Geography
Slavery
Slavery refers to the practice of owning and controlling people as property, often for forced labor. It has historically been a significant factor in shaping the geography of regions, as it influenced patterns of settlement, labor systems, and economic development. The legacy of slavery continues to impact geographical landscapes and social structures in various parts of the world.
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3 Key excerpts on "Slavery"
eBook - PDFAmerican Slavery, American Imperialism
US Perceptions of Global Servitude, 1870–1914
- Catherine Armstrong(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
65 It is this evolution of the global labour market that ensured the continuation of forced labour practices across the world, not just in the United States and Africa. global labour markets Labour and its provision and distribution around the world was of utmost concern to political leaders and to capitalists. Economic imperatives over- lapped with imperial ones, as the requirement for appropriate types of 61 Chesson, The Dutch Boers and Slavery, p. 24. 62 Eastoe Teall, Slavery and the Slave Trade, p. 10. 63 Grant, A Civilised Savagery, p. 1. 64 Nevinson, A Modern Slavery, p. 37. 65 Ibid., p. 44. Global Contexts: US Perceptions of Slavery 87 labour in particular regions intersected with the ideology of conquest and civilisation. The moral benefit to the worker of undertaking regular, struc- tured wage labour rather than subsistence farming or hunting was cham- pioned by authors who argued that Europeans and Americans were best placed to educate natives about how and why to work producing staple crops or in extraction economies such as gold and diamond mining. Similar discussions had been ongoing since at least the medieval period, when the sugar industry in the Mediterranean and Atlantic islands developed using forced labour, and then in a number of industries as the Spanish and later other European nations colonised the Americas. The transatlantic slave trade illustrated the most systematic attempt to solve a labour problem by moving large numbers of people from one location to another, using racial justifica- tion to provide moral vindication for doing so in the face of challenges from those opposed to Slavery. This model persisted into the post-emancipation period, despite Slavery no longer being legally and morally tolerated. As shown below, the post-emancipation systematic relocation of labour was still being triggered by the flourishing of commodity or extraction econo- mies, and justified by both Europeans and Americans using racial logic.
eBook - PDFUnderstanding Global Slavery
A Reader
- Kevin Bales(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- University of California Press(Publisher)
When Slavery as an economic activity enters into areas with a high potential for generating moral outrage and controversy, such as prosti-tution, apparently simple measures become battlegrounds. Many a good researcher has been wounded on that battleground and has retired to pur-sue other, less dangerous subjects. This loss of good researchers is espe-cially regrettable because the phenomenon under consideration is a rap-idly evolving, moving target requiring long-term study. Criminals are inventive. They work in a context of intense competition, they must be X exible, and they must adapt quickly or (at times literally) die. The pace of social research, especially large-scale research, is glacial by comparison. Criminals, human tra Y ckers among them, came to understand glob-alization before most of us. Early on, they mounted large-scale operations to tra Y c and enslave people, utilizing the attributes of the newly global-ized world economy. Because the context of globalization is rapidly evolving, the W t between abusive labor practices, such as Slavery, and the economy, both local and global, is dynamic. This is important, in part because these are economic activities, albeit criminal, and one dimension of their measurement must be economic. Two key themes of economic globalization are the erosion of control by nation-states and the functional integration of dispersed (economic) activities. 3 As discussed in chapter 4, these characteristics have suited human rights organizations admirably and created a context for potential growth. These characteristics have also fostered nonstate actors that might be thought of as anti-human-rights actors, especially criminal organizations. The importance of these two themes—of dispersed economic activity and the loss of governmental control—for those who try to gain a bet-ter understanding of Slavery and forced labor is that both tend to obscure the phenomenon and make the collection of information more di Y cult.
- Craig Perry, David Eltis, Stanley L. Engerman, David Richardson(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
CHAPTER 1 Slavery IN THE MEDIEVAL MILLENNIUM * craig perry, david eltis, stanley l. engerman, and david richardson The three preceding volumes of The Cambridge World History of Slavery (henceforth CWHS) already in print have had a major shaping influence on this final collection of essays and have served to underscore the import- ance of the present volume. Nonspecialists and the general public alike are acutely aware of the existence, indeed centrality, of Slavery as an institution in the postcontact Americas and in ancient Greek and Roman societies. But general knowledge of the history of Slavery between the fall of Rome and the rise of the transatlantic plantation complexes might be charitably described as lacking precision. Most readers would recognize that extreme social inequality developed in the larger and more complex polities in this millennium-long era and that some form of coerced labor emerged in just about every society. If pressed for an example, many would be more likely to mention not Slavery, but serfdom, a practice closely associated with, though not confined to, medieval Europe. Yet the global perspective underpinning the essays below suggests that Slavery continued to flourish in all parts of the world for which records and material objects have survived. In short, both the dismemberment of the Roman Empire and Columbian contact had large effects on who was enslaved but quite possibly not on the incidence of the institution across the globe. What also follows, given what is known of historical global population distribu- tions, is that most enslaved persons in recorded history have not been African and male, much less of Slavic (from which the word “slave” is derived) origins, but rather could come from any number of regions and were most likely female.
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