slavery

History of slavery - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

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The 1926 Slavery Convention, an initiative of the League of Nations, was a turning point in banning global slavery. Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by the UN General Assembly, explicitly banned slavery. The United Nations 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery was convened to outlaw and ban slavery worldwide, including child slavery. In December 1966, the UN General Assembly adopted the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which was developed from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 8 of this international treaty bans slavery. The treaty came into force in March 1976 after it had been ratified by 35 nations. As of November 2003, 104 nations had ratified the treaty. According to the British Anti-Slavery Society, "Although there is no longer any state which recognizes any claim by a person to a right of property over another, there are an estimated 27 million people throughout the world, mainly children, in conditions of slavery.

Napoleon came to power in 1799 and soon had grandiose plans for the French sugar colonies; to achieve them he had to reintroduce slavery.

The Slavery Abolition Act, passed on 23 August 1833, outlawed slavery itself in the British colonies. On 1 August 1834 all slaves in the British West Indies, were emancipated, but still indentured to their former owners in an apprenticeship system. The intention of, was to educate former slaves to a trade but instead allowed slave owners to maintain ownership illegally.

The bloody American Civil War ended slavery in the United States in the 1860s; the system ended in Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s because it was no longer profitable for the owners. Slavery continued to exist in Africa, where Arab slave traders raided black areas for new captives to be sold in the system. 

In the first half of the 19th century, small-scale slave raids took place acrossPolynesia to supply labor and sex workers for the whaling and sealing trades, with examples from both the westerly and easterly extremes of the Polynesian triangle. By the 1860s this had grown to a larger scale operation with Peruvian slave raids in the South Sea Islands to collect labor for the guano industry.

Rapa Nui / Easter Island [edit]

The isolated island of Rapa Nui/Easter Island was inhabited by the Rapanui, who suffered a series of slave raids from 1805 or earlier, culminating in a near genocidal experience in the 1860s. The 1805 raid was by American sealers and was one of a series that changed the attitude of the islanders to outside visitors, with reports in the 1820s and 1830s that all visitors received a hostile reception. In December 1862, Peruvian slave raiders took between 1,400 and 2,000 islanders back to Peru to work in the guano industry; this was about a third of the island's population and included much of the island's leadership, the last ariki-mau and possibly the last who could read Rongorongo. After intervention by the French ambassador in Lima, the last 15 survivors were returned to the island, but brought with them smallpox, which further devastated the island.

After the failure of Reconstruction, freed slaves in the United States were treated as second class citizens. For decades after their emancipation, many former slaves living in the South sharecropped and had a low standard of living. In some states, it was only after the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s that blacks obtained legal protection from racial discrimination (see segregation).

(If Westboro Baptist wanted to make a point about something, it should have been about this, not about "fags.")

Several slave rebellions took place during the 17th and 18th centuries.

• 1642: Massachusetts becomes the first colony to legalize slavery.
• 1650: Connecticut legalizes slavery.
• 1661: Virginia officially recognizes slavery by statute.
• 1662: A Virginia statute declares that children born would have the same status as their mother.
• 1663: Maryland legalizes slavery.
• 1664: Slavery is legalized in New York and New Jersey.^[175]

The first slaves used by Europeans in what later became United States territory were among Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón's colonization attempt of North Carolina in 1526. The attempt was a failure, lasting only one year; the slaves revolted and fled into the wilderness to live among the Cofitachiqui people.^[173]

It was not until the Slave Codes of 1705 that the status of African Americans as slaves would be sealed. This status would last for another 160 years, until after the end of the American Civil War with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865.
Slavery was legally ended nationwide on 13 May by theLei Aurea ("Golden Law") of 1888. In fact, it was an institution in decadence at these times, as since the 1880s the country had begun to use European immigrant labor instead. Brazil was the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery.

Escaped slaves formed Maroon communities which played an important role in the histories of Brazil and other countries such as Suriname, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica. In Brazil, the Maroon villages were called palenquesor quilombos. Maroons survived by growing vegetables and hunting. They also raided plantations. At these attacks, the maroons would burn crops, steal livestock and tools, kill slavemasters, and invite other slaves to join their communities.

One slave narrative was composed by an Englishman, John R. Jewitt, who had been taken alive when his ship was captured in 1802; his memoir provides a detailed look at life as a slave, and asserts that a large number were held.

Jewitt wrote in the Narrative that he was ordered to participate in a night-time raid on a village identified as A-y-chart. He said he took four captives, which Maquinna allowed him to keep as his own "as a favour", while Thompson killed seven (p. 150). All of the inhabitants were either killed or enslaved. However, some doubt Jewitt and Thompson really participated in any such attack. While the story appears in the Narrative, there is no mention of any such occurrence in the original diary and no mention of the four slaves. Contemporary maritime historical accounts^{[citation needed]} support the possibility that Jewitt was recounting the story of a Wickaninnish attack that he heard about; this may be because he wished to dramatize his story for his readers.

He was allegedly ordered to marry, because the council of chiefs thought that a wife and family would reconcile him to staying with the Nootka for life. He was reportedly given a choice between forced marriage for himself and capital punishment for both him and his "father". "Reduced to this sad extremity, with death on the one side, and matrimony on the other, I thought proper to choose what appeared to me the least of the two evils" (p. 154). However, Jewitt's story of forced marriage has also been questioned. Both Captain Barclay and a later British ethnologist in the mid-19th century reported meeting older witnesses who said Jewitt had been involved in a very passionate love affair with the daughter of a neighbouring chief. It has been speculated^[who?]that Jewitt created the "forced marriage" story in accordance with the mores of the time. Jewitt's account does confirm he married the seventeen-year-old daughter of a neighbouring chief.

Jewitt remained a captive of Maquina until 1805, during which time he became immersed in the Nootka culture and was forced to marry. The distinction between prisoner of war and slave is not clear-cut, but Jewitt lost his liberty and had to work for Maquinna. Jewitt uses the word "slave" to describe his position and asserts that Maquinna had about 50 others, consisting of half his household. Thompson (the sailmaker) and Jewitt were taunted, out of Maquinna's hearing, as "white slaves", with explosive results, including a death.
Now:

Evidence emerged in the late 1990s of systematic slavery in cacao plantations in West Africa; see thechocolate and slavery article.^[147]

In parts of Ghana, Togo, andBenin, shrine slavery persists, despite being illegal in Ghana since 1998. In this system of ritual servitude, sometimes called trokosi (in Ghana) or voodoosi in Togo and Benin, young virgin girls are given as slaves to traditional shrines and are used sexually by the priests in addition to providing free labor for the shrine.

(Gotta love the holy rollers.)


The trading of children has been reported in modern Nigeria and Benin. In parts of Ghana, a family may be punished for an offense by having to turn over a virgin female to serve as a sex slave within the offended family.


 ...slavers had a vested interest in capturing rather than killing, and in keeping their captives alive; and that this coupled with the disproportionate removal of males and the introduction of new crops from the Americas (cassava, maize) ...

(Seems fitting that we ddie of corn syrup poisoning. Karma.)

In 1807, the UK Parliament passed the Bill that abolished the trading of slaves. The King of Bonny (now in Nigeria) was horrified at the conclusion of the practice:^[148]

"We think this trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself."

French historian Fernand Braudel noted that slavery was endemic in Africa and part of the structure of everyday life. "Slavery came in different disguises in different societies: there were court slaves, slaves incorporated into princely armies, domestic and household slaves, slaves working on the land, in industry, as couriers and intermediaries, even as traders" (Braudel 1984 p. 435). During the 16th century, Europe began to outpace the Arab world in the export traffic, with its slave traffic from Africa to the Americas. The Dutch imported slaves from Asia into their colony in South Africa. In 1807 Britain, which held extensive, although mainly coastal colonial territories on the African continent (including southern Africa), made theinternational slave trade illegal, as did the United States in 1808. The end of the slave trade and the decline of slavery was imposed upon Africa by outside powers.

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During The Holocaust, the Germans used slave labor from across occupied Europe to support their war effort, and numbering perhaps 6 million people.^{[107][108][109]}

Denmark-Norway was the first European country to ban the slave trade. This happened with a decree issued by the king in 1792, to become fully effective by 1803. Slavery itself was not banned until 1848. At this timeIceland was a part of Denmark-Norway but slave trading had been abolished in Iceland in 1117 and had never been reestablished.^[104]

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.^[52] The runaway Polish and Russian serfs and kholops known as Cossacks('outlaws') formed autonomous communities in the southern steppes.^[53]

 ...Such oppression by an elite minority eventually led to slave revolts; the Third Servile Warled by Spartacus was the most famous and severe. Greeks, Berbers, Germans,Britons, Slavs, 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.^[22]

Slavery was common practice and an integral component of ancient Greece throughout its rich history, as it was in other societies of the time including ancient Israel and early Christian societies.^[15][16][17] 
Slavery is no longer legal anywhere in the world.^[6] Mauritaniaabolished it in law in 1981^[7] and was the last country to do so – seeAbolition of slavery timeline. However, the number of slaves today is higher than at any point in history,^[8] remaining as high as 12million^[9] to 27 million.^[10][11]