Many insist that slavery did not disappear, it would only change shape. And this is the view of those for whom wages are nothing more than a soft version of chains. Perhaps it could lose at least the racial connotation along the way…
Slavery is an ancient institution. It would exist from the first moment that a man realized he could impose his will on another. Its abolition in the last two centuries is one of the most extraordinary achievements of the modern era.
The link between slavery and the concept of race is less ancient. For the Romans, the typical slave was mostly a loser in war, regardless of skin color or geographic origin. For the Church then, a slave could be an infidel, but the possession of a Christian’s property by another was forbidden. With the explorations of Africa and the discovery of the Americas, the racial factor emerges, especially with the idea that the dark skin must represent the enduring curse of Noah to the younger son Cam and his descendants, of whom the color of the skin would have been a testimony of the sins committed by the ancestors. Others thought that slavery could provide a way of salvation,
The “slave” of the popular imagination is today a black African, to the point that it is difficult to conceive racial alternatives, but in a forgotten episode the enslavement of a large part of the white population of the United States was instead proposed to avoid the bloody Civil War that shook the country between 1861 and 1865. George Fitzhugh was an American social theorist — one of the fathers of sociology — who observed in his pre-war writings that: “” It is a pamphlet against white men to say they are not fit for slavery. … Take them young, train them, tame them, civilize them and they would become faithful and precious servants, like the British bought in large numbers through the system of debt servants from our colonial ancestors ”.
Debt servitude was a type of employment contract that characterized European emigration at the beginning. It was born to supply workers to the first British Caribbean and North American colonies, allowing European migrants to face the prohibitive expense of travel in exchange for their future work through contracts that can be transferred to third parties. Termination of the relationship by the migrant was considered a crime. Fitzhugh believed that capitalism inevitably created social inequality and that the oppressed could be better protected through subjugation. “If we could buy some Yankees as domestic servants, confining blacks to work in the fields, all disagreements over abolitionism would cease.” It wasn’t satire. Fitzhugh was a slave owner, southerner and “Virginia gentleman”,
Developing the theme in the 1857 book “Cannibals All”, I observe: “We conclude that 19 out of 20 individuals have a ‘natural and inalienable’ right to be cared for and protected, to have guardians, trustees, a teacher, a master; in other words, the right to be slaves ”. Instead, black American slaves were emancipated in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln. Brazil freed them in 1888. In 1980 the African state of Mauritania was the last country in the world to officially abolish all forms of slavery.
