A Short History of Slavery

 When people think of slavery, especially in America, they tend to think of slavery in the south before the time of the Civil War. However, slavery existed long, long before that. Dan Carlin says that humanity is "addicted to bondage," and if you look at history you might start to think like he does. Slavery was the backbone of the Roman Empire, and part of the reason the Roman Empire fell (Among a thousand others) was that the Romans ran out of people to conquer and enslave. During the times of the "Holy" Roman Empire, the Christians enslaved Africans, Africans enslaved Christians (Yes, that happened, the Christian nations were far from the only nations to practice slavery), and the people in the east of the world enslaved pretty much everybody. Traditionally, slaves came from captured war captives and not Africans. Almost all of the Roman slaves, for example, were war captives. That included Africans of course, the Romans conquered pretty much everybody they came across and that included North Africa, but they weren't enslaved because they were Africans, they were enslaved because they were war captives. Later, as the European nations, especially Spain and Portugal, started to settle in Central and North America, they tried to enslave the native populations to grow sugarcane and other cash crops, but that didn't work out because the natives kept dying to new sicknesses and committing suicide (The Spaniards were beyond cruel to their slaves.). So the Spaniards started shipping Africans to work the farms. African slavery existed before this, the world almost always had a supply shortage of labor at the time, and the Africans just happened to be on hand at the time. Nations like Spain were far more advanced than the African nations, and it turned out the African nations had plenty of slaves already from wars that they were willing to sell. Eventually, the slave trade was abolished, but that didn't free the people already in slavery. America and England were some of the first to actually free the slaves and abolish them completely and utterly, England through the political wrangling of William Wilberforce, and America through a war against the south, which was not particularly willing to let go of all the free labor it had.