"Slavery is contrary to the natural right whereby all men are born free and independent," Montesquieu wrote in 1748, at a time when the slaveship of the Negroes of Africa ensured the economic prosperity of part of Europe.
Montesquieu's phrase will be famous in France and England, and will contribute to sensitizing public opinion to condemn slavery in the Western world.
Older than AltaDate
In time immemorial, dating back to before writing, warriors did not hesitate to kill their enemies, after abusing them. Then the natures gradually "refined", and the victors realized that they could get rid of the menial labor if they gave it to the vanquished, in exchange for some sustenance.
Sumerian slavery
The first Sumerian cities with a peasant tendency were concentrated on the coasts of the Persian Gulf and in the Tigris and Euphrates Delta. Once stability was restored, the exploitation of the land required a lot of cheap labour to build irrigation facilities, maintain them, and carry out field work.
After the advent of writing, we received, from the third millennium BC, lists of goods, tools, and riches included in the accounts of the temples. One of the marks engraved on clay plates enables the counting of slaves. In the land of Sumer, captives were dragged into slavery with ropes tied to rings attached to their noses...
With the disappearance of the old custom of eating human flesh, slavery acquired its rules. Yet it was sometimes the only luck of the enslaved to survive, as if it were human herds in the property of a master who had no qualms about exploiting them in every possible way.
Slavery to the Greeks
The real secret lies in the prosperity of Athens, during the fifth century BC, and in the popularity of its trade, in the toil of its many slaves? They made robes, jars, and perfumes, and constituted labor for boat workshops, ports, and mines, yet these slaves were treated as cattle.
When Aristotle realized that the invention of machines would lead to the abolition of slavery, he wrote in his Politics that:
"The usefulness of animals and slaves is, roughly, the same. Both of these categories help us with their muscular strength to meet our needs in existence... This is why, in a sense, war is a natural method, since it forces us to hunt down wild animals and slaves who refuse to subservience, even though they were born to serve masters..."
Slavery to the Romans
In Rome, slavery was carefully thought out and practiced. Caton was famous for his advice, Cicero for his writings on the subject, and the Romans, unconvinced by the multiplication of enslaved crowds, devised another behavior, raising the finest slave elements for use in circus games, where gladiators had been very popular for three centuries.
Christianity and the Middle Ages
Christianity initially spread among the lower classes, but the Church of the early centuries did not, however, condemn slavery, and according to St. Augustine, the equality of human beings was prevented by the sinful attitude of human enslavement. In 630, the religious synod of Reims forbade the sale of slaves to non-Christians, and the Council of Toledo, in 655, ordered that sons descended from monks become slaves of the church. When the discovery of Christophe Columbus expanded the crown of the Church, the Pope granted the Spanish the entire new continent, because "the land which is a common heritage belongs to God alone."
For Christians, the ideal slave was the Negro, and it is said that when the monks of the desert, Antoine, Bakum, and Paul Tibi, crossed the Nile, they believed, when they saw the Ahbash, that these were the physical incarnations of Satan. Isn't blackness (they believe) the color of Satan?
At once, these Negroes were transformed, in the eyes of the monks, into demons worthy of all kinds of curse. Thus, it seemed that only slavery could give them salvation, giving them the material means to atone for the original sin!
Slavery in modern times
The thirst of the European conquerors for gold led them to sentence to hard labor in the mines the Caribbean Indians, who died in large numbers, and Cuba and Haiti were depopulated. The French centenarians who came on the voyages of Jacques Cartier and Mr. de Robert Valle imposed works on the inhabitants, who soon perished because of this. English colonialism did no better than the Spanish and Portuguese in the American world, and labour, due to its scarcity, was imported from Africa without paying attention to the fact that the area from Senegal to Angola was devoid of inhabitants.
Trading was done more carefully than anti-slavery campaigns. In addition, the tripartite trade was defined as the activity of ships loaded with Indian-made cloths (used as a unit of calculation for the value of a single), glass artefacts (the slave cup), and inferior guns exchanged in Africa for the number of slaves to be bartered in the Antilles for spices that the ship would sell in France.
Thus, Europe, with the exception of Portugal in 1444, has never seen those Negroes whose fertility has caused the creation and growth of the first stock companies and the current banking system. If Europe accomplished the greatest human transport known in history, it also established life insurance, and so paid for cargo insurance – were these herds human? – To ask questions that caused the abolition of slavery at the level of minds, texts, and actions.
Today, slavery is still common in some regions of the Far East, and institutional slavery, like the world's oldest occupation, may be deeply entrenched in man who is always willing to exploit his fellow man, at all costs.
In 1851, Beecher-Stowe wrote her famous novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. This novel made a major contribution to the evolution of ideas towards the abolition of slavery. This seer depicted, with great precision, the daily life of slaves, who had only two choices: ransom or death!
Cotton plantations in some U.S. states—such as Missouri, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee—helped perpetuate slavery for a long time. After the Federal Law of 1808 banned the importation of slaves, some farmers turned to human domestication to compensate for this ban!
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