Slavery, treaties and abolition

The irons of forced labor.

Getty Images / Studio Box

Text by: Arnaud Jouve Follow

10 mins

Each year, on December 2, the United Nations celebrates the “International Day for the Abolition of Slavery”, a day of commemoration and recognition to recall a crime of universal scope, which has relegated millions of human beings to rank of goods, and to pay tribute to the freedom fighters who have always fought for the assertion of human rights.

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No exhaustive inventory can account for the abomination of slavery and the horror of the slave trade.

As the Director General of

, Irina Bokova

wrote

, "

 "

Spartacus, the ancient hero

We do not know anything about the origin of slavery. Some say that in the first human societies, man thought only of physically eliminating his enemy and that it was not until much later, when he took prisoners, that he sometimes decided to make them slaves. his service. " 

”, says the 

. In contrast, in ancient Egypt (as later in Christian Europe), men, women or children sell themselves or are sold to pay off debts. The king of Babylon in the 18th century BC defined the value of a slave in the code of Hammurabi and considered it to be equivalent to a donkey, while in West Asia the code of the Hittites ( 1800 to 1400 BC) recognizes that the slave is a human being but of a lower class.

A condition against which have certainly rebelled many men whose stories have not reached us.

During the Roman Empire (between 27 BC and 476 AD), following multiple military conquests, the number of slaves became greater than that of free men.

The slaves are subjected to the worst treatment and many revolts break out.

The most famous hero of this time was the slave gladiator 

, who raised an army of slaves against Rome to free himself.

Its story will inspire many authors and multiple struggles.

The slave, "a sort of animated property"

The phenomenon of slavery is almost universal. We find traces of it in the past of many civilizations on all continents, as well in the sedentary pastoral societies of the Middle East as among the nomadic pastoralists of North America, as servants in China or as sailors in Scandinavia. The slave is considered as a servile labor force, anything can be asked of him, he totally belongs to a master as a good or a thing. Aristotle (Greek philosopher, 384 to 322 BC) defined the slave as " 

 ", his humanity has been reduced to the status of a commodity, his life no longer belongs to him and he is subject to his. master in a relationship of domination based on violence.

The profit economy will largely use slavery in all sectors of activity of great difficulty which require a large labor force, as in the mining sector (the silver mines of Laurion, exploited by Athens in the 5th century BC or the gold mines of the Ashanti kingdoms in 18th century Ghana).

But it is above all the plantation economy that will cause the largest transfers of labor in all of history to the detriment of the peoples of Africa.

Wars and Treaties

From Antiquity to the Middle Ages, the number of slaves increased in countries like Spain, Portugal and Italy mainly from the great maritime republics of the time like Genoa or Venice where many merchants operate. slaves. A period which will end in the 15th century in the West with serfdom (a feudal system where the person, "the serf", is attached to a land and depends on a lord) which will gradually replace slavery.

In the Arab-Muslim world, from the 7th century on, slavery was deeply rooted in mores. Slavs are transported to Muslim Spain. The Middle East and North Africa source their supplies from Africa, which supplies large contingents of slaves, who transit through the Sahara, the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea (estimated by historians between 5,000 and 10,000 slaves per year). Men are used primarily in the military or for domestic work, and women serve as sex slaves or concubines for harems. One of the most important slave revolts which took place in Iraq from 869 to 883 put an end to the massive exploitation of blacks in the Arab world. But this practice of using slaves, in other proportions, persisted for a long time. In the nineteenth century,Zanzibar became an important export market for slaves to the Persian Gulf: according to the sultanate, nearly 700,000 slaves passed through the island between 1830 and 1872.

The last slave market was closed in Morocco in 1920. Saudi Arabia did not abolish slavery until 1962 and it was not until 1981 that it was officially abolished in Mauritania. 

revealed, in a 1992 report, that slavery did not disappear in Mauritania or Sudan where children were still sold as slaves in 1993.

Since Antiquity, Africa has been plagued by multiple systems of the slave trade. From Pharaonic Egypt, to the trans-Saharan traffic, to the transatlantic slave trade, Africa was torn apart by numerous traffics fueled by internal wars, sources of prisoners subjected to slavery. The great Empires of Ghana (9th-11th century), Mali (13th-15th century) or Songhai (15th-16th century) all practiced slavery to varying degrees. The first emperor of the Empire of Mali, Soundiata Keïta prescribed to Kouroukan Fouga, at the beginning of the 13th century, his 

 (one of the oldest constitutions in the world) which advocates social peace in diversity, the inviolability of the human person, education, the integrity of the homeland, food security, freedom of expression and business , the abolition of slavery by raids and the prohibition of mistreatment of slaves.

But the charter will be called into question after his death and his commandments will then be forgotten.

The collapse of the Songhai Empire, which dominated West Africa until the 16th century, and internal wars between clans and royalty in sub-Saharan Africa will fuel the transatlantic trade then in the making.

The biggest deportation movement in history

The transatlantic slave trade and the slave trade in the Indian Ocean perpetrated by Europeans from the 15th century, in the Americas, in the Caribbean and in the Indian Ocean, against the African, Amerindian, Malagasy and Indian populations, recognized as crimes against humanity, were, as historian

sums it up 

, " 

".

For about four centuries, the slave trade was intellectually legitimized by the construction of a racist, anti-black ideology and legally by a murderous text, the “Black Code” of 1685. Its triangular trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas was the largest organized deportation movement in history. Millions of Africans have been torn from their homes to be deported to the New World with no possibility of return (from 11 to 16 million people, according to sources).

Almost 11%, on average, died during the voyage on the ships.

The Africans, considered more resistant than the Amerindians, were then sold to work in the plantations or as servants in the properties.

Families were often scattered, women were constantly exposed to rape by owners and all suffered ill-treatment, shackling, sometimes torture and murder.

Today, African Americans and the descendants of island slaves are still deeply affected by this painful past.

Resistance and struggles

There have been successful revolts. Most were carried out on the African coasts, because once embarked on the high seas, it was extremely rare. It is said that in 1539 some 109 slaves took control of a Portuguese ship, the

, but no more was heard of the ship. According to documents from the British maritime insurance company, Lloyd's, 1,053 ships were sunk in front of Africa, 17% of which were due to revolts, looting or insurrections, between 1689 and 1803.

In the Americas and the islands, numerous revolts marked these four centuries of domination. Some managed to escape (we called them "the maroons") and recreated societies in the image of their land of origin in isolated places (Amazonia, the Hauts de La Réunion). Others faced their oppressors. The main source of opposition to slavery will come from the slaves themselves. In 1791 a slave revolt began in Haiti that the whites could not quell. It will lead, on August 29, 1793, to the abolition of slavery on the island, proclaimed by the Commissioners of the Republic Sonthonax, member of the Society of Friends of Blacks, and Polverel, both endowed with extraordinary powers.

On February 4, 1794, the measure of the two commissioners was ratified by the Convention which extended it to all the French colonies.

However, in 1799, under pressure from the sugar traders, slavery was reestablished in 1802 by the First Consul Bonaparte.

The revolt of the Blacks that will follow through the Antilles will lead, on January 1, 1804, to the independence of Haiti which will be led by 

, a former slave of Saint-Domingue, comrade in arms of 

, descendant of black slaves, who will become one of the great figures of Haiti, of the anti-colonial and abolitionist movements.

The abolitionists

From the 18th century, the excesses of slavers provoked abolitionist reactions carried by many writers (Montaigne, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Marivaux ...) and economists (Adam Smith, Rossi) who attacked the very principle of the slavery. Its removal in England and France will take place in two stages. It will be first the prohibition of the slave trade (1807 for England, 1815 for France), then the emancipation of slaves (1833 for England, 1848 for France on the initiative of 

 who is will travel to the West Indies to proclaim definitively the abolition of slavery, decreed on March 4, 1848).

In the United States, anti-slavery sentiment intensified in 1831 with the publication of an abolitionist newspaper, 

, and by slave revolts led by Nat Turner that lasted until 1840, when many slaves escaped to the northern states to gain freedom. After the Civil War and after Denmark and the Netherlands abolished slavery in 1860, the United States incorporated this abolition into the 13th Amendment to its Constitution on January 31, 1865.

In this movement, international condemnations are multiplying to affirm the end of slavery.

The Brussels Colonial Conference, the League of Nations (SDN), the Saint-Germain-en-Laye Convention, the Geneva Slavery Convention, and

 of 10 December 1948 states in article 4: “ 

 "

Throughout the ages, men have fought against their condition as slaves and others have fought for their freedoms.

This International Day for the Abolition of Slavery pays tribute to them.

Our selection on the subject:

• To read :

→ Auscultating slavery America, with Ta-Nehisi Coates

→ The worlds of slavery: a comparative history

→ Guyana: the history of the Boni, from slavery to marronage

→ From abolition to modern slavery

• To listen :

→ In the footsteps of slavery

→ Former servants of a member of the Saudi royal family recount the hell they suffered

→ The new faces of “modern”

slavery → Slavery, colonialism, segregation: how to deal with inheritance?

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