Slavery
system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Slavery is when a person is treated as the property of another person. This person is usually called a slave and the owner is called a slavemaster. It often means that slaves are forced to work, or else they will be punished by the law (if slavery is legal in that place) or by their master.
There is evidence that even before there was writing, there was slavery.[1] There have been different types of slavery, and they have been in almost all cultures and continents.[2] Some societies had laws about slavery, or had an economy that was built on it. Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome had many slaves.
During the 20th century, almost all countries made laws forbidding slavery. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that slavery is wrong. Slavery is now banned by international law.[3] Nevertheless, there are still different forms of slavery in some countries.[4] The Islamic Republic of Mauritania was the last country in the world to officially ban slavery.[5] In 2007, "under international pressure", its government passed a law allowing slaveholders to be prosecuted.[6]
However, in 2019, approximately 40 million people, were still enslaved throughout the world despite slavery being illegal. About 26% of these were children. In the modern world, more than half of the people who are slaves provide forced labour, usually in the factories and sweatshops of the private sector of a country's economy.[7]
In industrialised countries, human trafficking is a modern form of the slave trade. In non-industrialised countries, enslavement by debt bondage is a common form of enslaving a person.[8] Modern forms of slavery include captive domestic servants, people in forced marriages, and child soldiers.[9]
The English word "slave" comes from the medieval word for the Slavic peoples of Central Europe and Eastern Europe, because these were the last ethnic group to be captured and enslaved in Central Europe.[10][11] According to Adam Smith and Auguste Comte, a slave was mainly defined as a captive or prisoner of war. Slave-holders used to buy slaves at slave auctions. In many cases, slaves were not allowed rights.