"Of the over twelve million Africans forced into the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, only four percent – roughly 470,000 men, women, and children – were sent to North America. The overwhelming majority of enslaved Africans in the trans-Atlantic slave trade went to sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil. This significant difference in trade numbers stems from various factors, particularly contrasting mortality and reproduction rates for enslaved populations in different regions." -- Lowcountry Digital History Initiative: A Digital History Project hosted by the Lowcountry Digital Library at the College of Charleston
Overall a good analysis. Notable: Europe generally banned slavery of Europeans in the Middle Ages, leaving Africa the primary source of commercial slaves - enslaved by their own - hence the subsequent racial associations.
End gets a bit squishy. Please ensure discussion of slavery doesn’t dilute the term by including “poorly paid with few options” which isn’t slavery (that’s a problem to address, but it’s not outright ownership of humans as disposable tools).
Not really.
There is not.
Slavery used to be universal and racism based on far more tiny differences then it is now.
Slavery is all about bypassing the free market. The slave owner doesn’t want to pay what a free person would demand in wages to do the same work as the slave.
Slavery in the US could only have lasted as long as good agricultural land was very cheap, as it was in the early days before the country filled up. A free man, working for himself, would be able to get more out of a given acre of land than a slave who would strive to escape work when the owner wasn’t looking. This was why slave owners constantly demanded that slavery be allowed in the western territories.
Yep, there is slavery in the U.S. today, the slavery of the worker bees to the nonproductive drones.
If you google the subject, there’s actually a consensus (albeit a tentative one) that there are more slaves in the world today than at any time in the past. I don’t think most people have any idea of this.
And that’s going with a fairly restrictive definition of slavery. As governments grow more totalitarian and control an ever greater share of the economy, and control grows over people’s personal lives through censorship, educational indoctrination and surveillance, I think a fair case can be made that slavery is a general condition now of humanity.