Digital History

Slavery in the Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern	Previous	Next
Digital History ID 440

Slavery dates to prehistoric times and was apparently modeled on the domestication of animals. From the earliest periods of recorded history, slavery was found in the world's most advanced regions. The first civilizations--along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus Valley of India, and China's Yangtze River Valley--all had slavery. The earliest known system of laws, the Hammurabi Code, recognized slavery and declared that slaves could be sold or inherited. But the percentage of slaves in these early civilizations was small, in part because these societies kept relatively few male slaves. In the tales of Homer and in the Old Testament, male war captives were typically killed, while women were enslaved as field laborers or taken as concubines.

Although slavery was a universal institution in the ancient world, only a handful of societies made slavery the dominant labor force. The first true slave society in history emerged in ancient Greece between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C. In Athens during the classical period, a third to a half of the population consisted of slaves. Ancient Rome would be even more dependent on slavery. It is not an accident that our modern ideas of freedom and democracy emerged in these slave societies. Most early societies lacked a word for freedom; but large-scale slavery in classical Greece and Rome made these people more aware of the distinctive nature of freedom.

Slavery never disappeared from medieval Europe. While slavery declined in northwestern Europe, where it was replaced by serfdom, it persisted in Sicily, southern Italy, Russia, southern France, Spain, and North Africa. Continuing warfare between Christians and Muslims generated large numbers of slaves to work in agriculture. Most of these slaves were "white," coming from areas in Eastern Europe or near the Black Sea.

When Europeans began to colonize the New World at the end of the fifteenth century, they were well aware of the institution of slavery. As early as 1300, Europeans were using black and Russian slaves to raise sugar on Italian plantations. During the 1400s, decades before Columbus's "discovery" of the New World, Europeans exploited African labor on slave plantations on sugar-producing islands off the coast of West Africa. European colonization of the New World led to a dramatic expansion in slavery. During the sixteenth century, Portugal and Spain extended racial slavery into the New World, opening sugar, coffee, and cotton plantations in Brazil and the West Indies and forcing black slaves in Mexico to work in mines. During the seventeenth century, England, France, Denmark, and Holland established slavery in their New World colonies.

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