SLAVERY AND REAL HISTORY

It is a safe bet that everyone reading this column had an ancestor who was either a slave or slaveholder.
It is also no coincidence that the effort to abolish slavery on a sustained and global basis did not occur until after the advent of the industrial revolution.
Persistent slavery can be found in all cultures once people ceased being exclusively hunter-gatherers. Slavery was in fact “normal” until recent times. Sudan became the last country to legally abolish it in 2007 but, although illegal, it continues to be practiced in some countries.
[Note by JW: these countries are all Moslem because Allah officially approves of slavery in the Koran – see Allah and Slavery from February 2007.]
In most countries throughout history, the slaves were often of the same race as the slaveholder. In the antebellum South, most whites were not slaveholders, and some American blacks were. Well before the Revolution, there were some white slaves — mainly Irish — that the British had brought to America.
Slavery in other words, like most things in history, was a complex institution that differed from time to time and place to place, and to criticize and vilify our ancestors for not having today’s values is not particularly useful.













