Slavery across history

[tshadowchaser]

Over the course of written and oral history slavery has at some time been a part of every culture, country, and people. So I ask you to review slavery over the centuries and say if

• Slavery has been good for the countries that held slaves
• Been good for the country holding slaves but turned bad for the reasons of slavery only
• Ever actual saved a culture, people from becoming extinct by moving some of its people to a location where they flourished even if in slavery for a time
• Provided the means for which the descendents of slaves gained prominence in the country that enslaved them
• Was actual a benefit for the country that had taken slaves from it by reducing the amount of people there and thusly enable those left to survive the on slot of famine, etc. Also was it a benefit to those supplying slaves

Please no “it is wrong period” answers I want facts to go with the thoughts.

This is not about slavery in the USA only but all of the world. If you want to discuss the results of slavery in the USA then start a thread on it

 

[exile]

Over the course of written and oral history slavery has at some time been a part of every culture, country, and people. So I ask you to review slavery over the centuries and say if

• Slavery has been good for the countries that held slaves
• Been good for the country holding slaves but turned bad for the reasons of slavery only
• Ever actual saved a culture, people from becoming extinct by moving some of its people to a location where they flourished even if in slavery for a time
• Provided the means for which the descendents of slaves gained prominence in the country that enslaved them
• Was actual a benefit for the country that had taken slaves from it by reducing the amount of people there and thusly enable those left to survive the on slot of famine, etc. Also was it a benefit to those supplying slaves

Please no “it is wrong period” answers I want facts to go with the thoughts.

This is not about slavery in the USA only but all of the world. If you want to discuss the results of slavery in the USA then start a thread on it

Sheldon, my reading of the ethography is that you get slavery under very specific conditions—namely, when there is an abundance of resources in relation to the population that can exploit those resources. When land, for example is tight relative to the population, slavery is much less likely to develop; when there is a lot of land relative to a population, slavery is more likely to develop. The point of slavery, economically I think, has always been to maximize the yield of land, with secondary benefits such as show-off perks for higher ranked individuals (if there's no clear class system) or member of the higher-ranked classes (if there is).

I think I read a long ethnological study of the distribution of slavery over time and space when I was a graduate student and had to take some social anthropology courses as part of my program in linguistics. The data came from the Murdock Human Relations Area Files, at that time the biggest available database on social features of human societies. The correlation between slavery on the one hand and low populations in relation to carrying capacity on the other was quite striking. Territoriality didn't enter the picture, of course: if you're in conflict for territory, it means you're putting pressure on carrying capacity, so you wouldn't expect to find slavery under those conditions. But raiding for slaves was common where the man/land ration was high, under favorable conditions.

And what those conditions involved, in part, was that the land had to be fertile, or something comparable with a hunting-based resource economy. The Inuit and the Great Basin Shoshone had enormous man/land ratios: vast howling wildernesses and very small populations. But so very much land was necessary to support a single individual that there was no economic point in slavery: you couldn't afford extra mouths to feed at the best of times. In the pre-contact Pacific NW, in ancient Greece, in Scandinavia and Celtic Europe, on the other hand, slavery seems to have evolved well in advance of large populations. Fertile land can't be fully exploited without hands to work it, and if you don't have enough of your own, you acquire some unwilling help by force and reap the profits.

That story was pretty well supported by the available data, as I say, and it makes a certain amount of sense...

 

[jarrod]

i think a lot of societies have stunted their technological development by allowing slavery. labor saving devices don't have much value if you have slaves to do the labor.

jf

 

[grydth]

Two countries who made massive use of slave labor in the Twentieth Century, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, may have seemed on the surface to have benefited....at least at the time.

The Third Reich used huge numbers of foreigners in its war industry. many were taken by force or by fraud. Those from the East especially, the "Ostarbeiter" were little better than slaves. But sabotage was epidemic and those people wrought a terrible vengeance when the Reich fell. A different vengeance has been taken in war crimes trials to this day.

Russia used its own "zeks" as well as Axis POWs for major projects that killed many of them. Did things get done, though? Read Solzhenitsyn's visit to the Belomor Canal in the Gulag Archipelago - how valuable were these 'accomplishments' at the time? The discovery of this secret slave empire helped bring down the Communists and forever tarnished their supposed ideals.

The short term gains were quite shallow and the detriments persisted long after.

 

[girlbug2]

The Egyptians' enslavement of the Israelites comes to mind as a good example of slavery that initally benefitted the country but ultimately was its downfall.

The Israelistes were originally invited guests that settled in the land of Goshen. When that pharoah was replaced later on, however, the new pharoah chose not to honor that royal promise of protection and generosity. He became paranoid that the Israelites would rise up against him and so he plotted to enslave them. No doubt the rich, fertile land of Egypt also needed extra hands to work it, and so for about 400 years the slaves were oppressed and exploited until Moses led them out under God's guidance. In the process of fleeing Egypt the Israelites plundered their neighbors' wealth. So ultimately the Egyptians were worse off for having had slaves.