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'Slavery' is a social-economic system under which certain persons—known as 'slaves'—are deprived of personal freedom and compelled to perform labour or services. The term also refers to the status or condition of those persons who are treated as the property of another person or household. This is referred to as "chattel slavery".
Slaves are held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase, or birth, and are deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive compensation in return for their labour. As such, slavery is one form of unfree labour.
Although outlawed in nearly all countries today slavery is still secretly practiced in many parts of the world. There are an estimated 27 million victims of slavery worldwide.^[1][2]
In Mauritania alone it is estimated that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are enslaved, many of them used as bonded labour.^[3][4] Slavery in Mauritania was finally criminalized in August 2007.^[5] In Niger, slavery is also a current phenomenon; a Nigerian study has found that more than 800,000 people are still slaves, almost 8% of the population.^[6][7]

Contents

Etymology

Definitions

Other uses of the term

History

Human trafficking

Economics

Contemporary slavery

Abolitionist movements

History of abolitionism

Apologies

Reparations

Religion and slavery

See also

Footnotes

Bibliography

Primary sources

USA

Slavery today

External links

Etymology

The word ''slave'' in the English language originates from the Middle English ''sclave'', from the Old French ''esclave'', the Medieval Latin ''sclavus'', the early Greek ''sklabos'', from ''sklabenoi'' Slavs, of Slavic origin; akin to Old Russian Slovene, an East Slavic tribe.^[8][9] The term ''sclavus'' originally referred to the Slavs of Eastern and Central Europe, as many of these people had been captured and then sold as slaves.

Definitions

The 1926 Slavery Convention described slavery as "...the status and/or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised..." Slaves cannot leave an owner, an employer or a territory without explicit permission (they must have a passport to leave), and they will be returned if they escape. Therefore a system of slavery — as opposed to the isolated instances found in any society — requires official, legal recognition of ownership, or widespread tacit arrangements with local authorities, by masters who have some influence because of their social and/or economic status.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) defines forced labour as "all work or service which is extracted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily", albeit with certain exceptions of: military service, convicted criminals, emergencies and minor community services.^[10]
The current usage of the word 'serfdom' is not usually synonymous with slavery, because medieval serfs were considered to have rights, as human beings, whereas slaves were considered “things” — property.^[11] Slaves are people who are owned and controlled by others in a way that they have almost no rights or freedom of movement and are not paid for their labour, aside from food, clothing and shelter needed for basic subsistence.

Other uses of the term

None of the following are covered by this article. See the respective articles for details.

★ The International Labour Organization says that child labour usually amounts to forced labour.

★ Many anarchists, socialists, and communists have condemned "wage slavery" or "economic slavery", where workers are forced to choose between accepting wages perceived as too low for their work and not being paid at all (and so presumably starving). This is related to the notion of economic coercion.

★ Some libertarians and anarcho-capitalists view government taxation as a form of slavery^[12]

★ Some feel that military drafts and other forms of coerced government labor constitute slavery.

★ Some proponents of animal rights apply the term ''slavery'' to the condition of some or all human-owned animals, arguing that their status is no different from that of human slaves.^[13]

History

Main articles: History of slavery


Slavery predates writing and evidence for it can be found in almost all cultures and continents. Slavery can be traced to the earliest records, such as the Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia (~1800 BCE.), which refers to slavery as an already established institution. The forced labor of women in some ancient and modern cultures may also be identified as slavery. Slavery, in this case, includes sexual services.
Historically, most slaves ancestors were initially captured in wars or kidnapped in isolated raids but some were sold into slavery by their parents as a means of surviving extreme conditions.
Most slaves were born into that status. Ancient warfare often resulted in slavery for prisoners and their families who were either killed, ransomed or sold as slaves. Captives were often considered the property of those who captured them and were looked upon as a prize of war. Normally they were sold, bartered or ransomed. It originally may have been more humane than simply executing those who would return to fight if they were freed, but the effect led to widespread enslavement of particular groups of people. Those captured sometimes differed in ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race from their enslavers, but often were the same as the captors. The dominant group in an area might take captives and turn them into slaves with little fear of suffering the like fate, but the possibility might be present from reversals of fortune, as when Seneca warns, at the height of the Roman Empire and when various powerful nations fought among themselves anyone might find himself enslaved. The actual amount of force needed to kidnap individual people for slaves could lead to enslavement of those secure from warfare, as brief sporadic raids or kidnapping often sufficed. St. Patrick recounts in his ''Confession'' having been kidnapped by pirates, and the Biblical figure Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers.

''And as often as you reflect how much power you have over a slave, remember that your master has just as much power over you. "But I have no master," you say. You are still young; perhaps you will have one. Do you not know at what age Hecuba entered captivity, or Croesus, or the mother of Darius, or Plato, or Diogenes?''

Ancient societies characterized by poverty, rampant warfare or lawlessness, famines, population pressures, and cultural and technological lag are frequently exporters of slaves to more developed nations. Today the illegal slave trade (mostly in Africa) deals with slaves who are rural people forced to move to cities, or those purchased in rural areas and sold into slavery in cities. These moves take place due to loss of subsistence agriculture, thefts of land, and population increases.
In many ancient cultures, persons (often including their family) convicted of serious crimes could be sold into slavery. The proceeds from this sale were often used to compensate the victims. The Code of Hammurabi (~1800 BCE) prescribes this for failure to maintain a water dam, to compensate victims of a flood. The convicted criminal might be sold into slavery if he lacked the property to make compensation to the victims. Other laws and other crimes might enslave the criminal regardless of his property; some laws called for the criminal and all his property to be handed over to his victim.
Also, persons have been sold into slavery so that the money could be used to pay off their debts. This could range from a judge, king or Emperor ordering a debtor sold with all his family, to the poor selling off their own children to prevent starvation. In times of dire need such as famine, people have offered themselves into slavery not for a purchase price, but merely so that their new master would feed and take care of them.
In most institutions of slavery throughout the world, the children of slaves became the property of the master. Local laws varied as to whether the status of the mother or of the father determined the fate of the child; but were usually determined by the status of the mother. In many cultures, slaves could earn their freedom through hard work and buying their own freedom; this was not possible in all cultures.
The type of work slaves did depended on the time period and location of their slavery. In general, they did the same work as everyone else in the lower echelons of the society they lived in but were not paid for it beyond room and board, clothing etc. The most common types of slave work are domestic service, agriculture, mineral extraction, army make-up, industry, and commerce.^[14] Prior to about the 18th century, domestic services were acquired in some wealthier households and may include up to four female slaves and their children on its staff. The chattels (as they are called in some countries) are expected to cook, clean, sometimes carry water from an outdoor pump into the house, and grind cereal. Most hired servants to do the same tasks.
Many slaves were used in agriculture and cultivation from ancient times to about 1860. The strong, young men and women were sometimes forced to work long days in the fields, with little or no breaks for water or food. Since slaves were usually considered valuable property, they were usually well taken care of in the sense that minimally adequate food and shelter were provided to maintain good health, and that the workload was not excessive to the point of endangering health. However, this was not always the case in many countries where they worked on land that was owned by absentee owners. The overseers in many of these areas literally worked the slaves to death.
In mineral extraction, the majority of the work, when done by slaves, was done nearly always by men. In some places, they mined the salt that was used during extensive trade in the 19th century.^[15]
Some of the men in ancient civilizations that were bought into chattel slavery were trained to fight in their nation's army and other military services. Chattel slaves were occasionally trained in artisan workshops for industry and commerce.^[16] The men worked in metalworking, while the females normally worked in either textile trades or domestic household tasks. The majority of the time, the slave owners did not pay the chattels for their services beyond room and board, clothing etc.
Female slaves, who were mostly from Africa, were long traded to the Middle Eastern countries and kingdoms by Arab traders, and sold into sexual slavery to work as concubines or prostitutes. Typically, females were sold at a lower price than their male counterparts, with one exception being when (predominantly) Irish women captured in Viking raids were sold to the Middle East in the 800-1200 period.

In the West, slavery ended during the Medieval period, only to be revived after the Renaissance and its appreciation of the organization of classical society (i.e. ancient Greece and Rome).^[17]
According to the Anti-Slavery Society, "Although there is no longer any state which legally recognizes, or which will enforce, a claim by a person to a right of property over another, the abolition of slavery does not mean that it ceased to exist. There are millions of people throughout the world — mainly children — in conditions of virtual slavery, as well as in various forms of servitude which are in many respects similar to slavery." [1] It further notes that slavery, particularly child slavery, was on the rise in 2003. It points out that there are countless others in other forms of servitude (such as peonage, bonded labor and servile concubinage) which are not slavery in the narrow legal sense. Critics claim they are stretching the definition and practice of slavery beyond its original meaning, and are actually referring to forms of unfree labour other than slavery. In China in 2007, dozens of people have been jailed for enslaving hundreds of people [2].

Human trafficking

Trafficking in human beings, sometimes called 'human trafficking', or 'sex trafficking' (as the majority of victims are women or children forced into prostitution) is not the same as people smuggling. A smuggler will facilitate illegal entry into a country for a fee, but on arrival at their destination, the smuggled person is free; the trafficking victim is enslaved. Victims do not agree to be trafficked: they are tricked, lured by false promises, or forced into it. Traffickers use coercive tactics including deception, fraud, intimidation, isolation, threat and use of physical force, debt bondage or even force-feeding with drugs of abuse to control their victims. Whilst the majority of victims are women, and sometimes children, forced into prostitution, other victims include men, women and children forced into manual labor.
Due to the illegal nature of trafficking, the exact extent is unknown. A US Government report published in 2003, estimates that 800,000-900,000 people worldwide are trafficked across borders each year. This figure does not include those who are trafficked internally.

Economics

Economists have attempted to model during which circumstances slavery (and milder variants such as serfdom) appear and disappear. One observation is that slavery becomes more desirable for land owners when land is abundant but labor is not, so paid workers can demand high wages. If labor is abundant but land is scarce, then it becomes more costly for the land owners to have guards for the slaves than to employ paid workers who can only demand low wages due to the competition. Thus first slavery and then serfdom gradually decreased in Europe as the population grew. It was reintroduced in the Americas and in Russia (serfdom) as large new land areas with few people become available. Another observation is slavery is more common when the labor done is relatively simple and thus easy to supervise, such as large scale growing of a single crop. It is much more difficult and costly to check that slaves are doing their best and with good quality when they are doing complex tasks. Thus, slavery tends to decrease with technological advancements requiring more skilled people, even as they are able to demand high wages.[3]
It has also been argued that slave societies tend to have low technological advancement, since the focus is on increasing the number of slaves rather than looking for new production methods or new energy sources. Because of this, theoretical knowledge and learning in Greece—and later in Rome—was largely separated from physical labor and manufacturing. [4]

Contemporary slavery

Since 1945, debate about the link between economic growth and different relational forms (most notably unfree social relations of production in Third World agriculture) occupied many contributing to discussions in the development decade (the 1960s). This continued to be the case in the mode of production debate (mainly about agrarian transition in India) that spilled over into the 1970s, important aspects of which continue into the present (see the monograph by Brass, 1999, and the 600 page volume edited by Brass and van der Linden, 1997). Central to these discussions was the link between capitalist development and modern forms of unfree labour (peonage, debt bondage, indenture, chattel slavery). Within the domain of political economy it is a debate that has a very long historical lineage, and - accurately presented - never actually went away. Unlike advocacy groups, for which the number of the currently unfree is paramount, those political economists who participated in the earlier debates sought to establish who, precisely, was (or was not) to be included under the rubric of a worker whose subordination constituted a modern form of unfreedom. This element of definition was regarded as an epistemologically necessary precondition to any calculations of how many were to be categorized as relationally unfree.
According to a broader definition used by Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves, another advocacy group linked with Anti-Slavery International, there are 27 million people (though some put the number as high as 200 million) in virtual slavery today, spread all over the world (Kevin Bales, ''Disposable People''). This is, also according to that group:

★ The largest number of people that has ever been in slavery at any point in world history.

★ The smallest percentage of the total human population that has ever been enslaved at once.

★ Reducing the price of slaves to as low as US$40 in Mali for young adult male laborers, to a high of US$1000 or so in Thailand for HIV-free young females suitable for use in brothels (where they frequently contract HIV). This represents the price paid to the person, or parents.

★ This represents the lowest price that there has ever been for a slave in raw labor terms — while the price of a comparable male slave in 1850 America would have been about US$1000 in the currency of the time (US$38,000 today), thus slaves, at least of that category, now cost one thirtyeighth of their price 150 years ago, although this does not refer to the price of an 1850 slave in Africa.
As a result, the economics of slavery is stark: the yield of profit per year for those buying and controlling a slave is over 800% on average, as opposed to the 5% per year that would have been the expected payback for buying a slave in colonial times. This combines with the high potential to lose a slave (have them stolen, escape, or freed by unfriendly authorities) to yield what are called 'disposable people' — those who can be exploited intensely for a short time and then discarded, such as the prostitutes thrown out on city streets to die once they contract HIV, or those forced to work in mines.
Although outlawed in most countries today slavery is, nonetheless, practiced ''in secret'' in many parts of the world — with outright enslavement still taking place in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.^[18]
There are three general types of slavery today: wage slaves, contract slaves, and slaves in the traditional sense.

★ 'Wage slavery' is most common in underdeveloped areas, where employers can afford to employ people at low wages, knowing they can't afford to risk their employment. Most child laborers can be considered to be wage slaves.

★ 'Contract slaves' are generally poor, often illiterate, people who have been tricked into signing contracts they do not understand.

★ 'Slavery in its traditional sense' is still very active; only its activities are carried out underground. Actual slavery is still carried out much the same way it has been for centuries: people, often women and children, are abducted (usually from an underdeveloped country such as in the Middle East, South America, Africa and the former Soviet Bloc countries), loaded aboard a ship and smuggled to a foreign country (usually Asia or the Middle East) and they are sold, the men and male children sold for labor, while the women and girls for domestic slavery or to work as unwilling prostitutes primarily in the West.
Slavery still exists today all across the world. Groups such as the American Anti-Slavery Group, Anti-Slavery International and Free the Slaves, the Anti-Slavery Society, and the Norwegian Anti-Slavery Society continue to campaign to rid the world of slavery.
On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 4 states:
:''No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.''
Since 1997, the United States Department of Justice has, through work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, prosecuted six individuals on charges of slavery in the agricultural industry. These prosecutions have led to freedom for over 1000 slaves in the tomato and orange fields of South Florida.
This is only one example of the contemporary fight against slavery worldwide, which is especially pervasive in agriculture, apparel and the sex industry.
In the contemporary United States, the mantle of "abolitionist" has been widely embraced by those who seek to abolish the death penalty, those advocating immigration rights, and anarchists seeking to abolish the state.

Abolitionist movements

Main articles: Abolitionism

History of abolitionism

Slavery has existed, in one form or another, through the whole of recorded human history — as have, in various periods, movements to free large or distinct groups of slaves. According to the Biblical Book of Exodus, Moses led Israelite slaves out of ancient Egypt — possibly the first written account of a movement to free slaves. Later Jewish laws (known as Halacha) prevented slaves from being sold out of the Land of Israel, and allowed a slave to move to Israel if he so desired. The Cyrus Cylinder, inscribed about 539 B.C.E. in Persia, abolished slavery and allowed Jews and other nationalities who had been enslaved under Babylonian rule to return to their native lands. Abolitionism should be distinguished from efforts to help a particular group of slaves, or to restrict one practice, such as the slave trade.

Apologies

On May 21, 2001, the National Assembly of France passed the Taubira law, recognizing slavery as a crime against humanity. At the same time the British, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese delegations blocked an EU apology for slavery.
The issue of an apology is linked to 'reparations for slavery' and is still being pursued across the world. For example, the Jamaican Reparations Movement approved its declaration and action Plan.
In September 2006 it was reported^[19] that the UK Government may issue a "statement of regret" over slavery, an act that was followed through by a "public statement of sorrow" from Tony Blair on November 27, 2006.^[20]
On February 25, 2007 the state of Virginia resolved to 'profoundly regret' and apologize for its role in the institution of slavery. Unique and the first of its kind in the U.S., the apology was unanimously passed in both Houses as Virginia approached the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, where the first slaves were imported into North America in 1619.^[21]
On August 24, 2007, Mayor Ken Livingstone of London, England apologized publicly for England's role in colonial slave trade. "You can look across there to see the institutions that still have the benefit of the wealth they created from slavery," he said pointing towards the financial district. He claimed that London was still tainted by the horrors of slavery. Jesse Jackson praised Mayor Livingstone, and added that reparations should be made.^[22]

Reparations

Main articles: Reparations for slavery

Sporadically there have been movements to achieve reparations for those formerly held as slaves, or sometimes their descendants. Claims for reparations for being held in slavery are handled as a civil law matter in almost every country. This is often decried as a serious problem, since former slaves' relative lack of money means they often have limited access to a potentially expensive and futile legal process. Mandatory systems of fines and reparations paid to an as yet undetermined group of claimants from fines, paid by unspecified parties, and collected by authorities have been proposed by advocates to alleviate this "civil court problem". Since in almost all cases there are no living ex-slaves or living ex-slave owners these movements have gained little traction. In nearly all cases the judicial system has ruled that the statute of limitations on these possible claims has long since expired.

Religion and slavery

Main articles: Slavery and religion

Some argue that the Bible - particularly the Old Testament - condones slavery in Ancient Israelite society by failing to condemn the widespread existing practice^[23] present in other cultures. It also explicitly states that slavery is morally acceptable, but only under certain circumstances (Leviticus 25:44-46; Exodus 21:7-11).

See also

;Various

★ List of known slaves

★ List of notable opponents of slavery‎

★ Abolition of slavery timeline

★ Bandeirantes

★ Blackbirding

★ Classism

★ Compensated emancipation

★ Coolies

★ Corporate colonialism

★ Debt bondage

★ Fazendas

★ Freeborn

★ History of slavery

★ Indentured servant

★ International Year

★ Involuntary servitude

★ Master-slave dialectic

★ Sambo's Grave

★ Serfdom

★ Sexual slavery

★ Slave narrative

★ Slave rebellion

★
★ Roman Slave Revolts

★ Slavery at common law

★ Slave ship

★ Slave soldiers:

★
★ Janissary

★
★ Mamluk

★
★ Saqaliba

★ Subculture

★ Trafficking in human beings

★ Underclass

★ Unfree labour

★ Wage slavery

★ William Lynch Speech

★ Workhouse
;Slavery by region

★ Slavery in Mauritania

★ Slavery in Canada

★ Slavery in Japan

★ Slavery in Sudan

★ Arab slave trade

★ Slavery in antiquity

★ Slavery in medieval Europe

★ Slavery in Nazi Germany

★ Slavery in Soviet Union

★ Slavery in Modern Africa

★ African slave trade

★ Atlantic slave trade

★ Slavery in Asia

★ Coastwise slave trade

★ Islam and slavery

★ Swedish slave trade

★ History of slavery in the United States

★
★ Origins of the American Civil War

★
★ ''North Carolina v. Mann''

★
★ George Washington#Washington and slavery

★
★

★
★ United States National Slavery Museum
;Films

★ Alex Haley, ''Roots'', 1977 mini-series based on Haley's book

★ Owen 'Alik Shahadah, ''500 Years Later'', 2005

★ Haile Gerima, ''Sankofa'', 1993

★ Sergio Giral, ''Cimarron'', 1967

★ Marlon Brando, ''Burn!'', 1969

★ Sergio Giral, ''El Otro Francisco'' (The Other Francisco), 1975

★ Tomas Gutierrez Alea, ''La Ultima Cena (The Last Supper)'', 1976

★ Carlos Diegues, ''Quilombo'', 1984

★ Gene Hackman, ''Mississippi Burning'', 1988

★ Julie Dash, ''Daughters of the Dust'', 1991

★ (mockumentary/political drama)

★ Stanley Kubrick, ''Spartacus'', 1960

★ Jonathan Demme, ''Beloved'', 1998

★ Michael Apted, ''Amazing Grace'', 2006

★ Charles Burnett, ''Nightjohn'', 1996

★ Steven Spielberg, ''Amistad'', 1997

Footnotes

1. UN Chronicle | Slavery in the Twenty-First Century
2. BBC Millions 'forced into slavery'
3. The Abolition season on BBC World Service
4. Mauritania: Justice Initiative Hails Mauritania's New Anti-Slavery Law
5. Mauritanian MPs pass slavery law
6. The Shackles of Slavery in Niger
7. Born to be a slave in Niger
8. Encyclopædia Britannica Online - Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary - Slave
9. Encyclopædia Britannica Online - Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary - Slav
10. International Labour Organization definition
11. Regine Pernoud, ''Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths'' trans. Anne English Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), pp. 86-87
12. E.g., Tax Slavery
13. Spiegel, Marjorie. ''The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery'', New York: Mirror Books, 1996.
14. These are just a few jobs listed in the article titled "Archaeology and Slavery" in ''World Archaeology Magazine''
15. (Alexander, 50)
16. Alexander, 49)
17. Regine Pernoud, ''Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths'' trans. Anne English Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), pp. 85-96
18. Does Slavery Still Exist?
19. What the papers say, ''BBC News'', 2006-09-22
20. Blair 'sorrow' over slave trade, ''BBC News'', 2006-11-27
21. [5], ''BBC News'', 2007-02-25
22. Livingstone breaks down in tears at slave trade memorial
23. http://www.inu.net/skeptic/slavery.html

Bibliography

★ Fernand Braudel, ''Civilization and Capitalism'', vol. III: ''The Perspective of the World'' (1984, originally published in French, 1979.)

★ Davis, David Brion. ''The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823'' (1999)

★ Davis, David Brion. ''The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture'' (1988)

★ Finkelman, Paul. ''Encyclopedia of Slavery'' (1999)

★ Lal, K. S. ''Muslim Slave System in Medieval India'' (1994) [6] ISBN 81-85689-67-9

★ Gordon, M. ''Slavery in the Arab World'' (1989)

★ Nieboer, H. J. Slavery as an Industrial System (1910)

★ Postma, Johannes. ''The Atlantic Slave Trade'', (2003)

★ Rodriguez, Junius P., ed., ''The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery'' (1997)

★ Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. ''Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia'' (2007)

★ Shell, Robert Carl-Heinz ''Children Of Bondage: A Social History Of The Slave Society At The Cape Of Good Hope, 1652-1813'' (1994)

Primary sources

★ ''The Slavery Reader'', ed. by Rigas Doganis, Gad Heuman, James Walvin, Routledge 2003

★ [7] Mintz, S. ''Slavery Facts and Myths''

USA

★ Berlin, Ira. ''Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America'' (1999), most important recent survey

★ Boles, John. ''Black Southerners: 1619-1869'' (1983) brief survey

★ Engerman, Stanley L. ''Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor'' (1999)

★ Genovese Eugene D. ''Roll, Jordan Roll'' (1974), classic study

★
★ Richard H. King, "Marxism and the Slave South", ''American Quarterly'' 29 (1977), 117-31, a critique of Genovese

★ Escott, Paul D. "Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom" ''Journal of Southern History'', Vol. 67, 2001

★ Parish, Peter J. ''Slavery: History and Historians'' (1989)

★ Phillips, Ulrich B. ''American Negro Slavery:A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime'' (1918; paperback reprint 1966), southern white perspective

★ Phillips, Ulrich B. ''Life and Labor in the Old South'' (1929)

★ Sellers, James B. ''Slavery in Alabama'' (1950).

★ Sydnor, Charles S. ''Slavery in Mississippi'' (1933

★ Stampp, Kenneth M. ''The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South'' (1956), a rebuttal of U B Philipps

★ Vorenberg, Michael . ''Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment'' (2001)

★ Weinstein, Allen , Frank O. Gatell, and Lewis Sarasohn, eds., ''American Negro Slavery: A Modern Reader'', third ed. (1978)

★ Mintz, S. ''Digital History Slavery, Facts & Myths'' [8]

Slavery today

★ Tom Brass, Marcel van der Linden, and Jan Lucassen, ''Free and Unfree Labour''. Amsterdam: International Institute for Social History, 1993

★ Tom Brass, ''Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour: Case Studies and Debates'', London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999. 400 pages.

★ Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden, eds., ''Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues'', Bern: Peter Lang AG, 1997. 600 pages. A volume containing contributions by all the most important writers on modern forms of unfree labour.

★ Kevin Bales, ''Disposable People. New Slavery in the Global Economy'', Revised Edition, University of California Press 2004, ISBN 0-520-24384-6

★ Kevin Bales (ed.), ''Understanding Global Slavery Today. A Reader'', University of California Press 2005, ISBN 0-520-24507-5freak

★ Mende Nazer and Damien Lewis, ''Slave: My True Story'', ISBN 1-58648-212-2. Mende is a Nuba, captured at 12 years old. She was granted political asylum by the British government in 2003.

★ Gary Craig, Aline Gaus, Mick Wilkinson, Klara Skrivankova and Aidan McQuade: Contemporary slavery in the UK: Overview and key issues, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 26 Feb 2007, ISBN 978 1 85935 57
Somaly Mam Foundation

External links

;Historical

★ British Slaves on the Barbary Coast

★ Parliament & The British Slave Trade 1600 - 1807

★ Welcome to Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to Black History

★ Digital History - Slavery Fact Sheets

★ The West African Squadron and slave trade

★ African Holocaust

★ Transatlantic Slavery Gallery, Merseyside Maritime Museum

★ International Slavery Museum

★ British documents on slave holding and the slave trade, 1788-1793 (DjVu) and (a searchable facsimile at the University of Georgia Libraries)
;Current News Articles and Podcasts

★ BBC Radio programme directory on the topic of slavery List of subjects related and extensive links.

★ BBC "The Body Trade." Crime reports (recorded for listening on the web) Traffic in humans for sex, organs, labour and babies.
;Other

★ Anti Slavery International

★ Immaculata High School Child Slave Labor News
;Media

★ Sculpture marks abolition of slave trade anniversary