Having listened to a The Ancients podcast on “How Slavery Built the Roman Empire,” I started to do some online searching for states that had slavery or some other form of forced labor as part of their commonplace social system—together with colonialism, the source of much of Rome’s slaves
https://ourworldindata.org/slavery
The data the chart reflects is depressing, of course. I recognize as well that some of what it presents is, if not positively inaccurate, still a bit too optimistic for its own good. For instance, while the British Parliament’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 did end slavery in the Empire, forced or coerced labor did not exactly disappear in the British colonies. Another podcast, “Indian Indentured Labour,” streamed by In Our Time, laid out in painful detail the way that in the Empire’s Caribbean money-making colonies, the indentured servitude of Indian subjects of the Raj in effect replaced slavery in a way that made the term “servitude” more descriptive than “servants.”
The chart also takes us from the early Modern period all the way to the Post-modern world that we now inhabit but does not include any pre-modern state—nothing about Rome, for instance, or the Parthian Empire, or the Ghanaian Kingdom, or the Gupta Empire, or the Mayan or Incan Empires or several Native American Chiefdoms and Confederations, or any of the Chinese dynasties, or. . . . As far as I can tell only the Inuit and Aboriginal Australians, neither group in any way associated with colonial imperialism, did not practice any form of slavery. Some hope for humanity after all, it seems.
I was interested in the history and spread of slavery and forced labor as a way to think about the basis for the wealth and superior standard of living enjoyed by most Europeans and their colonial epigones. In fact, I find it almost impossible to distinguish the modern slave trade from modern colonialism. I suspected that Europe and its erstwhile colonies are wealthy now because they practiced slavery from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century. For European nations the wealth derives especially from but certainly not limited to the Transatlantic slave trade and the rooting of slavery as the primary tool for extracting wealth from the European colonies in the New World. In Asia and Africa and Australia it was not the Transatlantic slave trade that served as the basis for European wealth, but the enslavement of natives in the various colonies served the same function.
Wikipedia provides a ready accounting of the wealthiest countries in the world, by total GDP rather than by per capita GDP, where tiny countries like Singapore, San Marino, and Monaco rank high because they manipulate money. I reproduce here a list of the top ten countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
China, Japan, and Russia did not participate in the Transatlantic slave trade. That is not to say that China, Japan, and Russia did not have their own forms of slavery and forced labor. India and Brazil, also home to slavery, may seem to stand outside of the picture, but no more so than does another European colony, the United States. All three of those nations are ex-colonies, enjoying today the fruits of slavery and forced labor as practiced in the period from the sixteenth century to the present.
I recognize that other phenomena besides slavery are in part responsible for the wealth of some of these nations. The huge populations of India and China, the geographical and natural plenty of the United States and Brazil—all of that played a major role in engendering the wealth of those countries. But would those characteristics suffice without the grounding of slavery and forced labor?
Certainly in the case of the relatively small European nations—the UK, Germany, Italy, France—their wealth rests firmly on the foundation of colonization and slavery. Would the UK have produced the Industrial Revolution without the immense wealth that the sugar plantations of the Caribbean colonies provided? The connection between wealth and historical slavery may not be so obvious in countries like Germany or Italy, which certainly practiced their own form of enslavement but whose imperial ambitions come late in the period. But without the effect of slavery on the general European polity, would Germany and Italy be on that list? Of the top twenty-five economies in the world, European nations and their major colonies hold eighteen spots. Some of those countries, like the Netherlands and Spain, are in the same colonial and slavery ballpark as Britain and France. Belgium, a tiny country, is on the list—one could ask of Leopold II why that is the case. Others—Ireland, Switzerland, Poland—seem to me to be on the list by virtue of the general European exploitation of the rest of the world.
So yes, slavery and forced labor seem to be par for human course from ancient times all the way to the present—some nations still practice forced labor and, in effect, slavery. As “How Slavery Built the Roman Empire” made clear to me, slavery derived from colonial ambition was the essential component of ancient empires, without which there would not have been a Rome or a Mughal Empire or pharaonic Egypt. But for the modern world, from the sixteenth century onwards, it seems to me self-evident that slavery and its attendant colonial underpinnings have made our world. Slavery gave birth to the wealth of Europe and its sometime colonies.
