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Serf

Serf

Serfdom refers to the legal and economic status of some peasants under feudalism, specifically in the manorial (also known as seigneurialism) economic system. A serf is a laborer who is bound to the land. Serfs formed the lowest social class of the feudal society. Serfs differed from slaves in that serfs were not property themselves and could not be sold apart from the land which they worked. Serfdom is the forced labour of serfs, on the fields of the privileged land owners, in return for protection and the right to work on their leased fields. Serfdom involved work not only on fields, but various agricultural-related works, like forestry, transportation (both land and river-based), work in craft and even in manufactures. Serfdom evolved from agricultural slavery of Roman Empire and spread through Europe around the 10th century. It was dominant during the Europe's Middle Ages. In England serfdom lasted up to 17th century, in France until 1789. In most other European countries serfdom lasted until the early 19th century. The last European country to abolish serfdom was Russia, in 1861.

Etymology

Serf is derived from word servus, Latin for slave or servant.

Details

All land was owned by various landowners - nobility, Church and monarchs. Serfs and their families were allowed to farm some of the land to support themselves. Serfs were taxed on the produce and profits of their holdings. In addition, they had to devote a fair amount of time and labor to working the landowner’s demesne land, the section of the manor kept directly under the landowner’s control and not used by other tenants. The status of a serf was somewhat better than that of slave, for a serf had some rights and was not a property himself — no one owned him. But he was in various ways tied to a plot of land, the land was owned by someone else and could change owners. Typically, when serfdom prevailed, the land itself could not be sold because it was associated with political powers (just as the Monarch of Great Britain cannot sell Great Britain). Instead, the land was transferred via war, marriage, and the like. A serf was a peasant. While most serfs were farmers, some serfs were craftsmen - like the village blacksmith, miller or innkeeper. They were bound to the place and could not leave without the landowner's permission. They also owed work to the landowner; normally they were expected to farm the landowners' estates as well as their own, owed in addition some portion of their own harvest to the landowner, and were further required to perform other labor services upon demand. Their social and legal status was hereditary. Within these constraints, a serf had some freedom. A serf might accumulate personal property and wealth, and some serfs became wealthier than their lords - although this was rather an exception to the general rule. Serfs could raise what they saw fit on their lands, and sell the surplus at market. Their heirs were guaranteed an inheritance. The landowner could not dispossess his serfs without cause and was supposed to protect them from outlaws or other lords, and he was expected to support them by charity in times of crop failure. The restraints of serfdom on personal and economic choice were enforced through various forms of manorial court and the manorial administration. Specifics of serfdom varied greatly through time and region. In some places, serfdom was merged with or exchanged for various forms of taxation. The amount of serfdom required varied, for example in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 13th century it was few days a year; in the 14th century, one day per week; 4 days in the 17th century and 6 days in the 18th century, and early serfdom was most limited on the royal territories (królewszczyzny). The Russian system of serfdom was based on the principle that the lord owned the peasant under his control, so he could dispose of his serfs as he wished: he could even separate them from their land. Sometimes, serfs served as soldiers in the event of conflict and could earn freedom or even ennoblement for valour in combat. In other cases, serfs could also purchase their freedom, be manumitted by their enlightened or generous owners, or flee to towns or newly-settled land where few questions were asked. Laws varied from country to country: in England a serf who evaded recapture for a year and a day obtained his freedom. In many cases, serfs had to obtain permission from the landowner of their manor to marry a partner from off the manor. They could also be obliged to pay fines: on inheritance, on becoming a priest or monk or on having their children leave the manor and go to cities. Furthermore, serfs had to pay to use the lord’s grain mill and bread oven and were charged for miscellaneous services such as using the lord’s carts to haul their produce.

History of serfdom

Social institutions similar to serfdom were known in ancient times. The status of the helots in the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta resembled that of the medieval serfs, as did the condition of the peasants working on government lands in ancient Rome. These Roman peasants, known as colini, or "tenant farmers", are some of the possible precursors of the serfs. The Germanic tribes invading the Roman Empire for the most part displaced wealthy Romans as the landlords but left the economic system itself intact. However, medieval serfdom really began with the breakup of the Carolingian Empire around the 10th century. The demise of this empire, which had ruled much of the western Europe for more than 200 years, was followed by a long period during which no strong central governments existed in most of Europe. During this period powerful feudal lords encouraged the establishment of serfdom as a source of agricultural labor. Serfdom, indeed, was an institution that reflected a fairly common practice whereby great landlords are assured that others work to feed them and are held down, legally and economically, while doing so. This arrangement provided most of the agricultural labor throughout the Middle Ages. Slavery persisted right through the Middle Ages, but it was rare, diminishing and largely confined to the use of household slaves. Parts of Europe, including much of Scandinavia, never adopted many feudal institutions, including serfdom. In the later Middle Ages serfdom began to disappear west of the Rhine even as it spread through eastern Europe. This was one important cause for the deep differences between the society and economy of eastern and western Europe that has lasted down to our own day. In the Western Europe, the rise of powerful monarchs, towns, and an improving economy weakened the manorial system through the 13th and 14th centuries, and serfdom was rare following the Renaissance. Serfdom there generally came to an end in the 15th and 16th centuries, largely because of changes in the economy, population, and laws governing lord-tenant relations. The enclosure of manor fields for livestock grazing and for larger arable plots made the economy of serfs’ small strips of land in open fields less attractive to the landowners. Also, the increasing use of money made tenant farming by serfs less profitable; for much less than it cost to support a serf, a lord could now hire workers who were more skilled and pay them in cash. Paid labor was also more flexible since workers could be hired only when they were needed. At the same time, increasing unrest and uprisings by serfs and peasants, like Tyler’s Rebellion in England in 1381, put pressure on the nobility and the clergy to reform the system. As a result serf and peasant demands were accommodated to some extent by the gradual establishment of new forms of leasing the land and increased personal liberties. Another important factor in the decline of serfdom was industrial development - especially the Industrial Revolution. With the growing profitabilty of industry farmers wanted to move to towns to receive higher wages than those they could earn working in the fields, while landowners also invested in the more profitable industry. This also lead to the growing process of urbanization. urbanization Serfdom reached Eastern European countries relatively later than Western Europe - it became dominant around the 15th century. Before that time the population density of Eastern Europe was much lower than that of Western Europe, thus the lords of Eastern Europe created a peasantry-friendly environment to encourage migration east. Serfdom developed in Eastern Europe after the Black Death epidemics, which not only stopped the migration but depopulated Eastern Europe. The resultant large land-to-labor ratio combined with vast, sparsely populated areas gave the lords an incentive to bind the remaining peasantry to their land. With increased demand for agricultural products in Western Europe during the later era when Western Europe limited and eventually abolished serfdom, serfdom remained in force throughout Eastern Europe during the 17th century so that nobility-owned estates could produce more agricultural products (especially grain) for the profitable export market. Such Eastern European countries include Prussia (Prussian Ordinances of 1525), Austria, Hungary (laws of late 15th/early 16th century), the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (szlachta privileges of early 16th century) and the Russian Empire (laws of 16th century). Russian EmpireThis also led to the slower industry development and urbanisation of those regions. Generally, this process, referred to as 'second serfdom' or 'export-led serfdom', which persisted until the mid-19th century, became very repressive and substantially limited serfs' rights. In many of these countries serfdom was abolished during the Napoleonic invasions of the early nineteenth century. Serfdom persisted longest in Russia, where it remained the practice until February 19, 1861 (Russian Serfdom Reforms). It's worth to mention, though, that de-facto serfdom was fully extinguished in Russia as late as in 1974 (Changes to Passport system, decree #677 by the USSR government), when peasants were for the first time granted identification documents, together with an unrestricted right to move within the country. Russian serfdom was perhaps the most unique among the Eastern European experiences, as it was never influenced by German law and migrations, and the serfdom and manorialism systems were forced by the crown (Tsar), not the nobility.

External links

- [http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~atpc/heritage/history/h-life/peasant.html An extraction from the book "Serfdom to Self-Government: Memoirs of a Polish Village Mayor, 1842-1927"]
- [http://66.188.129.72:5980/History/PreModernEurope/pl-9trade.htm The Granary of Europe - serfdom in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth]
- [http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001447.html The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis], discussion and full online text of Evsey Domar (1970), "The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis," Economic History Review 30:1 (March), pp. 18-32
- [http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&an=4524448 The Estabilishment of Serfdom in Eastern Europe and Russia], Richard Trethewey, American Economist, Spring 1974, Vol. 18 Issue 1
- [http://cyberspacei.com/jesusi/peace/abolitionism/serf.htm Serfdom]
- [http://www.wws.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/serfsup.html SERFS UP!] Category:Feudalism Category:Labor Category:Slavery

Manorialism

: This article is about the Medieval system. For the 17th century system in Canada see Seigneurial system of New France. Seigneurial system of New France, common woodland, pasturage and meadow]] Manorialism or Seigneurialism describes the organisation of rural economy and society in medieval western and parts of central Europe, characterised by the vesting of legal and economic power in a lord supported economically from his own direct landholding and from the obligatory contributions of a legally subject part of the peasant population under his jurisdiction. These obligations could be payable in labour (the French term corvée is conventionally applied), produce ("in kind") or rarely money. The word derives from the inherited traditional divisions of the countryside reassigned as local jurisdictions known as manors or seigneuries, each subject to a lord (French seigneur), usually holding his position in return for undertakings offered to a higher lord (see Feudalism). The lord held a manor court governed by public law and local custom. Not all territorial seigneurs were secular: bishops and abbots held lands that entailed similar obligations. In the generic plan of a medieval manor from Shepherd's Historical Atlas (illustration, right) the strips of individually-worked land in the open field system are immediately apparent. In this plan the manor house is set slightly apart from the village, conferring the privacy that has been more a concern since the 18th century than it was in medieval times. Equally often, the village grew up around the forecourt of the manor, formerly walled, while the demesne of the manor stretched away outside, as still may be seen at Petworth House and other English houses with a "village front" and a "park front" and most commonly in Italy. To the contrary, when a grand new house was required by the new owner of Harlaxton Manor, Lincolnshire, in the 1830s, the site of the existing manor house at the edge of its village was abandoned for the new "Jacobethan" Harlaxton Manor, isolated in its park, with the village out of view. The conditions of land tenure underlie all social or economic factors in an agrarian society. Two legal systems of pre-manorial landholding obtained. One, the most common, was the system of holding land "allodially" in full outright ownership. The other was a use of precaria or benefices in which land was held conditionally, (giving us our word "precarious"). To these two systems the Carolingian monarchs added a third, the aprisio, which linked manorialism with feudalism. The aprisio made its first appearance in Charlemagne's province of Septimania in the south of France, when Charlemagne had to settle the Visigothic refugees who had fled with his retreating forces after the failure of his Saragossa expedition of 778. He solved this problem by allotting "desert" tracts of uncultivated land belonging to the royal fisc under direct control of the emperor. These holdings aprisio entailed specific conditions. The earliest specific aprisio grant that has been identified was at Fontjoncouse, near Narbonne (see Lewis, links). In certain areas of the former Empire of the West, a system of villas was entrenched in Late Antiquity and was inherited by the medieval world.

Common features

Manors each consisted of up to three classes of land: # Demesne, the part controlled immediately by the lord and exploited directly for the benefit of his household and dependents; # Dependent (serf or villein) holdings carrying the obligation that the peasant household supply the lord with specified labour services or a part of its output (or cash in lieu thereof), subject to the custom attached to the holding; and # Free peasant land, without such obligation but otherwise subject to manorial jurisdiction and custom, and owing money rent fixed at the time of the lease. Additional sources of income from the lord included charges for use of his mill, bakery or wine-press, or for the right to hunt or to let pigs feed in his woodland, as well as court revenues and single payments on each change of tenant. On the other side of the account, manorial administration involved significant expenses, perhaps a reason why smaller manors tended to rely less on villein tenure. Villein holdings were held nominally by arrangement of lord and tenant, but tenure became in practice almost universally hereditary, with a payment being made to the lord on the succession of another member of the family. Villein land could not be abandoned, at least until demographic and economic circumstances made flight a viable proposition; nor could they be passed to a third party without the lord's permission, and the customary payment. Though not free, villeins were by no means in the same position as slaves: they enjoyed legal rights, subject to local custom, and had recourse to the law, subject to court charges which were an additional source of manorial income. Sub-letting of villein holdings was not uncommon, and labour on the demesne might be commuted into an additional money payment, as happened increasingly from the 13th century. This description of a manor house at Chingford, Essex in England was recorded in a document for the Chapter of St Paul's Cathedral when it was granted to Robert Le Moyne in 1265: :He received also a sufficient and handsome hall well ceiled with oak. On the western side is a worthy bed, on the ground, a stone chimney, a wardrobe and a certain other small chamber; at the eastern end is a pantry and a buttery. Between the hall and the chapel is a sideroom. There is a decent chapel covered with tiles, a portable altar, and a small cross. In the hall are four tables on trestles. There are likewise a good kitchen covered with tiles, with a furnace and ovens, one large, the other small, for cakes, two tables, and alongside the kitchen a small house for baking. Also a new granary covered with oak shingles, and a building in which the dairy is contained, though it is divided. Likewise a chamber suited for clergymen and a necessary chamber. Also a hen-house. These are within the inner gate. :Likewise outside of that gate are an old house for the servants, a good table, long and divided, and to the east of the principal building, beyond the smaller stable, a solar for the use of the servants. Also a building in which is contained a bed, also two barns, one for wheat and one for oats. These buildings are enclosed with a moat, a wall, and a hedge. Also beyond the middle gate is a good barn, and a stable of cows, and another for oxen, these old and ruinous. Also beyond the outer gate is a pigstye. ::From J.H. Robinson, trans., University of Pennsylvania Translations and Reprints (1897) in Middle Ages, Volume I: pp283–284.

Variation among manors

Like feudalism, which together with manorialism forms the legal and organisational framework of what is often termed feudal society, manorial structures must not be imagined as a uniform phenomenon universal among societies exhibiting such characteristics. Areas of incomplete or non-existent manorialisation persisted into the later Middle Ages, while manorial economy underwent substantial development with changing economic conditions. Not all manors contained all three kinds of land: as an average, demesne accounted for roughly a third of the arable area and villein holdings rather more; but some manors consisted solely of demesne, others solely of peasant holdings. The proportion of unfree and free tenures could likewise vary greatly, necessitating greater or lesser reliance on wage labour for the performance of agricultural work on the demesne. The proportion of the cultivated area in demesne tended to be greater in smaller manors, while the share of villein land was greater in large manors, providing the lord of the latter with a larger potential supply of obligatory labour for demesne work. The proportion of free tenements was in general less variable, but tended to be somewhat greater on the smaller manors. Manors varied similarly in their geographical arrangement: most did not coincide with a single village, but rather consisted of parts of two or more villages, most of the latter containing also parts of at least one other manor. This situation sometimes led to the replacement by cash payments of the demesne labour obligations of those peasants living furthest from the lord's estate. As was the case with peasant plots, the demesne was not a single territorial unit, but consisted rather of a central house with neighbouring land and estate buildings, plus strips dispersed through the manor alongside free and villein ones: in addition, the lord might lease free tenements belonging to neighbouring manors, as well as holding other manors some distance away to provide a greater range of produce. Nor were manors held necessarily by lay lords rendering military service (or again, cash in lieu) to their superior: a substantial share (estimated by value at 17% in England in 1086) belonged directly to the king, and a greater proportion (rather more than a quarter) were held by bishoprics and monasteries. Ecclesiastical manors tended to be larger, with a significantly greater villein area than neighbouring lay manors. The effect of circumstances on manorial economy is complex and at times contradictory: upland conditions have been seen as tending to preserve peasant freedoms (livestock husbandry in particular being less labour-intensive and therefore less demanding of villein services); on the other hand, some such areas of Europe have been said to show some of the most oppressive manorial conditions, while lowland eastern England is credited with an exceptionally large free peasantry, in part a legacy of Scandinavian settlement. Similarly, the spread of money economy is often seen as having stimulated the replacement of labour services by money payments, but the growth of the money supply and resulting inflation after 1170 initially led nobles to take back leased estates and to re-impose labour dues as the value of fixed cash payments declined in real terms.

Historical development and geographical distribution

The term is most often used with reference to medieval Western Europe. Antecedents of the system can be traced to the rural economy of the later Roman Empire. With a declining birthrate and population, the key factor of production was labour. Successive administrations tried to stabilise the imperial economy by freezing the social structure into place: sons were to succeed their fathers in their trade. Councillors were forbidden to resign, and coloni, the cultivators of land, were not to move from the demesne they were attached to. They were on their way to becoming serfs. Several factors conspired to merge the status of former slaves and former free farmers into a dependent class of such coloni. Laws of Constantine the Great around 325 presuppose not only the negative semi-servile status of the coloni, but also their rights to sue in the courts. Their numbers were augmented by barbarian foederati who were permitted to settle within the imperial boundaries. As the Germanic kingdoms succeeded Roman authority in the West in the fifth century, the Roman landlord was often simply replaced by the barbarian, with little change to the underlying situation. The process of rural self-sufficiency was given an abrupt boost in the eighth century, when normal trade in the Mediterranean Sea was disrupted. The thesis put forward by Henri Pirenne, disputed by many, supposes that the Arab conquests forced the medieval economy into even greater ruralisation and gave rise to the classic feudal pattern of varying degrees of servile peasantry underpinning a hierarchy of localised power centres.

External link

- [http://libro.uca.edu/lewis/sfc5.htm Archibald R. Lewis, The Development of Southern French and Catalan Society, 718–1050] Category:Feudalism ja:荘園

Economic system

An economic system is a mechanism which deals with the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services in a particular society. The economic system is composed of people, institutions and their relationships. It addresses the problems of economics, like the allocation and scarcity of resources.

The division of economic systems

There are several basic questions that must be answered in order to resolve the problems of economics satisfactorily. For example, the scarcity problem requires answers to basic questions, such as: what to produce, how to produce it, and who gets what is produced. An economic system is a way of answering these basic questions. Different economic systems answer them differently. Please note that there is often a strong correlation between certain ideologies, political systems and certain economic systems (for example, consider the meanings of the term "communism"). Many economic systems overlap each other in various areas (for example, the term "mixed economy" can be argued to include elements from various systems). There are also various mutually exclusive hierarchical categorizations. The most basic and general economic systems are:
- market economy (the basis for several "right-wing" systems, such as capitalism)
- Mixed economy (arguably the "centrist" economic system)
- Planned economy (the basis for several "left-wing" systems, such as socialism)
- Traditional economy (a generic term for the oldest and traditional economic systems)
- Participatory economics (a recent proposal for a new economic system) An economic system can be considered a part of the social system and hierarchically equal to the law system, political system, cultural system, etc. More detailed lists of economic systems are given below.

List by left-wing and right-wing

Typically, "left-wing" economic systems involve a greater role for society and/or the government to determine what gets produced, how it gets produced, and who gets the produced goods and services, with the aim of ensuring social justice and a more equitable distribution of wealth (see welfare state). Meanwhile, "right-wing" economic systems give more power to certain private individuals (or corporations) to make those decisions, rather than leaving them up to society as a whole, and often limit government involvement in the economy. The primary concern of "left" economic systems is usually egalitarianism, while the primary concern of "right" economic systems is usually private property. The following list divides the main economic systems into "left-wing" and "right-wing" and it attempts to structure the systems in a given section by alphabetical order and in a vertical hierarchy where possible.

"Left-wing" systems

- Anarchism
- Communism
- Anarcho-communism also known as libertarian socialism, libertarian communism and left-anarchism
- Gift economy
- Inclusive Democracy
- Parecon
- Socialism
- Market socialism also known as socialist market economy

"Right-wing" systems

- Capitalism
- Anarcho-capitalism
- Laissez-faire capitalism
- Corporate capitalism
- Social market economy also known as Soziale Marktwirtschaft
- Feudalism

"Centrist" system

- Mixed economy

List by name

An etymologist's approach to economic systems, this list will attempt to sort all possible economic systems in alphabetical order, without any division or hierarchization. If a given economic system has several names, all are listed with a note beside each of them informing the reader that it is one of several alternate listed names.
- Anarchism
- Anarcho-capitalism
- Anarcho-communism also known as libertarian socialism, libertarian communism and left-anarchism
- Autarky
- Barter economy
- Buddhist Economy
- Capitalism
- Colonialism
- Command economy also known as planned economy
- Coordinatorism
- Corporate capitalism
- Communism
- Coordinatorism
- Inclusive Democracy
- Left-anarchism also known as libertarian socialism, libertarian communism and anarcho-communism
- Feudalism
- Green economy
- Hydraulic despotism (see also hydraulic empire)
- Libertarian socialism also known as anarcho-communism, libertarian communism and left-anarchism
- Libertarian communism also known as libertarian socialism, anarcho-communism and left-anarchism
- Market economy
- Market socialism also known as socialist market economy
- Mercantilism
- Mixed economy
- Mutualism
- Neo-colonialism
- Parecon also known as participatory economy
- Participatory economy also known as parecon
- Planned economy also known as command economy
- Resource based economy
- Self-management (as in Economy of Yugoslavia)
- Social market economy
- Socialist market economy also known as market socialism
- Socialism
- Subsistence economy
- Traditional economy
- Virtual economy

Laborer

In classical economics and all micro-economics labour a measure of the work done by human beings and is one of three factors of production, the others being land and capital. There are macro-economic system theories which have created a concept called human capital (referring to the skills that workers possess, not necessarily their actual work), although there are also counterposing macro-economic system theories that think human capital is a contradiction in terms.

Compensation and measurement

Wage is a basic compensation for labour, and the compensation for labour per period of time is referred to as the wage rate. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably. Other frequently used terms include:
- wage = payment per unit of time (typically an hour)
- earnings = payment accrued over a period (typically a week, a month, or a year)
- total compensation = earnings + other benefits for labour
- income = total compensation + unearned income
- economic rent = total compensation - opportunity cost Economists measure labour in terms of hours worked, total wages, or efficiency.

Marxian economics

In Marxian economics, the aim of labor economics is to provide insight and guidance for the optimal allocation of co-operative human labour. However, this optimality is not simply viewed as a "technical variable" as in micro-economics, because workers are not simply a "factor of production", but human beings who organise themselves and each other. Forms of labour co-operation can be oppressive, irrational and exploitative, or they can be beneficial, rational, or effective. That is to say, labor economics has a political dimension insofar as different workers and employers have different interests. There is a workers' point of view and an employer's point of view. Marxian economists argue that the reason why labor economics receives little attention is because it has become viewed as a management issue. But this may hide that a particular form of organising labour has little to do with economic efficiency, and more with getting an high income from an activity. Marxian economists believe that ultimately the most desirable form of labor organisation in the workplace is where workers manage themselves collectively, and elect managers where necessary; too much management is inefficient, it just means that people get high incomes for doing very little, capitalising on specialised knowledge or qualifications.

Types of labour

- brain worker
- free-work
- manual labour
- slavery
- volunteer

Feudal society

Feudal society is a sometimes debated term used to describe the medieval social order of western and central Europe and sometimes Japan (particularly in the 14th to 16th centuries) characterised by the legal subjection of a large part of the peasantry to a hereditary landholding elite exercising administrative and judicial power on the basis of reciprocal private undertakings. The term's validity is questioned by many medieval historians who consider the description "feudal" appropriate only to the specifically voluntary and personal bonds of mutual protection, loyalty and support among members of the administrative, military or ecclesiastical elite, to the exclusion of involuntary obligations attached to tenure of "unfree" land. This stricter concept is discussed under Feudalism, and the bonds which it excludes under Manorialism. Examples of feudalism are helpful to fully understand feudalism and feudal society. Some useful particular examples may be seen at Feudalism (examples).

Conception of feudal society

In the broader conception of feudal society, as developed in the 1930s by the French Annaliste historian Marc Bloch, the prevailing features include: # The absence of a strong central authority, and the diffusion of governmental power through the granting of administrative and legal authority over particular lands (fiefs) by higher lords (including the king) to vassals sworn by voluntary oath to support or serve them, usually (though not exclusively) by military means. # The obligation attached to particular holdings of land that the peasant household should supply the lord with specified labour services or a part of its output (or cash in lieu thereof) subject to the custom of the holding.

Common features of feudal societies

Features common among feudal societies, but which do not necessarily define them, include: # An overwhelmingly agrarian economy, with limited money exchange, necessitating the dispersion of political authority and the substitution of arrangements involving economic support from local resources; # The strength of the Church as an ally and counterpart to the civil-military structure, supported by its right to a share (tithe) of society's output as well as substantial landholdings, and endowed with specific authority and responsibility for moral and material welfare. # The existence of structures and phenomena not of themselves explicitly feudal (urban and village organisations, royal executive power, free peasant holdings, financial and commercial activity) but each incorporated into the whole. Alongside such broad similarities, it is important to note the divergences both within and between feudal societies (in forms or complexity of noble association, the extent of peasant dependency or the importance of money payments) as well as the changes which occurred over time within the overall structure (as in Bloch's characterisation of the 11th-century onset of a "second feudal age"). In particular, one should avoid envisaging the social order in terms of a regular "feudal pyramid", with each man bound to one superior lord and the rank of each clearly defined, in a regular chain of allegiances extending from the king at the top to the peasantry at the bottom: aside from the contrast between free and unfree obligation, allegiance was often given to more than one lord, while an individual might possess attributes of more than one rank. Nor should the medieval theory of the "three estates" of society - "those who make war, those who pray and those who labour" (bellatores, oratores, et laboratores) be considered a full description of the social order: while those excluded from the first two came over time to be counted among the third, nobles and clerics alike assumed administrative functions in the feudal state, while financial support was relied upon increasingly as a substitute for direct military service. While few would deny that most of France, England, parts of Spain and the Low Countries, western and central Germany and (at least for a time) northern and central Italy satisfied Bloch's criteria over much of the period, the concept remains of greatest use as an interpretive device for comparative study of local phenomena, rather than as a blanket definition of the medieval social order.

Historical development

Reaching its most developed form in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem in the 12th and 13th centuries, feudal society evolved in its developed form in the northern French heartland of the Carolingian monarchy of the 8th-10th centuries, but has its antecedents also in late Roman practice. Category:Middle Ages Category:Feudalism

Slavery

in 1834, London.]] Slavery is a condition in which one person, known as a slave, is under the control of another. Slavery almost always occurs for the purpose of securing the labour or sexual availability of the slave. A specific form, known as chattel slavery, is defined by the absolute legal ownership of a person or persons, including the legal right to buy and sell them.

Definitions

The 1926 Slavery Convention described slavery as "...the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised..." Therefore, a slave is someone who cannot leave an owner or employer without explicit permission, and who will be returned if they escape. Therefore a system of slavery — as opposed to the isolated instances found in any society — requires official, legal recognition of ownership, or widespread tacit arrangements with local authorities, by masters who have some influence because of their social and/or economic status. In the strictest sense of the word, "slaves" are people who are not only owned, but are also not paid, and who have no rights. The word comes from the Latin term sclavus, which is thought to have originally referred to slavs, people from Eastern Europe, including parts of the Byzantine empire. However, the current usage of the word serfdom is not usually synonymous with slavery, because serfs are considered to have had some rights. The International Labour Organization (ILO) defines slavery as a form of forced labour. It defines "forced labour" to be "all work or service which is extracted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily", albeit with certain exceptions: military service, convicts, emergencies and minor community services. [http://www.ilo.org/dyn/declaris/DECLARATIONWEB.DOWNLOAD_BLOB?Var_DocumentID=5059]. The ILO asserts that child labour amounts to forced labour in which the child's work is exacted from the family as a whole. In some historical contexts, compulsory labour to repay debts by adults has been regarded as slavery, depending upon the rights held by such individuals. Mandatory military service in liberal democracies is a controversial subject: one view is that conscripts are not "slaves", as they have substantial legal rights, and any government which took it upon itself to implement conscription, outside a time of extreme national emergency, would eventually face a backlash at an election. Another view interprets acceptance of conscription as a sign of chauvinist, ultra-nationalist and/or fascist ideologies, justified by philosophies such as the Hegelian notion of nations having rights which supersede those of individuals. In United States legal usage, the term involuntary servitude means a condition of labouring for another without one's willful consent. It does not necessarily mean the complete lack of freedom found in chattel slavery. Many left wing thinkers have discussed the idea of "wage slavery", although it is generally accepted that payment of a wage signifies "free labour", with the quite different disadvantages experienced by such workers. Ordinary citizens in totalitarian states are not generally considered slaves, as the only real point of comparison is restrictions on movement.

Unfree labour

Most people subject to the above conditions are covered by the generic term unfree labour, which includes all forms of slavery and similar labour systems. Unfree labour is now the preferred term of many scholars, because of the wide variety of ambiguities that may be attached to words like "slavery". One reason is that references to disparate, heterogenous types of labour have been translated into the English as "slavery". The British historian Sir Moses Finley, one of the most distinguished scholars of ancient slavery, suggested that "slavery" was imprecise and that chattel slavery, in which the slave has no legal rights and could be bought and sold, was sufficiently different from other forms of unfree labour, and a greater violation of human rights, to be labeled distinctively.

Contemporary status of slavery

Slavery is in almost all countries today considered illegal, a criminal activity outlawed by UN conventions. In some states, such as Niger, Myanmar and Sudan, the institution of slavery does still exist, as do child prostitution and sweatshop labour rings in many East Asian, African and Eastern European regions. [http://borgenproject.org/ The Borgen Project] has challenged U.S. leaders for doing business with countries that allow slavery. In sweatshop labour cases, unfree labourers are often told that they are working off a debt, but have no access to an accounting for that debt, and no right to take any higher-paying or less supervised employment. These people may be considered slaves if they are under the impression that challenging these conditions, or leaving in protest of them, would lead to serious bodily harm. Since the mid 1990s, with the opening up of the former Soviet Union, the end of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the opening up of East and Southeast Asia, there has been an increase in the trafficking in human beings, the movement of people into forced labour. A significant part of that includes sexual exploitation and forced prostitution, with, according to US State Department figures, at least 500,000 women and children forced into prostitution globally and "an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders annually." [http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Human-Trafficking.html?hp] Some labour conditions for imported "domestic" workers approach conditions of slavery in developed countries by means of legal loopholes, such as Canada's “Live-in Caregiver Program. [http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1099087810560]. Numerous abuses are reported to the authorities which frequently turn a blind eye. In all countries, people in many occupations are contracted for a period of years, but they are usually paid on a regular basis, are rarely contracted based on a debt, and are rarely sold into that status by their parents or others. In any case, an attempt by an employer to enforce such a contract through violence or threats thereof would be dealt with by the police. In the early 1990s evidence of illegal "forced labour and debt bondage" amounting to slavery was unearthed in the Amazon region. The Brazilian government has since taken measures against such activities, although concerns continue to be expressed that more stringent steps may be required. In 1995, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso announced a new series of measures to force compliance with the anti-slavery statutes. In September of 2002, a report to the Ministério de Trabalho (Ministry of Labour), stated that between 1995 and 2001 approximately 3,500 slave labourers had been freed, and that it was estimated that 2,500 people remained in such conditions at that time (O Globo, 2002). In the late 1990s evidence emerged of large scale child slavery in West Africa to work cocoa plantations , see Chocolate and slavery.

Annual Trafficking in Persons report

The United States fifth annual Trafficking in Persons report says the 14 nations that are not doing enough to stop international human trafficking are (new to the list) Bolivia, Cambodia, Jamaica, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Togo, United Arab Emirates and (continuing to be on the list) Myanmar, Cuba, Ecuador, North Korea, Sudan and Venezuela.

How do people become slaves?

Historically, slaves were often those humans of a different ethnicity, nationality, religion, sex or race than the dominant or aspirationally dominant group; typically taken prisoner as a result of warfare, capture meant death or slavery if no one paid ransom. Societies characterized by poverty, population pressures, and cultural and technological lag are frequently exporters of slaves to more developed nations. Today most slaves are rural people forced to move to cities, or those purchased in rural areas and sold into slavery in cities. These moves take place due to loss of subsistence agriculture, thefts of land, and population increases. Some researchers have recently suggested that ancient Greco-Roman slavery may have been related to the practice of infanticide. Unwanted infants were exposed to nature to die; these were then often rescued by slavetraders, who raised them as slaves. In many cultures, persons convicted of serious crimes could be sold into slavery. The proceeds from this sale were often used to compensate the victims.

History

Europe and the Mediterranean

The ancient Mediterranean civilizations

See also: Slavery in the ancient Mediterranean; Slavery in Abrahamic religions. Slavery in the ancient Mediterranean cultures and the Islamic Caliphate was a mixture of debt-slavery, marriage, slavery as a punishment for crime, and the enslavement of prisoners of war.

Medieval Europe

For Christian views on slavery see Religion and slavery. During the medieval period, slaves were traded openly in many cities, including Marseille, Dublin and Prague, and many were sold to buyers in the Middle East

Early Modern Europe

In the 17th century, slavery was used as punishment by conquering English Parliament armies against native Catholics in Ireland. Between the years 1649 and 1653, during the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland by the New Model Army under the command of Oliver Cromwell, thousands of Irish Catholics were forced into slavery. Cromwell had a deep religious dislike of the Catholic religion, and many Irish Catholics who had participated in Confederate Ireland had all their land confiscated and were transported to the West Indies as slaves. This helped lead to the formation of the island nation Monserrat, known as "the emerald aisle of the carribean" Item 20 of The Grand Remonstrance[http://www.constitution.org/eng/conpur043.htm], a list of grievances committed by King Charles I and presented to him in 1641, contains the following: "20. And although all this was taken upon pretence of guarding the seas, yet a new unheard-of tax of ship-money was devised, and upon the same pretence, by both which there was charged upon the subject near £700,000 some years, and yet the merchants have been left so naked to the violence of the Turkish pirates, that many great ships of value and thousands of His Majesty's subjects have been taken by them, and do still remain in miserable slavery." Slavery existed in Eastern Europe during the period (particularly in Russia and Poland). Only in 1768 was a law passed in Poland that discontinued the nobility's control of the right to life or death of serfs.

Modern Europe

Main articles: Holocaust; Nazi concentration camps. Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime created many Arbeitslager (labour camps) in Germany and Eastern Europe. Prisoners in Nazi labour camps were worked to death on short rations and in bad conditions, or killed if they became unable to work. Hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, died as a direct result of forced labour under the Nazis.

Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East

For Muslim views on slavery see Religion and slavery. The Arab world traded in slaves like many other cultures of the time. The Moors starting in the 8th century raided mediterranean coastal areas and would carry away sometimes whole villages to the Moorish slave markets on the Barbary Coast. The slave trade from East Africa to Arabia was dominated by Arab and African traders in the coastal cities of Zanzibar, Dar Es Salaam and Mombasa. Many Slavic males from the Balkans, and Turkic and Circassian males from the Caucasus Mountains and the eastern Black Sea regions were taken away from their homes and families and enlisted into special soldier classes of the army of the Ottoman Empire. These soldier classes were named Janissaries in the Balkans and Asia Minor, and Mamelukes in Egypt. The Janissaries eventually became a decisive factor in the intrigues of the Constantinople court of the Ottoman sultans, while the Mamelukes were mainly responsible for the expulsion of the Crusaders from Palestine.

Slavery in Africa

Slavery in North Africa

Slaves were being imported from Europe to North Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries. Slave-taking persisted into the 19th century when Barbary pirates would capture ships and enslave the crew. In all, about 1.5 million Europeans were transported to the Barbary Coast. It was a period when Europe was preoccupied by sectarian wars and European navies were depleted. The trade was run by the Moors and the expeditions were often captained by Europeans with North African crews. In the early 19th century, European powers started to take action to free Christian slaves. The first major action was the bombardment of Algiers in 1816.

Slavery in Sub-Saharan Africa

See also the articles Atlantic slave trade and triangular trade. Slavery was common and widespread in Africa long before the 19th century, perpetrated on Africans by Arabs or other Africans, usually but not always of a competing tribe. "Slavery was endemic in Africa, part of the structure of everyday life," Fernand Braudel has noted. "Slavery came in different guises 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). Two aggressive slave-trading civiliified it out of all recognition, and during the 16th century Europe began to outpace Islam in the export traffic. The Dutch imported slaves from Asia into their colony in South Africa. The United Kingdom, which held vast colonial territories on the continent (including South Africa), made the practice of slavery illegal in these regions. Ironically, the end of the slave trade and the decline of slavery was imposed upon Africa by its European conquerors. This action is what today may be called an instance of cultural imperialism. The nature of the slave societies differed greatly across the continent. There were large plantations worked by slaves in Egypt, the Sudan, and Zanzibar, but this was not a typical use of slaves in Africa as a whole. In some slave societies, slaves were protected and incorporated into the slave-owning family. In others, slaves were brutally abused, and even used for human sacrifices. Despite the vast numbers of slaves exported from Africa, it is thought that the majority of African slaves remained in Africa, continuing as slaves in the regions where they were first captured. Prior to the 16th century, the bulk of slaves exported from Africa were shipped from East Africa to the Arabian peninsula. Zanzibar became a leading port on this trade. Arab slave traders differed from European traders in that they would often capture slaves themselves, sometimes penetrating deep into the continent. They also differed in that their market greatly preferred the purchase of female slaves over male slaves. The Middle Passage, the crossing of the Atlantic to the Americas, endured by slaves laid out in rows in the holds of ships, was only one element of the well-known triangular trade engaged in by Portuguese, Dutch, French and British. Ships having landed slaves in Caribbean ports would take on sugar, indigo, raw cotton, and later coffee, and make for Liverpool, Nantes, Lisbon or Amsterdam. Ships leaving European ports for West Africa would carry printed cotton textiles, some originally from India, copper utensils and bangles, pewter plates and pots, iron bars more valued than gold, hats, trinkets, gunpowder and firearms and alcohol. Tropical shipworms were eliminated in the cold Atlantic waters, and at each unloading, a profit was made. The transatlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of slaves were captured for bounty by their own people in West Africa and shipped by European traders to the colonies of the New World. As a result of the Spanish War of Succession, the United Kingdom obtained the monopoly (asiento de negros) of transporting captive Africans to Spanish America. It is estimated that over the centuries, twelve to twenty million people were shipped as slaves from Africa by European traders, of whom some 15 percent died during the terrible voyage, many during the arduous journey through the Middle Passage. The great majority were shipped to the Americas, but also went to Europe and the south of Africa. Some historians conclude that the total loss in persons removed, those who died on the arduous march to coastal slave marts and those killed in slave raids, far exceeded the 65-75 million inhabitants remaining in Sub-Saharan Africa at the trade's end. Others believe that 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) would have limited general population decline to particular regions of western Africa around 1760-1810, and in Mozambique and neighbouring areas half a century later. There has also been speculation that within Africa, females were most often captured as brides, with their male protectors being a "bycatch" who would have been killed if there had not been an export market for them.

Modern Africa

Slavery persists in Africa more than in all other continents. Slavery in Mauritania was legally abolished by laws passed in 1905, 1961, and 1981, but several human rights organizations are reporting that the practice continues there. 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. In this instance, the woman does not gain the title of "wife". In the Sudan slavery continues as part of an ongoing civil war. Evidence emerged in the late 1990s of systematic slavery in cacao plantations in west Africa, see the chocolate and slavery article.

Slavery in the Americas

Slavery among indigenous people of America

In Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica the most common forms of slavery were those of prisoners-of-war and debtors. People unable to pay back a debt could be sentenced to work as a slave to the person owed until the debt was worked off. Slavery was not usually hereditary; children of slaves were born free. In Tahuantinsuyu, or the Inca Empire, workers were subject to a mita in lieu of taxes which they paid by working for the government. Each ayllu, or extended family, would decide which family member to send to do the work.

Slavery in Brazil

During the colonial epoch, slavery was a mainstay of the Brazilian economy, especially in mining and sugar cane production. The Clapham Sect, a group of Victorian Evangelical politicians, campaigned during most of the 19th century for the United Kingdom to use its influence and power to stop the traffic of slaves to Brazil. Besides moral qualms, the low cost of slave-produced Brazilian sugar meant that British colonies in the West Indies were unable to match the market prices of Brazilian sugar, and each Briton was consuming 16 pounds (7 kg) of sugar a year by the 19th century. This combination led to intensive pressure from the British government for Brazil to end this practice, which it did by steps over several decades. Slavery was legally ended May 13 by the Lei Áurea ("Golden Law") of 1888. Brazil obtained 37% of all African slaves traded, and more than 3 million slaves were sent to this one country. The Portuguese were the first to initiate the slave trade, and the last to end the slave trade. Starting around 1550, the Portuguese began to trade African slaves to work the sugar plantations once the native Tupi deteriorated. The African slaves were useful for the sugar plantations in many ways. First, African slaves had immunities to European diseases. The white workers were less able to fend off deadly diseases of the Caribbean, such as malaria. Second, the benefits of the slaves far exceeded the costs. After 2-3 years, slaves worked off their worth, and plantation owners began to make profits from them. Plantation owners made lucrative profits even though there was approximately a 10% death rate per year, mainly due to harsh working conditions. The very harsh manual labour of the sugar cane fields saw slaves use hoes to dig large trenches. The slaves planted sugar cane in the trenches and then used their bare hands to spread manure. The average life span of a slave was eight years. In the mid to late 19th century, many Amerindians were enslaved to work on rubber plantations. See Içá for more information.

Slavery in the British and French Caribbean

Slavery was commonly used in the parts of the Caribbean controlled by France or the British Empire. The Lesser Antilles islands of Barbados, Antigua, Martinique and Guadeloupe, which were the first important slave societies of the Caribbean, began the widespread use of African slaves by the end of the 17th century, as their economies converted from tobacco to sugar production. The slaves were treated terribly, often beaten and raped. They had such miserable lives that death was considered a welcome release. By the middle of the 18th century, British Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue had become the largest slave societies of the region, rivaling Brazil as a destination for enslaved Africans. Due to overwork, the death rates for Caribbean slaves were higher than birth rates. The conditions led to increasing numbers of slave revolts, campaigns against slavery in Europe, and the abolition of slavery in the European empires.

Status of African slaves compared to Caribbean slaves

African slaves and Caribbean slaves both received little respect from their masters, who looked at them as objects for work and trade. Slavery and slave trading was widespread in both the Caribbean islands and in Africa. Many of the slaves were unable to reproduce because the stress of the work caused still births in women and sterility in men. Caribbean slavery granted the masters complete freedom over the control of their slaves. Caribbean sugar plantations resembled factories in a modern capitalist society. In contrast, African slavery was less harsh than slavery on Caribbean sugar estates. African kinship groups sought to assimilate new slaves into their circle. Many slave villages worked under their own management and paid tribute for their services. The family lifestyle of slavery in many parts of Africa had a closer bond as smaller groups usually had face-to-face relationships.

Slavery in North America

Main article: Slavery in Colonial America, Slavery in Canada, History of slavery in the United States, Atlantic slave trade The first imported Africans were brought as indentured servants, not slaves. They were required, as white indentured servants were, to serve seven years. Many were brought to the British North American colonies, specifically Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. However, the slave trade did not immediately expand in North America. Slavery under European rule began with importation of European indentured labourers, was followed by the enslavement of indigenous peoples in the Caribbean, and eventually was primarily replaced with Africans imported through a large slave trade. The shift from indentured servants to African slaves was prompted by a growing lower class of former servants who had worked through the terms of their indentures and thus became competitors of their former masters. These newly freed servants were rarely able to support themselves comfortably, and the tobacco industry was increasingly dominated by large planters. This caused domestic unrest culminating in Bacon's Rebellion. It is unclear whether the first Africans in North America were chattel slaves or other kinds of unfree labourers, such as indentured servants. In any case, chattel slavery gradually became the norm. Bacon's Rebellion Several slave rebellions took place during the 17th and 18th centuries. Through the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (also known as the Freedom Ordinance) under the Continental Congress, slavery was prohibited in the Midwest. In the East, though, slavery was not abolished until later. The importation of slaves into the United States was banned on January 1, 1808; but not the internal slave trade, or involvement in the international slave trade externally. Aggregation of northern free states gave rise to one contiguous geographic area, north of the Ohio River and the old Mason-Dixon line. This separation of a free North and an enslaved South launched a massive political, cultural and economic struggle. Refugees from slavery fled the South across the Ohio River to the North via the Underground Railroad, and their presence agitated Northerners. Midwestern state governments asserted States Rights arguments to refuse Federal jurisidiction over fugitives. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 asserted that slavery's presence in the Midwest was nominally lawful (when owners crossed into free states) and this turned Northern public opinion even further against slavery. After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, armed conflict broke out in Kansas Territory, where the question of whether it would be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state had been left to the inhabitants. The radical abolitionist John Brown was active in the mayhem and killing in "Bleeding Kansas." Anti-slavery legislators took office under the banner of the Republican Party. In the election of 1860, the Republicans swept Abraham Lincoln into the Presidency. Lincoln however, did not appear on the ballots in most southern states and his election split the nation along sectional lines. After decades of controlling the Federal Government, the Southern states seceded from the U.S. (the Union) to form the Confederate States of America. Northern leaders like Lincoln viewed the prospect of a new slave nation, with control over the Mississippi River and the West, as unacceptable. This led to the outbreak of the Civil War. The Civil War spelled the end for chattel slavery in America. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was a reluctant gesture that proclaimed freedom for slaves within the Confederacy, although not those in strategically important border states which had remained in the Union, as Lincoln stated it 'If I could win the war having freed half of the slaves, I'd have freed half.'. Specifically exempted were slave states Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware, as well as parts of Virginia and Louisiana then under Federal occupation. However, the proclamation made the abolition of slavery an official war goal and it was implemented as the Union captured territory from the Confederacy. Slaves in many parts of the south were freed by Union armies or when they simply left their former owners. Many joined the Union Army as workers or troops, and many more fled to Northern cities. Legally, slaves within the United States remained enslaved until the final ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution on December 6, 1865 (with final recognition of the amendment on December 18), eight months after the cessation of hostilities. Slavery remained legal in Delaware and Kentucky until that time (Missouri and Maryland had officially abolished slavery during the war years). Only in Kentucky did a significant slave population remain by that time. Freed slaves in the United States were treated as second class citizens, for decades after their emancipation many slaves living in the South sharecropped and made so little that they might as well have been slaves. Only after the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 60's did blacks obtain legal status as full citizens (see segregation). Although very strict laws exist in the United States against racial discrimination, to a point of absurdity according to some, a very clear social divide exists between blacks and whites in the United States today. Some allege that slavery is being reintroduced to the United States under the guise of Imputed Income and Child Support. By this, states award custody of a child to one of two parents, while the other parent is then compelled to pay for the raising of the child without being given any say in raising the child. Child-support orders can be based on 'imputed income' and as such the orders can exceed 100 percent of a person's income. The law seems to be applied particluarly harshly to the African American community, the working poor and the seasonally employed.
Slavery in Asia

India
Unfree labour has existed in India for millennia, in different forms. The most common forms have been kinds of bonded labour. During the epoch of the Islamic empires in India and the Mughals, debt bondage reached its peak, and it was common for money lenders to make slaves of peasants and others who failed to repay debts. Under these practices, more than one generation could be forced into unfree labour; for example, a son could be sold into bonded labour for life to pay off the debt, along with interest. Much of India was ruled by the so-called Slave Dynasty from 1206-1290: Qutb-ud-din Aybak, a slave of Muhammad Ghori rose to power following his master's death. For almost a century his descendants ruled presiding over the introduction of Tankas and building of Qutub Minar.
Japan
Slavery in Japan was, for most of its history, indigenous, since the export and import of slaves was restricted by Japan being a group of islands. The export of a slave from Japan is recorded in 3rd century Chinese history, although the system involved is unclear. These slaves were called Seikō (生口) (lit. "living mouth"). In the 8th century, a slave was called Nuhi (奴婢) and series of laws on slavery was issued. In an area of present-day Ibaraki prefecture, out of a population of 190,000, around 2,000 were slaves; the proportion is believed to have been even higher in western Japan. By the time of the Sengoku period (1467-1615), the attitude that slavery was anachronistic had become widespread. In a meeting with Catholic priests, Oda Nobunaga was presented with a black slave, the first recorded encounter between a Japanese and an African. In 1588, Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered all slave trading to be abolished. This was continued by his successors. As the Empire of Japan annexed Asian countries, from the late 19th century onwards, archaic institutions including slavery were abolished in those countries. However, during the Pacific War of 1937-45, the Japanese military used hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war as forced labour, on projects such as the Burma Railway. (For further details, see Japanese war crimes.)
Korea
Indigenous slaves existed in Korea. It is widely known that the last names "Chun", "Bang", "Ji", and "Chuk" are recognizable as last names having once been given to slaves.
Abolitionist movements
Slavery's origins are prehistoric. So, too, are movements to free large or distinct groups of slaves. Moses led Israelite slaves from ancient Egypt in the Biblical Book of Exodus - possibly the first detailed account of a movement to free slaves. Though modern archeology throws doubt on the claims of such a mass exodus. However, abolitionism should be distinguished from efforts to help a particular group of slaves, or to restrict one practice, such as the slave trade. In 1772, a legal case concerning James Somerset made it illegal to remove a slave from England against his will. A similar case, that of Joseph Knight, took place in Scotland five years later and ruled slavery to be contrary to the law of Scotland. Following the work of campaigners in the United Kingdom, the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was passed by Parliament on March 25, 1807. The act imposed a fine of £100 for every slave found aboard a British ship. The intention was to entirely outlaw the slave trade within the whole British Empire. The Slavery Abolition Act, passed on August 23, 1833, outlawed slavery itself in the British colonies. On August 1, 1834 all slaves in the British Empire were emancipated, but still indentured to their former owners in an apprenticeship system which was finally abolished in 1838. 1838 France never authorized slavery on its mainland, but authorized it in some of its overseas possessions. On February 4, 1794, Abbé Grégoire and the Convention abolished slavery. Slaves in Haiti revolted when their masters did not accept the new rules from the metropolis. Slavery was re-established in 1802 by Napoleon, but failed to take hold because of the Haitian Slave Revolt in 1803 which gained the slaves their independence. Haiti became the first Black republic in 1803. Sierra Leone was established as a country for former slaves of the British Empire in Africa. Liberia served an analogous purpose for American slaves. The goal of the abolitionists was repatriation of the slaves to Africa. Also some trade unions did not want the cheap labour of former slaves around. Nevertheless, most former slaves stayed in America. Slaves in the United States who escaped ownership would often make their way north to Canada via the "Underground Railroad". Famously active abolitionists of the U.S. include Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass and John Brown. Slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865. 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, explicity 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 Declaraction 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.
Apologies
In June 1997, Tony Hall, a Democratic representative for Dayton, Ohio proposed a national apology by the U.S. government for slavery. This was at a time when the Catholic Church in France apologised for its silence and begged "forgiveness for Catholic inaction as regime sent Jews to their deaths in '40s". At the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, at Durban, South Africa, the US representatives walked out, on the instructions of Colin Powell. A South African Government spokesperson claimed that "the general perception among all delegates is that the US does not want to confront the real issues of slavery and all its manifestations." However, the US delegates argued that they left over a resolution that equated Zionism with racism. At the same time the British, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese delegations blocked an EU apology for slavery. The issue of an apology is linked to reparations for slavery and is still being pursued across the world. E.g. The Jamaican Reparations Movement approved its declaration and action Plan.
Reparations
As noted above, there have been movements to achieve reparations for those held in involuntary servitude, or sometimes their descendants. There is a growing modern movement to donate funds achieved in reparations efforts not to the descendants of those held as slaves in prior generations, but instead to donate them to those freed from slavery in this generation, in other countries and circumstances. In general, reparation for being held in slavery is handled as a civil law matter in almost every country. This is often decried as a serious problem, since slaves are exactly those people who have no access to the legal process. Systems of fines and reparations paid from fines collected by authorities, rather than in civil courts, have been proposed to alleviate this in some nations. In the United States, the reparations movement often cites the 40 acres and a mule decree. Recent effort have also targeted businesses that profited from the slave trade and issuing insurance on slaves. In Africa, the 2nd World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission was convened in Ghana in 2000. Its deliberations concluded with a Petition being served in the International Court at the Hague for US$777 trillion against the United States, Canada, and European Union members for "unlawful removal and destruction of Petitioners' mineral and human resources from the African continent" between 1503 up to the end of the colonialism era in the late 1950s and 1960s. This was the first time a price had been put on African Reparations. [http://web.archive.org/web/
- /http://www.people.virginia.edu/~eej2b/Soc410/barton.html]
Economics of slavery
According to the 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 2.7 million people throughout the world, mainly children, in conditions of slavery."[http://www.anti-slaverysociety.addr.com/slavery.htm] It further notes that slavery, particularly child slavery, was on the rise in 2003. It points out that there are countless others in other forms of servitude (such as pawnage, bonded labor and servile concubinage, which are not slavery in the narrow legal sense. According to a broader definition used by Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves, another advocacy group linked with Anti-Slavery International, there are 27 million people in slavery today, spread all over the world. This is, also according to that group:
- The largest number of people that has ever been in slavery at any point in world history.
- The smallest percentage of the total human population that has ever been enslaved at once.
- Reducing the price of slaves to as low as US$40 in Mali for young adult male labourers, to a high of US$1000 or so in Thailand for HIV-free young females suitable for use in brothels (where they invariably contract HIV). This represents the price paid to the person, or parents.
- This represents the lowest price that there has ever been for a slave in raw labour terms—while the price of a comparable male slave in 1850 America would have been about US$1000 in the currency of the time, that represents US$38,000 in today's dollars, thus slaves, at least of that category, now cost only one one-thousandth (0.1%) of their price 150 years ago. As a result, the economics of slavery is stark: the yield of profit per year for those buying and controlling a slave is over 800% on average, as opposed to the 5% per year that would have been the expected payback for buying a slave in colonial times. This combines with the high potential to lose a slave (have them stolen, escape, or freed by unfriendly authorities) to yield what are called disposable people—those who can be exploited intensely for a short time and then discarded, such as the prostitutes thrown out on city streets to die once they contract HIV, or those forced to work in mines.
Potential for total abolition
Those 27 million people produce a gross economic product of US $1.4 billion. This is also a smaller percentage of the world economy than slavery has produced at any prior point in human history. That, plus the universal criminal status of slavery, the lack of moral arguments for it in modern discourse, and the many conventions and agreements to abolish it worldwide, make it likely that it can be eliminated in this generation, according to Free The Slaves. There are no nations whose economies would be substantially affected by the true abolition of slavery. A first step towards this objective is the Cocoa Protocol, by which the entire cocoa industry worldwide has accepted full moral and legal responsibility for the entire comprehensive outcome of their production processes. Negotiations for this protocol were initiated for cotton, sugar and other commodity items in the 19th century—taking about 140 years to complete. Thus it seems that this is also a turning point in history, where all commodity markets can slowly lever licensing and other requirements to ensure that slavery is eliminated from production, one industry at a time, as a sectoral simultaneous policy that does not cause disadvantages for any one market player.
Famous slaves and former slaves
From the list of famous slaves:
- Saint Patrick, abducted from Britain, enslaved in Ireland, escaped to Britain, returned to Ireland as a missionary
- John Brown (fugitive slave), escaped and wrote of conditions in Deep South
- Frederick Douglass, abolitionist
- Enrique, the slave of Ferdinand Magellan, who became the first man to go around the globe.
- Malinche, famous translator during the Spanish conquest of Mexico
- Onesimus, owned by Philemon mentioned in the Bible
- Aesop, Greek author, famous for his fables
- Spartacus, led the Servile Revolt
- Toussaint L'Ouverture, led the independence of Haiti slave revolt after being freed.
- Harriet Tubman, nicknamed Moses because of her efforts in helping other slaves escape through the Underground Railway.
- Nat Turner, escaped and led revolt in Southampton County, Virginia
- Zumbi, in colonial Brazil, escaped and joined the Quilombo dos Palmares — the largest ever settlement of escaped slaves in Brazil — later becoming its last and most famous leader.
- Mende Nazer, a woman who was slave in Sudan and transferred to London to serve a diplomat family there
- Terence, Roman comic poet who wrote before and possibly after his freedom.
Films

- Stanley Kubrick, "Spartacus", 1960
- Tomas Gutierrez Alea, La Última cena - "The Last Supper", 1976
- Charles Burnett, "Nightjohn", 1996
- Julie Dash, "Daughters of the Dust", 1991
- Jonathan Demme, "Beloved", 1998
- Carlos Diegues, "Quilombo", 1984
- Haile Gerima, "Sankofa", 1993
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Forced labour
Unfree labour is a generic or collective term for forms of work, especially in modern or early modern history, in which adults and/or children are employed against their will by the threat of destitution, detention, violence (including death), or other extreme hardship to themselves, or to members of their families. Many of these forms of work may be covered by the term forced labour, although this tends to imply forms based on violence. Unfree labour includes all forms of slavery. (Although serfdom is technically a form of unfree labour, the term "serf" is usually only used in relation to pre-modern societies, under feudal political systems.)
Payment for unfree labour
If payment occurs, it may be in one or more of the following forms: it does not exceed subsistence or barely exceeds it; is in goods which are not desirable and/or cannot be exchanged, or; the payment is wholly or mostly comprised by cancellation of a debt or liability that was itself coerced, or belongs to someone else. Unfree labour is often more easily instituted and enforced on migrant workers, who have travelled far from their homelands and who are easily identified because of their physical, ethnic or cultural differences to the general population, since they are unable or unlikely to report their conditions to the authorities.
Unfree vs. free labour
By contrast, "free labour" is a situation which a worker is able to leave at any time, if they see fit. In practice, however, many nominally free labourers, in some historical periods and/or countries, face significant constraints on their ability to leave their jobs, and may not receive payment which is above the level of subsistence. For these reasons, some scholars prefer to see "free labour" and "unfree labour" as extreme points on a continuum, rather than being sharply distinct entities. According to the labour theory of value, under capitalism, workers never keep all of the wealth they create, as some of it goes to the profit of capitalists. Because of such factors, some people refer to the condition of the working class as "wage slavery". (Others may feel that such terms trivialize the experiences of real slaves.) By contrast, according to the subjective theory of value, labourers deserve no more and no less than the wages they are paid as a result of competition in the labour market.
Forms of unfree labour

Slavery
Main article: slavery. The archetypal and best-known form of unfree labour is chattel slavery, in which individual workers are legally owned throughout their lives, and may be bought, sold or otherwise exchanged by owners, while never or rarely receiving any personal benefit from their labour. Slavery was common in many ancient societies, including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient Israel, ancient China, as well as many societies in Africa and the Americas. Being sold into slavery was a common fate of populations conquered in wars. Perhaps the most prominent example of chattel slavery has been the enslavement of many millions of black people in Africa or forcefully transplanted to the Americas, Asia or Europe where their status as slaves would usually be inherited by their descendants. The term slavery is often applied to situations which do not meet the above definitions, but which are other, closely-related forms of unfree labour, such as such as debt slavery (although not all repayment of debts through labour constitutes unfree labour), or the work of Indigenous Australians in northern Australia on sheep or cattle stations (ranches), from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. In the latter case, workers were rarely or never paid, and were restricted by regulations and/or police intervention to regions around their places of work. According to sociologist Kevin Bales' book, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, there are now an estimated 27 million slaves in the world.
Bonded labour
A more common form in modern society is indenture, or bonded labour, under which workers sign contracts to work for a specific period of time, for which they are paid only with accommodation and sustenance, or these essentials in addition to limited benefits such as cancellation of a debt, or transportation to a desired country. (Debt bondage or debt slavery is a well-known form of indenture; this is sometimes known as peonage in the USA. However, the word peon is used more generally in Latin American history, and may in some cases imply free labour.) In some cases, indentured workers may receive small cash payments or other benefits. Indenture is still common in developing countries and was perhaps the dominant formal and official form of labour in early modern colonial societies, during the 17th century and 18th century. However, it should be stressed that indenture is often only a formal legal category, and in practice employers sometimes find it difficult or impossible to coerce indentured workers, unless the letter of the law is reinforced by law enforcement systems, and/or by full acceptance by workers, as a traditional practice.
Penal labour
Main article: Penal labour.
Prison labour
Convict<