Slavery in American and the World: Hisstory Culture and LawOverview
For the last half century, scholars in the United States and elsewhere have focused enormous attention on the impact of slavery on the development of the modern world. Scholars in many disciplines agree that, to a greater or lesser extent, the modern industrial economy was in part (some would say a large part) a result of the system of Atlantic slavery that began in the 1450s and ended in the 1880s. Historians have of course long been interested in slavery. But today slavery scholars are found in law schools, business schools, public policy schools, and medical schools. In universities we find slavery scholars (and courses on slavery) in various departments including economics, political science, literature, sociology, anthropology, fine arts, art history, and archeology. Movies, television programs, best-selling novels, and museum exhibits illustrate how slavery has become a fixture in American popular culture. Universities have sponsored scholarly investigations into whether their history was tied to human bondage. Slavery comes up in political debate over issues of flying the Confederate flag, building monuments, and reparations.
In the United States, slavery—which was abolished a century and a half ago—still works its way into presidential politics. In 2004, during a presidential debate, President George W. Bush (who was seeking reelection) was asked to identify a “bad” Supreme Court decision and he responded by naming the famous slavery-related case, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), although it was not clear he really understood what the case was about. When Barack Obama first ran for president, some people questioned if he was “really” black because his African ancestry was recent (his father was from Kenya) and thus he had no slave ancestry or heritage.
Analogies to slavery are also part of modern legal debates. Supporters of a women’s right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy argue that denying women this fundamental right is a kind of “slavery” imposed on her by the state. Opponents of these rights compare the decision in Roe v. Wade to Dred Scott. Similarly, opponents of the death penalty compare decisions supporting the penalty to Dred Scott.
In the late 20th century, most American associated slavery with the period from the 1450s to the 1880s when millions of Africans and their descendants were held as slaves in Europe, Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. But today slavery has taken a new twist, as some people struggling to suppress human trafficking claim this is a new form of slavery. The worldwide issue of human trafficking has led to a renewed interest in historical slavery, with at least some ironic results. In 2011 a distinguished historian of American abolitionism created a new organization, Historians Against Slavery, believing that those who study slavery in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries should become activists against human trafficking in the 21st century.
Slavery is in fact one of oldest social institutions in human society. Some of our earliest archaeological records document slavery in the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, China, and elsewhere. The economies of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome were heavily dependent on slaves. Slavery flourished after the fall of Rome, and in the medieval and early modern worlds. Five hundred years before Columbus sailed for the New World, the Vikings and the Arabs were major slave traders. When Portuguese ships explored the coast of Africa in the 1450s and 1460s, they returned with slaves purchased in the ports they visited. In the Americas the Inca, Aztec, and Maya all had elaborate slave systems well before the voyages of Columbus, while in what is now the United States various Native American nations held slaves, usually (but not always) in the form of captured neighbors. Hawaii had a slave class long before Europeans arrived. In China, India, and elsewhere in East Asia slaves were owned and traded. The discovery of the New World led to an expansion of slavery, the enslavement of local populations mostly by the Spanish (but sometimes in the early 17th century by the English as well), and ultimately, to somewhere between 12 and 13 million Africans being brought to the New World.
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