Cross-Border Labor Mobility : Historical and Contemporary Perspectives [1st ed.] 9783030365059, 9783030365066

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Caf Dowlah

Cross-Border Labor Mobility Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Cross-Border Labor Mobility

Caf Dowlah

Cross-Border Labor Mobility Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Caf Dowlah New York City, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-36505-9 ISBN 978-3-030-36506-6  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36506-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

The pages that follow provide the fascinating story of global human mobility from the onset of the earliest civilizations. It has been a daunting task—mountainous volumes of material had to be scrutinized to glean lessons from the past, and great efforts were made to present those in a single volume. The objective was to cover the third leg of the contemporary phase of economic globalization, that is, the mobility of labor across national borders. I have written about the other two legs of economic globalization before: international trade was covered in Backwaters of Global Prosperity (Praeger, 2004) and International Trade, Competitive Advantage and Developing Countries (Routledge, 2016); and global flows of capital were considered in Transformations of Global Prosperity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). With this, I finally complete my inquiry into the subject of economic globalization. I am grateful to numerous authors and scholars from around the world whose analytical as well as descriptive works left indelible marks in my mind and helped shape my own ideas and lines of inquiry. While every effort has been made to acknowledge such contributions it is inevitable that many will not be named here. Some scholars, such as David Brion Davis, Seymour Drescher, David Eltis, Robert William Fogel, Stanley L. Engerman, Orlando Patterson, had such a profound effect on my intellectual pursuits that I dedicate this book to them. I would like to thank Professor Gary Haufbauer of the Petersen Institute of International Economics for graciously reviewing several v

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PREFACE

chapters of this book and providing me with useful insights. I am also grateful to several anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, whose critical comments and suggestions greatly contributed to the reorganization and improvement of the book. A word of thanks is also due to James Cockayne and Julie Oppermann of the Center for Policy Research of the United Nations University, New York. They also graciously reviewed several chapters of this book in connection with the Modern Slavery Project of the United Nations, with which I am currently associated as a consultant. I also wish to thank some of my former colleagues at the City University of New York with whom I had many discussions on various topics considered in this book. Among them, Professors Paul Marchese and Michael Altimari deserve a special mention. I also owe very special thanks to Dr. Rashid Faruqee of the World Bank for similar discussions. My sons—Jheshan and Dilshan—also deserve thanks for their support to my work on this project. I would also like to thank Rachel Sangster, Tula Weis, Wyndham Hacket Pain, and Sooryadeepth Jayakrishnan of Palgrave Macmillan for their support during the publication process. It has been a thrilling but intellectually challenging research work—I leave it to the readers to judge its merit. Forest Hills, NY, USA October 10, 2019

Caf Dowlah Ph.D.

Contents

1 Introduction 1 2

Global Human Migration: An Overview 17

3

Slavery During Ancient and Medieval Periods 43

4

Slavery in the New World: The Saga of the Amerindians 61

5

Slavery in the New World: The Saga of Black Africans 81

6

Indentured Servitude: The Saga of the Indians and the Chinese 119

7

Temporary Cross-Border Labor Mobility Since World War I 141

8

Cross-Border Labor Mobility: Europe 169

9

Cross-Border Labor Mobility: The United States 203

10 Cross-Border Labor Mobility: The Twenty First Century 243

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CONTENTS

11 Cross-Border Labor Mobility: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Findings 277 Index 317

List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

Number of embarked and disembarked African slaves between 1501 and 1866 Regions where African slaves landed between 1501 and 1875 Transatlantic slave trade numbers between 1501 and 1875 Share of European colonists in the transatlantic slave trade in the mid eighteenth century Percentage share of the Atlantic slave trade held by each colonial power between 1501 and 1875 Slave population percentages in the New World in 1770 African slave populations in the Caribbean islands between 1650 and 1780 Number of Indian indentured servants sent abroad, 1834 and 1937 (thousands) Exports of Indian indentured servants by country Share of guestworkers in employment in selected European countries in 1976 Flow of guestworkers into the United States from Mexico and the West Indies between 1942 and 1979 Percentage of foreign workers in Gulf country workforces between 1975 and 2008 Share of female migrants in Gulf country populations for selected years between 1990 and 2017 Inflow of permanent immigrants to major European Union countries between 2007 and 2015 Number of petitions filed with the European Union during the refugee crisis of 2014–2016

86 88 88 89 90 93 93 126 127 151 155 159 161 184 189 ix

x 

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 8.5 Fig. 8.6 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4 Fig. 9.5 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 10.4 Fig. 10.5 Fig. 10.6 Fig. 10.7 Fig. 10.8 Fig. 10.9

Number of pending asylum applications in the European Union between 2014 and 2018 Number of third country nationals returned from the European Union between 2013 and 2017 Estimated number of illegal migrants in the European Union between 2009 and 2017 European countries with the highest Muslim populations Number of people who obtained legal permanent residency in the United States from various regions of the world between 2008 and 2017 Number of people who obtained legal permanent residency in the United States between 1820 and 2017 Foreign-born percentage of the US population between 1881 and 2017 Net international migration to the United States between 1790 and 2013 Border apprehensions in the United States (total and southwest border) between 1960 and 2018 Number of international migrants between 1970 and 2017 Inflow of foreigners to selected countries between 2015 and 2016 Inflow of permanent immigrants to major OECD countries between 2007 and 2015 (numbers in thousands) Inflow of international students to major developed countries between 2008 and 2015 (numbers in thousands) Number of asylum seekers for selected developed countries in 2017 Share of foreign-born people in the populations of developed countries between 2007 and 2017 Share of trafficking-in-persons victims in global forced labor between 2007 and 2016 Prosecutions and convictions of human traffickers around the world between 2011 and 2016 Global remittance inflows for the top 10 countries

189 190 192 197 222 224 226 227 236 246 246 248 248 249 249 256 263 269

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4 Table 5.5 Table 5.6 Table 5.7 Table 5.8

Large-scale slavery systems around the world during ancient and medieval periods 49 The shifting stance of the Spanish Crown on Amerindian slavery 67 Estimated number of Amerindian slaves in the Americas between 1492 and 1900 (numbers given are in thousands) 71 Southern Native Americans sold by the British slave trade between 1670 and 1715 72 Regional disembarkation of African slaves between 1501 and 1575 87 Slave trade numbers and the percentage share of the transatlantic slave trade held by colonial powers between 1501 and 1875 91 Net migration of blacks and whites to the British West Indies between 1650 and 1780 92 Data summarizing the shipment of African slaves between 1501 and 1775 94 Proportion of blacks in the British American colonies between 1630 and 1770 (percent) 96 Estimated profits for selected branches of the transatlantic slave trade between 1757 and 1850 106 Cost and profit per slave in the illegal slave trade for selected regions between 1826 and 1850 106 Sugar exports from the British West Indies in 1810 and 1830 108

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 5.9 Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 7.4 Table 7.5 Table 8.1 Table 8.2 Table 8.3 Table 8.4 Table 8.5 Table 8.6 Table 8.7 Table 9.1 Table 9.2 Table 9.3 Table 9.4

Cotton output and exports per slave in the United States between 1801 and 1850 113 Estimated labor migration from India and returns, 1834–1937 (numbers in thousands) 125 Estimated number of indentured servants and their destinations in Colonial British America between 1650 and 1780 (distribution in percent) 128 Estimated numbers of Chinese indentured servants in California in 1855 133 Labor migration from Maghreb countries to France between 1946 and 1968 149 Guestworkers in France and West Germany in 1977 (as a percentage of the total workforce) 150 Guestworkers admitted to the United States during 1942–1979 154 Estimates of migrant workers in Arab countries in 1980 158 International migrants stock as a percentage of the total population of GCC Countries, 1990–2017 160 Main destinations for Central and Eastern European migrants in the European Union in 2016 (numbers in thousands) 177 Countries with the largest international migrant populations in 2000 183 Foreign populations in Southern European countries in 1991 and 2006 (numbers in thousands) 183 Assignment of European Blue Cards between 2012 and 2017 185 Asylum applications to the European Union between 2014 and 2016 188 Estimated illegal populations in the European Union between 2009 and 2017 193 Muslim migration to European countries between 2010 and 2016 195 Progression of race/ethnicity composition in the United States for selected years between 1990 and 2014 206 Lawful permanent resident status granted by region and country of last residence between 1820 and 2013 208 European immigration to the United States between 1880 and 1914 211 Flows of legal immigrants to the United States between 1971 and 1990 220

LIST OF TABLES  

Table 9.5 Table 9.6 Table 9.7 Table 9.8 Table 9.9 Table 9.10 Table 9.11 Table 10.1 Table 10.2 Table 10.3 Table 10.4 Table 10.5 Table 10.6 Table 10.7 Table 10.8 Table 10.9 Table 11.1 Table 11.2

xiii

Number of people obtaining lawful permanent resident status by type and major class of admission for fiscal years from 2008 to 2017 223 Net international migration to the United States and population growth per decade between 1790 and 2010 225 The filing of H-1B petitions and acceptance rates in the United States between 2014 and 2018 226 Estimates of illegal immigrants in the United States for 2007 and 2010 (millions) 231 Estimates of unauthorized Immigrants in the United States between 2012 and 2016 232 Estimates of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in the United States in 2018 233 Illegal alien apprehensions throughout the United States, 1960–2018 235 Top-10 destination for international migrants in 2000 and 2017 (in millions) 249 Top-10 countries with the largest share of foreign-born people in 2000 and 2017 (in percent) 250 International migrant stock as a percentage of the total population of GCC countries between 1990 and 2017 253 Global estimates of human trafficking in 2016 254 Annual profit from forced sexual exploitation 258 Empirical findings on official corruption in trafficking in persons around the world between 2003 and 2019 259 Remittance inflows to low-to-middle-income regions of the world between 2010 and 2017 267 Top-10 remittance-receiving countries in the world between 2000 and 2017 268 Top-10 remittance-sending countries in the world between 2000 and 2015 270 Theories of immigration across disciplines 292 Push and pull factors for global migration 300

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This book is about the mobility of labor across national borders—no matter whether it is legal or illegal, temporary or permanent, voluntary or forced, regional or global. Although sounds paradoxical, the book focuses on a very small segment of the global population. After all, even in this age of twenty-first century globalization, only about 3.3 percent of the world’s population live in a country they were not born in, compared with 2.3 percent in 1970.1 In the last 50 years, the number of worldwide migrants—both short-term and long-term—has increased by just 1 percent, while during the same period, the share of international trade—goods and services crossing national borders—in global output has more than doubled2; and the amount of foreign investment—capital moving across national borders—increased more than 30 times.3

1 For example, in 2015, more than 740 million people migrated within their native countries, while 257 million moved across national borders (IOM 2017). Also see Fig. 1 in Chapter 10 in this book for a historical progression of cross-border labor mobility since 1970. 2 During the same period (1970–2017), the share of exports in global gross domestic product increased from 13.6 to 30 percent, and the share of exports increased from 13.7 to 28.5 percent. See World Bank National Accounts Data and OECD National Accounts Data Files. Available from: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ne.exp.gnfs.zs. 3 Between 1980 and 2015, global foreign direct investment (FDI) flows increased from $854 billion to $1.76 trillion—more than a 32-fold increase over 35 years. For further details see Dowlah (2018, 23–25).

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Dowlah, Cross-Border Labor Mobility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36506-6_1

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2  C. DOWLAH

Still not a single day goes by when passionate debate and controversy about immigration do not dominate global media. That people around the world are so concerned with mobility of people across national borders, while remaining greatly comfortable with a many-fold increase in the mobility of foreign goods and capital to their countries, discernibly suggests that they view importing goods or capital from abroad from economic perspectives, while considering the matter of accepting foreigners in their midst from non-economic perspectives. Numerous surveys in developed countries indicate that most people believe in economic globalization in everything but labor (Pritchett 2006; Dowlah 2016, 216–218).4 People in developed countries however have valid reasons to be concerned with cross-border labor mobility. In recent decades, about 70 percent of all immigrants across the world have migrated to developed countries, something that has already raised the share of international migrants in their populations from 9.6 percent in 1970 to 14 percent in 2017—in some of these countries the share has reached between 20 and 25 percent (UNDESA 2017). On top of that, there has also been a phenomenal rise in forced migration, sex trafficking, illegal migration, and political refugees in many of these countries (ILO 2017; WFF 2018; World Bank 2018b). At the same time, most international migrants originate from developing countries, and available literature suggests that usually those with a tertiary education and those that are more capable move abroad, often causing brain-drain, thus disserving their native economies while enriching host developed countries (Bhagwati 1979; Faini 2007; Nayyer 2008; Lucas 2005; Batista et al. 2007). International migration, which has been almost synonymous with the mobility of labor across national borders for many centuries, thus raises many complex questions for labor itself, as well as for l­abor-sending and labor-receiving countries, and the world economy at large. To understand the ramifications and consequences of such a complex phenomenon, 4 Most surveys in developed countries routinely find more than 50 percent of native populations opposed to immigration. Such sentiments are on the rise throughout Europe— especially in countries with sizeable immigrant populations, such as the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Italy. Such feelings have been galvanized since the massacre in Norway in 2011, the European refugee crisis of 2014–2016, and Brexit in the United Kingdom since 1917. In the United States, anti-immigrant feelings soared following the September 11 attack. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 has also often been attributed to rising anti-immigrant sentiments in the country. For further details see Bonafazi and Corraado (2008), Lynch and Simon (2003), Schain (2008), and Pew Research Center (2017).

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

this book’s journey begins with the beginning of human mobility itself. Available literature suggests that human beings have been on the move since the time immemorial. They moved for desirable land, income, security, and so forth, and populated every corner of the earth about 10,000 years ago, and have propelled human civilizations and urbanizations throughout the centuries ever since (Manning 2013; Bogucki 1999; Cavalli-Sfroza et al. 1994; Olson 2003). The mobility of humans across national borders however has been occurring only since the time when humans settled permanently, by occupying geographical territories, and organized themselves into nations or states. As the origin of rudimentary forms of nations or states can be traced to ancient civilizations, cross-border labor mobility must have been occurring for several thousand years now. Providing a credible account of the mobility of humans for all this time is obviously a daunting task. Following a brief sketch of global human migration since prehistoric times in Chapter 2, this study rather makes an effort to cover only the major epochs or episodes of such mobility that have left indelible marks in world history since the beginning of the early modern era.5 This book’s main focus is however on cross-border mobility of labor—workers crossing national borders to work and live in a foreign land, which is often called the third leg of economic globalization.6 In economic literature, human labor—the physical and mental services delivered by a natural person for the production of goods and services— is the most fundamental factor of production. Capital, which often controls labor, is nothing but a share of the fruits of labor that legitimately or illegitimately end up in the hands of entrepreneurs—the owners of capital. Capital is thus nothing but past labor.

5 There is no specific timeline that separates the early modern era from the modern era. Most researchers however trace the beginning of the early modern era to Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the Americas in the 1490s, and the modern era to the Industrial Revolution or the American Revolution. For this study, the early modern era starts with Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, and the modern era in the 1800s when steam engines and other innovative technologies revolutionized transport and communication systems heralding the era of industrialization. 6 The other legs of the contemporary phase of economic globalization are mobility of capital (foreign direct investment and global value chains) and international trade. This author has covered the other two legs of economic globalization before. See Dowlah (2016, 2018).

4  C. DOWLAH

Human labor is also very unique in the sense that while entrepreneurs— the owners of capital—can ship away their outputs to maximize profits or utility, in most cases workers must move along with their labor, because most of the labor, whether physical or mental, must be delivered in person (Sykes 1995). That in turn leads to another paradox of the contemporary world—due to aging populations and an unwillingness of the labor force to undertake dirty, dangerous, and degrading jobs, developed countries are in dire need of imported workers from poorer parts of the world, while at the same time knowing that most people cannot stand foreigners in their midst (Pritchett 2006; Llosa 2013; Schain 2008). Both these tensions—the tension in respect to terms of labor, how to split the fruits of labor between the owners of labor and the owners of capital, and the tension pertaining to the terms of making workers (both natives and foreigners) deliver labor as free or unfree labor—have prevailed throughout history (Engarman 1976; Drescher 1987). As the drive for capital accumulation and economic growth squarely depended on such tensions, numerous experiments have been made throughout history to squeeze the workers’ share of profits and enlarge the share of those owning capital—often such drives led to a complete denial of workers’ freedom to negotiate terms of labor, or to sell labor to the highest bidder on their terms (Potts 1990; Patterson 1982).

Prevalence of Coerced Labor As a result, not free labor, but coerced labor—labor delivered under force or duress, lacking free consent—had been extremely common throughout world history. In ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, for example, there were more than 100,000 slaves—twice the number of the free adult population (Lord 2013; Fisher 2014). Even in 1772, out of the estimated 775 million people on earth, only 33 million, or just about 4 percent of the global population, had freedom (Drescher 1987, 17).7 The degree, magnitude, and longevity of coercion—the scale of commodification and dehumanization of workers for the purposes of

7 Drescher (1987, 17) attributes this statement to the “political arithmetician’s bird’s eye survey of slavery with quantitative precision” by the English thinker Arthur Young (1741– 1820), who branded all people in all of Asia, Africa, most of the Americas, and Southeastern Europe as slaves.

1 INTRODUCTION 

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production and creation of wealth—however varied throughout the ages (Patterson 1982; Davis 2006; Wright 2017). Some of the major forms of coerced labor that dominated world history up until the first half of the twentieth century had been known as slavery, serfdom, and indentured servitude, each having their own economic, social, and political characteristics and ramifications. Slavery and serfdom—that represented extreme forms of coercion and existed since ancient times—were officially abolished only in the nineteenth century.8 Under both systems, masters had the right to exploit labor not only from the slave or serf, but also from their descendants. While slaves had no rights to land, serfs were tied to their land, enjoyed greater freedom than slaves, and were allowed to engage in their own economic activities, such as handicrafts and woodworking (Kolchin 1996; Moon 2002; Forsythe 2009). Indentured labor, which prevailed in medieval Europe and was adopted by colonial powers in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, continued in different parts of the world until the first half of the twentieth century. Indentured servitude generally involved a less severe form of coercion than slavery and serfdom, under which workers theoretically lost freedom temporarily and were granted freedom back after the end of a specified period of servitude (Galenson 1981; Engarman 1976; Goordrich 1932; Tinker 1974).

The Discourses on Coerced Labor Coerced labor also received widespread validation throughout history. Almost all societies around the world practiced it—albeit some more extensively than others. It has indeed been so extensive that all humans alive in the world today are descendants of either slave owners or slaves— often slaves and those who dominated them belonged to the same tribe or ethnic group (Miers and Kopytoff 1977; Watson 1980). There is no dispute that Sumerians enslaved Sumerians, Greeks enslaved Greeks, Christians enslaved Christians, Muslims enslaved Muslims, Jews enslaved Jews, Chinese enslaved Chinese, Indians enslaved Indians, Amerindians enslaved Amerindians, and Africans enslaved Africans. 8 The traditional form of slavery was officially abolished in the British Empire in 1833, in the French colonial empire in 1794, and in the United States in 1865. Serfdom was abolished in the Austrian Empire in 1781, in Denmark in 1788, and in Imperial Russia in 1861.

6  C. DOWLAH

Ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, for example, viewed the master and slave relationship as part of a vast cosmic scheme in which irrational nature was ordered and controlled by an intelligent and purposeful authority. Similar viewpoints were expressed by many famous philosophers, religious leaders, and others, even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.9 It was however the clash between two diametrically opposed political and economic ideologies, championed by Adam Smith (1723–1790) and Karl Marx (1818–1983), that propelled the debate to the center stage of global discourse in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. Adam Smith (1776), a moral philosopher, essentially viewed humans as commercial animals who make a living by selling their time and toil for the best price available. In Smith’s world of free markets, a laborer is presumably free to sell his labor to the best bidder, and he does so in his self-interest. A worker exchanges labor for income that may help him achieve greater control over his life, because the alternative of not exchanging labor might well be poverty or starvation. Smith viewed coerced labor as inefficient and detrimental to innovation, and envisaged that the work done by free labor would be cheaper in the end compared with work done by slaves. Smith even castigated that “it was only jailbirds and flotsam of European society who became the master of slaves” (cited in Drescher 1987, 17). Karl Marx (1973), on the other hand, saw two essential aspects in labor—one being ‘labor power,’ the capacity to do work, and the other being “labor, the actual physical act of working. To him, labor power was a commodity that a human being owns in his living body and can sell on his own account or be forced to sell under some forms of coercion or manipulation. To Marx, the actual labor takes place when the worker uses this labor power” to produce something. Marx believed that historically labor had been in chains—controlled and exploited by entrepreneurs (owners of capital) in their pursuit of profit, capital accumulation, and industrialization. Historical records suggest that labor markets around the world had hardly been symmetrical—they rather vacillated along the polar extremes envisioned by Smith and Marx. For the better part of world history however labor has been subjected to exploitation and coercion by owners of 9 Explained in further detail in Chapter 5. See also Davis (2006, 55), Peterson (1982), and Lord (2013).

1 INTRODUCTION 

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capital. Often workers lacked the freedom to sell their labor to their bidder of choice, often they were coerced into selling labor unwillingly, and often they themselves were traded as commodities or had to surrender their fundamental human rights either temporarily or permanently (Potts 1990). As a result, coerced labor, in one form or another, not free labor, had underpinned all historical processes of capitalist accumulation, industrialization, and colonialization that had dominated the world since the fifteenth century, as every continent and every society on earth had been drawn into the world market of labor. Worse still, the predominance of slavery and other forms of coerced labor increased further with almost all watershed moments and epochs in human history and thrived most in those areas and epochs where conventional wisdom would have expected it the least (Patterson 1982).

Transformation of Global Division of Labor By the eighteenth century, the processes of European capital accumulation, colonization, and industrialization that were set in motion since Columbus’s discovery of the New World, had dramatically altered the world economy. While Western colonial powers mobilized coerced workers across the world temporally and geographically for industrialization and capital accumulation,10 the rest of the world remained mired in agricultural backwardness and colonial subjugation, giving rise to a bifurcated international division of labor under which the industrialized West exported industrial goods, while the agricultural East supplied agricultural raw materials (Frank 1978). While Adam Smith and his followers attributed the success of Western industrialization to the miracle of capitalism, Karl Marx and his followers argued that massive industrialization of the West was sustained by an international division of labor, under which colonial powers ensured lower prices for raw materials obtained from the East, and comparatively higher prices for manufactured goods sold by colonial powers in captive colonial markets (Wallerstein 1979; Antonio 2003). 10 Industrialization swept through Western countries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—the United Kingdom achieved industrialization between 1783 and 1802, France between 1830 and 1860, Belgium between 1833 and 1860, the United States between 1843 and 1860, Germany between 1850 and 1873, and Sweden between 1868 and 1890. For further details see Rostow (1960).

8  C. DOWLAH

Empirical evidence also suggests that even in 1939, immediately before WWII, more than 70 percent of global manufacturing was concentrated in just four countries—Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States—when less than one dozen countries produced about 90 percent of global manufacturing output. About two-thirds of manufacturing output was exported to former colonies, who also supplied about four-fifths of the primary products to industrialized developed countries (Baldwin 2012). After WWII however the international division of labor that underpinned sustained expansion of the industrialization of colonial powers for several hundred years faced a major blow as dozens of former colonies had gained independence effectively undercutting hitherto secured sources of raw materials and captive markets for Western industrial goods. Another major jolt to the international division of labor came in the late 1970s, when confronting declining profitability, multinational enterprises (MNEs)—by then almost entirely owned by the West—began to relocate some of their low-cost, labor-intensive manufacturing processes to peripheral countries, propelling the rapid industrialization of the Asian Tigers—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea (Helpman and Krugman 1985; Dowlah 2018, 7–23; Twomey 2000). The process cemented further in the late 1980s as the forces of economic globalization received momentum with the relatively free movement of capital across national borders. Western MNEs then began to roam freely in search of low-cost production, efficiency, and profits without much impediment from nation-states, ushering in a new pattern of international division of labor and specialization which resulted in an increasing concentration of research and development activities in advanced developed countries, while developing countries were ended up as a vast reservoir of cheap and lower skilled labor (Gilpin 1986). In the 1990s, revolutions in information and communication technology along with a sharp reduction in transportation costs, propelled a massive expansion in offshoring and outsourcing activities by Western MNEs— increasingly more and more production tasks were shipped to developing countries under evolving global value chains (GVCs). New ways of communication and storage, fast and secure transmission, and delivery of codifiable outputs made possible the fragmentation of production and relocation of many production stages to low-wage developing countries that brought huge cost savings and productivity gains for MNEs (Amador and Cabral 2016; Antras and Rossi-Hansberg 2009; Gereffi 1994; Dowlah 2018).

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The new global division of labor has opened opportunities for developing countries to participate in production stages that were unavailable to them before. Previously they had access to only unskilled tasks, but with the GVCs, medium- and even high-skilled tasks also made available to them. The new international division of labor has thus phenomenally increased internationally contestable tasks in an increasingly globalizing world economy. As production stages move abroad and MNEs hire more and more foreign labor for their outsourcing and offshoring operations, that, in turn, makes unskilled and low-skilled workers in advanced countries more vulnerable to unemployment and lower wages. That, in turn, has created xenophobia, particularly against foreign workers, in many advanced countries (Baldwin 2012; Kowalski 2015; Dowlah 2018, 307–376).

Trends in Global Labor Migration Coinciding with the transformation of the global economy and international division of labor, the nature of migration of labor around the world has also been changing dramatically. Demand for migrant labor has been increasing in developed countries where native populations have been aging, many workers are unwilling to take up jobs in certain areas of employment, and not many workers with the right kind of technical skills are available (Basu 2016; Autor 2015). At the same time, being pushed by poverty, a meteoritic rise in the population, a lack of employment opportunities, and overall economic backwardness, millions of people in developing countries are willing to move abroad to capture available opportunities (World Bank 2018a). Migration of labor and the arrangements under which they migrate has thus emerged as a critical factor in understanding the modern economy as well as modern international division of labor. By the turn of the twentieth century, the forces of industrialization and colonization brought labor from every continent and almost every corner of earth into the world economy. Between 1800 and 1930, approximately 50 million Europeans moved to the Americas alone as free labor and indentured servants. Then, between 1830 and 1930, European colonial powers transported roughly 30–40 million Indian and 10–15 million Chinese indentured workers to their colonies across the world. This triple wave of migration, along with migrant labor from other parts of the world, such as Africa, the Middle East, Japan, and Northeastern Europe, produced more than 150 million labor migrants between 1800 and 1930 (Ueda 2007; Masseys et al. 1998).

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Then, during the two World Wars, all colonial powers—the British, the French, and the Germans—used forced labor extensively in borderland and colonial zones—when millions of Africans and Asians were used as coolies (Colley 2002; Potts 1990). Since WWI, the world also witnessed a sea change in the immigration policies of major developed countries. In the aftermath of WWI, the labor-scarce New World as well as all colonial powers of Europe, who actively had encouraged and even coerced and publicly subsidized migration throughout the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries, moved decisively to restrict immigration (Hutton and Williamson 2008; Mueller 1989). The pendulum swung again in the aftermath of WWII, when developed countries opened their doors to millions of migrant guestworkers to meet the rapidly growing labor demand for post-war reconstruction and subsequent economic booms, and institutionalized guestworker programs continued in the United States up to the early 1960s and in Northwestern Europe up to the early 1970s (Masseys et al. 1998). Cross-border mobility of labor further intensified following the collapse of the European colonies and the emergence of scores of independent states in the 1950s; the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s; and from the phenomenal rise in the migration of refugees, forced migration, and ­illegal migration, especially since the 1970s. Since WWII, the major destination of outward labor migration has been the United States and Europe. Even now a new immigrant arrives in the United States every 34 seconds.11 Historically, Europe had been a major source of labor emigration, but since WWII it has emerged as one of the great centers of labor migration from both within and outside its borders. In Europe, since 1992, net immigration has been more important as a source of population increase than natural change.12 In the meantime, in the early 1970s, the oil-exporting Gulf Region had emerged as another major destination for immigrant labor in search of remittance. In 2017, the foreign-born population comprised

11 See https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/new-years-population. html, accessed on February 17, 2019. 12 Net migration rate reflects the difference in number of immigrants and emigrants per 1000 of the population—a positive net immigration rate represents more people entering the country than leaving, while a negative rate represents more people leaving than entering.

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88 percent in the United Arab Emirates, 65 percent in Qatar, 56 percent in Kuwait, 48 percent in Bahrain, and 37 percent in Saudi Arabia (UN-DESA 2017). In the early 1990s emerged what is being called ‘modern slavery’—forced migration of people for forced labor, forced marriage, and commercial sexual exploitation. The contemporary phase of slavery however does not involve physically owning other people as slaves, but exploiting and controlling labor through coercion, dehumanizing and commoditizing individuals as property, and physically or mentally constraining them, preventing their freedom of movement. In 2016, around 40 million people were victims of modern slavery around the world (ILO 2017; Dowlah 2019).

Organization of the Book As the broad sketch outlined earlier indicates, this book considers the cross-border labor mobility of the major epochs and episodes of world history—stretching from ancient slavery to modern-day slavery. The book analyzes the underlying economic and political forces and dynamics that shaped such epochs and episodes from the vantage points of both theoretical underpinnings and empirical findings, from the perspectives of both workers and employers, as well as from the standpoints of labor-sending and labor-receiving countries. The treatise begins its journey with the beginning of human civilization itself. Chapter 2 explains how Homo sapiens moved across the world in the course of the last three and half millennia, how sometimes they moved freely to improve their own lot, and how sometimes they were coerced to move to improve the lot of others. Chapter 3 explores the unbroken sweep of slavery from the time of ancient civilizations to the end of the medieval period. Chapters 4 and 5 cover two of the most important episodes of slavery in world history— the saga of the largely unexplored slavery of Amerindians during the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, and the well-explored slavery of the Africans during the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Chapter 6 covers the indentured servitude of millions of Indians and Chinese in European colonies following the abolition of slavery around the world and exhaustion of slave supplies from Africa. Chapter 7 covers forced labor mobilized by colonial powers during the World Wars following the abolition of indentured servitude, the

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guestworker programs pursued by the United States and Northwestern European countries following WWII, and the temporary migration of labor for remittance to the oil-exporting Gulf Region since the 1970s. Chapters 8 and 9 cover cross-border labor mobility in the context of two of the largest destinations of migrant labor in the post-WWII period—the United States and Europe—focusing on both the economics and politics of the immigration policies and practices of these countries in respect to both permanent and temporary, as well as legal and illegal, migration. Chapter 10 covers the contemporary phase of cross-border labor mobility focusing on developments since the dawn of the twenty-first century. The chapter provides a broad sketch of contemporary trends and patterns of both permanent and temporary migration around the world, and also examines the part of modern-day slavery that involves cross-border labor mobility, such as forced migration and the trafficking of people for commercial sexual exploitation. Chapter 11 explores major cross-disciplinary theories of c­ross-border mobility, and examines the major empirical findings on the effects of cross-border labor mobility on wages, unemployment, brain-drain, and welfare in the context of both labor-sending and labor-receiving countries.

References Amador, J., & Cabral, S. (2016). Global Value Chains: A Survey of Drivers and Measures. Journal of Economic Surveys, 30(2), 278–301. Antonio, R. (Ed.). (2003). Globalization and Colonialism: The New International Division of Labor. In R. Antonio (Ed.), Marx and Modernity: Key Readings and Commentary (Part 6). London: Blackwell. Antras, P., & Rossi-Hansberg, E. (2009). Organization and Trade. Annual Review of Economics, 1, 43–64. Autor, D. (2015). Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(3), 3–30. Baldwin, R. (2012). Global Supply Chains: Why They Emerged, Why They Matter, and Where They Are Going (Working Paper FGI-2012-1). Fung Global Institute. Basu, K. (2016). Globalization of Labor Markets and the Growth Prospects of Nations (Policy Research Working Paper 7590). Washington, DC: World Bank. Batista, C., Lacuest, A., & Vicente, P. (2007). Brain Drain or Brain Gain? Micro Evidence from an African Success Story (Discussion Paper No. 3035). Bonn, Germany: Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).

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Bhagwati, J. (1979). International Migration of the Highly-Skilled: Economics Ethics and Taxes. Third World Quarterly, 1(3), 17–30. Bogucki, P. (1999). The Origin of Human Society. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Bonifazi, C., Okólski, M., Schoorl, J., & Simon, P. (2008). International Immigration in Europe. Amesterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Cavalli-Sfroza, L., Menozzi, P., & Piazza, A. (1994). The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Colley, L. (2002). Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850. New York: Anchor Books. Davis, D. (2006). Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Dowlah, C. (2016). International Trade, Competitive Advantage, and Developing Economies: How Less Developed Countries are Capturing Global Markets. New York: Routledge. Dowlah, C. (2018). Transformations of Global Prosperity: How Foreign Investment, Multinationals, and Value Chains Are Remaking Modern Economy. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dowlah, C. (2019, October). Modern Slavery: A Literature Review. Prepared for the United Nations University, New York. Drescher, S. (1987). Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Engarman, S. L. (1976). Some Economic and Demographic Comparisons of Slavery in the United States and the British West Indies. Economic History Review, 29, 252–275. Faini, R. (2007). Remittances and the Brain Drain: Do More Skilled Migrants Remit More? World Bank Economic Review, 21(2), 177–191. Fisher, M. (2014). Migration: A World History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Forsythe, D. (Ed.). (2009). Encyclopedia of Human Rights (Vol. 1). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frank, A. (1978). Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment. London: Macmillan Press. Galenson, D. (1981). White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis. London and New York: Cambridge University Press. Gereffi, G. (1994). The Organization of Buyer-Driven Global Commodity Chains: How U.S. Retailers Shape Overseas Production Networks. In G. Gereffi & M. Korzeniewicz (Eds.), Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (pp. 95–122). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Gilpin, R. (1986). The Political Economy of International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Goodrich, C. (1932). Indenture. In Encyclopedia of Social Sciences. New York.

14  C. DOWLAH Helpman, E., & Krugman, P. (1985). Market Structure and Foreign Trade: Increasing Returns, Imperfect Competition, and the International Economy. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hutton, T., & Williamson, J. (2008). The Impact of Immigration: Comparing Two Global Eras. World Development, 36(3), 345–361. ILO (International Labor Organization). (2017). Global Estimates of Modern Slavery. Geneva: ILO. IOM (International Organization for Migration). (2017). World Migration Report 2018. Geneva: IOM. Kolchin, P. (1996). Some Controversial Questions Concerning Nineteenth Century Emancipation from Slavery and Serfdom. In M. Bush (Ed.), Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage (pp. 42–68). New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Kowalski, P., Gonzales, J., Ragoussis, A., & Ugrate, C. (2015). Participation of Developing Countries in Global Value Chains: Implications for Trade and Trade-Related Policies (OECD Trade Policy Papers, No. 179). Paris: OECD Publishing. Llosa, A. (2013). Global Crossings—Immigration, Civilization and America. Oakland, CA: Independent Institute. Lord, C. (2013). Aristotle’s Politics (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lucas, R. (2005). International Migration and Economic Development. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Lynch, J. P., & Simon, R. (2003). Immigration the World over: Statutes, Policies and Practices. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Manning, P. (2013). Migration in World History. London: Routledge. Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Massey, D., Hugo, G., Taylor, J., Arango, J., & Kouaouci A. (Eds.). (1998). Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Miers, S., & Kopytoff, I. (Eds.). (1977). Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Moon, D. (2002). Abolition of Serfdom in Russia: 1762–1907. London: Routledge. Muller, T. (1989). Immigration Policy and Economic Growth. Yale Law & Policy Review, 7(1), 101–136. Nayyar, D. (2008). International Migration and Economic Development. In N. Serra & J. Stiglitz (Eds.), Washington Consensus Reconsidered: Towards a New Global Governance (pp. 277–305). New York: Oxford University Press. Olson, S. (2003). Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins. New York: Mariner Books.

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Patterson, O. (1982). Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Pew Research Center. (2017, November 29). Europe’s Growing Muslim Population. Potts, L. (1990). The World Labor Market: A History of Migration (T. Bond, Trans.). London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books. Pritchett, L. (2006). Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on International Labor Mobility. Washington, DC: Center for Global Development. Rostow, W. (1960). Stages of Economic Development—A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schain, M. (2008). The Politics of Immigration in France, Britain, and the United States: A Comparative Study. London: Palgrave. Smith. A. (1776). The Wealth of Nations (C. J. Bullock, Ed.). Reprint by Barnes and Nobles (2004). New York: Barnes & Nobles. Sykes, A. O. (1995). The Welfare Economics of Immigration Law—A Theoretical Survey with an Analysis of US Policy. In W. Schwartz (Ed.), Justice in Immigration. London: Cambridge University Press. Tinker, H. (1974). A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labor Overseas 1830–1920. London: Oxford University Press. Twomey, M. (2000). A Century of Foreign Investment in Third World. London and New York: Routledge. Ueda, R. (2007). Immigration in Global Historical Perspective. In M. Waters & R. Ueda (Eds.), New Americans (pp. 4–18). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. UNDESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs). (2017). International Migration Report 2017. New York: United Nations. Wallerstein, I. (1979). Capitalist World-Economy. London: Cambridge University Press. Watson, J. L. (1980). Asian and African Systems of Slavery. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. WFF (Walk Free Foundation). (2018). Global Slavery Index 2018. Minderoo Foundation. Globalslaveryindex.org. World Bank. (2018a). Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Labor Markets. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. (2018b). Asylum Seekers in the European Union: Building Evidence to form Policy Making. Washington, DC: World Bank. Wright, R. E. (2017). The Poverty of Slavery: How Unfree Labor Pollutes the Economy. London: Palgrave.

CHAPTER 2

Global Human Migration: An Overview

Introduction Over the centuries, human migration has received serious investigation by numerous observers and scholars, ranging from hardcore scientists to social scientists, architects to historians and geographers, travelers and traders to missionaries and warriors. As a result, a huge reservoir of knowledge now provides powerful sketches and insights on how and why human beings migrated to different parts of the world from the beginning of humanity. Historical records suggest that humans migrated for multifarious reasons: in search of better farmland and animals, habitats and territories, trade and commerce; to avoid economic and political repression, spread religious faith, or seek knowledge; and because of the rise and fall of civilizations, empires, states, kingdoms, and so on. Historical records also suggest that sometimes humans moved freely to improve their own lot, sometimes they were coerced to move to improve the lot of others. As they migrated as colonists, settlers, sojourners, travelers, invaders, preachers, traders, investors, slaves, serfs, indentured laborers, and free laborers along the way they changed languages and demographics, cultures and communities, ecologies and geographies, economies and technologies, arts and philosophies, and of course, the contours and mosaics of earth and its civilizations. This chapter chronicles this fascinating journey of humans since the time written records of history became available. The progression of human migration is discussed following major historical periods: the next section © The Author(s) 2020 C. Dowlah, Cross-Border Labor Mobility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36506-6_2

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covers the ancient period section three covers the medieval period section four covers the early modern era1; section five covers the modern era; and section six covers the period from WWI to the 1990s.

Ancient Period (3600 BC–AD 500) The pre-historic history of human migration (prior to 3600 BC) is far from clear. Available accounts suggest that the Homo sapiens emerged in the rich territories of the southern or eastern African continent between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago.2 Approximately 90,000 and 130,000 years ago, they migrated to the Near East—in the areas where now stand the states of Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Gradually they dispersed to Sumatra (Indonesia), Southeast Asia, and to the north of Australia between 60,000 and 75,000 years ago. Around 55,000 years ago, the main wave (or waves) of ‘anatomically modern humans’ spread rapidly across Eurasia. By around 15,000 BC, some humans, now known as the Amerindians,3 migrated to North America crossing the 600-mile-wide land bridge between Siberia and Alaska called Beringia. From there, by 12,800 BC, they reached Patagonia in southern Chile at the tip of South America. By about 10,000 BC, coinciding with the development of farming, humans came to inhabit almost the entire world, except Greenland, Madagascar, and New Zealand. Around that time, they began to settle in more permanent settlements around immovable land, abandoning movement as hunters and gatherers. Such settlements encountered little competition from rival human habitats in the largely unoccupied and sparsely populated world (Livi-Bacci 2012, 3). Soon after reaching the stage of permanent settlements, humans invented writing. The Sumerians and Egyptians developed writing between 3500 BC and 3000 BC, the Indus around 2700 BC, the 1 The literature review on human migration, especially from the ancient to the early modern era, is largely based on Fisher (2014), Manning (1990), Pagden (2003), Potts (1990), Campbell (2004), Cavalli-Sfroza et al. (1994), Olson (2003), Diamond (1997), and ­Livi-Bacci (2012)—I am deeply indented to them. 2 See Ancient History Encyclopedia, https://www.ancient.eu/article/1070/early-human-migration/, accessed on July 2, 2018. 3 They are interchangeably described as Native Indians, Red Indians, Native Americans, and so on. In the United States, they are now officially described as Native Americans. More on this in Chapter 3.

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Chinese around 1200 BC, and the Mesoamericans (indigenous populations of North America) around 650 BC. These three forces together— the development of agriculture, permanent settlement, and the development of writing—soon paved the way for the growth of cities, kingdoms, and civilizations. Thus, came to an end the prolonged era of largely unencumbered migration of humans without encountering any major competition and rivalry for resources from other human habitats (Fisher 2014, 8–13). Growth of Cities and Civilizations: Urbanization—large settlements of humans in the same location—sprung up almost simultaneously in several parts of the world. In around 3500 BC, Chinese rulers built walled cities characterized by major state projects, grand canals, and standardized roads along the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. Around 3150 BC, Pharaohs mobilized massive armies and people to build irrigation channels, capital cities, and pyramids in kingdoms around the upper and lower Nile River. Around 3000 BC sprung up the state of Mesopotamia (in modern-day Iraq) around the Nile Valley along the Tigris and ­ Euphrates Rivers. Around the same time, along the Indus River Valley arose the Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro (in modern-day Pakistan), which left incredible marks of urbanization including advanced sewerage systems. These episodes signified the earliest development of the Neolithic Revolution—the wide-scale transition of humans from hunting and gathering to permanent settlements, cultivation of crops and plants, and the earliest manifestations of urban living (Bodvarsson and Berg 2013). Such developments then paved the way for the emergence of some of the earliest civilizations on the face of the earth, such as the Sumerian, Nubian, Egyptian, and Achaemenid Empires (Persia), the Greek and Hellenistic states, the Qin and Han states (China), the Roman Empire around the Mediterranean, and the Mauryan and Gupta Empires (India). With the rise and demise of such kingdoms, empires, and civilizations, with the movement of invading and retreating forces, arose a massive demand for human migration across borders as soldiers, prisoners, traders, construction workers, auxiliary forces, captives, and slaves (Pagden 2003, 30).

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The Age of Great Empires: Around 550 BC, Cyrus the Great established the Achaemenes Empire (550–330 BC), which extended from the Balkans and Eastern Europe in the west to the Indus Valley in the east. The Persian Empire, the largest in world history up to that point, maintained a large professional army and incorporated peoples of various ethnic origins, faiths, and languages. Then, Alexander the Great (356– 323 BC) conquered vast regions of Europe and Asia—from the Balkans to Anatolia, from the eastern Mediterranean to Egypt, and from the Persian Achaemenid Empire to Hindukush in Afghanistan. Alexander the Great’s empire was however short-lived, collapsing with his death at the age of 32. The Roman Empire:  By the first century BC, most of the remnants of Alexander the Great’s empire fell into the hands of the Romans. Between 168 BC and 148 BC, the kingdoms of Macedonia and the Seleucid Empire (312–63 BC)—that extended from Babylonia to central Anatolia, Persia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and parts of today’s Kuwait, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan—came under the Roman Protectorate. By AD 117 the entire Mediterranean came under the Roman Republic. After the assassination of Julius Caesar (100–44 BC), the Roman Republic plunged into a civil war and Octavian (27 BC–AD 14) took over the helm as Emperor Augustus. He succeeded in ending the civil war, transforming Rome into a huge cosmopolitan state, and went down as the most effective emperor in Roman history. The Roman rulers, both during the Roman Republic (509–44 BC) and the Roman Empire (until AD 330), conquered much of Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. They built elaborate networks of walls, ditches, garrisons, forts, river defenses, and military roads from the Black Sea along the Danube and Rhine Rivers to northern Europe. For such massive construction projects, the Romans drew immigrants from diverse communities, often forcibly moved people around the empire, and captured millions of slaves from European, Asian, and African regions. The Roman Empire was indeed one of the first large-scale slave societies in world history. During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire (286 BC–AD 402), almost 75 percent of the population of the Italian Peninsula were in bondage. It was not until AD 212 that Roman

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Emperor Caracalla (AD 188–217) granted Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Empire creating a common homeland.4 By the third century AD, the Roman Empire suffered defeats at the hands of the Persians and the Goths and other Germanic tribes, which led Emperor Diocletian (AD 284–395) to divide the Empire into a Latin western part and a Hellenized eastern part. In AD 476, Flavius Odoacer—a German, who became the first king of Italy—deposed Romulus August, the last Roman emperor of the western part. The eastern part of the Empire, under the rule of Constantine the Great (AD 306–337), became the Byzantine Empire.5 By then several nomadic groups, such as the Goths, Vandals, Attila, and Huns—coalesced as Vandals, migrated thousands of miles across the northern Roman Empire and Spain, and established a kingdom in North Africa (in today’s Tunisia) in AD 429. By the middle of the fifth century, a powerful multiethnic alliance, led by Attila the Hun (AD 434–453), ravaged the western Roman Empire. By the sixth century AD many nomadic groups, or migratory communities of Europe had settled and mixed with substantial local populations to form over time our current nationalities, such as the Lombards in northern Italy, the Franks and Burgundians in France, the Angles and Saxons in England, and the Slavs in Eastern Europe. During the same period, in Africa, expanding trans-Saharan trade carried by camel caravans, enhanced the export northward of gold as well as slaves, cloth, and other goods in exchange for salt and other products—such trade gave rise to a series of cities and regional states along the Niger River in West Africa, and then spread around Central and Southern Africa. The Great Wall of China was also built around this time. Its construction began between 771 BC and 476 BC but was completed by the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang, founder of the Qin dynasty (206 BC–AD 220). Subsequent to this, the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) founded by Emperor Gaozu of Han also employed thousands of workers and soldiers for further construction of the Great Wall across China’s 4 Some of the Roman emperors were not Romans by birthplace. For example, Septimius Severus (AD 145–211) was born in North Africa, Trajan (AD 53–117) was born in Spain, and Diocletian (AD 244–311) was born in Dalmatia. 5 Constantine’s Byzantine Empire survived until the eleventh century, when Seljuk Turks seized Byzantine Armenia. Eventually the Ottoman Turks led by Sultan Mehmet II took over Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire in 1453.

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northern and western frontiers to defend the empire from foreign invasion, especially from the Mongol nomads. The ancient period also witnessed migration due to the spread of religion. In South Asia, during the sixth to fifth centuries BC, Buddhism spread, especially when Emperor Asoka (268–232 BC), the founder of the Mauryan dynasty, adopted Buddhism as the official religion. Asoka apparently inscribed Buddhist edicts on rocks and frescos guarding borders and notifying messages of the Buddhist authority. During this period, many Buddhist missionaries traveled to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia as well as across Afghanistan and into China, Korea, and Japan to spread Buddhism. Later, Roman Emperor Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire also prompted similar migration.

Medieval Period (AD 500–1400) By AD 500, the global human population totalling about 300 million had already migrated across the whole earth via both land and sea—apart from Antarctica and some isolated islands. Many of them still lived as nomads, but a large majority had settled down in fertile regions as communities or states. Thus, new forces, such as trade, war, and religion came to the forefront as drivers of human migration. By the fifth century, the Arabian Peninsula emerged as a great center of human migration. Being in an area of dry land, not supportive of agriculture, the nomadic peoples of the Peninsula primarily engaged themselves in trading and herding. The region enjoyed a strategic locational advantage for trade—in the southeast was the Byzantine Empire based in Constantinople, in the southwest was the Sassanian Empire of Iran, in the east was the vibrant economy of Egypt, while seasonal monsoonal winds also linked them to eastern Africa and Asia. Such advantages led to a mushrooming of many commercial towns on inland and shoreline trade routes all over the Arabian Peninsula during this period. Spread of Islam:  In the sixth century, a new religion called Islam swept across the Arabian Peninsula when scores of Muslim merchants, preachers, scholars, soldiers, and rulers migrated long distances and converted many Eurasian and African communities to the religion. Soon Muslim rules expanded across the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean) into Anatolia (Asia Minor) forcing back the Roman Empire in Byzantine and displacing the Sassanian Empire across Iran, spreading across Africa and into the

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Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal, and southern France) and along the eastern coast of Africa and the Asian continent. Such rapid and extensive expansions of Muslim rule and religion—through migration as well as conversion—created the first unified Muslim global community called ummah (Dar-al-Islam), in which all Muslims, irrespective of ethnic origin or skin color, were considered equal. Not only Muslims, but ­non-Muslims too were allowed to migrate freely within the multicontinental and multinational state (Fisher 2014, 31). In the eighth century, the Abbasid dynasty (750–1258) further enhanced human mobility by legalizing domestic as well as international trade across Asia and North Africa. By 1450, three extensive intercontinental trading networks emerged: (a) the Sahel network around the Mediterranean that linked Morocco, southern Europe, Egypt, and Araba; (b) the Silk Road that connected the eastern Mediterranean, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and China; and (c) the Monsoonal network that linked the coasts of the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. All these trade networks adopted a common language called Swahili and were effectively controlled by Muslim rulers and traders. Muslim rulers also encouraged Muslim scholars—known as the ulemas and Sufis—to migrate throughout Dar-al-Islam and as well as outside it, in places such as Central Asia, Western China, Southwest Asia, and Northwest India, to spread Islam. Such migrations of Muslim preachers also facilitated expansions of the domains of Muslim rulers outside the Arabian Peninsula. In 1055, the Seljuk Turks seized Baghdad and later founded the Ottoman Empire in 1299. Around this time, Sultan Saladin overthrew the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt (909–1174) and established the Ayyubid Dynasty (1174–1341), which ruled over Egypt, Syria, Upper Mesopotamia, the Hejaz, Yemen, and other parts of North Africa.6 Also, in the early thirteenth century, a group of Turk slaves, established the first ruling slave dynasty in India called the Delhi Sultanate that lasted almost 100 years (1206–1290).

6 Saladin’s empire was founded by slave soldiers known as Mamluks—ethnic Turks from central Asia. Highly trained in martial arts, Mamluks formed the backbone of the military apparatus of Ayyubid rulers. They were the ‘ultimate slaves,’ like the familia Caesaris of the early Roman Empire and the palatine eunuchs of Byzantium and Imperial China (Clifford 2013; Patterson 1982, 299).

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Other Migrations: Meanwhile in Europe, around AD 800, Charles the Great (768–814) founded the Holy Roman Empire by uniting much of Western and Central Europe. As a result, the Roman Catholic Church emerged as a transcontinental arena for religious leaders and pilgrims from many cities and territories. Also, expansion in agricultural production as well as other economic and social activities created huge demand in the Holy Roman Empire for workers from distant lands to build cathedrals, civic buildings, and defensive walls. The Vikings: From a human migration standpoint however the most sensational development was the Scandinavian Viking culture that sparked cross-continental and cross-oceanic explorations during the eighth through twelfth centuries. Vikings succeeded in making innovative vessels that could ride over swells and waves to carry cargo and passengers for overseas trade, and they migrated west across the North Atlantic and south to the Mediterranean, both along Europe’s west coast and down the north–south flowing rivers of western Russia. They migrated to Scotland, northern and eastern England, and Ireland raiding as well as settling as farmers and marrying local women. Vikings also raided for furs, slaves, silver, and luxury goods from the Byzantine Empire, the Abbasid Caliphate, as well as the transcontinental Silk Road. The Mongols:  While Scandinavians mastered the coasts and rivers around Europe, an East–Central Asian ethnic group called Mongols used the land to conquer surrounding areas. One of the most successful Mongol figures— Genghis Khan (1162–1227)—succeeded in penetrating the Great Wall of China and defeating many Chinese kingdoms. His highly mobile armies, totaling a million men, conquered lands stretching from Korea and north China across Central Asia to Afghanistan, northern Iran, the Black Sea, and eastern Russia, creating the largest empire in history at that time. The Mongol expeditions caused massive human migration—not only hundreds of thousands of soldiers and their families but also numerous others moved across the empire. The Aztecs:  Meanwhile in the Americas, one of the largest Mesoamerican states, the Aztec alliance, brought numerous nomadic tribes together through their shared cultural traditions of the Nahunta language, and their long southerly migration on foot from their sacred origin in Aztlan.7 7 It is uncertain whether Aztlan was a real or mythical place—some literature suggests it was located either in northwest Mexico or southwest United States, others doubt whether such a place ever existed.

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Around AD 1250 one of these migratory tribes, known as Mexica, settled around Lake Texcoco (in current Mexico City), and gradually expanded their settlements in Tenochtitlan, a large city with a population of around 300,000. At the same time, in the south, along the Andes, the expanding Inca Empire (1438–1533), the largest in America in the pre-Columbian period, also brought numerous tribes under its jurisdiction. By the fifteenth century however the Incans were displaced by European conquistadors who unleashed not only intra-American migration but also a new era of transatlantic migration. Seasonal Migration:  The medieval era also witnessed seasonal and circular migration—people moved from one country to another and returned home in a short period of time. Many Africans, for example, were involved in such seasonal or circular migration. They moved in search of greater security and subsistence, to escape natural disasters and warfare, and for trade and pilgrimage. One of the classic examples of such migration was the religious pilgrimage called Hajj—a Muslim pilgrimage to the holy sites of Mecca. By 1400, Hajj episodes gathered pilgrims from all over the world—from as far west as Morocco and Iberia, as far east as Turkestan and India, and as distant as Siberia and the Philippines (Manning 1990, 94).

Early Modern Era (AD 1400–1800) Up until the fifteenth century, all great empires—the Mede and the Achaemenid Empires of Iran, the Mughal Empire in India, the Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine Empires in Central Asia, that of Caesar and Augustus in Rome, and Alexander the Great in Greece—all were large territorial landmasses strewn across thousands of miles. The fifteenth century changed all that as dramatic advances in maritime technology vastly expanded human activity across and around the seas. Several sea-going populations—the Chinese, the Arabs, and the West Europeans—dramatically improved their navigational capacities to establish elaborate networks of sea routes connecting West Africa to the Americas, East Africa to the Indian Ocean, and North Africa to the Mediterranean. These new networks not only reinforced the earlier patterns of regional migration, but also led to a large-scale redistribution of the world’s population and a massive growth of worldwide systems of plantations, mines, empires, and colonies.

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In the early fifteenth century, an admiral of the Chinese Ming Empire (1368–1644), named Zheng He, undertook several intercontinental oceanic expeditions to the China Seas and the Indian Ocean,8 and between 1403 and 1435, he commanded seven large-scale voyages from Taiwan to the Persian Gulf and down the east coast of Africa as far as Mombasa in Kenya. Subsequently however Zheng He’s expedition ended as the Ming Empire abandoned transoceanic expeditions and rather launched several land expeditions to send Chinese immigrants/missionaries to the Japanese islands to spread Buddhism (Fisher 2014, 36). Around the same time in Europe, the Portuguese launched their first transoceanic expeditions to the African coast under the command of Henry the Navigator (1394–1460). Henry the Navigator is often credited for the discovery of a sea route to Africa, but many dispute such claims as his voyage took place in 1420, after Chinese Admiral He had already completed five of his seven voyages into the Indian Ocean. Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama however duly earned credit for rounding the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean in 1797 with only four small ships. The credit for intercontinental voyages in the Atlantic Ocean, especially for creating new sea lanes and discovering unoccupied Atlantic islands, goes to Portuguese mariners (Manning 1990, 114). European Colonization: The small Portuguese base that Vasco da Gama established in West Africa in 1497 eventually turned into a mighty Portuguese Empire, which by the seventeenth century extended all the way from West Africa to India and Southern China. The process of great European colonization across the Atlantic started in 1492 when the Spanish crown commissioned an Italian navigator named Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) to voyage across the Atlantic to Asia. Columbus however landed on a Caribbean island in the Bahamas believing that it was an offshore island of Japan. His erroneous discovery of the Americas however led to the establishment of maritime connections, for the first time in world history, between four continents—Europe, Africa, and the Americas.9 8 Presumably, Admiral He and one of his captains were Muslims who performed a pilgrimage to Mecca during one of their voyages (Manning 1990). 9 The discovery of America, a hitherto unknown landmass of immense size and complexity, also shattered all previous notions of world geography and opened the possibility that there might be other undiscovered continents around the world. Such beliefs subsequently led Dutch navigator Abel Tasman to land in Tasmania and the South Island of New Zealand in 1642, and Captain Cook in Australia between 1772 and 1775 (Pagden 2003).

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Columbus’s reign was however very brief. He was replaced by Nicolas Ovando as the Spanish governor of the Indies in 1502.10 Within five decades, Ovando and his successors brought large regions of mainland Americas under the Spanish control. The rule of the conquistadors—­ soldiers and explorers of the Spanish Empire—were brutal. Apparently they caused massive blood-baths known as matanza (butchery) to systematically depopulate and conquer the native population of the Amerindians (Potts 1990, 11–23). As the other sea-going European power, the Portuguese, also undertook expeditions into the New World, they New World—the Spanish ruled across the West Atlantic, while the Portuguese ruled across the East Atlantic. Meanwhile, in 1494, the two European powers of the world— the Spanish Crown and the Portuguese King—signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the entire non-European world between themselves. The Tordesillas Line—a pole-to-pole line down the Atlantic—gave the western half of the non-European world to the Spanish Crown, while the eastern half went to the Portuguese King. Subsequently, they signed the Treaty of Zaragoza in 1529 drawing another dividing line down the Pacific Ocean, with Brazil, Africa, western Asia, India, Southeast Asia, and Japan going to the Portuguese King, and the rest of the Americas and the Philippines to the Spanish Crown. Soon other expanding European nations, including Britain, Germany, France, and the Netherlands, also set out their own armies, missionaries, merchants, and settlers to create colonies in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. With the emergence of new trade routes, new ports, and new colonies, a massive new phase of migration of people across the oceans and continents ensued. All European nations actively encouraged the settlement of their nationals in newfound colonies. By the mid eighteenth century, some 700,000 Spaniards moved to New Spain (Central and North America and the Philippines), and about 500,000 Portuguese moved to Portuguese colonies in Brazil, Africa, and Asia. Following British colonization of the Americas, numerous European settlers—the British, Irish, Scots, French, and Germans—also migrated to North America’s Atlantic coast.11 The process also led to 10 Ovando led a fleet of 32 ships with 2500 soldiers, servants, artisans, and functionaries, of whom more than 1000 died and more than 500 fell ill (Livi-Bacci 2012, 32). 11 In 1718, the British Government also authorized the transportation of European criminals to the American colonies. Over the course of half a century, 40,000–50,000 British convicts sailed to North America—shipments stopped only after the newly independent

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thousands of Europeans migrating to peripheral countries of Africa and Asia as well.12 European colonization, along with military campaigns and the growth in European settler communities during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries also resulted in the subjugation and destruction of millions of Amerindians, the enslavement of millions of Africans, and the growth of new creole societies—colored people with European and non-European ancestry (Ueda 2007). Massey et al. (1998) puts the migrants of this period in four categories: (1) a large number of European agrarian settlers; (2) a sizeable number of European administrators and artisans; (3) a small number of European entrepreneurs who founded plantations to produce materials for European mercantile economies; and (4) nearly 10 million Africans who were forcibly transported to the Americas. One of the far-reaching consequences of the processes of colonial migration and the colonialization of the Americas was that for the first time in world history people of different races were combined in distinct class structures. Gradually the migration of Europeans, African slaves, and indentured workers transformed the North and South Americas into complex multiracial societies. Non-Europeans—Amerindian indigenous people and African slaves—were degraded into biologically inferior and savage races who were ruthlessly exploited in numerous plantations and agricultural economies all over the New World. Land-based Empires:13  The early modern period also witnessed several large-scale land-based expeditions. The Ottoman Empire, founded by Turkish ruler Fatih Sultan Mehmet (1432–1481) after defeating the Byzantine Empire, lasted for 600 years. During the course of the first 200 years of its rule, the Ottoman Empire spread over much of Eastern and Central Europe, the southern and eastern Mediterranean, and the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq. During the Ottoman rule, Constantinople, United States refused to take more British prisoners. Afterwards, the British Crown transported convicts to Australia (Fisher 2014, 61). 12 From

the seventeenth century onward, small populations of Amerindians (native Indians), Africans, and Asians also migrated to Europe—as intermediaries or employees of European businesses or wives of Europeans who ventured back to Europe. One of those wives was Pocahontas, brought to England by an Englishman. She was the daughter of Powhattan, an Amerindian headman living near the English colony of Jamestown. 13 The discussion on land-based empires is largely based on Fisher (2014, 52–55).

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the capital of the Empire, emerged as the world’s most highly diverse and cosmopolitan imperial city—many religious and ethnic communities enjoyed great autonomy under Ottoman rulers. Meanwhile, in Iran, Shah Ismail founded the Safavid dynasty (1501– 1736) by amalgamating nomadic Turkman tribes and farming populations of Persian Tajik cultures. Within a century, the Safavids spread their rule across surrounding regions and extended trade relations with China, India, Levant, and Europe. After the collapse of the Safavid Empire, another Turkman—Nadir Shah (1736–1747)—took over Iran. Around the same time in India, Emperor Babur (1526–1530)—a descendant of Mongol ruler Genghis Khan (1206–1227) and Turkish Emperor Tamerlane (1370–1405)—established the Mughal Empire by defeating the Muslim Afghans of the Delhi Sultanate and Hindu regional rulers of north India. The Empire that lasted more than 200 years (1626–1858) eventually controlled all of South Asia, more than one million square miles of land space containing 200 million people, of which about two thirds were Hindus. The Mughals encouraged emigration of Muslim warriors, officials, and scholars from Central Asia, Iran, and the Arabia. Another land-based empire of this period was Imperial Russia. By the mid eighteenth century, Imperial Russia extended settler and military colonies across northern Asia all the way to the Pacific coast and beyond Alaska. The Russian Empire also consolidated its rule over various Slavic groups in Eastern Europe, including the Ukraine and Caucasus regions, and pushed to the south against the Ottomans. By the late nineteenth century, Russian rule extended east into Asia, reaching Mongol, Uzbek, and Turkman nomadic groups. Russian Empress Catherine II made extraordinary efforts to promote German migration to modernize Russian agriculture.14 As a result, 14 In 1792, Catherine II created a buffer zone in depopulated areas between Russians and semi-nomadic peoples to the east of the lower Volga, and offered potential migrants free transport and cash, 80 acres of free land, freedom of religion and administrative autonomy, 10-year interest-free loans to build homes and buy tools, a 30-year exemption from taxes, and perpetual exemption from military service. In 1871, Czar Alexander II however revoked the exemption of German settlers from military service, which prompted a wave of migration to the United States. In 1924, the Volga colonies became one of the autonomous republics of the former USSR. In 1941, Stalin dissolved the Republic and sent its inhabitants to Siberia—those who survived emigrated to Germany after 1980 taking advantage of the ‘Law of Return.’

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between 1763 and 1767, roughly 30,000 Germans migrated to the Volga region. Following defeat of the Turks in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774, definitive acquisition of the Crimea by Russia in 1783, and Catherine II’s settlement of Germans, the Russian population in the New South grew from 1.6 million to 14.5 million between 1724 and 1859 (Livi-Bacci 2012, 41). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Prussia and Austria also encouraged immigration of Germans. Following the Thirty Years’ War, they established new German settlements in Pomerania with immigrants coming from Brandenburg and Silesia. Acquisition of Silesia by Frederick II of Prussia in 1740 also led to the transfer of large numbers of colonists and the Germanization of the region. By the end of Frederick’s reign, 430,000 colonists settled within an enlarged Prussia. German migration into Hungary also continued at the same time—between 1689 and the end of the eighteenth century, about 350,000 Germans migrated to Hungary. Similarly, during the 1760s, under Charles II, thousands of German migrants settled in Sierra Morena in Andalusia (Livi-Bacci 2012, 28, 41). Religious Persecution:  The early modern period also witnessed ­large-scale migration due to religious persecution. The Thirty Years’ War (1618– 1648) in Central Europe among the Protestant and Catholic rulers, for example, led to the death of a million people and the migration of countless others. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648), that brought an end to the war, guaranteed the rights of people to move to neighboring states to avoid being forcibly converted to the religion of local rulers, and safe passage of merchants across the countries by sea and land. Still, in 1685, the Catholic French rulers forced 400,000 Huguenots (Calvinists who endorsed the Reformed tradition of Protestantism) to emigrate. Similarly, after Spanish rulers captured Granada, a flourishing Muslim center in Iberia, numerous Muslims were forced to migrate, and in addition, half a million other Muslims and Moriscos (Muslim converts to Catholicism) were deported between 1609 and 1614 (Fisher 2014, 56–61). The Spanish rulers also expelled 200,000–800,000 Jews during the Catholic Inquisition in the late fifteenth century.15 Many of these Jews took shelter in neighboring Portugal, which also subjected them to inquisition in the mid 1530s. Many of these Jews then fled to Africa, 15 England also officially banned and deported Jews during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603).

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seeking the protection of Muslim rulers, while others returned to Spain and converted to Christianism. These Marranos (converted Jews) also later faced deportation. Some of these Jewish refugees eventually found home under the Ottoman rulers, who received them kindly, lent them money, and gave them fields and estates (Marcus 1938). Trade Relations: Trade also played an important role in the mobility of people during the period. Many Arab and Chinese traders travelled across well-established sea routes to the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos. There were also several trade routes between India, the Arabian Peninsula, and West Africa. For several hundred years, circular migration was a common feature of working life for various artisan groups, such as blacksmiths, acrobats, and singers, who travelled across Asian countries in small groups. European colonization of Asian countries was also strongly linked to trade. Many northern European merchants established trade monopolies in Asian colonies by establishing commercial joint stock corporations with their home countries. Some of these corporations, such as the Dutch West India Company (1621), the English Royal African Company (1660), and the East India Companies of the English (1600), the Dutch (1602), the Danes (1616), the French (1660), and the Swedes (1731), had global operations.16 In course of time, some of these companies not only commanded enormous international capital and investment, but also hired large numbers of European merchants and military officials. The Dutch East India Company, for example, alone sent no fewer than one million Europeans (many of them Germans) to Asia, especially to Indonesia, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1800, the British East India Company, with a private army of 260,000, twice the size of the British Army, took over administrative and military control of India. The company ruled the Indian subcontinent effectively for 100 years (from 1757 to 1858). It was only after the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 that the British Crown assumed control of the subcontinent that lasted until 1947.17 16 The

numbers in parentheses show year of establishment. the Asian countries, Japan however was an exception. Anticipating disruptions that European colonialism might cause, in 1600, the Shoguns cut-off the country from the rest of the world to keep the sacred land of Japan pure and their subjects out of the reach of outsiders. In 1613, Japan promulgated the Closed Country Edict forbidding any Japanese ship to leave for foreign countries and any Japanese to go abroad, mandating the death sentence to any Japanese who returned home after residing abroad. 17 Among

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Modern Era (1800–WWI) The modern period witnessed one of the most transfixing waves of migration in world history, as the processes of populating the transatlantic empires created by European colonial powers—Portugal, Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands—soon led to intercontinental migration. Between 1800 and 1930, approximately 48 million Europeans left home for abroad—around 8 million of them migrated from the British Isles alone, including more than a million Irish who left following the potato famine of 1845–1847 (Massey et al. 1998). Most of these European migrants landed in the United States—as the rising industrial power endowed with scarcely populated vast areas of fertile land opened up great economic opportunities for the relatively poor, less industrialized, and politically and religiously repressed Europeans. At the same time, millions of Europeans also migrated to other American destinations as well as New Zealand and Australia. European migrants were not only welcomed, but also enticed by governments of receiving countries. Under the Homestead Act, 1862, the United States, for example, granted about 160 million acres of public land, nearly 10 percent of the total area of the country, to 1.6 million households free of cost for committing to farming the land and applying for US citizenship. In 1873, Argentina extended special assistance to immigrants, such as providing free lodging and finance for initial settlements. In 1888, Brazil began financing the transatlantic voyages of Europeans and helped them to acquire land in designated areas. Similarly, millions of Europeans who migrated to New Zealand and Australia received such incentives. During the period, intercontinental migration of Europeans was also facilitated by significant improvements in transoceanic navigation and transportation. For example, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it took five to six weeks to travel by ship from Liverpool to New York, but by the 1880s, the travel time had dropped to about a week. Also, a trip from England to the United States cost around $44 in the 1850s, but by the 1880s the cost fell to $20. Similarly, the cost of travel from Spain to South America fell to $35 by the beginning of the twentieth century from $50 in the 1870s (Livi-Bacci 2012, 48). European emigration was also facilitated by internal political developments. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, many European nations imposed elaborate bans and restrictions on emigration and

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some of them even treated emigration as a treasonous offense. But by the 1830s, scores of European nations, including England, Germany, Hungary, Russia, and many Scandinavian countries, liberalized polices to encourage emigration. Intercontinental migration received another boost with the abolition of slave trade by all European empires by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Until then most transatlantic emigration originated from Northwestern Europe, with the abolition of the slave trade however the net further widened to Southeastern Europe as well. As a result, emigration from across Europe to the Americas peaked at more than 1 million annually in the nineteenth century—most of them landed in the United States, but a significant number also migrated to other countries. For example, by the late nineteenth century, about 1 million Europeans had migrated to Brazil, and by the early twentieth century, 1.5 million Italians had migrated to Argentina and Brazil. After the abolition of slavery,18 approximately 30–40 million Indians and between 10 and 15 million Chinese indentured servants were brought to colonial plantations across the Caribbean Basin and other parts of the world.19 The triple wave of migration—from Europe, China, and India—produced a global total of approximately 100 million migrants from the start of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, and with the addition of migrants from other parts of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Japan, the total number of migrants during this period exceeded 150 million (Ueda 2007, 89). Among all emigrant nations, perhaps the British surpassed all others by the twentieth century—they settled on every habitable continent on earth and built the largest empire by population and geographical extent in world history. They populated the United States, Canada, some other American countries, New Zealand, and Australia. Among destination countries, Australia perhaps provides an interesting example—the entire continent was populated by convicts. By the 1830s, about 3000 British convicts were sent to Australia annually, 18 As mentioned before, slavery was officially abolished in the British Empire in 1833, in the French colonial empire in 1848, and in the United States in 1865. 19 Also, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thousands of Indian soldiers fought in British wars in China, Southeast Asia, Africa, West Asia, and Europe, and tens of thousands of seamen, servants, clerks, merchants, laborers, and their wives and children moved to Britain.

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and by 1868, when the British officially ended transporting criminals to Australia, over 160,000 men and 25,000 women convicts had been sent to Australia. Not many free individuals migrated to Australia as the journey was more expensive and challenging compared with other transatlantic travel. Also, the British Government handled almost all aspects of highly subsidized migration to Australia in terms of recruitment, selection, and consignment—immigration schemes were skewed toward the lowest echelons of British society (Richards 1991, 19–41). Among the other European colonial powers in terms of emigration, the French followed the British. At various times the French ruled much of North and West Africa, Madagascar, Canada, French Guinea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and various Indian Ocean, Caribbean, and Pacific islands. Also, the French and the British colonial empires competed in the Americas, Africa, and Asia for a long time, with each moving large numbers of soldiers, sailors, and civilians around the world. Scramble for Africa: Africa had been a hotbed of rivalry among European colonial powers. Temperate climate and strategic location made South Africa attractive to European emigrants for world trade, agricultural production, and mineral wealth. In 1652, the Dutch East India Company made Cape Town a key resupply settlement for European ships passing to and from Asia. Subsequently, many Dutch Calvinists, French Huguenots, and German Lutherans, labelled as Afrikaners, settled as farmers. After the British colonists threw the Dutch colonists out of South Africa in 1806, the Afrikaners took over most of South Africa and founded two countries—the Orange Free State and the Transvaal—while local Africans—the Zulus, under the leadership of Shaka—expanded their rule across central and southern Africa. In 1879, the British invaded both the Zulus and Afrikaners, and by 1901 incorporated Afrikaner states and the British colonies of Cape Town and Natal into one country called the South Africa. It was a white-dominated self-governing apartheid state, a dominion of the British Crown.20

20 Between 1797 and 1906, the British rulers passed a series of laws decreeing that black Africans and Asians could not venture out of their restricted zones unless they carried a passbook that authorized such travel. These laws served as the foundation of African apartheid, which was eventually eliminated in 1994.

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Another major rearrangement of Africa came in 1885, coinciding with the emergence of Germany as a colonial power, when the Congress of Berlin distributed almost 80 percent of African lands that were not under colonial rule at that time to various European states.21 Only two African countries, Liberia and Ethiopia, survived this rearrangement, but later succumbed to Italian invasion in 1935–1936. Intra-European Migration:22  The modern period also witnessed massive migration within the European continent. During the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, German colonization of neighboring lands caused large-scale migration across Prussia, Austria, Hungary, Volga, the Black Sea, and Poland. Then in the early nineteenth century, Napoleon Bonaparte’s (1804–1815) vast imperial armies spread across continental Europe, causing massive migration of conscripted soldiers as well as uprooted populations. Each of the Napoleonic invasions created a massive number of refugees—thousands of Spanish civilians resisted Napoleon’s crushing invasion of Spain, and millions of Russians resisted Napoleon’s attack on Russia. During the late eighteenth through nineteenth centuries, the expansion of the Russian Empire also caused massive migration as Russian rule spread over eight million square miles of continental Eurasia. Catherine the Great (1762–1796) alone expanded the Russian Empire by about 200,000 square miles into Eastern Europe and Central Asia by annexing large parts of Poland in 1772 and Crimea in 1783.23 As mentioned earlier, she also created a buffer zone in the depopulated areas between the Russians and ­semi-nomadic people to the east of the lower Volga region, and populated the region with German immigrants.24

21 The Berlin Conference (1884–1885) coincided with the emergence of Germany as an imperial power. Organized by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the Conference formalized the so-called scramble for Africa by eliminating the autonomy and self-governance of African countries and distributing most African land to European colonial powers. 22 This section is largely based on Livi-Bacci (2012, 28–41). 23 Both Catherine the Great and her husband Czar Peter II were German immigrants. Although the Russian Empire had at its core Slavic culture and the Russian Orthodox Christian Church, the rulers of the Romanov dynasty that ruled the Empire for more than 100 years were non-Slavs and non-Orthodox immigrants. 24 Following the acquisition of Crimea in 1783, and the settlement of Germans in Volga, it is estimated that the Russian population in the New South grew from 1.6 million to 14.5 million between 1724 and 1859 (Livi-Bacci 2012, 41).

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The Russian Empire extended further with the weakening of the Ottoman Empire following the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878). As a result, various Muslim Khanates east of the Caspian Sea, across Central Asia to the Pacific, came under Russian rule.25 Muslims in annexed lands generally were treated tolerably, but occasionally converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity. Russian Czars also resettled many Muslim and Christian communities in Crimea and the Caucasus to less strategic places. Catherine the Great however denied citizenship to five million Jews, forced them to live within Pale boundaries, in today’s Poland, Ukraine, Moldovia, Belarus, Lithuania, and western Russia. By the early twentieth century, about 4.5 million Jews migrated from the Russian Empire to North America, mainly to the United States. Japanese Migration:  As mentioned earlier, Japan banned both immigration and emigration for 200 years to maintain national purity against external influence. By the mid nineteenth century, under the Meiji ­rulers (1868–1912), the country suddenly opened by freeing peasants to emigrate from their hereditary assigned lands. The Meiji rulers also built extensive railways and industries with international ambitions and adopted universal male conscription for the national army to extend the empire across East Asia. In 1894–1995, Japanese armies seized Taiwan by defeating the Qing Chinese Empire. In 1900, Japan crushed the massive Chinese Boxer Rebellion, joining with allied forces comprised of the United States, Russia, and five European powers. In 1904 and 1905, Japan’s navy defeated the Russian fleet in the Baltic and along the Pacific coast and took over Korea. Each of these expansions and expeditions resulted in massive migrations. Also, the Meiji in Japan allowed the emigration of Japanese people as indentured servants. By 1900, about 65,000 Japanese emigrants entered Hawaii, and by 1917, there were 200,000 Japanese in North America and 225,000 in Latin America.26

25 Following the war, six great powers of the time—Russia, Great Britain, France, ­ ustria-Hungary, Italy, and Germany—as well as the Ottoman Empire and four Balkan A states—Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro—joined the Berlin Conference in 1878 and agreed to the major reallocation of territories propelling a massive cross-migration of people to new states. 26 One of the descendants of Japanese indentured laborers, Alberto Fujimori, became president of Peru in 1990.

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From WWI to the 1990s By the early twentieth century, European colonial powers, Russia, and the United States together controlled about 85 percent of the globe (Kennedy 1984). But the geopolitical landscapes of the world changed dramatically after WWI as imperial powers and colonial boundaries underwent sweeping transformations. Some of the largest multiethnic empires, such as the German Hohenzollern, and Turkish Ottoman empires, were shattered under the weight of insurgents and victorious allied powers. The resultant redrawing of political boundaries prompted massive migrations as populations moved to fit more closely to the boundaries of their own nationalities or ethnicities (Manning 2005, 164). Dislocations of WWI: Following WWI, a part of the German Empire became the German Republic, while scores of other countries, such as France, Britain, Belgium, New Zealand, Australia, and Poland, took over German colonies in Africa and Asia. Similarly, the Habsburg Empire was dissolved into Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia, and some of its territories went to other nations. At the same time, the Russians overthrew the Romanov Empire, which resulted in the displacement of millions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia when a new nation, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), emerged in 1922. In the meantime, immediately before WWI, parts of the Ottoman Empire were transformed into the Turkish Republic—in the remainder of the Empire, France established control over Syria and Britain established control over Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine. Such a mammoth redrawing of political boundaries across Europe and Asia immediately created gigantic flows of both immigration and emigration across the continents of Asia and Europe. Most importantly, WWI served as a turning point when the movement of humans as migrants largely changed to the movement of political refugees. Before the war, most migrants made individual decisions to move for personal reasons— during and after WWI, most migrants moved as members of groups identified for expulsion or oppression (Manning 2005, 164). In the 1930s, the Great Depression made millions of people homeless across the industrialized world27; the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) led 27 The

Great Depression, that lasted more than a decade from 1929–1939, was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world up to that point. At the depth of the depression in 1933, some 15 million Americans, about one quarter the labor

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to the death of half a million people in addition to creating millions of refugees; in Russia, Joseph Stalin’s massive collectivization drive pushed millions into Siberia and Central Asia as well as killing millions of others; and Hitler’s Nazi Germany killed millions of Jews, in addition to sending many to concentrations camps or forcing numerous others to flee Germany. Dislocations of World War II:  Dislocations and migrations of millions of people continued as the world plunged into WWII, when massive armies of German and Italian fascist regimes conquered most of continental Europe while Japanese imperial forces expanded their control over much of East and Southeast Asia. The Allied Forces mobilized even larger military forces against the Axis Powers. Both invading and retreating armies forced many millions to migrate by destroying their cities, towns, and villages. WWII caused more than 90 million refugees in China, 31 million in Europe, and 13 million in Japan.28 Following the War, victorious governments redrew many national boundaries across colonies—many nations and ethnic groups gained independence or rights of self-determination, and in the process, vast numbers of people were displaced internally or became international refugees. Nationalist movements and other disruptions broke apart the British, French, Dutch, Japanese, and other colonial powers, creating massive voluntary and forced migrations around the world. Scores of new countries emerged in the two decades after WWII across Asia and Africa, and in many of these countries the dominant ethnic groups forced long-domiciled minorities out. In 1947, the partitioning of British India into religion-based nationalities—Pakistan and India—resulted in one of the largest migrations in world history. About 12 million people cross-migrated—while Muslims

force, were unemployed, about half of the country’s banks failed, and the country’s industrial production declined by a half. The economic woes of Americans soon spread around the industrialized world mainly due to global adherence to a fixed currency exchange regime called the Gold Standard. 28 During WWII, Japan incarcerated about 130,000 captured civilians—the majority of them were Europeans, Australians, New Zealanders, and Americans. They also conscripted about 5.4 million Koreans as forced laborers and imported about 670,000 Koreans to Japan. During the war, the United States also deported more than 100,000 American citizens and permanent residents of Japanese ancestry (Manning 2005).

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moved to Pakistan, Hindus moved to India—and up to 2 million died in the process. Similarly, in 1948, when the United Nations created the Jewish homeland in Israel on Palestinian land, approximately 800,000 globally dispersed Jews migrated making about 1.8 million Muslim and Christian citizens minorities in their own ancestral holy land.29 Also, in 1953, when the Allied Forces divided Korea into North and South Korea, some 400,000 North Koreans migrated to South Korea. As the European overseas empires disappeared in the late 1960s,30 millions of European settlers return migrated to their ancestral homeland from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. After Algeria achieved its independence in 1962, about 800,000 French colonizers emigrated back to France; after Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980 and South Africa ended apartheid in 1993, thousands of Afrikaners migrated back to Britain, Canada, Australia, and other countries; and after the Congo gained independence in 1960, about 100,000 Belgians migrated back home. Globalization and Human Migration:  Between 1840 and 1940, three great waves of global migration reshaped global demographics—the movement of Europeans across the Atlantic to the Americas, the movement of Indians and Chinese to Southeast Asia, and the movement of Han Chinese and Russians to Northeastern Asia (Groeneveld 2017). Obviously, all these movements occurred under varying degrees of freedom, ranging from voluntary movement to restrictive forms like indentured labor. Then, two great World Wars brought a massive change to global migration patterns—increasingly migrations came to be dominated by force, as many imperial powers conscripted colonial populations for their wars, and the number of political refugees mounted phenomenally because of the redrawing of national boundaries and political conflicts. Since the early 1970s, the world has been in the throes of massive economic and political globalization which has dramatically changed the nature and pattern of human migration. In addition to other factors, 29 The Israeli population grew from 806,000 in May 15, 1948 (since Independence Day), to 7.2 million at the end of 2007. With Israel’s annexation of Palestinian land following the 1967 war, about 5 million Palestinians are currently stateless. 30 Britain still has 14 colonies—officially described as ‘dependent territories.’ France also has several overseas territories in the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, and Spain still clings to Ceuta and Melilla on the North African coast.

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air travel massively increased regional and international connectivity; a global expansion of corporate capital, international trade, and commerce made the world more integrated than ever before; and interlinkages of global labor markets and the creation of transnational communities tremendously accelerated migration around the world. While WWI and WWII brought a major change in migration patterns, being more dominated by political refugees, from the 1970s human migration became both voluntary and forced, intra-state, regional, and international, as well as becoming increasingly comprised of greater proportions of women. Most importantly, global migration since the 1970s has overwhelmingly been comprised of voluntary labor migration. Laborers from less developed countries have increasingly been migrating to developed countries to escape meteoritic rises in population and limited resources back home, in search of better jobs and prospects. As a result, migrations have increasingly been directed at a few rich countries. Also, since the 1970s, many traditional migrant-sending countries, like those in Western Europe, have turned into migrant-receiving countries, and a range of other countries such as oil-rich Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and newly industrialized countries such as Thailand, South Korea, and Singapore have emerged as migrant-receiving countries. Also, unlike the previous phases when migration heavily involved permanent settlement, since the 1970s, temporary and circular migration have become more predominant. People have been migrating more than once in their lifetimes and have been migrating to different countries and returning home. Migration in recent decades has not only involved permanent settlement, but also transient migration and repeat migration. Many migrants now maintain active homeland connections while integrating into their host nations through the acquisition of citizenship, acculturalization, and social mobility (World Bank 2018). Moreover, since the 1970s the world’s geopolitical landscape has changed dramatically, further impacting the nature of human migration. In 1989, the Berlin Wall—the symbol of physical separation between the capitalist and communist blocs—came down under a mass upsurge. Millions of East Germans and others from Eastern Europe migrated to West Germany following its collapse. Then, in 1991, the Cold War, that separated the capitalist and socialist world, came to an end, with the dissolution of the former Soviet Union. The break-up of the Soviet Union and the subsequent rearrangement of state boundaries turned about 27 million people into international migrants. About 4.5 million Russians,

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who settled in the former Soviet republics, return-migrated to Russia, while around 7 million non-Russians also migrated to Russia (Skeldon 2008). Also, in 1991, Yugoslavia, a conglomerate of diverse ethnic groups exploded into decade-long brutal infighting. Millions of people were forced to migrate while millions were massacred as rival groups from Bosnia and Herzegovina and other states engaged in one of the worst ethnic-cleansing events in modern history. Meanwhile, political conflict also resulted in genocide in Rwanda in 1994, creating about 2.8 million international refugees in Sudan’s western province of Darfur. About a million Rohingya Muslim refugees from Buddhist Myanmar migrated to Bangladesh in the mid 1990s, facing ethnic cleansing and genocide—a saga continuing even now. There has also been a significant increase in forced migration since the 1970s. Millions of people are being forced to migrate internally, regionally, or internationally due to political violence and conflict, environmental disasters, developmental activities of governments, as well as forced marriages and human trafficking. Because of the complexities involved in human migration since the 1970s, this topic has been discussed more comprehensively in Chapter 10.

References Bodvarsson, O., & den Berg, Van. (2013). The Economics of Immigration. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer. Campbell, G. (2004). Introduction: Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labor in the Indian Ocean World. In G. Campbell (Ed.), The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (pp. vii–xxxii). London: Frank Grass. Cavalli-Sfroza, L., Menozzi, P., & Piazza, A. (1994). The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clifford, W. (2013). State Formation and the Structure of Politics in Mamluk Syro-Egypt. Bonn: Bonn University Press. Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton. Fisher, M. (2014). Migration: A World History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Groeneveld, E. (2017, May). Early Human Migration. Ancient History Encyclopedia. https://www.ancient.eu/article/1070/early-human-migration/. Livi-Bacci, M. (2012). A Short History of Migration (C. Ipsen, Trans. into English). Malden, MA: Polity Press.

42  C. DOWLAH Manning, P. (1990). Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades. New York: Cambridge University Press. Manning, P. (2005). Migration in World History. New York: Routledge. Marcus, J. (1938). The Jew in the Medieval World: A Sourcebook, 315–1791. New York: JPS. Massey, D., Hugo, G., Taylor, J., Arango, J., & Kouaouci, A. (Eds.). (1998). Worlds in Motion. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Olson, S. (2003). Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins. New York: Mariner Books. Pagden, A. (2003). Peoples and Empires. New York: Modern Library. Patterson, O. (1982). Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Potts, L. (1990). The World Labor Market: A History of Migration (T. Bond, Trans.). London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books. Richards, E. (1991). Voices of British and Irish Migrants in Nineteenth Century Australia. In C. Pooley & I. Whyte (Eds.), Migrants, Emigrants and Immigrants: A Social History of Migration (pp. 19–41). London and New York: Routledge. Skeldon, R. (2008). Linkages Between Internal and International Migration. In J. DeWind & J. Holdaway (Eds.), Migration and Development Within and Across Borders. New York: International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Ueda, R. (2007). Immigration in Global Historical Perspective. In M. Waters & R. Ueda (Eds.), New Americans (pp. 4–18). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. World Bank. (2018). Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Labor Markets. Washington, DC: World Bank.

CHAPTER 3

Slavery During Ancient and Medieval Periods

Introduction The term ‘slavery’ broadly refers to an extreme form of coerced labor that entails enslavement, perpetual bondage, commodification, animalistic or worse than animalistic treatment of humans by their masters, or a manifestation of all or some of these features. There have been varieties of slaveries around the world—the magnitude and depth of coercion and brutality of a particular slave system depends on a host of factors, such as the nature of work, age, culture, race, and religion of slaves, their socio-economic and cultural standing, the economic and political motives of their masters, and the overall economic and political superstructure that formally or informally sanctions or permeates such measures or practices. Historical records suggest that slavery existed in almost all societies in almost all regions around the world and in almost all ages since ancient times. Leading scholars agree that there is probably no group of people of any racial or ethnic background on earth whose ancestors were not at one time or another slaves or slaveholders. What is worse is that often those who felt the whip of slavery and those who did the whipping belonged to the same tribal, racial, religious, or cultural group. There is no dispute that Sumerians enslaved Sumerians, Greeks enslaved Greeks, Christians enslaved Christians, Muslims enslaved Muslims, Jews enslaved Jews, Chinese enslaved Chinese, Indians enslaved Indians, Amerindians enslaved Amerindians, and Africans enslaved Africans. © The Author(s) 2020 C. Dowlah, Cross-Border Labor Mobility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36506-6_3

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It is thus not surprising that the institution of slavery has received widespread intellectual attention since the time of Aristotle and has been one of the most intensely researched areas of study across multiple disciplines, spanning history and politics, anthropology and sociology, and economics and psychology.1 Slavery, in its traditional forms may have disappeared, but in its basic nature still survives in the form of human trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage, sex trafficking, forced marriage, and such other slave-like exploitations, broadly described as ‘modern slavery.’ This book however is not on slavery, it provides brief glimpses of the phenomenon as it pertains to cross-border labor mobility from the ancient period to the contemporary world. This chapter provides the conceptual background and evolution of slavery as an institution, and the actual practice of various forms of slavery during ancient civilizations to the medieval period. The next two chapters cover two of the most important episodes of slavery in world history—the slavery of the Amerindians in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, and the slavery of the Africans during the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Modern-day slavery is covered in Chapter 10. The chapter is organized as follows: the next section elaborates on the conceptual contexts, origins and sources of slavery; section three explains the evolution of the slavery system during the ancient period; and section four focuses on the practice of slavery during the medieval period.

Contextual Background The term ‘slavery’ doesn’t have any universally acceptable definition. The reason is simple—all slavery is not alike—there has been a wide variety of slaveries across different ages and societies and it has differed significantly in respect to the exercise of coercion, cruelty, subjugation, and overall treatments in obtaining and perpetuating slave labor. The League of Nations, the precursor of today’s United Nations, in its first convention on slavery in 1926, defined slavery as “the status or conditions of a

1 One study suggests that at least 15,000 books have been written on African slavery alone (Resendez 2016, 8).

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person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”2 But given the variety and complexity involved in slavery-like practices, a prominent scholar on slavery, David Davis (1984, 8) wrote, “The more we learn about slavery, the more difficulty we have defining it.” Another prominent scholar on slavery, Orlando Patterson (1982), has shown that the predominance of slavery has increased further with almost all watershed moments and epochs in human history and thrived most in those areas and epochs where conventional wisdom would have expected it the least. Historical records suggest that slavery and human civilization advanced hand in hand. Although some studies trace the origin of slavery to the great advances of the Bronze Age (3300–1200 BC) when plough and irrigation agriculture emerged, some go even further back to primitive hunting and gathering societies (Goody 1980, 18–21). It is however more reasonable to assume that slavery emerged with urbanization and civilization when human societies learned to domesticate animals, developed extensive agriculture, and came to build urban civilizations with complex social stratification (Davis 2006, 37). Such stipulation is based on the premise that urbanization created a demand for production of surplus food in the countryside, and farmers in the countryside utilized their leverage on land-ownership to own slaves as it elevated their social status in addition to offering them an economically attractive choice of using low-cost labor. Although such interpretation is very common in relevant literature, it may be true for closed slavery that prevailed, for example, in India and China, where land was the primary source of wealth, but may not be an equally valid argument in respect to open slavery that existed, for example, in l­and-abundant Africa, where the key power came from control over women, slaves, guns, and horses, not from land (Miers and Kopytoff 1977; Watson 1980, 13). Moreover, actual practice as well as conceptualizations and interpretations of slavery have also changed over the ages as the institution of slavery progressed hand in hand with civilization. Most of the modern 2 Subsequently, the UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery (1956) defined the concept of ‘slavery-like practices,’ covering a wide range of institutions and practices similar to slavery, such as debt bondage, serfdom, forced labor, and forced marriage. It also criminalized many slavery-like practices making them prosecutable offences.

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researchers on slavery emphasize two predominant characteristics of slavery—the property aspect and the aspect of dehumanization. The former emphasizes institutionalization of slaves as property, that is, they are owned by some individuals or groups, and that the ownership is generally perpetual, it legally extends to slaves as well as their descendants (Finley 1968, 307; Tuden and Plotnicov 1970, 11–12). The dehumanization aspect, on the other hand, focuses on the internal sociological dynamics of slave–master relationships. Patterson (1982, 106–107) maintains that such dynamics manifest in three forms: (a) an extreme form of personal domination by a master on a slave’s life and death—leading to the social and cultural death of slaves; (b) natal alienation—the dehumanization of slaves and their descendants into the permanent property of their masters; and (c) the subjugation of slaves to a perpetual condition of dishonor—slaves have no legitimate exit from their master’s unbridled power and domination over them. The characteristics of slavery, as emphasized by Patterson, are however largely based on the experience of the transatlantic slave trade that flourished during the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, when millions of black Africans were forcibly brought to the Americas as slaves and subjected to complete dehumanization and commodification to obtain cheap labor under a well-orchestrated structure and process for capitalist accumulation. Although historically all slavery had been brutal, inhuman, and barbaric, available literature does suggest that not all slaveries involved such a scale of complete dehumanization and commodification. Even the personal property aspect of slavery varies from case to case. In fact, in most premodern slaveholding societies, the sale of s­econd-generation or third-generation descendants of slaves was legally prohibited. Moreover, as Davis (2006, 36) points out, although slavery signified classifying and categorizing the most debased social class since time immemorial, there had actually been a spectrum of slave systems, starting with those that accorded slaves a variety of protection and rights. For example, the Barbary system, that flourished for several hundred years during the times of Ottoman rule, for enslaving whites, provided slaves with the hope of redemption and return, and was primarily motivated by procuring ransom or extortion, not for using slaves for dehumanization or as a source of cheap labor for capital mobilization (Colley 2004, 64–65). Of course, the episode of African slavery during the fifteenth

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through the nineteenth centuries provided an example for the opposite end of the spectrum.3 There has also been considerable debate about the way slaves have been acquired throughout the ages. Historically, one of the largest sources of slavery was capture in warfare—as wars and hostilities were frequent and brutal in early civilizations, they afforded opportunities to victorious armies to enslave captured armies and fallen inhabitants. Instead of killing captured armies, many victorious forces throughout the ancient to medieval periods preferred to enslave them so that slave-labor could be exploited for gainful trades. But there were also many other modes of acquiring slaves throughout the ages. For example, kidnapping or piracy was rampant in ancient and medieval slaveholding societies, especially in Mesopotamia and the ancient East. Some societies used slavery as a form of tribute and tax payment, in some cases made tribute payments in terms of slaves to save families or tribes and withstand foreign threats. The Romans, for example, acquired large number of slaves as tribute payments to protect states, and several African slaveholding societies relied heavily on such slave tributes to augment their slave populations. Also, traditional African and Asian societies practiced something known as debt servitude, whereby members of a debtor’s family were pawned or pledged as security for a loan. Many societies practiced penal slavery—where slavery was awarded as punishment for crimes—it was a significant source of acquiring slaves in ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, and Hellenic Egypt as well as in several oriental societies. Often impoverished families sold their own children to slavery—such practices existed in Africa, in the Near East and the Orient, in the ancient Mediterranean region and in some Greek states and the Roman Empire. Historically, trade has been another major source of slavery—from the most primitive to the most modern periods, less developed societies offered their own people to acquire luxury goods and guns from traders from advanced societies—as practiced by the Africans and the Amerindians, in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, in medieval

3 The transatlantic slave system is discussed in Chapter 5. For more detail on various types of slavery, see Patterson (1982) who analyzed 66 slaveholding systems around the world from sociological perspectives, mainly focusing on the dynamics of power relationships between masters and slaves.

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Europe, and during the transatlantic trade. Self-enslavement has also been recorded—when impoverished people voluntarily enslaved themselves. Such practices existed in several societies, in modern times too, such as in Japan, China, and Russia, where poverty was the most important reason for self-enslavement among the mass of domestic slaves. Even marriages were a source of self-enslavement in many primitive oriental and European slaveholding societies.4 Historical records also suggest that slavery, not free labor, had been the most widely accepted form of labor since time immemorial. All societies and civilizations—whether primitive, medieval or modern, rural or urban, industrial or agricultural; all regions of the world—Western and Eastern, to the south or north; and all major religions—Islam, Christianism, or Judaism—validated, even harbored, slavery in one form or another, at one stage or another. Slavery also received ringing philosophical validation throughout history. The Greek philosopher Aristotle viewed the relationship between master and slave as being as natural as the relationship of body and soul, and his mentor, Plato viewed slavery as part of a vast cosmic scheme of irrational nature ordered and controlled by an intelligent and purposeful authority (Davis 2006, 55; Lord 2013).5 Similar views were expressed by many modern philosophers too, ranging from British philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) to German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) to French philosopher Montesquieu (1689–1755). Even the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), the father of liberalism, who championed the “inalienable rights of man to life, liberty, and property” was a staunch defender of slavery—he was an investor in the Royal African Company that monopolized the British slave trade (Fogel and Engerman 1974, 5–6).6

4 For

further details on the various modes of acquiring slaves throughout the ages, see Patterson (1982, 105–131); Chapter 5 of Quirk (2011) for various slavery types; and Vogt (1975, 171–188) for philosophical discourses on slavery. 5 Vogt (1975, 26–38) argues that both Plato’s political utopia, that insisted on life without marriage and private property for the Philosopher Kings, and Aristotle’s practical handbook of addressing issues of organizing state and running statecraft, revolved around their extreme insistence on the value of intellectual and social activity—a leisurely life of reflection for the ruling class, which they thought would be impossible in a slave-free society. 6 For further details on the religious and philosophical validation of slavery, see Chapter 5.

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The Ancient Period As the previous discussion suggests, slavery has been widely validated, encouraged, and adopted by many societies and civilizations since the ancient times. Indeed, history is also full of examples of slavery that involved both domestic as well as international mobility of labor. More often than not such mobility blurred any dividing lines of race, gender, culture, religion, and economic standing of those involved. We begin the journey with ancient civilizations. Many ancient societies practiced slavery extensively where slaves were essentially considered as personal property. As Table 3.1 indicates, the proportion of slaves constituted between 30 and 33 percent of the Greek population between the fifth century BC and the beginning of the Roman Empire. Similarly, between 30 and 35 percent of the population of the Roman Empire, between 300 BC and 100 BC, were slaves. Slavery Table 3.1  Large-scale slavery systems around the world during ancient and medieval periods Date

Estimated slave population (percent) 30–33

(Athens, Corinth, Aegina, and Chios) Roman Italy Roman Empire Visigothic Spain Muslim Spain Mediterranean Spain

5th century BC to early Roman period 225–200 BC

10

100 BC to AD 300 AD 1–150 AD 415–711 AD 756–1492 13th century

30–35 16–20 >66 >20 >20

Africa Early states of western Sudan Pre-Islamic Ghana Islamic Ghana Mali

4th century to 1076 1076–1600 1200–1500

>30 >30 >40

9th–10th century AD 660–918 AD 918–1392

>50 50? >33

Europe Greek states

Asia and Oceania Iraq (lower Mesopotamia) Korea

Source Author’s compilation based on Appendix C of Patterson (1982, 353–364)

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was also pervasive in ancient Africa—during the fourth century AD more than 30 percent of the population of Ghana were slaves. Indeed, almost all ancient civilizations of the world—the Egyptian, the Sumerian, the Babylonian, the Chinese, and the Indian—practiced slavery quite extensively. The Egyptian civilization, which emerged in the Nile Valley as far back as about 3100 BC, used captured foreigners for their agricultural and construction works, drafted them to their military, and used them as rewards for exceptional service to Pharaoh. The Egyptians enslaved many people domestically—for ­ destitution (mainly for insolvency to the state) and crime (as penal ­punishment). In Pharaonic Egypt, slaves were given as dowry for the marriage of daughters. Although increasingly being challenged, it is widely believed that the building of mammoth monuments, like the pyramids, might have involved the employment of extensive slave labor.7 The Sumerian civilization, that emerged along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers around 3000 BC, had also practiced slavery extravagantly. One of the Sumerian rulers, named Sargon, famously owned more than 9000 slaves. Sumerian rulers also punished thieves and murderers to serve their victims as slaves, many Sumerian orphans and illegitimate children grew up as slaves in temples, and many impoverished Sumerians sold their children into slavery.

7 Controversy

surrounding the issue remains unresolved although pyramids were built about 4500 years ago. Available literature suggests that it took 10,000 workers more than 30 years to build just one single pyramid—a total of 80 pyramids were built. The largest of all, built for the Pharaoh Khufu, was the biggest building on the planet. To build such a mammoth structure, workers moved six and a half million tons of stone—some in blocks as large as nine tons, and they moved these with nothing but wood and rope (Shaw 2003). Ancient Greek historian Herodotus claimed that the pyramids were built by slaves. The Old Testament also says that the Egyptians enslaved the children of Israel and that Pharaoh put them to the construction of buildings. Later, Hollywood films propagated that ancient Israelite slaves—ancestors of the Jewish people—built the pyramids. Even former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, during his visit to Egypt in 1977, claimed that Jews built the pyramids. Recent archeological discoveries found some tombs of workers, who were thought to have built the pyramids, positioned next to the pyramids—if workers were slaves they would not have been buried next to powerful Pharaohs. The findings also suggest that workers were well-fed and well-treated—also suggesting that workers might not have been slaves. For recent reports see “Egypt: New Find Shows Slaves Didn’t Build Pyramids,” US News, January 12, 2010, and “Egypt Tombs Suggest Free Men Built Pyramids, Not Slaves,” BBC News, January 11, 2010.

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The Babylonian civilization, which succeeded the Sumerians around 2300 BC, also practiced slavery. Although all previous civilizations had used slaves for dowry, for the Babylonians it was a significant mode of slave acquisition. One of the Babylonian rulers, named Hammurabi, has widely been credited for codifying slave laws for the first time in world history.8 Unlike other types of slavery in the past, Babylonian slavery is believed to have been less brutal, slaves were allowed to own personal property. The Greek Civilization: The Greek civilization, that flourished in the fifth through the third century BC and is considered the birthplace of democracy, was almost entirely dependent on slave labor. The Greeks also practiced cross-border labor mobility as the main mode of acquiring slaves—most of their slaves came from other regions of the Mediterranean. Both the leading states of ancient Greece—Sparta and Athens—depended on coerced labor, although their slaveries were dissimilar. Athens had something similar to chattel slavery, that later appeared in the Americas whereas Spartan slaves owned hereditary land while working for their masters—more like the serfdom that appeared in Europe in later centuries. Most of the Athenian slaves worked as domestic servants and lacked conventional rights—their rights depended on their masters and the kind of work they did. In general, while male slaves ran households as stewards, female slaves looked after the children or acted as concubines. In the fifth century BC, of the approximate Athenian population of 155,000, more than 45 percent were slaves (Cohen 1995). Another account suggests that Athens had more than 100,000 slaves—twice the size of the free adult population of the city (Lord 2013). Slavery indeed helped the leisurely Athenians to engage in endless debates on democracy, liberty, and justice that made such an enduring contribution to human civilization. The Greeks however also used slaves as their police force—known as the Scythian Archers. These slaves were owned by the state and were authorized to use force against citizens. The Roman Empire: The Roman Empire that dominated the world from 286 BC to AD 402 had literally exceeded all previous civilizations in terms of its dependence on slavery—three out of four residents 8 The Hammurabi tablet provides the first written reference—the first legal code of slavery—and the first record of the sale of slaves around 2300 BC (Goody 1980, 18).

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in the Italian Peninsula’s 2.1 million population lived in bondage during its reign (Hopkins 1978, 100).9 To the Romans, slaves were outsiders and the property of masters—control over slaves was total. Power of Romans was mediated through wealth, especially in terms of land and slaves—land was more important but slaves were more flexible and less problematic. Apparently, Roman masters took special delight in possessing a large retinue of slaves—something that enhanced their sense of honor and reputation in the eyes of their peers.10 Although most Roman slaves were captives of wars, debt slavery was also very common in the Roman Empire, as defaulting debtors and ransomed prisoners of war could be condemned to slavery. Many slaves were also procured through markets—the slave markets of Rome were indeed among the largest and busiest in the world at that time. Slaves were usually sold at public auctions, often with money-back guarantees—if a slave was unable to do what he was described to be able to do, he could be returned (Manning 2013). But unlike Greek slavery, which was overwhelmingly urban and industrial, Roman slavery was both rural and urban. The Romans used slaves in almost every type of craft and trade—the most privileged slaves served the emperor and received better treatment than others. Most served as miners, who were whipped into continuing their efforts by overseers, or farmers who worked in chain gangs. The Romans also forced slaves to serve as gladiators—Spartacus, a slave gladiator, led a great uprising against the Roman Empire between 73 BC and 71 BC with an army of 120,000 slaves and gladiators.

The Medieval Period During the course of the next thousand years, usually described as the medieval period, slavery further expanded and solidified as some large-scale slaveholding societies emerged. Much of this large-scale ­ slavery resulted from the massive spread of Islam during the seventh to thirteenth centuries when spectacular Muslim conquests created a vast intercontinental world—extending from modern Pakistan westward 9 The Encyclopedia Britannica (1961, 20:776) and Hopkins (1978) however provide slightly lower estimates of the slave population in the Roman Empire during this period. 10 For further details, see Patterson (1982, 7–8, 21–26, 30, 125), Duncan-Jones (1974), Finley (1968), and Hopkins (1978).

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across the Middle East and northern Africa to Spain and France. Such a vast intercontinental Muslim world, which apparently received religious approval,11 created a massive demand for slaves who could be employed as household servants, soldiers, members of harems, eunuch chaperones, as well as administrative and military officials—coreligionists were also enslaved in addition to foreigners and infidels. Muslim empires during the medieval period—the Ottoman, the Moroccan, the Indian, and the Persian—together controlled at some point or another about one third of the global population, and were remarkably urban, commercial, and culturally rich, employing slaves quite extensively. Most of the demand for slave labor however originated from the Muslim empires/dynasties along the Mediterranean, and much of the demand was met by relatively unsophisticated tribes to the north and south—many of these tribes seized prisoners of their own to sell at hundreds of trading stations that sprung up along the southern Mediterranean (Colley 2004, 106–107). Muslim-dominated regions of precolonial Africa, countries such as Ghana, Songhay and Mali, the Kingdom of Dahomey and Ashanti, the caliphate of Sokoto, and the sultanate of Zanzibar all relied heavily on slave labor and the slave trade (Patterson 1982, 141).12 The Ottoman Slave Markets:  The Ottoman Empire, which controlled the entire Mediterranean for about 600 years during the medieval period, had been a great catalyst for spreading large-scale slavery—the Empire absorbed millions of slaves from both the black African south and the white Slavic north. By the fourteenth century, the Ottoman Empire controlled the northeastern Mediterranean coastline through Serbia, Albania, Morea, and Turkey; the easternmost parts of the Mediterranean

11 As discussed in further detail in Chapter 6, all Abrahamic religions validated slavery, although not uniformly. Pointing to slavery, Muslim scholar Ibne Sina (980–1037) remarked, “God in his providential wisdom had placed, in regions of great heat or great cold, peoples who were by their very nature slaves, and incapable of higher things—for there must be masters and slaves” (cited in Davis 2006, 43)—an almost verbatim reproduction of Plato’s position approximately 1000 years earlier. 12 Moslem societies however generally treated slaves with an absence of race hatred and were relatively lenient. Moreover, often slaves were accepted as members of a master’s family, their children were trained for harems in music and dancing, some harem children even became queen mothers, and some of the slaves became military generals and established their own dynasties (Goody 1980, 29–35).

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of Egypt and Syria; and the western Mediterranean through their North African provinces of Tripoli, Tunisia, and Algiers. By the 1350s, the Empire penetrated Europe and in 1453 captured Constantinople and opened new floodgates for the slave trade from the European front. Even in defeat, the Ottoman army returned from the Gates of Vienna with 80,000 captives in 1683 (Colley 2004, 106). Because of its size, wealth, and urbanized population, the Ottoman Empire was a flourishing market for overseas traders, sophisticated manufactures, as well as slaves. An immense number of slaves—ranging between 1.5 million and 7 million—flowed from the Crimea, the Balkans, and the steppes of West Asia to Muslim markets (Davis 2006). During this period, the Crimean Khanate of Mongolia (1475–1783) emerged as one of the largest suppliers of slaves to the Ottomans. They captured millions of slaves throughout the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea, and for every slave sold at least two or three were killed during their ruthless raids, with more dying before reaching the markets. Some studies suggest that between 1468 and 1694 Tartars and other Black Sea slave traders sold millions of Ukrainians, Georgians, Circassians, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Slavs, and Turks to Ottoman markets, with thousands of them converted to Islam.13 A large part of the Ottoman slave trade was carried out by pirates along the Barbary Coast—along Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. Known as Barbary Corsairs, the pirates primarily engaged themselves in the white slave trade and mainly targeted European ships from countries with which the Ottoman Empire had military conflicts. The extent of the Barbary Corsairs’ white slave trade can be gauged from the fact that in the early seventeenth century, about 8000 English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish captives were taken to North Africa by Algerian fleets alone. Such slaves were used for all occupations, including administrative and military tasks, with many used as galley slaves.14 13 Some studies available on the internet suggest that between 1450 and 1700, the Crimean Tatars exported about 2.5 million slaves to the Ottoman Empire https://www. ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-africa/white-slaves-barbary-002171, accessed on July 24, 2018. See also http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_ 01.shtml; http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/mar/11/highereducation.books; and http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/whtslav.htm. 14 Some of the Corsair fleets of Algiers were seventy vessels strong, and like the galley fleets of France, Spain, and Italy, they used slaves in the galleys. It is believed that in 1580, between 25,000 and 35,000 of Algeria’s total population of 100,000 were slaves (Patterson 1982, 460). See also Clissold (1977).

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The Ottoman Empire also induced large-scale migration of black slaves from sub-Saharan Africa into Muslim countries for several centuries. Some estimates suggest that the number of black slaves migrated to the Ottoman Empire equaled or exceeded the number of African slaves transported to the New World in later centuries. One estimate suggests the number could be almost 18 million, far exceeding that of the 12 million transported to the New World (Davis 2006, 61–62). The Ottoman slaves produced wide-ranging goods—from agricultural goods including coffee, cotton, and coconuts to dates, sugar, and millet; and precious metals, including gold and copper, and pearls (Clarence-Smith 2006, 14–15; Wright 2017, 52). Although both instances of slavery lasted for several centuries and both involved intercontinental movement of slaves, they were very different. First of all, unlike slaves in the New World, studies suggest that Barbary and Ottoman slaves were treated relatively leniently, with an absence of race-hatred, irrespective of skin color, indeed, many were allowed to become richer than their masters (Watson 1980; Goody 1980, 29).15 Second, Barbary and Ottoman slaves lived more diverse lives freer lives than the majority of plantation slaves in the Caribbean or the Americas. Numerous Barbary and Ottoman slaves converted to Islam and thus gained freedom quickly, many slaves were treated as family members and allowed to marry Muslim women, many were allowed to own small properties, and many worked as sailors, weavers, porters, mercenaries, medical experts, architectural advisers, and armorers (ClarenceSmith 2006). Third, the loss of freedom of slaves under the Barbary system had a temporal limit—European male slaves, together with more affluent and protected women slaves, could usually look forward to being ransomed at some point. As such ransoms often took a decade to arrive, slave owners had incentives to keep their European slaves alive and healthy in the hope of collecting bounty (Colley 2004, 57–62).16 15 Clarence-Smith (2006, 2–4) however maintains that only a small percentage of them could be richer than their masters, but the vast majority suffered from manual drudges, condemned to slave status, and used as cannon fodder. 16 In the 1670s, the parents and wives of almost a thousand English captives in Algiers petitioned to the British Parliament against inhuman treatment of their relatives in the Mediterranean. Barbary slavery was so severe for the Europeans that many European nations officially set aside allocations for releasing their captives. Even a relatively remote state like Denmark at one point devoted 15 percent of its profits from Mediterranean trade for releasing captives (Colley 2004, 47–57). Enslavement of Western Europeans also helped them to see the horrors of slavery, and as a payback for the re-conquest of the Iberian Peninsula (Quirk 2011, 25).

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African Slave Markets: The medieval period also witnessed a massive growth in slavery in African society. As mentioned before, many African countries, such as Ghana, Songhay and Mali, the Kingdom of Dahomey and Ashanti, the caliphate of Sokoto, and the sultanate of Zanzibar, all relied heavily on slave labor. In Ghana, for example, at least one third of the population was enslaved during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the country emerged as a major commercial center of trans-Saharan trade and used numerous slaves as porters and traders to carry goods across the Sahara (Patterson 1982). Similarly, Mali used slaves extensively for its agriculture, military, industry, as well as government services.17 During the medieval period, a booming slave trade emerged in sub-Saharan Africa and along the east coast of Africa, which “was larger and older than the Atlantic slave trade” and supplied between 5000 and 10,000 slaves annually to the Ottoman Empire—trade continued long after the suppression of the slave trade by many colonial powers (Wright 2017, 53). European Slave Markets: Meanwhile, in tenth-century Europe, during the eastward expansion of the Germans, a huge conglomerate of people, known as Slavs, were primary targets for enslavement. Bound by various Slavic languages, Slavs were natives to a vast Eurasian region, stretching from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe all the way northward and westward to Northeast Europe, Northern Asia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, as well as Western Europe and Western Asia. So many Slavs were captured and enslaved in the tenth century that their racial name Slav gave birth to the generic term ‘slave.’18 Then during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, a robust slave market emerged in Italy. In addition to using slaves extensively as

17 Famously, Emperor Masa Musa, who took Mali to its zenith as one of the richest empires in the world, made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1337 escorted by more than 10,000 slaves (Manning 1990). 18 The English word ‘slave’ is however believed to have originated from the medieval Latin world ‘sclavus,’ and its western European counterparts—‘sclave’ in French, ‘esclavo’ in Spanish, and ‘sklave’ in German—commonly meant a person of Slavic descent (Davis 2006, 49).

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domestic servants and shop assistants, Italians employed many slaves to build large cosmopolitan cities that emerged in the country during the Middle Ages (Manning 2013, 49). Following the western capture of Constantinople in 1204, Italian merchants carried out a booming long-distance seaborne slave trade that sold tens of thousands of ‘white’ Armenians, Bulgarians, Circassians, Mingrelians, and Georgians from regions around the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov to Mediterranean markets (Davis 2006, 49). Italians also traded many Russians, Greeks, Moors (North Africans and Arabs), Ethiopians, and Tartars (Mongolian and Turkic tribes of Eastern Europe and Central Asia),19 and imported a small number of black slaves from North Africa.20 During this period, Florence emerged as a booming slave trade center where no fewer than 10,000 bondsmen (mostly bondswomen) were sold between 1414 and 1423. Most of these slaves were whites and were mainly used for sugar production,21 although many were employed in other areas and exchanged in shoreline markets for coveted goods. But the booming Italian slave trade came to an end after the Ottoman Turks recaptured Constantinople in 1453 and blocked the entrance from the

19 Many

of these slaves were used for sugar production. Remnants of this white slave trade include details of (in 1600) a few Greek and Slavic slaves in Spanish Havana, and in the 1580s, there were many freed Turks, North African Moors, and even Frenchmen and Germans among the Spanish galley slaves in Santo Domingo and Cartagena of Colombia (Davis 2006, 49). 20 By the time Christopher Columbus sailed for the first expedition to the Americas, the number of black slaves in the Old World numbered more than 25,000 (Fogel and Engerman 1974, 15). 21 By this time sugar had already emerged as the greatest of slave crops, and between 60 and 70 percent of all slaves ended up in one or another of Europe’s sugar colonies. Sugar was introduced into the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean—from Syria to Greece to Cyrenaica and the eastern coast of Libya) in the seventh century by the Arabs. During the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, the Normans (French from Normandy) and Venetians (Italians from the state of Venice) took over the Arab sugar industry in Palestine and promoted the production of sugar in the Mediterranean islands of Cypress, Crete, and Sicily, from where sugar was exported to all parts of Europe. The institutional apparatus of plantations that was developed in these islands for the production of sugar by using primarily white slaves was eventually applied to blacks in the New World in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. For further details, see Chapter 1 of Fogel (1989).

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Mediterranean into the Black Sea, cutting off a major source of slaves to European markets (Davis 2006, 81).22 In addition to the Mediterranean countries, Spain, Italy, and Africa, the medieval period also witnessed large-scale slavery in some oriental societies, especially in Korea where slavery played a significant role in the palatine service and administration for over a thousand years, up until the thirteenth century (Table 3.1). Asian Slave Markets: Slavery had also existed in the great Asian civilizations since the ancient times. Historical records suggest that slavery was extensive in China even during the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 25) as well as during the periods of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro (2600–1900 BCE) in the Indian subcontinent. Many other Asian countries, such as Japan, Malaysia, Korea, Indonesia, Indochina, and Thailand, all had vibrant slavery systems of their own, that flourished both over land and sea for several thousands of years—between 20 and 50 percent of these people were enslaved in various forms of coerced labor. But Asian slavery systems were largely domestic in nature, in many countries even free labor or wage labor was very uncommon. Available literature however suggests that a considerable number of Indian slaves were sold in the Middle East, many Korean slaves were sold in China, and many Chinese slaves were sold in North America. But large-scale cross-border labor mobility of Asian populations occurred with the phase of indentured servitude, when millions of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese were exported to various parts of the world.23

22 The incidence of cutting off of major sources of slaves to European markets by the Ottomans might have played a role in the opening of the transatlantic slave trade. Portuguese traders, who began the transatlantic slave trade, established their trading posts along the West African coast at this time, around the 1440s. Soon after trading posts were established, average imports of slaves into to Iberian Peninsula and the Iberian controlled islands off the coast of Africa (the Canaries, the Madeira and Sao Thome) rose to about 1,000 per year. See Chapter 1 of Fogel (1989) for further details. 23 For further details on Asian slavery systems, see Fogel (1989), Campbell (2004), Genevose (1972), Miers (2003), and Reid (1993). The indentured servitude of the Asians is considered in Chapter 6.

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References Campbell, G. (2004). The Structure of Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labor in the Indian Africa and Asia. London: Frank Cass. Clarence-Smith, W. (2006). Islam and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press. Clissold, S. (1977). The Barbary Slaves. London: Paul Elek. Cohen, R. (1995). The Cambridge Survey of World Migration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Colley, L. (2004). Captives—Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850. New York: Anchor Books. Davis, D. (1984). Slavery and Human Progress. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, D. (2006). Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Duncan-Jones, R. (1974). The Economy of the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Encyclopedia Britannica. (1961). Accessed Online on March 21, 2018. Finley, M. (1968). Slavery. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 14, 307–313. Fogel, R. (1989). Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. New York: W. W. Norton. Fogel, R., & Engerman, S. (1974). Time to Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Vol. I). Boston: Little Brown. Genevose, E. (1972). Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slave Made. New York: Random House. Goody, J. (1980). Slavery in Time and Space. In J. Watson (Ed.), Asian and African Systems of Slavery (pp. 16–42). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hopkins, K. (1978). Conquerors and Slaves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lord, C. (2013). Aristotle’s Politics (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Manning, P. (1990). Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades. New York: Cambridge University Press. Manning, P. (2013). Migration in World History. London: Routledge. Miers, S. (2003). Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of Global Problem. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Miers, S., & Kopytoff, I. (Eds.). (1977). Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Patterson, O. (1982). Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Quirk, J. (2011). The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

60  C. DOWLAH Reid, A. (1993). The Decline of Slavery in Ninteenth Century Indonesia. In M. Klien (Ed.), Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia (pp. 64–82). Madison: University of Wisconson Press. Resendez, A. (2016). The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. New York: Mariner Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Shaw, J. (2003). Who Built the Pyramids? Not Slaves. Archaeologist Mark Lehner, Digging Deeper, Discovers a City of Privileged Workers. Harvard Magazine, July–August, 2003. Tuden, A., & Plotnicov, L. (Eds.). (1970). Social Stratification in Africa. New York: Free Press. Vogt, J. (1975). Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man (T. Weidermann, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watson, J. (1980). Asian and African Systems of Slavery. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wright, G. (1987). The Efficiency of Slavery: Another Interpretation. American Economic Review, 69(1), 219–226. Wright, G. (2006). Slavery and American Economic Development. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Wright, R. (2017). The Poverty of Slavery: How Unfree Labor Pollutes the Economy. London: Palgrave.

CHAPTER 4

Slavery in the New World: The Saga of the Amerindians

Introduction This chapter covers cross-border labor mobility focusing on the saga of the Amerindians—the pre-Columbian indigenous populations in the New World that Christopher Columbus erroneously described as ‘Indians.’1 The indigenous populations that lived in the New World before Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas have never been precisely established. Some nineteenth-century estimates had the number as low as 10 million, but some late twentieth–century estimates have it between 50 million and more than 100 million. A ‘consensus estimate’ recently placed the number around 54 million, most of whom lived in Mesoamerica and South America: 25.7 million in Mexico, 14.6 million in Peru, 9.8 million in Bolivia, 6 million in Guatemala, 4.5 million in

1 Columbus described the people in the newly found land as ‘Indians’ as he thought he had landed in India. Columbus was also unaware of the fact that he had discovered a New World and added two more continents to the existing maritime connections between Europe and Africa. Recent genetic analysis shows that the Amerindian populations that Columbus met originated from their East Asian ancestors between 25,000 and 36,000 years ago, and most researchers agree that they arrived in the Americas through Beringia—the area encompassing parts of present-day East Asia and North America, connected by what is known as the Bering Land Bridge. For further details see ­Moreno-Mayar et al. (2018).

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Ecuador, 4 million in the United States, 2.1 million in Canada, and 2 million in Chile (Denevan 1992; Taylor 2002).2 Over the course of 150 years after Columbus’s landing in the Americas however the population of Amerindians declined to less than 6 million—about 10 percent of the ‘consensus estimate’ of the population when he sat his foot in the Bahamas in 1492 (Davis 2006, 97–98). Columbus established his first fort in Haiti, it had more than a million Amerindians, but the population came down to about 10,000 by 1520, and to about 250 by 1550 (Mann 2005; Churchill 1994). Between 1509 and 1519, over 60,000 Amerindians were transported to Hispaniola from the Bahamas, only 800 survived. Similarly, of the thousands of Amerindians shipped from Nicaragua to Panama and Peru, less than 20 percent survived; the indigenous population of central Mexico, Peru, and Chile fell by almost 90 percent in the 75 years after the Spanish invasion; and in the Caribbean, the indigenous population declined from 300,000 and 500,000 to fewer than 500 by 1540s (Davis 2006, 97–98; Sherman 1971, 25). Many of these catastrophic declines in the Amerindian population had traditionally been attributed almost totally to the population’s apparent incapacity to resist a ‘virgin soil pandemic’—European diseases such as smallpox, influenza, and malaria—something more recent literature claims to be grossly exaggerated and misleading. Recent research rather suggests that in addition to wars and epidemics, trauma of coerced labor and slavery was largely responsible for the precipitous decline of the Amerindian population in the Spanish America in the early sixteenth century.3 The focus of this treatise is however not on the entire saga of the Amerindian population, but rather on the slavery or involuntary servitude of Amerindians during the period of the European colonialization of the New World after Columbus landed in the Bahamas. Until recently, the slavery or involuntary servitude of the Amerindians received scant attention, 2 For further details see also Mann (2005), Stannard (1993), Haines and Steckel (2000), http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas. 3 Scores of authoritative sources have made this point in recent years, for example, see Gallay (2002), Batstone (2010), and Resendez (2016). Wright (2017, 153) goes even further to argue that in cases where disease had been the only source of demographic pressure, many populations rebounded, for example, Europe recovered from the Black Death and many Asian countries recovered from calamities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but that did not happen in the case of the Amerindians.

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scholars around the world rather remained fixated on the most dominant slavery of black Africans in the Americas. In recent decades however it has increasingly been recognized that slavery of the Amerindians is not a peripheral issue, but a central element in their history, which has powerfully impacted not only their lives but also shaped the very nature of European colonialization, empire building, and the capitalistic developments of the world economy since the fifteenth century (Gallay 2009, 2–3). It is also increasingly being recognized that the subjugation, slavery, and servitude of the Amerindians was indeed the first large-scale exploitation of foreign workers for capitalistic accumulation by European colonial powers in their conquered territories outside Europe. It is also increasingly becoming clear that the slavery or involuntary servitude of the Amerindians far exceeded that of the black Africans, both in terms of scale and magnitude, and in many respects, served as the preliminary stage in the development of the transatlantic slave trade during the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries (Potts 1990, 16). This chapter is organized as follows: the next section elaborates on the nature and magnitude of subjugation and slavery of Amerindian populations during the reign of the Hispanic Empire in the Americas; section three explains the saga of the Amerindians in the land that constitutes the United States, where Amerindians are officially described as Native Indians; and section four concludes the chapter.

Slavery of the Amerindians The story of subjugation and extermination of indigenous Amerindians began in 1492, precisely with the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, which paved the way for the establishment of large-scale colonies of the Spanish Crown across the Atlantic. Eventually the Spanish Empire in the Americas—that lasted for more than 300 years, up until 1832—spanned across the Americas except Brazil, Canada, the eastern United States, some small countries in South America, and the Caribbean.4 4 The Spanish Empire encompassed most of the Caribbean Islands, most of Central America, half of South America, much of North America, such as Mexico and the southwestern and Pacific coastal regions of the United States, and the current states of Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Texas, and Utah.

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For the Amerindians however the Spanish invasion was most traumatic during the first five decades after Columbus landed in the Bahamas,5 when using the Caribbean islands as their base, Spanish conquistadors quickly subdued major regions of the Americas as well as the Greater Antilles in the Caribbean—Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica—a densely populated area with millions of indigenous people. For the indigenous population the next 100 years was also extremely perilous—as conquistadors inflicted large-scale butchery (matanza) on the population to destroy, capture, conquer, and enslave them—literally decimating the population (Potts 1990, 17). Available literature suggests that Spaniards adopted both involuntary servitude and outright slavery as their preferred modes to utilize the vast reservoir of newly discovered labor. Amerindians were familiar with slavery—as many of them had enslaved members of their own or other tribes for centuries, but with the intervention of the Spaniards, the captivity and coerced labor of Amerindians expanded on a large scale and slave labor was commodified into a global economy as the Spanish Empire emerged as the most dominant slaving power in the world. Indeed, the Spanish Empire had been to Amerindian slavery what Portugal and England had been to African slavery (Resendez 2016, 3–4). Spanish slavery of Amerindians however had a checkered history. When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella appointed Christopher Columbus the Viceroy and Admiral of the Ocean Sea for the islands that he might discover and acquire for the Spanish Empire, he was clearly instructed to “strive and endeavor to win over the inhabitants” of newfound lands. The Catholic Sovereigns of Spain, while asking Columbus to spread the Christian faith, insisted he should “treat the Indians very well and lovingly and abstain from doing them any injury,” and punish any members of his fleet if they mistreated them “in any manner whatsoever” (Bergreen 2011, 120–124).6 5 Columbus’s fleet of three ships left Spain on August 3, 1492, and made landfall in the Bahamas on October 12, after about two months. He then sailed to the island of Hispaniola (in present day Haiti) and built the first Spanish settlement in the New World naming it La Villa de Navidad. His first fort was however destroyed by fire within a year, then he built his next settlement further east in the current Dominican Republic, and named it La Isabela, after Queen Isabella of Spain. 6 The Spanish Crown however was not opposed to slavery itself. When Columbus sailed for the Americas, there were already around 25,000 African slaves in the Iberian Peninsula and the Iberian controlled islands off the coast of Africa—the Canaries, Madeira, the Cape Verde archipelago, and Sao Thome (Fogel and Engerman 1974, 15; Fogel 1989).

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Conquistadors however hardly adhered to the diktats of the Spanish Crown and sermons of the Catholic Sovereigns. Columbus himself forced many Amerindians to extract gold from mines as soon as 1494, immediately after establishing forts in Haiti. Churchill (1994) claims that Columbus instituted policies of slavery (encomiendo) and systematic extermination against the Amerindian population while serving as Viceroy and Governor of the Caribbean islands and the Mainland of America during his reign of 1493–1500, and that his programs reduced the Taino population from as many as 8 million at the outset of his regime to about 3 million in 1496, and about 100,000 at the time of his departure.7 The scale and magnitude of the Amerindian slavery and subjugation in the hands of the Spaniards however remains controversial—some studies suggest that conquistadors inflicted massive butchery and some even describe it as a genocide. Churchill described it as a ‘vast genocide,’ ‘the most sustained on record.’ Stannard described it as the “worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people.” Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr. described it as, “there can be no more monumental example of sustained genocide—certainly none involving a ‘race’ of people as broad and complex as this—anywhere in the annals of human history” (cited in Lewy 2004).8 In a recent study, Resendez (2016) also claims that intoxicated by prospects of wealth in the new colony—where gold flowed in rivers, mines were full of precious metals, vast areas of arable and exotic land had no limits, and such a vast reservoir of labor was ready to be tapped into for profitable intercontinental commerce—the conquistadors, armed with guns and attack dogs, forcibly enslaved nomadic native populations without caring about their skills, ability, and attitude or whether their victims were male, female, or even children. The United Nations has however refrained from declaring the slavery and slaughter of the Amerindians at the hands of the Spanish Crown as genocide. The UN designates genocide as a serious international crime—an act of 7 Tianos are indigenous Arawak people who inhabited the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas when Columbus landed in the Bahamas. Churchill’s (1994) account suggests that the Spanish census of the island in 1514 showed barely 22,000 Tiano’s remaining alive, dropping to just 200 in 1542. 8 Available from https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/7302.

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deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group,9 and concluded that evidence for the slavery and slaughter of Amerindians in the hands of the Spanish Crown did not constitute such a deliberate and systematic effort. Some scholars also believe that the slavery and slaughter of Amerindians did not rise to the level of genocide. Davis (2006, 97–98), for example, asserts that although the term ‘genocide’ has often been used to refer to the extermination of Amerindians by Spaniards, the Spaniards clearly had no plan or motive for the systematic extermination of Amerindians, and over a period of three centuries, Spanish and Portuguese rulers rather created a vast body of legislation intended to segregate and protect Amerindians from the exploitative forces of colonization. Similarly, Gallay (2009, 2–12) also maintains that while the extermination of Amerindians during the Spanish colonization had “unfortunate consequences for the native population,” the conquistadors were not more intolerably or invariably cruel in their conquest of the Americas than other colonizing European powers. Blackburn (1988, 5–31) echoes the same by arguing that although the conquest and exploitation of Amerindians served as a source of Spanish wealth and power, outright slavery or extermination of the population had never been their prime motive. Shifting Stances of the Spanish Crown:  In his first voyage back to Spain in 1493, Columbus took 550 Amerindians with him.10 Planning to supply even more Amerindian slaves in return for breeding cattle, seeds, and foodstuffs from Spain, Columbus pleaded with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that “Indian slaves could provide cheaper labor for Europe and compensate for the financial expenditure required on overseas expeditions.” He described one Amerindian slave as worth more than three black slaves in strength and ingenuity, but the Spanish Crown however not only disapproved Columbus’s slavery plans, but

9 See Article II of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), available from https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml. For further details about the alleged genocide of Amerindians see also Rosenbaum (1996), Charny (1999), Gellately and Kiernan (2003), Rubenstein (2004), and Churchill (1997). 10 Evidently, Columbus crammed all 550 Amerindians into four small caravels—about 200 of them died during the journey and their bodies were cast into the sea.

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Table 4.1  The shifting stance of the Spanish Crown on Amerindian slavery Year

Action

1499

King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella turned down Columbus’s plea for enslave the Amerindians The Spanish Crown allowed conquistadors to legally enslave any insurgent Amerindian as well as those who took up arms against the Crown’s Christianization mission The Spanish Crown issued a decree legalizing slavery in the Caribbean An imperial decree of Spanish Crown banned slavery The Spanish Crown legalized slavery or forced servitude for any Amerindian refusing to convert to Christianity The Spanish Crown banned Amerindian slavery throughout Spanish America

1503

1504 1511 1513 1542

also ordered in 1499 that Amerindian slaves already brought to Spain be returned to the New World (Potts 1990, 9–12).11 The Spanish Crown however kept on changing its stance in respect to Amerindian slavery. In 1503, immediately after Columbus was replaced by Nicolas Ovando as the Spanish Governor of the Indies, the Spanish Crown allowed conquistadors to legally enslave any insurgent Amerindian as well as those who took up arms against the Crown’s Christianization mission (see Table 4.1). The imperial decree also granted broad powers to colonial officials to force nomadic Amerindians to work, while also allowing broad latitude to missionaries to convert Amerindians to Christianity. The next year, in 1504, the Spanish Crown issued another decree legalizing slavery in the Caribbean. Then in 1511, after fewer than 10 years, another imperial decree banned slavery again. Apparently, this time the ban on slavery was prompted not because of any opposition to enslaving Amerindians but because abolition of slavery was expected to expand the colonial labor force, increase colony yields, and enrich the Crown’s coffers. In 1513 however the Spanish Crown revised its position again— this time the new decree legalized slavery or forced servitude on any Amerindian who refused to convert to Christianity. Numerous nomadic 11 After Spanish rulers disapproved Columbus’s slavery plans and ordered their return, in the summer of 1500, with the exception of an old man and a little girl, all other Amerindians chose to return to the Caribbean (Resendez 2016, 24–28).

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Amerindians were forced into slavery or indentured servitude under the decree. When the news of such atrocities caused an uproar in mainland Spain, a papal bull in 1537 declared, “Indians are by no means to be deprived of their liberty, nor should they be any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it should be null and void” (cited in Davis 2006, 73). Then, three decades later, in 1542, the Spanish Crown banned Amerindian slavery altogether throughout Spanish America. The Encomienda and Mita Systems:  Columbus’s reign was very brief, but during his short tenure he instituted policies of slavery (encomiendo) associated with Amerindians. In the next five decades, the brutal rule of his successors not only brought large regions of mainland America under Spanish control, but also further solidified the slavery system. By the 1550s, a network of vested interests were firmly in place—local government officials as well as colonists, who had made huge profits from the business of slave trading over many decades, had little incentive to implement the final imperial ban on Amerindian slavery. Studies suggest that between 1492 and 1550, this nexus of slavery, overwork, and famine killed more Amerindians in the Caribbean than the so-called ‘virgin soil epidemic’—among all these human factors, slavery had been the major killer.12 To bypass the imperial ban on slavery of Amerindians, conquistadors implemented various other forms of coerced labor—some adopted from the Spanish feudal system and others sprung from local Incan institutions—some even resembled wage labor. By the time the final ban on Amerindian slavery came, the encomienda, a tributary system adopted from the Spanish feudal system introduced by Columbus, was firmly in place. Under the encomienda, conquistadors forced the indigenous population to work on their land while slowly converting them into Christianity. The encomienda was largely a subterfuge of slavery—although Amerindians were officially allowed to retain their personal freedom, in reality they were turned into de facto slaves for producing crops for Spanish trade and to support religious and government institutions and individuals (Simpson 1950). 12 Even the Spanish King Ferdinand believed that so many indigenous people died in the early years of Spanish colonization because of the fact that, lacking beasts to carry burdens, the conquistadors “had forced the Indians to carry excessive loads until they broke down themselves.”

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By 1574, after fewer than 100 years of Spanish rule in the Americas, 1.9 million Amerindian households—called tributaries—were registered with the Spanish authorities. The tributes were paid mainly in the form of precious metals, such a gold and silver, foodstuffs, such as chicken and eggs, and crops, such as maize and corn. Since a typical Amerindian family consisted of four to five people, there were about 1.9 million tributaries in Spanish America in 1574, indicating that there were around 8.5 million Amerindian laborers at the disposal of Spanish rulers at that time (Potts 1990, 19–24). Records suggest that gradually the encomienda system was extended to coerce numerous Amerindians to work in the mines under a new scheme called Mita. Introduced in 1574, under the system, workers were granted two weeks rest after one week of work—after one year in the mines workers were granted a break for seven years. In reality not many workers survived even their first year in the mines. Thus, being sent to the mines amounted to a death sentence—of every hundred sent to the mines about 30 survived. La Casas, one of the 2500 colonists who arrived in Espanola with Governor Obando, believed that three million indigenous people died in just a few years (Resendez 2016, 37–39). When the Mita system was eventually abolished 238 years later, in 1812, the scheme already cost the lives of over eight million forcibly recruited Amerindians (Potts 1990, 22–24). Mexico’s silver-boom—that lasted for about three centuries—provides a glaring example of how such carnage took place. The silver-boom produced roughly 12 times as much metal as the California Gold Rush (1848–1855). The work and danger involved in silver exploration was way more daunting than exploring for gold—while gold is laid in open-air deposits, silver needs to be extracted from deep underground. Some of the silver shafts in Mexico were between 250 and 635 yards deep—digging to such a depth required an untold amount of hard work. Worse still, Mexico’s silver extraction took place when Spanish monarchies prohibited all foreigners from silver districts. While the California Gold Rush lasted about a decade and attracted thousands of people from across the world, colonial Mexico depended entirely on local labor for three centuries, resulting in astoundingly high death tolls (Resendez 2016, 101–104). The Spanish Crown’s ban on Amerindian slavery barely made a dent in eradicating or even limiting coerced Amerindian labor as several major slaving zones sprung up throughout Spanish America. Among them, the most daunting slaving zone was in Chile, from where thousands

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of enslaved Amerindians were shipped to Peruvian cities and mines. Another zone extended through the provinces of Paraguay, Tucuman, and the adjacent areas, where thousands of Amerindians were hunted in the Rio de la Plata basin along the coast of Brazil. Another zone crisscrossed through the vast grasslands of Colombia and Venezuela along the tributaries of the Orinoco River, where Spanish traffickers competed with English, French, and Dutch slave networks. Many captives ended up in the Spanish haciendas of Trinidad, the English plantations of Jamaica, and the Dutch towns of Guyana and Ecuador. Still another zone ran through the Chichimecs of Sinaloa, New Mexico, and Nuevo Leon from where Amerindian slaves were supplied to ranches, silver mines, and the towns of northern Mexico as far south as Mexico City (Resendez 2016, 131–134). Magnitude of Amerindian Slavery:  The exact number of Amerindians and Amerindian slaves will perhaps never be determined. As mentioned earlier, at the time Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492, the Amerindian population was estimated to be between 8.4 million and 54 million; 80 years later, in 1574, the estimated population had dropped to around 8.5 million; in 1550, about 158 years after Columbus’s landing, the estimated population was fewer than 6 million; and by the end of the Spanish colonization in the Americas, in 1852, after some 300 years, the Amerindian population was reduced to 1.5 million only. Three centuries of Spanish rule had thus resulted in the almost complete annihilation of a vast reservoir of labor which appeared to be inexhaustible at the outset of colonization. Aside from coercing them to work and subjecting them to various forms of brutality, conquistadors also killed them on a large scale. After the Spanish crown finally banned the enslavement of Amerindians, conquistadors resorted to a variety of labor arrangements—such as encomiendas, repartimientos, convict leasing, and debt patronage—to get around the law, but all these subterfuges of labor maintained the essential traits of slavery: forcible removal of victims from one place to another; violence or threats of violence used to compel people to stay in the work place; and workers were forced to work with nominal or no pay (Resendez 2016, 4–6). Given the clandestine nature of Amerindian slavery, it is very difficult to establish accurate numbers of Amerindian slaves—no systematic records exist for their shipments or sale as is available for the African slavery which is discussed in Chapter 5. A recent study however suggests

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Table 4.2  Estimated number of Amerindian slaves in the Americas between 1492 and 1900 (numbers given are in thousands)

1492–1550 1551–1600 1601–1650 1651–1700 1701–1750 1751–1800 1801–1850 1851–1900 Total

North America (excluding Mexico)

Mexico and CircumCentral Caribbean America

South America (excluding Brazil)

Brazil

Totals

2–10 5–15 15–45 40–90 20–40 15–30 10–20 40–90 147–340

250–700 110–190 35–90 45–90 20–50 30–60 30–80 70–150 590–1410

40–80 165–270 190–350 185–355 145–260 100–145 40–90 100–180 965–1730

40–60 120–200 80–150 60–100 50–130 40–100 30–90 70–150 490–980

462–1050 430–750 350–690 350–670 250–505 195–355 125–325 300–640 2462–4985

130–200 30–75 30–55 20–35 15–25 10–20 15–45 20–70 270–525

Note These estimates are based on numerous sources, for greater details see Resendez (2016, 331–334) Source Author’s compilation based on Appendix 1 of Resendez (2016, 331–334)

that between 1492 and 1900, the number of Amerindian slaves ranged between 2.5 million and 5 million throughout the Americas—Central America, South America, and North America. These estimates, based on extensive research, indicate that the number of Amerindian slaves ranged between 147,000 and 340,000 in the United States and Canada; between 590,000 and 1.4 million in Mexico and Central America; between 270,000 and 525,000 in the Caribbean; and between 1.45 million and 2.7 million in South America (see Table 4.2). In the southern United States, enslavement of Native Americans numbered between 24,000 and 51,000, with concentrations of Native American populations varying between states—the largest was in Florida where numbers sat between 15,000 and 30,000 (Table 4.3). By the early eighteenth century however the Spanish Empire—the sixteenth century global superpower that in the east stretched across most of Europe to the Philippines and India, and in the west spanned across most of the Americas—began to disintegrate under the onslaught of the Spanish American War that began in 1808. By 1833, the majority of Spanish territories in America, such as Mexico, Chile, and Colombia, gained their independence, and the Spanish Empire was reduced to Cuba

72  C. DOWLAH Table 4.3  Southern Native Americans sold by the British slave trade between 1670 and 1715 Place/peoples

Low estimate

High estimate

Florida Arkansas, Taensa, and Tunica Petite nations (Lower Mississippi Valley) Choctaw Tuscarora and associated populations Westo Subtotal Piedmont, Creek, Savannah Chickasaw, Cherokee Motcama, Guale and others Total

15,000–20,000 1000 1000 1500–2000 1000–1200 500 20,000–28,200 – – 4000 24,000–32,200

30,000 2000 2000–3000 2500 1800–2000 1500 41,000 – – 10,000 51,000

Source Based on Table 2 of Gallay (2002, 299)

and some other small islands, like Puerto Rico.13 In 1898, following its defeat, Spain gave up Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam to the United States. Such a massive change in the global power structure however changed very little for the lives of Amerindians, many of them found little difference under their new masters—the British, the French, and the Dutch colonial rulers.

Slavery of the Native Americans Contrary to common perception, Native Americans—those Amerindians who lived in the territory that now constitutes the United States—had also been subjected to capture, exploitation, servitude, and enslavement by European colonists, mainly by British settlers. The story of the enslavement of Native Americans is however more complicated than that of the Amerindians in Mexico and South America. At the time Columbus discovered the Americas, it is believed that an estimated four to ten million indigenous people lived in the area that now the United States.14 13 By then Holland controlled Surinam, Curacao, and Bonaire; the French controlled Martinique, Haiti, Guadeloupe, and French Guinea; and Britain controlled Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, Trinidad, the Bahamas, and Bermuda. 14 Churchill (1997) puts number of the Amerindian population in North America at 12 million; Fixico (2019) estimated the number between 5 to 15 million in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492. See also Lewy (2004) and Gellately and Kiernan (2003).

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Apparently, British settlers initially professed their antipathy toward slavery—they not only denounced their colonial competitor Spaniards for enslaving and exterminating indigenous populations but also viewed Native Americans as their natural allies against the Spaniards. European settlers initially treated Native Americans more fairly, albeit, compared with their Spanish counterparts. They used Native Americans as soldiers, slave raiders, hunters, processors of pelts, tobacco, rice, and indigo plantation workers, as guides, and as domestic servants. Native American tribes, in turn, often sold captives from other tribes to augment their own political and economic power relative to other tribes, to obtain European goods, such as weapons (rifles and pistols), clothes (needles and scissors), Caribbean rum, and European jewelry. Some estimates suggest that between 30,000 and 50,000 Native Americans were captured directly by the British or by Native Americans themselves for sale to the British as slaves before 1715 (Gallay 2002, 285–299). The initial rapport between the Native Americans and European settlers however began to unravel when facing a rapidly growing demand for labor and export commodities. British settlers, especially in the south—in the Carolinas and Georgia—started exploiting Native Americans as captive labor and slaves. The rift came in a bloody uprising by the Powhatan Confederacy in 1622 when as much as a quarter of the English population of the Virginia colony was killed. In the New England colonies,15 where both the colonists and the British Crown acknowledged native inhabitants as British subjects with collective rights in terms of land, enslavement of native Americans entered a new phase with the Pequot War (1636–1637), when the settlers of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay killed between 400 and 700 Pequots and captured and enslaved thousands more, selling many of them on the coast of Nicaragua in an area called Providence Island. Then, between the 1640s through to the 1660s, European settlers undertook a series of measures to subjugate and enslave native inhabitants. In 1641, Massachusetts became the first British American colony to legalize slavery by allowing the bondage of several hundred Pequot captives along with many African slaves. In addition, colonial courts

15 The New England colonies were Connecticut, Rhode Island, Providence, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, which eventually became separate states of the United States of America.

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also occasionally condemned native inhabitants to perpetual slavery for a variety of infractions, such as sheltering enemy Native Indians, robbery, debt, theft, assault, and drunkenness. For example, in 1650, a Connecticut Court ordered the seizure and shipping out of Native Americans who committed crimes against English settlers; in 1659, Rhode Island decreed that Native Americans convicted of theft or property damage, who failed to pay damage costs, could be sold as slaves to other British colonies; in 1660, the state of Connecticut ordered the deportation of American Indians to Barbados for committing robbery; and in 1682, the state of Virginia declared Indians, Mulattos, and Negros as real estate, and New York forbade African or Native American slaves from leaving their masters’ homes or plantations without permission (Marissa 2016; Newell 2009). By 1661, slavery became legal in all the original 13 colonies of the United States. In the background, when slavery of Native Americans became legal and commonplace in all colonies, was King Philip’s War in the mid 1670s. This cost the lives of 2500 colonists as well as 11,000 Native Americans. The war also led to the enslavement of thousands of Native Americans. Several colonies, such as Plymouth, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, sold enslaved Native Americans through public auctions. Many of them were exported to distant lands, such as Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, the Azores, Spain, and Tangier in North Africa (Fisher 2014). The trading of Native American slaves accelerated further following King Philip’s War. Available estimates suggest that between approximately 24,000 and 51,000 Native Americans were traded from just the southern states of America between 1670 and 1718 (Table 4.3). In fact, between 1670 and 1720 more Native American slaves were shipped out of Charleston—the main port for importing African slaves to the United States—than African slaves were imported, mainly because both English and French setters found exporting Native Americans a more profitable business.16 16 The purchase price of slaves from Native Indian sellers varied widely between the French and English colonists. In 1708, English colonists paid 15–16 trade muskets per slave—about £10 to £11 sterling. In 1714, the French governor offered between 100 and 150 livers—about £6 to £10 sterling. Thus, the cost of a Native American slave was between £5 and £10 sterling—they were sold to other colonies at much higher prices generating hefty profits (Gallay 2002, 312).

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With the prospect of being sent to the Caribbean plantations and facing extremely harsh treatment far from their homes and communities, some Native Americans pledged to fight to the death, while many others surrendered. As many as 40 percent of those who surrendered ended up in involuntary servitude or slavery in English households in New England. Massachusetts however forcibly resettled most of the decimated population into designated enclaves where Native Americans enjoyed rights to land, lease incomes, and protection from enslavement. However, by the mid eighteenth century, captive Native American workers could still be found throughout the region. The Rhode Island Census of 1774, for example, found 35.5 percent of all Native Americans living in the state as indentured servants with white families (Newell 2009).

Concluding Remarks That millions of Amerindians—indigenous peoples throughout the Americas—were forced into enslavement or involuntary servitude for several centuries, and that such coerced labor provided the foundation for the expansion of European colonialism—initially for the Spanish, but subsequently for the British, the French, and the Dutch as well—and for the industrialization and economic growth of colonial powers, can hardly be questioned. It is also hard to dispute that during the three hundred years of Spanish rule over much of the Americas, millions of Amerindians were ruthlessly exterminated. The traditional theory that indigenous populations succumbed en masse to the so-called ‘virgin soil pandemic’ is increasingly losing ground. Although no consensus exists yet in terms of whether genocide took place, not many can deny that the extermination of the Amerindian population must have been one of most brutal massacres in world history.17

17 In June 2019, while offering an apology for the slaughter of Native Americans, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom acknowledged it as a genocide. Referring to alleged 16,000 Native American deaths in Californian during the 1840s through the 1870s in the hands of the state and local militias, Newsom declared, “It’s called a genocide. That’s what it was. A genocide. [There’s] no other way to describe it and that’s the way it needs to be described in the history books.” Earlier, in 2009, the United States officially apologized to the American Indians for ‘violence, maltreatment, and neglect,’ without admission of liability https://www.history.com/news/native-american-genocide-california-apology. Also see Barkan (2003) for greater details.

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Historical records also suggest that slavery and other forms of servitude of Amerindians flourished throughout Spanish America as a ­large-scale clandestine enterprise up to the end of the nineteenth century. This happened despite the Spanish Crown banning slavery throughout Spanish America in 1542; Spain’s King Charles II declaring a comprehensive ban on all Amerindian slavery in the Western hemisphere in 1679; post-independence Mexico prohibiting all forms of labor bondage and extending citizenship to the Amerindians in 1829; and the United States never legalizing the slavery of Native Indians, and abolishing all forms slavery in all its territories in 1862.18 Studies also suggest that immediately after the end of official subjugation and exploitation of Amerindians, colonial powers began to import African slaves. It may well be argued that the transatlantic slave trade (discussed in Chapter 5)—that brought millions of Africans to the American shores—burgeoned as the Amerindian labor force declined precipitously. The Spanish Crown, indeed, granted licenses as early as the first half of the sixteenth century to bring African slaves—they were considered to be more robust and suitable for hard physical labor than the Amerindians.19 In 1570, there were only about 40,000 African slaves in Spanish America, but by 1650, only eight years later, the number swelled to 857,000, and by the end of the Spanish colonial era the number reached 2.3 million (Potts 1990, 9–12; Simpson 1950). Available studies also suggest that in many respects Amerindian slavery was more catastrophic than African slavery that catapulted the Western world to economic dominance during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. As discussed in Chapter 5, African slaves were ruthlessly exploited under an extremely efficient slave regime geared to empire

18 As

mentioned above, original colonies of the United States however legalized slavery as far back as 1661. After the independence of the United States in 1776, all Native Americans were moved to federally protected reservations under the provision of the US constitution. It should however be noted that Native American collusion with the British during the American Revolution,  and subsequently during the War of 1812 between the United States and the United Kingdom (often described as the Second US War of Independence) exacerbated American hostility and suspicion toward them. 19 There were other considerations as well. West African blacks were familiar with largescale agriculture, labor discipline, and making of iron or steel tools. In addition, they also shared with the Europeans a resistance to Old World diseases (Davis 2006, 89–99).

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building and capitalist accumulation, but Amerindian populations experienced a catastrophic decline, on top of ruthless exploitation. Moreover, in contrast to the male-dominated African slave trade, most Amerindian slaves were women and children. Amerindian women were traditionally involved in weaving, food gathering, and child rearing, which were more profitable to colonists than their male counterparts, who were good for hunting and fishing. Colonists also found Amerindian women better suited for domestic services—women were often sexually exploitated too.20

References Barkan, E. (2003). Genocides of Indigenous Peoples: Rhetoric of Human Rights. In R. Gellately & B. Kiernan (Eds.), Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (pp. 117–140). New York: Cambridge University Press. Batstone, D. (2010). Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade and How We Can Fight It. New York: HarperCollins. Bergreen, L. (2011). Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492–1504. New York: Penguin Books. Blackburn, R. (1988). The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776–1848. London and New York: Verso. Charny, I. (1999). Encyclopedia of Genocide. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Churchill, W. (1994). Indians Are Us: Culture and Genocide in Native North America. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. Churchill, W. (1997). A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas—1492 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Davis, D. (2006). Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Denevan, W. (Ed.). (1992). The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (2nd rev. ed.). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Fisher, M. (2014). Migration: A World History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

20 Even

Columbus’s first fort, La Villa de Navidad in present day Haiti, apparently caught fire because drunk sailors were chasing Amerindian women. Promiscuous non-wedlock sexual exploitation of Amerindians throughout the Spanish rule resulted in the birth of a distinct group of people in South America known as Mestizos, who historically suffered racial as well as social discrimination and were often denied access to respected occupations. By the end of the colonial era, almost 30 percent of the South American population were believed to have belonged to such mixed races (Potts 1990, 33–34).

78  C. DOWLAH Fixico, D. (2019, August 16). When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of Civilization. https://www.history.com/news/nativeamericans-genocideunited-states. Fogel, R. (1989). Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. New York: Norton and Company. Fogel, R. W., & Engerman, S. L. (1974). Time to Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Vol. 1). Boston: Little, Brown. Gallay, A. (2002). The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gallay, A. (Ed.). (2009). Indian Slavery in Colonial America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Gellately, R., & Kiernan, B. (Eds.). (2003). The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press. Haines, M., & Steckel, R. (2000). A Population History of North America. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lewy, G. (2004). Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide? Available from: http://hnn.us/articles/7302.html. Mann, C. (2005). 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Knopf. Marissa, F. (2016). Colonial America Depended on the Enslavement of Indigenous People: The Role of Enslaving Native Americans in Early American History Is Often Overlooked. Smithsonian.com. Accessed January 29, 2016. Moreno-Mayar, J. V., Potter, B. A., Vinner, L., Steinrücken, M., Rasmussen, S., Terhorst, J., et al. (2018, January 3). Terminal Pleistocene Alaskan Reveals First Founding Population of Native Americans. Nature. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature25173. Newell, M. (2009). Indian Slavery. In A. Gallay (Ed.), Indian Slavery in Colonial America (pp. 33–66). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Potts, L. 1990. The World Labor Market: A History of Migration (T. Bond, Trans.). London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books. Resendez, A. (2016). The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Boston and New York: Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Rosenbaum, A. (Ed.). (1996). Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Rubenstein, W. D. (2004). Genocide: A History. New York: Pearson Longman. Sherman, W. (1971). Indian Slavery and the Cerrato Reforms. Hispanic American Historical Review, 51(1), 25–50. Simpson, B. (1950). The Ecomienda in New Spain: The Beginning of New Spanish Mexico. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press. Stannard, D. (1993). American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Taylor, A. (2002). American Colonies: Volume 1 of the Penguin History of the United States. New York: Viking. Wright, R. (2017). The Poverty of Slavery: How Unfree Labor Pollutes the Economy. London: Palgrave.

CHAPTER 5

Slavery in the New World: The Saga of Black Africans

Introduction This chapter covers cross-border labor mobility focusing on the ­transatlantic slave trade that brought more than 12 million African slaves to the New World under one of the best organized, well-orchestrated, well-financed, and gruesome slavery systems in the history of humankind. The transatlantic slave trade that lasted more than three hundred years—from the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries—in many respects further refined and reinforced wide varieties of coerced labor experimented during the period of Spanish America (discussed in Chapter 4). Oddly, it turned Christopher Columbus’s dream upside down, that is, launching a profitable slave trade by exporting indigenous Americans to European countries, under the transatlantic slave trade millions of African slaves from across the Atlantic Ocean were trans­ ported to the Americas, instead.1 By the first half of the sixteenth century several developments shifted the attention of European colonial powers to the African continent, such as: (a) the apparently endless reservoir of Amerindians had declined precipitously due to warfare, disease, extermination, and slavery; (b) free white labor was less and less available—many white indentured laborers had already earned their freedom and mobility, and the reminder became 1 As discussed in Chapter 4, Columbus brought several hundreds Amerindians to Spain in 1893 with the intent to sell them as slaves to Europeans.

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more expensive becasue of European trade and legal constraints2; (c) rapidly growing profitable plantations in the New World needed more abundant and dependable sources of cheap labor; (d) African slaves were capable of enduring the rigors of tropical climate better than Europeans and Amerindians; and (e) African slaves were clearly a less expensive option for plantation labor (Fogel 1989; Galenson 1981, 126–140). The massive slavery system that eventually evolved involved four continents across the Atlantic—European colonizers procured and shipped African labor to deploy in North and South American plantations on a scale and magnitude the world had never seen before. The system required not only coordination of numerous populations, governments, and businesses across four continents—North and South America, Africa, and Europe—but also awfully arduous and risky navigation of slaves for thousands of nautical miles across the Atlantic and the Indian oceans (Eltis 1987). Exclusively drawn from the African continent, about 90 percent of slaves were deployed in plantations in the New World, but a great majority of them were treated extremely inhumanely. All that came with direct patronage of European imperial powers—they not only legalized slavery but also encouraged the slave trade by allotting land and mines to colonial planters and miners to facilitate profitable production and trade of staples and minerals across the world (Blackburn 1988, 20–31). In the end, an estimated 12.5 million African slaves were shipped to the New World under the transatlantic slave-trading system that propelled great capitalistic development of European colonial powers while causing massive economic, demographic, and social losses in the African continent—setting up one of the most gruesome examples of slavery in the world history. This chapter explores the origins and proliferations of the transatlantic slave trade and African slavery in the New World, its contribution to European capitalist development, the politics and economics of African slavery, and its overall ramifications for Africa, the Americas, and the world at large.

2 Indentured labor is discussed in Chapter 6. It generally refers to a form of unfree or coerced labor under which workers are legally bound to serve a master for a certain period of time specified in the agreement. Indentured laborers were not slaves, although many, especially ­non-whites, often received slave-like treatment. Before resorting to importing African slaves, European colonists used European white indentured labor extensively.

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The chapter is organized as follows: the next section focuses on the transatlantic slave trade that encompassed four continents and lasted almost 400 years; section three covers African slavery in the context of the United States, focusing on its adoption and eventual abolition; section four covers the economics of African slave trade from the perspectives of the British imperial economy, the economy of the United States, and the African continent; and section five concludes the chapter.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade Evidently it was Christopher Columbus who first conceived of the idea of a transatlantic slave trade—he sailed back to Saville (Spain) in 1893 carrying 500 Amerindians to launch a profitable slave trade with Europe.3 The transatlantic slave trade that Columbus dreamed of eventually was materialized, albeit in a roundabout fashion—it brought millions of black Africans to the New World instead of bringing millions of Amerindians to Europe. It was however not Columbus, but Portuguese traders, who opened the gateway to the African slave market for the New World by establishing regular contacts between European slave ships with sub-Saharan African slave routes along the coasts of West Africa—eventually paving the way for the great transatlantic slave-trading system.4 The transatlantic slave-trading system eventually closed all previous slave-trading systems in the world that prevailed along the Indian Ocean, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, medieval Europe, and the trans-Saharan terrains.5 Initially the system depended on two of the earlier 3 As

explained in Chapter 4, Columbus planned to supply Amerindian slaves to Spain in return for breeding cattle, seeds, and foodstuffs. He also argued that Amerindian slaves could provide cheaper labor for Europe and compensate for the financial expenditure of European overseas expeditions. 4 Portuguese settlers moved into the Cape Verde Islands of Africa and set up slave-trading stations on the coast of Guinea by the 1460s, way before Columbus landed in the Americas. Most of those slaves worked in the cotton and indigo estates and weaving and dying factories of Portuguese settlers, while many others were sent to slave markets in Madeira (Portugal) or Saville (Spain) where a profitable African slave market existed (Cohen 1995). 5 The Indian Ocean trading system, the oldest of all, survived from 1580 BC to the nineteenth century, the system was responsible for exporting an estimated five million African slaves to the Middle and the Near East. The Black Sea and the Mediterranean trading system rose to prominence during the end of seventh century BC and survived until the early medieval period when mainly Christian Spain, but also Italian city states, recruited slaves

84  C. DOWLAH

slave-trading systems—the trans-Saharan and Mediterranean. The earliest groups of Africans that landed in the New World came from the Iberian Peninsula, where they were delivered by the Mediterranean system. The earliest group of Africans directly shipped from Africa came from the Senegambian coast, from traders involved in trans-Saharan trade. In the end however the transatlantic slave trade spread far wider as these two trading systems could barely keep up with the rapidly growing demand for slave labor in the New World. Initially, Portuguese traders enforced a monopoly on transporting African slaves to their own colony in Brazil. As Africa was not yet colonized, slaves were procured from the fortified bases established on the west coast—along today’s Mozambique and Madagascar—because of their geographical proximity to South America. The slavery of Africans was indeed first introduced, developed, and tested in the Portuguese colony of Brazil (Potts 1990, 58). Finding no precious metals, such as gold or silver, in Brazil, the Portuguese colonists established large-scale sugar plantations, depending on African slaves. Before the slave trade was banned in 1850, three to eight million African slaves were transported to Brazil.6 Meanwhile, the already existing transatlantic slave trade extended further when the Spanish Crown granted licenses to Portuguese traders to bring thousands of African slaves to the Spanish colonies in the Americas. The availability of cheap African slaves soon led to a great expansion of labor-intensive plantations of sugar, cotton, and tobacco across the Caribbean Islands and the Americas. With the increasing flow of African slaves to Brazil and Spanish-American colonies; the emergence of great sugar refining and distribution centers in Antwerp (Belgium) and Amsterdam; and African slaves largely replacing Amerindians, soon across Europe and Africa. The medieval European trading system, that flourished from the early ninth century to the middle of the twelfth century, involved mainly two principal routes—the western route ran through the North Sea and across the English Channel, and the eastern route involved sea, river, and overland transport. The trans-Saharan trading system lasted the longest, for almost thirteen centuries—it mainly catered for the demand from North African and the Mediterranean states for African labor. An estimated 6.8 million slaves were transported under the system between AD 650 and the nineteenth century. For further details see Chapter 2 of this book, Patterson (1982, 151–168), Curtin (1969), Gemery and Hogendorn (1979), and Bean (1974). 6 As a result, more than two-thirds of the Brazilian population between 1530 and 1650 were slaves—the share however fell to 48 percent by the end of the eighteenth century and 15 percent in 1872 (Davidson 1961, 16).

5  SLAVERY IN THE NEW WORLD: THE SAGA OF BLACK AFRICANS 

85

a great transatlantic slave-trading system emerged. The system grew in leaps and bounds as other European colonial powers—the British, the French, the Dutch, the Danes, and the Swedes, each having their own plantations in the Caribbean and Americas—joined the transatlantic slave trade with their own shipping infrastructures (Davis 2006, 87). The newly evolved transatlantic slave-trading system was perfected further throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. European imperial powers promoted the slave trade by granting licenses to slave traders, allotting lands and mines to planters and miners, and facilitating trade and commerce for colonial productions across the oceans and continents (Blackburn 1988, 20–31). The trading system that evolved also demonstrated many other important features of the modern world economy, such as flows of international investment in distant colonial regions, the search for low labor costs to produce goods for transatlantic markets, multinational imperial ventures for plantation products with complex business transactions involving seamen, bankers, merchants, investors, credit exchanges, and insurance facilities across many countries, and so on (Davis 2006, 87; Eltis 1987, 51). Shipments of African Slaves:  Shipment of African slaves under the transatlantic slave-trading system had been one of the largest transcontinental migrations in world history. As Fig. 5.1 indicates, between 1501 and 1866, a total of 12.5 million African slaves embarked for the New World, of which 10.7 million disembarked—the gap of 1.8 million, 14.5 percent of the total, may largely be attributed to casualties during ocean crossings. Of the slaves that landed in the New World 65 percent were male and 21 percent children. Most slaves disembarked in the British and French colonies in the Caribbean (51 percent), followed by the Portuguese colonies of Brazil (36 percent), the Spanish colonies in the Americas (6 percent), and mainland America (4 percent) (Table 5.1 and Fig. 5.2).7

7 The latest database provides significant upward, and more accurate, revision of the previously available estimates of slaves traded under the transatlantic slave-trading system. Previously, a widely quoted source, Curtin (1969), put the total number of African slaves imported to the New World at 9.5 million. Patterson (1982, 160) placed the number between 11 and 12 million (plus or minus 20 percent). In respect to the share between colonial powers, Fogel (1989) attributed 40 percent to the Portuguese; 47 percent to the British, French, and Spanish colonies; 5 percent to the Dutch, Danish, and Swedish colonies; and 5 percent to the colonies that later formed the United States.

86  C. DOWLAH

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Fig. 5.1  Number of embarked and disembarked African slaves between 1501 and 1866

Although shipment of African slaves spanned about 400 years, less than 5 percent of that took place before 1600, roughly 16 percent took place during the seventeenth century, and the vast majority occured during 1700–1850, when the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and the cotton plantations in the southern states of America were at the peak of their profitability (Potts 1990, 39–41). Of the grand total of 12.5 million African slaves shipped to the New World, 6.4 million—more than half—were shipped in the eighteenth century alone. Another 2.6 million, one fifth of the grand total, landed in the nineteenth century, before or immediately after most slave-owning societies abolished slavery as well as the transatlantic slave trade. Slave shipments picked up by the early eighteenth century, then climaxed in the last quarter of the same century, and eventually wound down in the third quarter of the nineteenth century when both the legal and illegal slave trade still continued (Fig. 5.3). The shipment of slaves picked up in the eighteenth century, when more than a million came in each quarter, mainly because by then African slaves emerged as the principal source of labor for all European colonies across the New World—from French Canada to British New England to the Spanish settlements in Chile and Argentina, and to the Caribbean. By then, the dominance of the Portuguese in the transatlantic shipment of slaves had already been passed to a highly profitable triangular trade system operated by the British. Carrying highly profitable goods demanded in West Africa, such as firearms, alcohol, cotton goods, metal trinkets, and beads, British ships departed from Liverpool or Bristol. Then, in the ports along the African

624 0 0 266 359 0 1306 1437 377 3589 1151 18 0 0 0 9127 0.1

1501–1525 1526–1550 1551–1575 1576–1600 1601–1625 1626–1650 1651–1675 1676–1700 1701–1725 1726–1750 1751–1775 1776–1800 1801–1825 1826–1850 1851–1875 Totals Share (percent)

0 0 0 0 0 0 1675 10,134 39,327 96,687 122,141 23,829 63,233 585 1922 359,533 3.6

683 6092 9280 19,907 15,216 11,150 117,568 323,611 479,769 678,934 1,108,360 1,146,997 534,635 363,074 188,963 5,004,239 50.6

Mainland The Caribbean North America 0 14,926 33,960 155,922 195,846 103,788 23,605 16,632 40,378 15,407 2589 12,993 27,382 3849 0 647,277 6.5

Spanish mainland Americas

Source Author’s compilation based on Emory University Slavery Database

Europe

Date

0 0 388 931 1670 39,981 8431 81,492 241,128 422,937 352,746 453,519 1,042,969 881,532 9798 3,537,522 35.7

Brazil

Table 5.1  Regional disembarkation of African slaves between 1501 and 1575

0 0 0 399 0 240 3368 92 1063 473 1144 1680 34,412 103,723 18,340 164,934 1.7

Africa

0 2234 300 35,891 11,157 5857 5431 6863 12,807 37,880 24,618 11,907 12,806 9081 0 176,832 1.8

Other

1307 23,252 43,928 213,316 224,248 161,016 161,384 440,261 814,849 1,255,907 1,612,749 1,650,943 1,715,437 1,361,844 219,023 9,899,464 100.0

Totals

5  SLAVERY IN THE NEW WORLD: THE SAGA OF BLACK AFRICANS 

87

88  C. DOWLAH

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Fig. 5.2  Regions where African slaves landed between 1501 and 1875

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Fig. 5.3  Transatlantic slave trade numbers between 1501 and 1875 (Source Emory University Database)

coasts they sold these goods in exchange for slaves, and then crossed the Atlantic. After disposing of slaves along the Atlantic coasts, shippers then picked up valuable products from the West Indies, such as sugar, molasses, and tobacco, and sailed back to England, where wealthy consumers eagerly awaited.

5  SLAVERY IN THE NEW WORLD: THE SAGA OF BLACK AFRICANS 

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Fig. 5.4  Share of European colonists in the transatlantic slave trade in the mid eighteenth century (Source Based on Eltis [1987, 50])

By the mid eighteenth century, England emerged as the largest slave-trading country in the world, with a 41 percent share of the global market, Portugal was relegated to second position with a 29 percent share, France was third with about 20 percent, and the Dutch were fourth with less than 6 percent (Fig. 5.4). Over the whole period of transatlantic slave trading, from 1501–1875, the Portuguese retained the largest share (47 percent), followed by the British (26 percent), French (11 percent), Spanish (8 percent), Dutch (4 percent), and mainland Americans (about 2 percent) (Fig. 5.5 and Table 5.2).8 Massive shipments of African slaves over several hundreds of years profoundly changed the demographics of the New World. By 1770, immediately before the American Revolution, 34 percent of the total population in British America were African slaves, and their share was 35 percent in Portuguese America (Brazil). But nowhere was the concentration of African slaves more spectacular than in the Caribbean islands, which were extensively used by all European colonists for highly profitable

8 By the 1820s however the dominance of European-based transatlantic slave shipments came to an end, as over 90 percent of shipments came to be based in the Americas (Eltis 1987, 50).

90  C. DOWLAH

United States 2% Netherlands 4%

Great Britain 26%

France Denmark / Balc 1% 11%

Spain / Uruguay 8%

Portugal / Brazil 48%

Fig. 5.5  Percentage share of the Atlantic slave trade held by each colonial power between 1501 and 1875

plantations. In the British Caribbean, 86 percent of the population were African slaves, the share was 88 percent in the French Caribbean, 83 percent in the Dutch Caribbean, 72 percent in the Danish Caribbean, and 35 percent in the Spanish Caribbean (Fig. 5.6 and Table 5.3). The British Caribbean islands provide a good example of the concentration of African slaves—the share of African slaves was 87 percent in the population of Antigua, 80 percent in Barbados, 92 percent in Jamaica, 79 percent in Montserrat, 77 percent in Nevis, and 82 percent in St. Kitts. The remaining population was composed of European white indentured servants and convicts, aside from plantation owners and officials (Fig. 5.7). By 1820, about 10 million African slaves were brought to the New World, with only 2.6 million whites coming from Europe, about two thirds of net immigrants to the New World were thus African slaves (Davis 2006, 80).9 African slaves were however shipped in appalling conditions—they were crammed below decks, shackled, and badly fed—one in six of them died during the ocean crossing. Slave traders often packed them tightly to maximize profit—about one in three slaves transported by the Dutch and one in five slaves transported by French died during ­shipment. Despite such heavy casualties, the slave trade was highly ­profitable—during the seventeenth century, the Royal African Company 9 Davis’s account, that by 1820 nearly 10 million slaves departed from Africa for the New World as opposed to 2.6 million whites, is accurate. But subsequently, between 1820 and 1880, about 13.7 million Europeans departed for the New World, greatly outnumbering the 2.3 million African slaves who departed during the same period (Eltis 2002, 350).

6363 25,375 28,167 60,056 83,496 44,313 12,601 5860 – – 4239 6415 1,68,087 4,00,728 2,15,824 10,61,524 8.5

1501–1525 1526–1550 1551–1575 1576–1600 1601–1625 1626–1650 1651–1675 1676–1700 1701–1725 1726–1750 1751–1775 1776–1800 1801–1825 1826–1850 1851–1875 Totals Share in the total (percent)

7000 25,387 31,089 90,715 2,67,519 2,01,609 2,44,793 2,97,272 4,74,447 5,36,696 5,28,693 6,73,167 11,60,601 12,99,969 9309 58,48,266 46.7

Portugal/ Brazil – – 1685 237 – 33,695 1,22,367 2,72,200 4,10,597 5,54,042 8,32,047 7,48,612 2,83,959 – – 32,59,441 26.0

Great Britain – – – 1365 1829 31,729 1,00,526 85,847 73,816 83,095 1,32,330 40,773 2669 357 – 5,54,336 4.4

Netherlands

Source Author’s compilation based on Emory University Slavery Database

Spain/ Uruguay

Period – – – – – 824 – 3327 3277 34,004 84,580 67,443 1,09,545 1850 476 3,05,326 2.4

United States – – 66 – – 1827 7125 29,484 1,20,939 2,59,095 3,25,918 4,33,061 1,35,815 68,074 – 13,81,404 11.0

France – – – – – 1053 653 25,685 5833 4793 17,508 39,199 16,316 – – 1,11,040 0.9

Denmark/ Baltic

13,363 50,762 61,007 1,52,373 3,52,844 3,15,050 4,88,065 7,19,675 10,88,909 14,71,725 19,25,315 20,08,670 18,76,992 17,70,978 2,25,609 1,25,21,337 100.0

Totals

Table 5.2  Slave trade numbers and the percentage share of the transatlantic slave trade held by colonial powers between 1501 and 1875 5  SLAVERY IN THE NEW WORLD: THE SAGA OF BLACK AFRICANS 

91

1970 1283 1390 1190 2197 1320 2183 1320 889 765 494 (94) 257 15,164

682 655 3222 5976 10,379 8536 13,046 12,876 8025 12,543 13,432 8094 3696 1,01,162

Black

16,970 5428 6444 4746 9773 2902 11,242 7595 4000 3654 4988 1380 1661 80,783

White

Barbados

31,364 28,650 22,219 21,885 35,027 22,523 29,007 31,556 24,519 26,074 29,086 16,444 (468) 3,17,886

Black – 7513 4412 3168 4545 2732 2693 3438 765 3630 4148 3743 8094 48,881

White

Jamaica

– 9158 17,326 25,936 39,394 38,954 49,882 59,059 45,901 62,691 70,148 53,906 72,129 5,44,484

Black 909 (227) 2259 508 1061 444 758 405 – 296 543 47 82 7085

White 227 348 3235 1484 2879 1725 1582 5804 395 3086 4025 2000 456 27,246

Black

Montserrat

Note Positive values indicate net immigration and negative values indicate net emigration Source Author’s compilation based on table H4 in the appendices of Galenson (1981, 218)

1650s 1660s 1670s 1680s 1690s 1770s 1710s 1720s 1730s 1740s 1750s 1760s 1770s Total

White

Decades Antigua

5303 (401) 762 254 682 13 601 379 (74) 222 593 608 655 9597

2500 (441) 4412 2674 4848 235 3699 2758 1877 3185 2889 1345 1263 31,244

White Black

Nevis

7576 (1671) – 856 1212 2392 510 2366 173 148 642 (281) 246 14,169

White

St. Kitts

Table 5.3  Net migration of blacks and whites to the British West Indies between 1650 and 1780

4621 (802) 3021 1123 2045 16,248 (3817) 13,451 7383 7111 7383 3895 4140 65,802

Black 72,122 49,493 68,702 69,800 1,14,042 98,024 1,11,386 1,41,007 93,853 1,23,405 1,38,371 91,087 92,211 12,63,503

Total

92  C. DOWLAH

5  SLAVERY IN THE NEW WORLD: THE SAGA OF BLACK AFRICANS 

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