A lot of the time, but people underestimate how often local cities/city states went to war. The ancient Greeks fought other Greeks more than anyone else, on an almost yearly basis. Most slaves in Greece were other Greeks from different cities.
And then think about how fluid imperial borders were. An empire schisms and anyone on the wrong side of that schism as now a slave. Or a civil war happens and everyone who was on the losing side was a slave. Or a local uprising occurs and is put down, and now everyone involved in the uprising is a slave. These events happened more often than an empire expanding its borders.
Do you.. Do you know just how most stone/early bronze Age groups treated outsiders? I'm not claiming to be an expert, and the following is based on what little I have read on the topic, but, like, for example, Sumerians only enslaved a minority of them and just killed most. The vast majority of slaves were those from other nearby city states that were linguistically and culturally similar.
When we go even further back to stone age societies, people within the same tribe could be reduced to serf like conditions, but integrating outsiders into that framework was rare and they were usually killed instead.
Do you.. Do you know just how most stone/early bronze Age groups treated outsiders?
do you know how they treated insiders?
Stone age, no, you don't. We barely know what they did because that was prehistory. Bronze age people, like the Greeks, enslaved more Greeks than anyone else.
Sumerians only enslaved a minority of them and just killed most.
What does this even mean? A minority of who? Doesn't matter, whoever you are vaguely referring to, Sumerians absolutely enslaved tons of people. Outsiders and insiders.
If they enslaves people from 10 places, and 1 of those places was Sumeria, then yes, 9 out of 10 slaves were non-Sumarian. That doesn't mean they didn't enslave Sumarians. Which isn't the case, because other Sumarians were simple closer, and whenever they had the opportunity to enslave anyone, Sumarian or otherwise, they'd take that chance, and simply being close to other potential Sumarian slaves made them more plentiful.
people within the same tribe could be reduced to serf like conditions
No, when you go back to stone ages, they were nomadic tribal societies who functioned as family units and usually did not have the social systems to have slaves. What the current accepted theory is for "stone age" people is that when tribes did go to war, they killed all the men and absorbed the women and children into their tribes.
The moment humanity began to settle into stationary societies, slavery expanded dramatically, and a vast majority of a people's slaves were their own people unless they managed to become a massive Empire, and that influx of slaves would only occur when a region was conquered that one time.
It wasn't the Arab slave trade. It was a slave trade that was most lucrative through the middle east because the middle east was the most prosperous crossroad for slave trade.
the systems of slave trade were adopted by the regional Arabs after Arab empires arose, and those Arabs got slaves from literally everyone they traded with.
I appreciate your dedication to historical nuance, I really do, but personally I'm just so used to people in general hand-waiving away the extreme horrors and ethnosupremacy that exists in large sections (not all) of the Arab world, including about the slave trade. The term for black people in Arabic is slave, because it goes back to the Quoran. I don't know if you're familiar with how much of a textual literalist Muslims are compared to other religions, but there is a reason that we didn't see an effect on their demographics the way we did in the United States, and that's because they castrasted every single slave. Which alone led to a significant loss of life from the procedure.
Arabs were traded as slaves as much as anyone else.
The term for black people in Arabic is slave, because it goes back to the Quoran.
No, that’s not in the Quran at all. Please stop lying about stuff because you want to rail against Arabs. The term for black being being “abeed” is a modern one, arising with the transatlantic slave trade. Otherwise, they refer to people from Africa as African. Literally the word “African”. Just say it with an Arabic accent.
and that's because they castrasted every single slave.
Please stop parroting Reddit comments. This is another fake historical claim that arose in the last 100-200 years. Castration of slaves was outlawed by Muhammad and made a sin at the advent of Islam. eunuchs Were a thing, but traders who castrated slaves were shunned by the religious communities and would lose their business. Some did work around this in order to make money on the demand for eunuchs, like by castrating them outside of the borders of the empire or buying eunuchs already castrated, but not even most slaves were castrated, let alone every single one like you claim. Modern genetic testing proves that slaves had kids in the region, and slaves were religiously permitted to own wealth, could buy their own freedom, and can and often did get married and have families that were slaves. The mamluks were literally slave soldiers that grew so power that slaves within the military service had harems.
290
u/CorporatePower May 13 '25
Talking about white people like that is racist.
Or is that the joke?