Slavery

Slavery is the coercive control of one person by another in conditions that substantially resemble ownership. The 1926 Slavery Convention defined it as the status or condition of a person over whom powers attaching to ownership are exercised; later law also addresses trafficking, debt bondage, forced labour, and similar practices.¹ Enslaved people could be bought, sold, inherited, pledged as debt, punished, or compelled to work, although the exact rules varied widely.

Slavery is not confined to one region, religion, or historical period. Forms of enslavement existed in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, China, Africa, the Islamic world, the Americas, and Europe. Status could be hereditary, temporary, imposed as punishment, or linked to warfare and debt. Some enslaved people held specialized occupations, accumulated resources, or secured manumission, but these possibilities did not remove the underlying legal and physical domination.

The Atlantic slave trade connected African enslavement to European imperial expansion and plantation economies in the Americas. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, merchants transported millions of Africans across the Atlantic under lethal conditions; historians estimate about 12.5 million embarked and about 10.7 million survived to disembark.² Enslaved labor produced sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice, and cotton, while violence, family separation, surveillance, and resistance shaped everyday life.

Abolition developed unevenly through enslaved people’s resistance, religious and political movements, revolts, litigation, emancipation laws, and changing economic and imperial policies. Haiti’s revolution created an independent state after a successful antislavery revolution, while Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in most of its colonies in 1833. The United States abolished slavery constitutionally in 1865 after the Civil War. Abolition did not end racial hierarchy, forced labor, or the economic consequences of expropriation.

International law prohibits slavery and the slave trade, including in circumstances where domestic law fails to protect victims. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that no one shall be held in slavery or servitude, and the 1956 Supplementary Convention expanded attention to institutions and practices resembling slavery.³ The International Labour Organization distinguishes forced labour by the involuntary nature of work and the threat of a penalty, while recognizing that coercion can be physical, legal, economic, or psychological.⁴

Contemporary exploitation includes trafficking for labor or sexual exploitation, debt bondage, forced marriage, forced domestic work, and coercive recruitment in agriculture, construction, fishing, mining, and conflict economies. The ILO, Walk Free, and International Organization for Migration estimated 40.3 million people were living in modern slavery in 2016, while emphasizing that measurement is difficult and that the category includes forced labour and forced marriage rather than only legally recognized ownership.⁵

Enslaved people were historical actors who resisted, preserved families and cultural practices, negotiated working conditions, escaped, organized revolts, and created new religious and artistic traditions. Resistance ranged from slowing work and sabotage to maroon communities, uprisings, lawsuits, and revolutionary movements. In the Caribbean and the Americas, African languages, foodways, music, religious forms, and political traditions profoundly influenced societies despite sustained attempts at cultural suppression.

Legal emancipation often left coercive systems intact. After formal abolition, colonial authorities and states used apprenticeship, vagrancy laws, contract enforcement, convict leasing, and forced cultivation to compel labor; scholars therefore distinguish the legal end of ownership from the disappearance of unfree labor.⁶ Memory and restitution remain contested: museums, archives, universities, governments, and corporations continue to debate how to document profits, identify victims, return cultural property, and address the intergenerational effects of enslavement and racial discrimination.

Abolitionism

A movement seeking to end slavery and, in many settings, the slave trade.

Debt bondage

A condition in which labor is demanded to repay a debt whose terms or duration prevent genuine freedom.

Forced labour

Work or service exacted under threat of a penalty and not offered voluntarily.

Manumission

The legal release of an enslaved person by an owner or public authority.

Maroon

A member of a community formed by escaped enslaved people, especially in the Americas and Caribbean.

Trafficking in persons

The recruitment, transport, transfer, harboring, or receipt of people through coercive or deceptive means for exploitation.