Slavery is an age-old system where one group of people treat another group as property. Since ancient Civilisation times, those who were part of an army or a people defeated in battle, more or less automatically became slaves of the winner.
No one thought much about this for thousands of years. It was just the way things were. All societies had slaves, from the Ancient Egyptians, through Ancient Greeks, Romans, Saxons, Viking, Maya, Aztec and so on. There was no society that did not have slaves. In Saxon England people even chose to become slaves if they were short of food because the slave owner was, by law, obliged to feed and clothe them. There were nine million slaves in India at the time when slavery was abolished in 1843. There were two million slaves in Ethiopia in the 1930s and a third of a million slaves in Saudi Arabia before slavery was abolished in 1962.
The Slave Trade that occurred between West Africa, North America and Europe in the 15th to 19th centuries was just a normal part of how things were. Arab states in Africa used to raid villages in Central Africa, capture able-bodied men, together with women and children, and take them off to the coast where they were easier to sell, or ship them on demand to the Middle East. Europeans trading along the coast got to hear of the slaves the Arabs wanted to sell. In North and South America there was a great shortage of people to work on the lands the Europeans had recently captured, and so it was natural that they would buy slaves from the Arabs and take them to where they were needed in the Americas. Even the leader of the newly-formed United States, who broke from Britain because they objected to paying taxes without representatives in the British Parliament, saw nothing wrong with keeping slaves while seeking their own independence. Today we might see this as extraordinary, but that is not how they saw it at the time.
Slavery was legal in all of the 13 American colonies, and all plantations depended on them. Twelve million Africans were sent to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Most went to South America, with Brazil being the largest market for slaves. About 700,000 were sent to the United States. But because slaves had children, and they were automatically slaves, by 1860, there were four million slaves in the United States.
But slavery was not confined to black peoples. During the Middle Ages, the Moors of North Africa raided coastal towns of the Mediterranean and up into the Atlantic Ocean. These were the Barbary pirates. They captured one and a quarter million white slaves.
By the 17th century, some religious groups, such as the Quakers, had seen slavery as one of the great wrongs of the world. By 1772, British judge Lord Mansfield ruled that slavery was illegal in England. This was a time before the American Revolution, and so what was law in Britain was also law in the American colonies. In 1777 the people of Vermont (then an independent nation) decided to abolish slavery. Then in 1794 France abolished slavery. The slave trade in the United Kingdom was abolished in 1807. The Slave Trade Act was passed by the British Parliament on March 25, 1807, making the slave trade illegal throughout the British Empire.
But by now the United States was no longer part of the British Empire. Slavery continued in the United States, even though the importing of slaves was made illegal in 1808. It took a civil war to put that right. Slavery was made illegal in the United States in 1863. It was Abraham Lincoln who issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves held in the (by then defeated) Confederate States.
But do not think that slavery is a thing of the past. In the modern world there are between 12 and 30 million people who are still slaves.
