Re: Modern slavery
trindflo,
Please fact check me. I'm more than a little aghast at what I found.
I can't quite manage that. I don't have the facts, but I am a suspicious, cynical and somewhat argumentative man. When you're shocked by a figure from a modern campaign group / charity / political party / think tank you have to remember that shocking you is the whole point. There's an awful lot of campaigns out there, and they need to be heard above the noise. And not a few of them, on all sides politically speaking, are therefore willing to basically make their numbers up. And even more are willing to mess with the statistics until they're meaningless.
We've got the obvious problem of global population now being over 7 billion, when it was around 1 billion in, say, 1800. So ideally you'd like to compare in percentage terms. But even if there were only as many slaves, that would still be shocking, given that it's illegal almost everywhere now.
However, you notice they give figures on your first link for the Atlantic Slave Trade. Which was probably the ugliest example of slavery because something like a third of the people died in the crossing and it was tied up with racism in a such a horrible way - which lead to the slaves being treated so much worse. Whereas in Africa at the time, slavery was practised quite widely. But slaves were treated much better, and wouldn't be moved that far from where they originally lived. Also North African (Barbary pirates and others) slave traders were operating widely in the 17th Century - and before. They were sending ships to capture people from the coasts of France, Ireland and England for centuries, and selling them into slavery (mostly in the Ottoman Empire) - which was a big empire, and allowed slavery. They even had a slave army, the Janissaries, of moslty enslaved children from South Eastern Europe who were trained as a permanent fighting force. In 1800 Russia had a population of about 35 million, of whom about 50-80% were peasants - a large majority of who were serfs. Unfree tenant farmers, not allowed to leave the land they were on, and who could be bought and sold, with that land. My Chinese history isn't up to knowing about how widespread slavery was in China (banned 1910) or India (banned 1843). Western Europe had pretty much outlawed slavery by the end of the Medieval period - or it had died out. By the Early Modern (Tudor) period English courts wouldn't alllow slavery on common-law tradition (I don't know if there was actual leglislation). The Portuguese ambassador's slaves managed to run away during the reign of Elizabeth I, and were freed by an English court, much to his disgust. Ironically just at the point that some English traders and *ahem!* privateers (English Pirates? No! We don't have any of those!) were starting to join in the slave trade in the Caribbean. Plus all the native Caribbeans and South Americans who got enslaved - and weren't part of the Atlantic trade.
What was the actual number of enslaved people globally in 1800? It was in the tens of millions (just in the Russian Empire alone), but don't now if it would make the low hundreds of millions.
As a straight percentage of global population I'd strongly suspect that the most slaves ever was in classical Greek/Roman times. Although in Rome slaves could own property, and in fact own other slaves, and good masters were expected to free their more educated slaves and set them up with a business or trade as clients in the Roman patronage system. You might take a Greek slave to educate your children, in the expectation that you'd set him up in business when your kids had grown up - it was even possible to sell yourself into slavery to get money for your family, though a hell of a lot of Roman slaves were caputred after battles. Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul was estimated by Plutarch (a decade or two later) to have killed a million Gauls and led to the enslavement of another million.
I'm also rather suspicious about terms like "modern slavery". Because that suggests a bit too much wiggle-room in definitions, where they don't go back and use the same standards in the old figures. A medieval apprenticeship lasted 7 years, during which period you couldn't leave, work for anyone else or marry without your master's permission. But on the up-side you got pay, food and lodging, training, education and often the chance to join the master's business as an equal - or even take over from him. You could often marry into the family too. Not legal now, but not considered all that exploitative at the time - because the rewards were so good.
Finally let's look at World War II. Nazi Germany had the Organisation Todt, slave labourers from occupied territories. There were 1-2 million of them, plus a similar number in concentration camps being slowly worked to death producing goods for the SS, plus up to five million Russian prisoners of war who were mostly worked to death as well. The Soviet Union were also working a couple of million people to death at any one time in the Siberian Gulags. But a bit of quick searching when I thought of this suggests the numbers aren't enough to offset slavery being mostly banned in the 19th Century.
Rambling here, but I'd bet a small amount that in absolute numbers slavery probably peaked in the early 19th Century - and that the peak in percentage terms was probably in the classical period - and that 100 million is an over-estimate for now - but that the numbers now are depressingly high. I'm also fully prepared to be told I'm wrong by someone with proper figures - but I think I have good groundsn for my scepticism.