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Slavery was institutionalized by the time the first civilizations emerged (such as Sumer in Mesopotamia, [5] which dates back as far as 3500 BC). Slavery features in the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BC), which refers to it as an established institution. [6]
The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which began as early as the 15th century, introduced a system of slavery that was commercialized, racialized and inherited. Enslaved people were seen not as...
Slavery was a species of dependent labor differentiated from other forms primarily by the fact that in any society it was the most degrading and most severe. Slavery was the prototype of a relationship defined by domination and power.
Slavery typically involves compulsory work, with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by the party that holds them in bondage. Enslavement is the placement of a person into slavery, and the person is called a slave or an enslaved person (see § Terminology).
Many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619, when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved Africans ashore in the British colony of Jamestown,...
Slavery is known to have existed as early as the Shang dynasty (18th–12th century bce) in China. It has been studied thoroughly in ancient Han China (206 bce –25 ce), where perhaps 5 percent of the population was enslaved. Slavery continued to be a feature of Chinese society down to the 20th century.
Slaves were of varying importance in Mesoamerica and on the South American continent. Initially slaves were imported because of a labor shortage, aggravated by the high death rate of the indigenous population after the introduction of European diseases in the early 16th century.
Slavery was practiced in the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, and helped propel the United States into the Civil War. Learn more about slavery and its abolition...
The arrival of the first captives to the Jamestown Colony, in 1619, is often seen as the beginning of slavery in America—but enslaved Africans arrived in North America as early as the 1500s.
Slavery predated European forays into the Atlantic world, but the system that developed during the 16th and 17th centuries was a more exploitative, inhumane, and racially tinged institution than anything that had previously existed in Europe, Africa, or the Americas.