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| Slavery in Historical Perspective |
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Digital History ID 438
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During the nineteenth century, slavery was often described as "the peculiar institution." But throughout much of human history, free wage labor, not forced labor, was the truly peculiar institution. Most people worked not out of a desire to better their condition in life but because they were forced to: as slaves, serfs, peons, or indentured servants. Slavery in the United States was not unique in treating human beings like animals. The institution of slavery could be found in societies as diverse as ancient Assyria, Babylonia, China, Egypt, India, Persia, and Mesopotamia; in classical Greece and Rome; in Africa, the Islamic world, and among the New World Indians. At the time of Christ, there were probably between two and three million slaves in Italy, making up thirty-five to forty percent of the population. England's Domesday book of 1086 indicated that ten percent of the population was enslaved. Among some Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest, nearly a quarter of the population consisted of slaves. In 1644, just before the Dutch ceded Manhattan to the British, enslaved Africans made up forty percent of the population. It is notable that the modern word for slaves comes from "Slav." During the Middle Ages, most slaves in Europe and the Islamic world were people from Slavic Eastern Europe. It was only in the fifteenth century that slavery became linked with people from sub-Saharan Africa.
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