Geoffrey Blainey

A Very Short History of the World

Ancient China possessed slaves by the millions, and the practice of selling people into slavery in China was not banned until 1908. Indians owned slaves before and after the time of Christ. Many tribes and some states in America, long before the coming of Columbus, owned slaves and half-slaves. Europe's serfdom, which survived in Russia until the very decade when slavery ended in the United States, was a version of slavery. A slave was a familiar sight in the Greek city-states. In lands ruled by Rome slaves were to be seen on thousands of rural estates. Each slave was in effect an extra pick or axe or shovel, an extra hand at harvest time, an additional pair of hands in the building and road-mending gangs or the household kitchen. So long as these slaves produced more than they ate, they were an asset. In many parts of the world it was almost a rule of warfare that prisoners were either killed or enslaved. As wars were frequent, the count of new slaves in each century was high. To be a slave was preferable to the alternative—to be a corpse.

Early Christianity, like early Judaism and Islam, understood that slavery was an ancient and useful institution, and not to be meddled with. Learned and compassionate opinion in the 21st century cannot understand how slavery for so long could have been accepted without question, but then this new century is the heir to ideas of human equality and dignity which were uncommon in earlier centuries. Moreover today the prosperous countries have no economic need for slavery. Thanks to technology, they have a glut, not a scarcity, of unskilled muscle power. Moreover they have a new and tireless slave known as fossil fuel, which was not known to early civilisations.

Long before European ships began to carry slaves from Africa, the Africans themselves were busy traders in slaves. Since 1500, more African slaves have probably been sold to Islamic lands than to Christian lands, and Muslims have been the main slave-traders in Africa. Presumably there was an active slave trade in Africa long before Islam arrived.

Inside Africa many people were enslaved by their own kinsfolk. Fathers sometimes sold their own children into slavery, and brothers sold brothers. Maybe half of the slaves who ended their days in foreign lands or regions had been enslaved by the African group or society of which they were a member. Slaves were usually debtors, criminals, misfits or rebels and they were especially prisoners taken in war.

In the 16th century most slaves exported from western Africa were women and were sold to Islamic lands. A century later most slaves were men and were shipped in European-owned ships to Christian colonies in America. The Portuguese pioneered the slave trade to the Americas—they already used African slaves in their own sugar plantations in the Cape Verde Islands and in Madeira—and the British and other seafaring nations soon joined in the highly profitable but callous trade. A long strip of coastal western Africa, stretching from the Senegal River to Cameroon, supplied most of the slaves; and in the busiest years of the 1700s they were shipped across the Atlantic at the rate of 100 000 a year. Working in sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations scattered all the way from the mouth of the Amazon to Jamaica and Virginia, they did not see their homeland again. Most of the sugar eaten in Europe was grown by African slaves working in exile.

The voyage in little sailing ships across equatorial waters from western Africa must have been an ordeal. Most slaves were crowded below in the hot darkness, often in chains. Their supply of drinking water was meagre, and they had not previously been at sea. For the European crew the voyage was often as hazardous, and many died of tropical diseases.

Generations of African-Americans were born into slavery but few escape routes were open to them. A baby born to a black mother and a white father—the father was usually the owner or overseer—was virtually free. Another path of escape was simply to run away. Many slaves ran in fear of a coming whipping, or as a result of a whipping. Sometimes dogs pursued them. Many of those who did escape to a nearby forest or swamp voluntarily returned to slavery with its secure supply of food and shelter and the consoling religious faith of their fellow slaves.

Slavery was a lottery in its tempo of work, its punishments and its rewards. Much depended on the personality of the owner and his wife and his over-seer—who was often black—and on the attitudes of the government under whose laws the slave worked. Almost certainly the United States was superior to Brazil and other lands in its treatment of slaves, and some observers of American slavery agreed that on a typical cotton or rice plantation, the cabins of the slaves were at least as comfortable as those of poorer people in Scotland and Sicily. But outside the cabins there was no freedom.