By: Luis de Andrade

The Great Greek philosopher, Aristotle, described a slave as a “property with a soul”.  Slaves were deemed as possessing no rights, they could be killed, mutilated, or tortured as their master pleased and without consequences.  Slavery was the primary mode of production in the ancient civilizations.  Roman society viewed slavery as the logical way of ensuring productivity as all, but the poorest household had slavery.  In simple words, anyone who could afford to have a slavery, had one.  And it was like this until the late roman empire, when the process of transition from slavery to serfdom started.

Contrary to what is taught to children at schools and in different parts of the world; during late Roman empire period it was estimated nearly five million slaves resided on the territory of the roman empire.  It is equivalent to the current population of Slovakia or Norway.  For the most part, during roman empire, historians made no reference about slaveries’ skin color.  Slavery was basically a product of war; a universal institution and every single “prisoner of war” was a potential slave.  Because slavery was a product of war; I only assume that slavery occurs even before roman empire exists. The slave population decrease due to plagues, and the inability of the roman empire to capture new slaves, and it was one of the causes of the drop in economic productivity with the roman empire.

Slavery ended, at least on the paper, and the period of serfdom started.  The serfs/peasants were free slaves with, some, rights.  The masters were not long allowed to kill them, for example but they still have obligations towards the masters, but they could walk away wherever they want to.  Many serfs returned to their masters, voluntarily, because they were starving and no place to live.  As the time went by, and with the invention of machineries, the landlords need for slaves decreased.  A machine could perform the job of many slaveries, it was a logical process to move away from feudalism to capitalism in Europe.  But circa of 1525 Africans then became to be the target of slave traders, why?  

The reason was Christopher Columbus and the subsequent colonization of the Americas.  We know that before, Columbus arrival in the Americas, the Arabs were already trading African slaves.  But this is a topic for a different conversation.   In 1492 the new world was “discovered” European colonizers needed people to work on that vast land.  It was a such hypocrisy; however, in Europe non-black slaves were no longer acceptable by the society.  The Arabs had a profitable trading working relationship with African kings, who sold captured Africans to them.  The colonizers never managed to subjugate native Americans.  The solution was to also turn to African slavery.  

Slavery was never about skin color.  Slavery was about overpowering their opponent.  It was about showing to your enemy who was in charge.  It was about breaking and bringing your adversary to their knee.  The victorious wanted to stir completely fear on the conquered.  Slavery was also about economic advantage.  Many European countries and the United States benefited immensely from free labor.  It is believed that about 10 million African slaves worked for free in the United States, and for almost 250 years.  For the most part of the history of servitude, it had no color associated to it.