Slave trade - Misplaced Pages

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The slave trade is almost as old as civilisation itself.

Between the 6th and 10th centuries, the primary sources of slaves for Western Europe and the Middle East were the Slavic peoples of the Balkans and Eastern Europe. This word "slave" is derived from Slav, in English and many other European languages.

After the conquest of North Africa and the Iberian peninsula (modern day Portugal and Spain) by Muslims Moors, the Islamic world became an important importer of slaves from Central Europe. Slaves from pagan central Europe were transfered through Christian Western Europe to Muslim countries in Spain and Africa. Slave trade routes were established between trading centres in Slavic areas and metropolitan centres in Moorish Iberia. As in the infamous West African slave trade, the majority of slaves were prisoners captured in wars between Slavic tribes and tribal states.

The trade in enslaved Slavs ended after the mass conversions of most Slavic peoples, in many cases as a result of the ministry of the companion Saints Cyril and Methodius (the former who got the Cyrillic alphabet named after him). Because they were now Christians - and the Great Schism between Roman and Eastern Orthodox Christianity had not yet occurred - they could no longer be transported across Christian territories.

That did not liberate the Serfs, of course. Notwithstanding 'serf' is from a Latin word meaning both 'servant' and 'slave,' serfs were not slaves on the technicality that they constituted a social order or class of persons who were not themselves property, but were bound to the land on which they lived. Thus, serfs were obligated to give service in prescribed occupations under command of the person who owned the land to which they were bound. One could say the difference between a serf and a slave is that the latter was directly owned while the former was indirectly owned. The last European serfs were emancipated by the Russian Tsar Alexander II in 1861.

Neither did termination of the European slave trade end slavery. Non-Europeans generally were fair game for use as slaves, though the practice of slave ownership within Europe came to be frowned upon. Slave trade of Black Africans to the Americas (particurly to Brazil and the United States) ermerged, then, as the biggest slave economy in history.

Slavery was effectively abolished in colonial Canada in the 1790's and throughout the British Empire in 1833.

The United States abolished slavery in two phases during the American Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed only those slaves in the break-away Confederate States of America, the independence of which the Government of the United States did not recognise. Emancipation was later extended to the slave-holding states of Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia (which seceded from Virginia and joined the United States, when Virginia seceded from the United States), Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia.

Brazil ended slavery in 1888 (see Lei Áurea for details).

On the Arabian Peninsula, slavery was abolished in Qatar in 1952, in Saudi Arabia and the Yemen Arab Republic in 1962, in the United Arab Emirates in 1963, in South Yemen in 1967, and in Oman in 1970.

The slave trade continues today, most infamously in the Sudan but people in other countries are certainly involved, legally or illegally, to one degree or another. Most modern slave trading appears to have two lines of focus: the almost always illegal trade of women for actual or de facto enslavement as sex workers, and the usually (but not always) illegal trade of women and men for sweatshop labour - especially the trade in illegal immigrants for purposes of employment in illegal sweatshops as de facto slaves.

For specific articles on the slave trade, see:

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