ON SLAVERY

by Professor Jon Saul

 

About 360 million years ago, land animals emerged from the sea.

About 4.4 million years ago, ‘primates’, which includes apes and chimpanzees. began to walk on their hind legs, leaving their front legs (arms) free.

Approximately 2 million years ago, some of these creatures evolved into human beings: ‘Homo Sapiens’, meaning, literally, ‘wise human’. You and I are human beings.

Humans have always lived in groups: families, tribes, communities and civilizations.

Humans have always lived in strife, struggling to survive and struggling with each other.

 

When human groups clashed, which was sometimes called ‘war”, the result was often that one group dominated another.

 

The chief result of this was that one group enslaved the other. This was an arrangement, practice, that was common to all peoples throughout the world throughout time. This meant that the dominant groups forced the subjugated groups to work on their behalf.

 

Thus, slavery (the subjugation of one group of people to another) was a staple of the human condition almost since the beginning of human history.

 

Human slavery has taken many forms and many names: slavery, serfdom, bondage, captivity, oppression, vassalage, wage-slavery, repression, servitude among others.

 

As more and more humans populated the earth, human societies grew more complex. From the earliest civilization until 1776, throughout the world, human slavery flourished as the chief relationship between the ruling classes of humans and their subjects.

 

In China, there were emperors and warlords. In Africa, there were tribal chiefs. In Europe and Asia there were the nobility: kings and queens. These ruling classes dominated the common people, forcing them to give up the fruits of their labor in order to support the ruling classes.

 

The earliest book, the Bible, speaks of Hebrew slavery. Estimates are that there are more slaves throughout the world today than ever before, including approximately 40 million people, including the exploitation of children, the trafficking of humans for organs and involuntary labor.

 

Back in the 15th Century, Europeans began to subjugate North and South America. The chief powers of Europe were England, France, Spain, Portugal, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These organizations of people were all monarchies. They had ruled Europe for 1500 years. The King, Queen or Emperor (the aristocracy) owned all the land and all the people, with very few exceptions. The vast majority of the people were subjected to the local ruler’s decisions about how they would live, what they would do, where they might go.

 

These European rulers fought wars with each other and with the people of the Americas. They overcame the people living in those regions. They killed them and they enslaved them in order to gain control over the land and the natural resources of these two continents.

 

For 300 years, they sent immigrants to the Americas to populate the lands and make the European ruling classes rich. They fought more wars with each other in order to decide who would control which lands.

 

By the middle of the 18th Century, in North America, the King of England ruled all the European people who had settled there.

 

In 1776, the people decided that they would no longer be slaves to the King. They decided to put their lives on the line in order to win their freedom.