In the United States slavery is understandably associated with the South since it was the Southern states that so vigorously defended the practice during the nineteenth century. However, to understand how slavery first took hold in the South, historians...

A frican slavery in the Western Hemisphere began in the sixteenth century, when captives were first brought across the Atlantic from the western coasts of Africa to work on European sugar plantations in Cuba, Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, and several...

Understanding the origins, justification, and economy of slavery is crucial to understanding American society, the coming of the Civil War, and the effect of that war on American culture and identity. Chattel slavery has existed throughout world...

Slavery Introduction The history of slavery testifies not only to the economic benefits it provides the enslavers, but also to the credence that certain people are innately inferior to others. Whether it is chattel slavery—absolute ownership of a...

Through most of human history societies have used slavery as a form of labor. The ancient Greeks, Native American tribes, the Roman Empire, the ancient Egyptians, Nazi Germany, and even European nations of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were...

condition in which one human being was owned by another. A slave was considered by law as property, or chattel, and was deprived of most of the rights ordinarily held by free persons. There is no consensus on what a slave was or on how the institution...

. Roman Gaul knew chattel slavery, and chattel slavery of the classical type persisted in the households and on the estates of the Gallo-Roman and Merovingian aristocracy long after the fall of imperial administration. Under the Carolingians, classical...

Despite the historical importance of slavery in many parts of the world anthropologists study, the subject remains somewhat marginal within the discipline. Much more has been written by historians, most of this dealing with the trans-Atlantic trade...

The definitions of slavery are as numerous as the societies in which slavery was to be found, and for good reason. The rights which owners had over their slaves and the duties by which they were bound constituted a bundle whose composition varied from...

The intersection of men, masculinity and slavery provides a site for examining the formation of male subjectivities within slavery. Slavery, a social relation in which people own other people as legal property, has been practised in all of the...

Forced labour for little or no pay under the threat of violence. Slavery has existed on nearly every continent, including Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and throughout most of recorded history. The ancient Greeks and Romans accepted the...

A slave does not choose his master. (African) A slave yesterday, today a freedman. (Roman) Better a poor man’s son than a rich man’s slave. (Rumanian) Better an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave. (French) He who has...

Frequently used as a term of contempt in the seventeenth century, but used jokingly in modern times, e.g. when a wife orders a husband to do something in the tone of a slavedriver. There is an example of such usage in Life at the Top, by John Braine....

Condition of human being under the ownership of another. According to the *Bible, an *Israelite can only own an Israelite slave for seven years. After that he or she must be freed. *Jews could own foreign slaves and in the Middle Ages some participated...

Servitude, the cage of the soul....

Slavery is a social-economic system under which certain persons — known as slaves — are deprived of personal freedom and compelled to perform labour or services. The term includes the status or condition of those persons who are treated as the...