Oh sweet Total Power, I have done my research. Not frantic googling in response to a discussion, but years of reading on the subject.
Slavery was abolished in Europe around the turn of the first millennium, and it was the first place in the world to abolish slavery.
It was only reintroduced on the discovery of the New World, and aided by the long running Islamic Slave Trade, which sold sub Saharan Africans to the Europeans.
But you don't actually read my posts, do you? Slavery is universal. I never said slavery was invented by the Europeans, i said, slavery was industrialised by them. That was never even part of any of these discussions that slavery wasn't common back then. I thought that was a granted. Transporting people across oceans and using them to produce cash crops- rather than necessary food or war materiel,as happened before- as chattel based an a philosophy that dehumanises them based on their physiognomic differences is not universal. It is specific. It started with Europeans.
Did the Arabs employ transported labourers across several continents for the sheer profit of cultivating and selling cash crop commodities? Not a rhetorical question;a genuine. I don't know, but I suspect not. Those market system lines led to the sea. I'm not sure the people along such routes were all Arabs, I'd be highly skeptical.
It never, ever occurred to Hideyoshi, strangely enough, to do such a thing. And he was a violent, paranoid nutcase. Nor did occur to the Chinese, the Koreans or even the Mongols, even though they all had the seafaring technology necessary. Just saying. He was also an exception, I guess. I hope everyone's sense of the European as inevitable agent of progress is affronted enough for this afternoon. "The white man made the world freer by banning slavery, my arse." Go read some history, folks.
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