I remember some years ago talking to a woman who asserted passionately that slavery was an evil foisted on the world by Europeans and white Americans. I suspect that many people still do think that, including many of the said Europeans and Americans.

Of course, the well-known enslavement of black Africans in the Americas and the horrors of the notorious “Middle Passage” are nowadays looked upon as a crime against humanity. But slavery has a much wider reach than that. Although in recent centuries Africans probably formed a major portion of those enslaved both by Europeans and various Muslim regimes, it is often forgotten that over several centuries Europeans too were enslaved by Middle Eastern, North African and Turkish Muslims.

Slavery in history

No-one knows how far back in time slavery stretches, but it has existed in many different cultures. It was widespread in the ancient world, with slaves forming a significant portion of many populations and making a vital contribution to their economies. Slaves were not necessarily racially different from their owners. One could be born into slavery, captured in war, convicted of crime or fallen into debt. In ancient Rome, there were far more slaves than citizens.

The essence of slavery is that one’s labour is exploited by someone else, without proper wages. With the most extreme form of slavery, so-called chattel slavery, a slave is treated as property, with the owner often having power of life or death over the slave. As well as their labour, slaves may lose control over their own bodies and be subject to sexual slavery.

Abolition of slavery

In the West, Christians often claim credit for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade. It is true that many of the campaigners were Christians, but then so were the slave owners and traders. The Bible accepted the institution of slavery and nowhere expressed opposition to it. In fact St Paul enjoined slaves to obey their masters. It was with the spread of Enlightenment values and the idea of the Rights of Man that western Christians began to question the whole idea of one person owning another.

Slavery in the 20th century

Because so much attention has been focused on the African slaves in the Americas, it is easy to suppose that when slavery was formally abolished there at different historical dates (finishing with Brazil in 1888) it therefore came to an end. But that was far from true, and various forms of slavery persisted into the modern world. The 20th century saw a wide-scale breakdown of humanity under the dictatorships that sprang up after World War I. The Nazi regime worked about 12 million slave labourers under very harsh conditions. Many of them were worked to death and others were killed when they could no longer work. During the Sino-Japanese War and World War II, Japan enslaved about 10 million Chinese and large numbers of Koreans, Indonesians and prisoners of war. Many of them were worked to death. In addition a large number of civilian women (the so-called “comfort women”) were used as sexual slaves by Japanese troops.

A longer-lasting enslavement occurred in the prison camps and colonies of the USSR. Starting under Lenin, but reaching new heights under Stalin, these institutions swallowed up tens of millions of people. Many were not Soviet citizens, but prisoners of war or citizens of countries under Soviet control. Conditions were often extremely harsh, and large numbers of prisoners died.

Slavery in the 21st century

Of course, World War II and the Soviet Union are now history. What of the present?

In such matters it is impossible to come by accurate figures. The organisation Free the Slaves [1] estimates that a total of 27 million people are currently enslaved, but this is probably a considerable under-estimate. Anti-Slavery International [2] lists six main forms of slavery in the modern world:

Bonded labour
Early and forced marriage
Forced labour
Slavery by descent
Trafficking
Child labour

Although these different types of slavery can be distinguished, in many cases they overlap. For example, in the Indian Subcontinent, where a great deal of bonded labour is found, it often involves child labour.

Child slaves are found in many parts of the world: carpet workers in India and Pakistan, camel jockeys in the Arab world, child factory workers and miners and child prostitutes in many countries. Above all, large numbers of children are forced to work on the land either by their families or by masters who have bought them from traffickers. There are also hundreds of thousands of child soldiers.

Bonded labour is a very old form of slavery. It is usually distinguished from chattel slavery, because at least theoretically the slave is not owned by the master. Nevertheless, it is a form of slavery, because the slave works without wages and is often very badly treated. It usually arises in the first place because a poor person contracts a debt that s/he is unable to repay and agrees to give labour in place of repayment. The debtor is then trapped into a situation where the loan can never be repaid and where his or her labour is required for life. Often whole families are enslaved in this way, with the labour obligation being passed down the generations. In India the practice is illegal but still widespread, and the victims are overwhelmingly Dalits (untouchables).

I will not write here about early and forced marriage. (See my article on child marriage in International Humanist News for April 2007. [3]) Obviously there is an overlap between child marriage and child labour. Sometimes forced marriages can represent a form of bonded labour, as girls or women are given in payment of a debt or other obligation.

The term “forced labour” is usually reserved for labour that is enforced by the state, as in the cases of the prison camps cited above. There are still regimes where forced labour occurs, and, of course, many states require those convicted of crimes to undertake some sort of compulsory labour. In past centuries British convicts were sentenced to penal transportation, which was a combination of exile and forced labour. Initially transportation supplied slave or indentured labour to the American colonies, but when the USA became an independent country it was decided to set up colonies in Australia.

The folk ballad Van Dieman’s Land expresses poignantly the fate of the transportees in Australia:

The first day that we landed
Upon that fateful shore,
The planters came round us,
They might be twenty score.
They ranked us off like horses
And sold us out of hand,
And yoked us to the plough, brave boys,
To plough Van Dieman's Land.

Although we no longer see transportation, millions of people are trafficked into various forms of slavery. Trafficking is distinct from smuggling in that people are deceived by the traffickers or simply kidnapped. Trafficking is widespread in parts of Africa. Since the collapse of Communism many Eastern European girls and women have been trafficked for the sex trade in the West. In parts of Asia there is considerable trafficking of children as sex slaves.

In a short article it is impossible to cover the whole gamut of slavery. I urge everyone to read the moving account of Simon Deng, when he testified about his personal experience of slavery at a 2005 conference organised at the UN by IHEU. [4] Unfortunately, it cannot be said that conditions for his people have improved since then.

No country on earth is totally free of slavery. It is scandalous that this horrible exploitation of vulnerable people should still exist today. Humanists can help to make people aware of its existence and incidence. We can question governments and big companies about their actions (or inactions). We can support organisations that work against slavery and to help slaves. We must stop slavery from spreading misery into another century.

1 http://www.freetheslaves.net/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=183&srcid=-2
2 http://www.antislavery.org/index.htm
3 http://www.iheu.org/node/2555
4 http://www.iheu.org/node/1539

Diana Brown is a former editor of International Humanist News