instructed the Israelites to “remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt.”³ From ancient Babylon, Assyria, Syria, Palestine to ancient China, India, and the entirety of the Americas, the written records of humanity’s ancient past demonstrate that slavery existed, at one time or another, in virtually every human society.

An Ancient Debate and Slavery’s Evolution

ARISTOTLE (384–322 BC) AND PLATO (ca. 428–424 BC), the great Greek philosophers, debated whether slavery was part of nature, the natural order of the universe, or the creation of man. If slavery was as old as humankind, then was the slave created by the laws of man, of nature, or of God?

In Politics, Aristotle notes that the master-slave relationship appeared as natural as the husband-wife and father-child relationship, and that humanity is divided between master and slave. However, Aristotle frames the debate by stating that “the rule of a master over slaves is contrary to nature, and…the distinction between slave and freeman exists by law only, and not by nature; and being an interference with nature is therefore unjust.”⁴

The master is only the master of the slave; he does not belong to him, whereas the slave is not only the slave of his master but wholly belongs to him. Hence we see what is the nature and office of a slave; he who is by nature not his own but another’s man, is by nature a slave; and he may be said to be another’s man who, being a human being, is also a possession.⁵

But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature?

There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.⁶

Therefore, slaves are of nature because they are necessary and expedient.

Some scholars seem to reconcile this contradiction within Aristotle by suggesting that existing laws, customs, and traditions confirm the natural origin of slaves. Masters, by nature, are not meant to become slaves (as captives in war), whereby those naturally born to be slaves are not meant to be masters. Prisoners of war were not natural slaves, but through misfortune became slaves by law. Aristotle also separates the master from the slave by attributing virtue, a soul, and character to the master and not to the slave.

Plato is less expansive on the origin of slaves but rationalizes their existence by explaining that they lack the ability to reason, therefore they needed masters to rule their lives. In his ideal state as described in Republic, slaves are an integral part of the society. In Plato’s view, justice consists of the superior ruling over the inferior and having more power than the inferior among humans as well as among animals.

Regardless of the philosophers’ arguments about slavery as to its origin, virtually all slave societies had statutes and codes regarding the just treatment of slaves and their individual manumission.

Although Aristotle rationalized the natural origin of slavery, he also believed in the incentive of manumission: the master granting his slave eventual freedom in exchange for good behavior and productive work. According to Aristotle, the prospects of manumission were both “just and expedient” as rationalized above. Manumission could be earned by the slave through a process whereby the slave bought his or her freedom, or manumission could be granted as a gift by the master.

David Livingstone (1813–1873), the nineteenth-century British explorer, believed that slavery was a natural part of human development. But Livingstone was horrified by the slavery he witnessed in his missionary work in Africa. He was an ardent proponent for the elimination of slavery in Africa. In his Journals, Livingstone writes:

We may compare cannibalism to the stone age, and the times of slavery to the iron and bronze epochs—slavery is as natural a step in human development as from bronze to iron.

…The monuments of Egypt show that this curse has venerable antiquity.⁷

Slavery thus began as humans transitioned from hunters and gatherers and nomadic tribes following their food source to the cultivation of crops and the domestication of livestock. Captives in war and skirmishes could then be put to work and produce more than they consumed. Prior to the advent of agriculture, a captive would have been a burden on the group and either killed, held for sacrifice, or traded to the opposing tribe for a captive they may have had of their own tribe.

As humans began to organize themselves around settlements, captives in war could be put to work not only in agriculture but also in mining, land and swamp clearing, building and construction, and various menial tasks. These small tribal settlements gave way to larger lineage groups, and then organizations of city-states, states, empires, and the nation-state. Slavery was an important part in this evolution of political systems.

Slaves fulfilled three main functions: social (harems, concubines, eunuchs), political (military, bureaucrats, administrators), and economic (modes of production). In many African cultures, slaves could also be counted as members of the tribe and could be assimilated into the family or clan. This enhanced the stature of the family. Land was owned by the tribe or central government. Wealth was attained by owning slaves not land. However, there was a constant need to replenish slaves due to manumission, assimilation, death, or escape.

In many societies slaves were poets, writers, musicians, and handicraft workers in addition to being laborers. It was not uncommon for slaves to become the wives of their masters. Many Islamic states used slaves in their military. Non-Muslim prisoners of war were trained as warriors, converted to Islam, and conscripted to the military. In Egypt, these slave soldiers were called Mamluks and eventually ruled the country for some three hundred years, beginning in the middle of the thirteenth century.

The war captive who became a slave was also alien to the new tribe or political organization, and considered a foreigner and outsider. In several societies, the word for slave meant a person of a foreign country, one who was most likely taken as a captive in war or kidnapping. Among the ancient Greek states, captives taken in war were of the same ethnicity but were of another country. This was also true of the slaves held among the Hebrews and Israelites. It was not until the fifteenth century that race became associated with slavery in the Western world. Arabs may have preempted the New World in viewing slavery as a matter of race because of their longer history of black slave trading along the various trade routes from Sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. As early as the ninth century, and possibly before, Arab traders spreading the Islamic faith carried black Africans to North Africa and the Mediterranean as slaves. The Arab word for slave, abid, increasingly became associated with black Africans.

Racism can be characterized as one group of people feeling superior to another based on ethnic, tribal, kinship, or perceived racial differences. Slavery was often justified in the Christian world because it was thought to be sanctioned in the Old Testament. Some slavers claimed that Noah cursed his son Ham for an indiscretion and as punishment condemned his son, Canaan, to both blackness and slavery. A divine sanction to slavery, “The Curse of Ham,” evolved from this erroneous interpretation of the Bible. According to this myth, blacks were descendants of Ham’s son and their enslavement was justified. The white rulers of South Africa during the apartheid years of 1948–1994 used “The Curse of Ham” to justify their segregationist and racial policies. This tale was used by many Christians as justification for the enslavement or mistreatment of blacks. Scholars continue to explore the origin and linkage of blackness, darkness, servitude, slavery, and race.

The words of Judge Roger B. Taney, in delivering the opinion of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision in 1857, illustrate how racism has “colored” the minds of even the most educated:

They [slaves] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.⁸

Thus, it was thought to be to the Negro’s benefit to be enslaved!

While slavery has been legally banned in all countries, racism persists. In the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire, roughly the sixth century to the fourteenth century, much of the former Empire sank into a prolonged depression referred to by many as the Dark Ages. This period included the rise of Vandal and barbarian tribes that ravaged much of Europe, the dearth of Latin literature and historical writing, periods of plague and disease, and lack of material cultural accomplishment. Trade and commerce declined compared to the Roman period. Most of Northern Europe devolved into feudalism, a social and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One An Ancient Institution
• Chapter Two Modern Day Slavery
• Chapter Three Middle East
• Chapter Four Africa
• Chapter Five Asia
• Chapter Six The New World
• Chapter Seven United States
• Chapter Eight Summary
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Image and Photographic Credits
• About the Author