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Slavery was widespread throughout the ancient world. However, some of the most common examples seem to differ qualitatively from slavery as it's commonly conceived today. For instance, Greek slavery was often the result of war or more similar to later Medieval serfdom, whereas African and Middle Eastern slavery seems to have allowed the children of slaves to essentially become family members, albeit possibly of a lower social status. In many of these cases, slavery was not hereditary, and the children of enslaved people could become free.

Neither of these was quite the same as later chattel slavery in the Americas, where enslavement was hereditary with a growing enslaved population, and enslaved individuals could legally be bought and sold.

Obviously, the prevalence and importance of chattel slavery exploded with European colonization of the Americas, primarily through the enslavement of Africans. However, how common was chattel1 slavery worldwide before the trans-Atlantic slave trade?

1: While the term can be a little vague, by chattel slavery I mean slavery in which individuals are legally considered property to be disposed of as the putative owner wishes, and in which slavery is both heritable and frequently inherited. For instance: serfdom probably wouldn't count, because even though the lord controls the labor of their serfs, and serfdom is inherited, the lord couldn't do whatever they wanted with their serfs, or directly sell or buy them.

sds
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Obie 2.0
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    That's a total misrepresentation of Greek slavery. Spartan helots were akin to serfs yes, but Greek slavery was something else entirely. Ancient Greece absolutely practised hereditary chattel slavery, and slaves were very much legally sold and bought in massive markets, often to/from abroad. Graeco-Roman masters did free their slaves relatively often, but the children of slaves inherited the slave status unless explicitly freed by the master. In general, chattel slavery *is* hereditary. Reducing a human being to property inherently implies they could be sold. – Semaphore Mar 27 '19 at 09:13
  • @Semaphore - OK. I'd heard differently. I thought that slavery in Greece was usually something that happened to defeated victims of war, and that it didn't tend to last generations like the later trans-Atlantic slave trade, or was like later European serfdom. As for chattel slavery being hereditary, yes, I agree that's what the term usually encompasses, but I wanted to be specific. – Obie 2.0 Mar 27 '19 at 09:58
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    War was a major source of slaves in antiquity, but the Greeks in particular had moral qualms about enslaving fellow Greeks; hence much of their own slaves were thus imported from abroad. This doesn't really make any difference - the offspring of captured slaves continued to be slaves. Either way this is not a real defining difference between Greek slavery and later Trans Atlantic slavery - much of the slaves in the latter were sourced from African tribal wars, too. – Semaphore Mar 27 '19 at 10:05
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    Just to add to @Semaphore 's excellent comments, AFAIK, slave status in the Graeco-Roman world was inherited through the mother, regardless of who the father was, if known. So, if your mother was a slave, tough, so were you - even if your father was your owner or his son! – TheHonRose Mar 27 '19 at 12:29
  • @TheHonRose: But (prior to modern DNA tech) there's no way to be certain who the father actually is. – jamesqf Mar 27 '19 at 17:39
  • Could someone write an answer incorporating these and other information? I'm not only asking about Greece, too. – Obie 2.0 Mar 27 '19 at 18:50
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    @jameswf but that's a universal problem, upt and including inheriting a throne! Technically, I believe, slaves did not have "parents". – TheHonRose Mar 27 '19 at 18:59
  • @Though in the US, it wasn't unknown for white fathers to recognize (and free) their children with slave mothers. One notable example was the "mountain man" Jim Beckwourth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Beckwourth – jamesqf Mar 28 '19 at 03:38
  • Clearly some of my assumptions were wrong. But does anyone want to incorporate some of these excellent observations into an answer? – Obie 2.0 Mar 28 '19 at 03:55
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    Possible duplicate of Is it true that slavery was endemic in Sub-Saharan Africa previous to the establishment of the trans-Atlantic slave trade? – sds Mar 29 '19 at 21:39
  • @sds - I don't think so. I'm not only asking about Africa, let alone Sub-Saharan Africa. I'm interested in Europe, Asia, the Americas - a broad picture. And I'm not asking about just any form of slavery. – Obie 2.0 Mar 29 '19 at 21:40

1 Answers1

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how common was chattel slavery worldwide before the trans-Atlantic slave trade?

Trans-Atlantic slave trade never amounted to more than a third of African slave trade. Most of the African slaves were bought by the Muslims in the Middle East, who immediately castrated all males (which is why there are few Africans there these days).

Slavery is an ancient universal institution, which appeared independently in all cultures and societies which reached a certain level of productivity per capita: in subsistence societies (e.g., Yanomami) male POW are worthless because they cannot produce more than they eat and have to be guarded (females, whose capture is the purpose of warfare, do not have to be guarded after they are raped and impregnated). However, after agriculture is invented, POW can be enslaved because now they produce more than they consume, and this is what we do observe, historically. For more details, see Das Kapital.

More:

sds
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  • FYI , 10% of the Saudi population is of African descent, the United States population of African descent is about 12%, so it's pretty comparable. –  Mar 29 '19 at 22:58
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    @JMS: I think the US percentage is much higher than that - depending of course on how one defines "descent". If it's all or most of one's ancestry, perhaps, but there are a lot of mixed-race people out there, especially when the mixing happened several generations ago. – jamesqf Mar 31 '19 at 04:45
  • "Slavery is an ancient universal institution, which appeared independently in all cultures and societies which reached a certain level of productivity per capita." Can you elaborate on this? I'm interested in more than just the African slave trade. – Obie 2.0 Mar 31 '19 at 10:10
  • @Obie2.0: I elaborated, but you really need to do your own research. – sds Mar 31 '19 at 13:14
  • @jamesqf yes you are correct but for the purposes of this question self identified African Americans are a direct comparison to Saudi Arabians who demonstrate the characteristics. Descendants who don’t demonstrate the characteristics would be mostly absent from both samples. –  Mar 31 '19 at 16:16
  • @sds - That's unfortunately a problem with this site: it's supposed to help inform people who may not have the expertise to do the research you can do, or to sift through the chaff to find accurate information, but questions that are not written from a perspective of already understanding what they are asking about get a poor reception. – Obie 2.0 Oct 27 '22 at 05:01
  • I feel like this answer is not really addressing the question. The answer doesn't discuss chattel slavery prior to the Modern Era, which seems to be what the question is actually about. Further, a set of links to Wikipedia and Quora are not answers in the Stack Exchange sense. – Bacon Bits Apr 05 '23 at 13:09