Slavery in ancient cultures was known to occur in civilizations as old as Sumer, and it was found in every civilization, including Ancient Egypt, the Akkadian Empire, Assyria, Ancient Greece[3] Rome and parts of its empire. Such institutions were a mixture of debt-slavery, punishment for crime, the enslavement of prisoners of war, child abandonment, and the birth of slave children to slaves.[4] In the Roman Empire, probably over 25% of the empire's population[5], and 30 to 40% of the population of Italy[6] was enslaved.

Records of slavery in Ancient Greece go as far back as Mycenaean Greece.

It is often said that the Greeks as well as philosophers such as Aristotle accepted the theory of natural slavery i.e. that some men are slaves by nature.[7][8] At the time Plato and Socrates slavery was so accepted by the Greeks (including philosophers) that few people indeed protested it as an institution [9], although there were in fact a few voices of opposition[citation needed].

During the 8th and the 7th centuries BC, in the course of the two Messenian Wars the Spartans reduced an entire population to a pseudo-slavery called helotry.[10] According to Herodotus (IX, 28–29), helots were seven times as numerous as Spartans. In some Ancient Greek city states about 30% of the population consisted of slaves, but paid and slave labor seem to have been equally important[11]

Greeks however were among the first Europeans to abolish slavery with their constitution on 1823, which specifically noted that "in greek territory no human being can be sold or bought, no matter his or her religion, and if a slave enters Greece, he is automatically considered an absolutely free man or woman and nobody can make claims on him or her".

Отредактировано korotky_trinity (2009-09-22 15:57:25)

Romans inherited the institution of slavery from the Greeks and the Phoenicians [12]. As the Roman Republic expanded outward, entire populations were enslaved, thus creating an ample supply to work in Rome's farms and households. The people subjected to Roman slavery came from all over Europe and the Mediterranean. Such oppression by an elite minority eventually led to slave revolts (see Roman Servile Wars); the Third Servile War led by Spartacus was the most famous and severe. Greeks, Berbers, Germans, Britons, Thracians, Gauls (or Celts), Jews, Arabs, and many more were slaves used not only for labor, but also for amusement (e.g. gladiators and sex slaves). If a slave ran away, he was liable to be crucified. By the late Republican era, slavery had become a vital economic pillar in the wealth of Rome.http://www.dl.ket.org/latinlit/mores/slaves/

Chaos and invasion made the taking of slaves habitual throughout Europe in the early Middle Ages. St. Patrick, himself captured and sold as a slave, protested an attack that enslaved newly baptized Christians in his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus.

Slavery during the Early Middle Ages had several distinct sources. The Vikings raided across Europe, though their slave raids were the most destructive in the British Isles and Eastern Europe. While the Vikings kept some slaves for themselves as servants, known as thralls, most people captured by the Vikings would be sold on the Byzantine or Islamic markets. In the West the targets of Viking slavery were primarily English, Irish, and Scottish, while in the East they were mainly Slavs. The Viking slave trade slowly ended in the 1000s, as the Vikings settled in the European territories they once raided, Christianized, and merged with the local populace.

The Islamic World was also a main factor in Medieval European slavery. From the early 700s until the early Modern time period (rough the 18th or 19th centuries) Muslims consistently took European slaves. This slavery began during the Muslim Conquest of Visigothic Spain and Portugal in the 8th century. The Muslim powers of Iberia both raided for slaves and purchased slaves from European merchants, often the Jewish Radhanites, one of the few groups that could easily move between the Christian and Islamic worlds. As the Muslims failed to conquer Europe in the 8th century they took to pirate raids against the shores of Spain, southern Portugal and France, and Italy, that would last roughly from the 9th century until the 12th century, when the Italian city-states of Genoa, Venice, and Pisa, along with the Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, as well as the Sicilian Normans, began to dominate the Mediterranean. The Middle Ages from 1100 to 1500 saw a continuation of the European slave trade, though with a shift from the Western Mediterranean Islamic nations to the Eastern, as Venice and Genoa, in firm control of the Eastern Mediterranean from the 12th century and the Black Sea from the 13th century sold both Slavic and Baltic slaves, as well as Georgians, Turks, and other ethnic groups of the Black Sea and Caucasus, to the Muslim nations of the Middle East. The sale of European slaves by Europeans slowly ended as the Slavic and Baltic ethnic groups Christianized by the Late Middle Ages. European slaves in the Islamic World would, however, continue into the Modern time period as Muslim pirates, primarily Algerians, with the support of the Ottoman Empire, raided European coasts and shipping from the 16th to the 19th centuries, ending their attacks with the naval decline of the Ottoman Empire in the late 16th and 17th centuries, as well as the European conquest of North Africa throughout the 19th century.

The Mongol invasions and conquests in the 13th century made the situation worse.[16] The Mongols enslaved skilled individuals, women and children and marched them to Karakorum or Sarai, whence they were sold throughout Eurasia. Many of these slaves were shipped to the slave market in Novgorod.[17][18][19]

Slave commerce during the Late Middle Ages was mainly in the hands of Venetian and Genoese merchants and cartels, who were involved in the slave trade with the Golden Horde. In 1382 the Golden Horde under Khan Tokhtamysh sacked Moscow, burning the city and carrying off thousands of inhabitants as slaves. Between 1414 and 1423, some 10,000 eastern European slaves were sold in Venice.[20] Genoese merchants organized the slave trade from the Crimea to Mamluk Egypt. For years the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan routinely made raids on Russian principalities for slaves and to plunder towns. Russian chronicles record about 40 raids of Kazan Khans on the Russian territories in the first half of the 16th century.[21] In 1521, the combined forces of Crimean Khan Mehmed Giray and his Kazan allies attacked Moscow and captured thousands of slaves.[22]

In 1441, Haci I Giray declared independence from the Golden Horde and established the Crimean Khanate. For a long time, until the early 18th century, the khanate maintained a massive slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. In a process called the "harvesting of the steppe", they enslaved many Slavic peasants. About 30 major Tatar raids were recorded into Muscovite territories between 1558-1596.[23] In 1571, the Crimean Tatars attacked and sacked Moscow, burning everything but the Kremlin and taking thousands of captives as slaves.[24] In Crimea, about 75% of the population consisted of slaves.[25]

Medieval Spain and Portugal were the scene of almost constant warfare between Muslims and Christians. Periodic raiding expeditions were sent from Al-Andalus to ravage the Iberian Christian kingdoms, bringing back booty and slaves. In a raid against Lisbon, Portugal in 1189, for example, the Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur took 3,000 female and child captives, while his governor of Córdoba, in a subsequent attack upon Silves, Portugal in 1191, took 3,000 Christian slaves.[26]

The Byzantine-Ottoman wars and the Ottoman wars in Europe brought large numbers of Christian slaves into the Islamic world too.[27] After the battle of Lepanto approximately 12,000 Christian galley slaves were freed from the Ottoman Turks.[28] Christians were also selling Muslim slaves captured in war. The Knights of Malta attacked pirates and Muslim shipping, and their base became a centre for slave trading, selling captured North Africans and Turks. Malta remained a slave market until well into the late 18th century. It required a thousand slaves to equip merely the galleys (ships) of the Order.[29][30]

Slavery in Poland was forbidden in the 15th century; in Lithuania, slavery was formally abolished in 1588; they were replaced by the second enserfment. Slavery remained a minor institution in Russia until the 1723, when the Peter the Great converted the household slaves into house serfs. Russian agricultural slaves were formally converted into serfs earlier in 1679.[31] The runaway Polish and Russian serfs and kholops known as Cossacks (‘outlaws’) formed autonomous communities in the southern steppes.[32]

Before, during and after Roman times, the practice of slavery was common in the British Isles. The Anglo-Saxons continued and expanded their slave system, sometimes in league with Norse traders.

Chattel slavery of English Christians was discontinued when William of Normandy conquered England in 1066, but according to the Domesday Book census in 1086, 10% of the country's population was enslaved.[43] The trade in serfs and slaves in England was abolished in 1102, although the legal force of the event is open to question.

The Council of Westminster, a collection of nobles, issued a decree: "Let no one hereafter presume to engage in that nefarious trade in which hitherto in England men were usually sold like brute animals." However, the Council had no legislative powers, and no act of law was valid unless signed by the monarch.[citation needed]

The last form of enforced servitude in Britain (villeinage) had disappeared by the beginning of the 17th century[citation needed]. Slavery resurfaced in that century as a form of punishment against Catholics. Following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, as many as 100,000 men, women and children were enslaved and transported to the colonies in the British West Indies and British America.[44][45] Over half of all white immigrants to Colonial America during the 17th and 18th centuries consisted of indentured servants.[46][47]

Britain played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade. The "slave triangle" was pioneered by Francis Drake and his associates[citation needed]. Slavery was a legal institution in all of the 13 American colonies, and the profits of the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to 5% of the British economy at the time of the Industrial Revolution.[48] In 1807, following many years of lobbying by the Abolitionist movement, the British Parliament voted to make the slave trade illegal anywhere in the empire.

Thereafter Britain took a prominent role in combating the trade, although it took another generation before slavery itself was abolished in the British empire. Between 1808 and 1860, the West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard.[49] Action was also taken against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade, for example against "the usurping King of Lagos", deposed in 1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers.[50]

In 1811, Arthur William Hodge was the first slave owner executed for the murder of a slave in the British West Indies.[51] He was not, however, as some have claimed, the first white person to have been lawfully executed for the killing of a slave.[52][53]

The Arab or Middle Eastern slave trade continued into the early 1900s,[119] and by some accounts continue to this day. Slavery in Morocco was outlawed in the 1930s.[120] As recently as the 1950s, Saudi Arabia had an estimated 450,000 slaves, 20% of the population.[121][122]

It is estimated that as many as 200,000 black south Sudanese children and women (mostly from the Dinka tribe sold by the Sudanese Arabs of the north) have been taken into slavery in Sudan during the Second Sudanese Civil War.[123][124] In Mauritania it is estimated that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are currently enslaved, many of them used as bonded labor.[125] Slavery in Mauritania was criminalized in August 2007.[126]

The Arab trade in slaves continued into the 20th century. Written travelogues and other historical works are replete with references to slaves owned by wealthy traders, nobility and heads of state in the Arabian Peninsula well into the 1920s. Slave owning and slave-like working conditions have been documented up to and including the present, in countries of the Middle East. Though the subject is considered taboo in the affected regions, a leading Saudi government cleric and author of the country's religious curriculum has called for the outright re-legalization of slavery[127][128].

Children as young as two years old are used for slavery as child camel jockeys across the Arab countries of the Middle East. Although strict laws have been introduced recently in Qatar and UAE, thanks to better awareness of the issue and lobbying by human rights organisations such as the Ansar Burney Trust, the use of children still continues in outlying areas and during secret night-time races.

Many of the Iraqi women fleeing the Iraq War are turning to prostitution, others are trafficked abroad, to countries like Syria, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Iran.[129] In Syria alone, an estimated 50,000 Iraqi refugee girls and women, many of them widows, are forced into prostitution.[130]

Cheap Iraqi prostitutes have helped to make Syria a popular destination for sex tourists. The clients come from wealthier countries in the Middle East - many are Saudi men.[131] High prices are offered for virgins.[132]