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Legacy Genealogy Cruise 2004
Click here for Dave's Cruise Log
Click here for Ken's Cruise Log
Click here for User Comments about the cruise
Click here for a multitude of pictures from the cruise. (This is a large page and will take a while to load for people with slow Internet connections.)
Click here for info on next years October 2005 cruise. Book your cabin today before it's too late.
What a Group!
Here is about one half of the Legacy Cruise group that came this year.
In the Beginning
Well, the time had finally come. After six months of planning I now had to actually decide what to put into the suitcases. For me it was actually pretty easy. My wife Pegi had spent the previous few weeks bringing home Hawaiian shirts and shorts for my approval. I think I kept them all! Into the bags they went, along with my scuba gear...
The plane flight we took from Seattle,
Washington to Miami, Florida was a "red eye," leaving at 10:30 at night, flying
all night, and arriving in Miami at 10:30 in the morning, with a short layover in
Atlanta, Georgia. After catching the free shuttle from the airport to the
Fairfield Inn, where most of the people on the Legacy cruise stayed the night
prior to boarding the ship on Saturday morning, the fun began. People from all
over the country and all over the world started arriving. We checked them off
our list and handed over their Legacy Cruise T-shirts,
were coveted and destined to become collectors items... As you can see in the
picture, the t-shirts were... noticeable. I would call the color "electric
green." Others would call it "nuclear green" or "radio-active green." Regardless of the
official color name, you would be able to see them a mile away!
After many of the cruisers had arrived we realized that we were famished. A few of us inquired at the front desk and found out that there was a free limo service available that would take us down to South Beach, give us a short tour, and then deposit us at an excellent Italian restaurant for dinner. "Call them up," I said, and within twenty minutes we were on our way. The dinner was great and included a band and a roving singer who went from table to table. After dinner we walked down to the beach and watched a young man build a sand castle. We then went back to the restaurant and caught the next limo back to the motel.
Day Zero (Saturday)
The Fairfield Inn rented a 50-passenger, air conditioned bus to shuttle us to the docks. So, after a nice continental breakfast, we all boarded the bus wearing our flashy t-shirts and arrived at the Carnival Cruise Lines about 11:00. The boarding procedure consisted of a couple of 20-minute lines and a ten minute seated wait. Our luggage was automatically taken from the bus and put on the ship, later to be delivered right to our cabins. (This was just the start of the pampering we would experience for the next week!) We boarded the ship at noon and after the initial shock of how huge the boat was, headed right for the lunch buffet on the Lido deck, which is the ninth floor. (This was just the start of the continuously available food that would be at hand 24 hours a day.)
Since we had boarded early (the normal boarding time is 1:30), we were asked to stay away from our cabins for a while until the stewards had cleaned them from the previous cruise occupants. This, of course, was easy to do because there was a lot of food to eat! We then wandered around the ship to try to get our bearings.
The Ship
The ship, the Triumph, is gigantic to say the least! It consists of 13 floors (decks) above the waterline. Ten of these have cabins on all or a portion of them. It will handle 2758 guests. (This cruise was full.) For those who are interested, the ship is 893 feet long and weighs over 203 million pounds (91 million kilograms)! It cruises at about 21 knots (about 24 mph or 38 kph). It is a floating city.
It has a
central atrium that is nine stories high, four swimming pools, lots of hot tubs,
a huge water slide, several formal and casual dining areas, a Las Vegas style
stage which must seat a couple thousand people, bars, lounges, shops, a casino,
an Internet bar, a fitness center, a spa, and lots more. I don't think I found
all the places there were on board. We would often get lost as we tried to
figure out where we wanted to go. But there were always helpful people around to
set us straight. By the end of the week however, we were pretty good at
navigating around.
In the afternoon we went to see our room. There are three types of rooms, inside, ocean view and balcony. Ours was inside. That means no windows. No indication of whether if was night or day. When the light were out, it was dark. In the end I think that I would always want an inside room on a cruise like this. It lets you sleep in as late you as want without be awakened by daylight. Our room was on the ninth floor, the Lido Deck. This made it pretty convenient to get to the buffet lines quickly, but a room on any of the other floors would be just as good. There are a multitude of elevators and it only takes a minute or so to get to any floor. Our room had a king-size bed, a nice desk, a couple of hanging closets, two night tables and a good-sized bathroom (head) with a shower. The ship makes its own water on a continual basis so you don't have to worry about how long of a shower you take. They even provide the soap, shampoo, and a hair dryer!
I think the entire Legacy group was signed up for early dinner. That means that we all meet in the London Dining Room at 6:15 for seating at our assigned tables. Since not all of the luggage was yet delivered to our rooms, the first night is come-as-you-are, which in our case meant that everyone was wearing their Legacy shirts. We were a sea of florescent green on the center-main level. The dinners are a sophisticated, first-class experience. A waiter and an assistant waiter place the napkin in your lap and hand you a menu which includes many magnificent appetizers, salads, and gourmet entrees. If you can't choose between two wonderful dishes, order both. I had the sweet and sour shrimp and the steak the first night. Later in the week when they were serving lobster (I love lobster), I ordered two! And the delectable desserts were to die for... Near the end of each dinner, all the staff gets together and puts on a little show for the guests. It might consist of a line dance that everyone is invited to join, or a sing-along, or the macarena...
Then back to our cabin. Wooo, what's on the bed? Some kind of animal... Each night the cabin stewards would turn down your bed and leave a towel animal and a couple mints sitting on top. Each night was a different animal. (Later, during the week, the crew would put on a demonstration of how the animals were made.)
Now off to the Rome Lounge for the evening's entertainment. Each night there are fantastic shows ranging from professional dancers, to comedy, to music. Interspersed are bingo (win up to $1000), Jeopardy, Family Feud, and other games. There was even a talent show consisting of performances from some of the guests. There is also a sing-along piano bar, disco dancing, and a karaoke bar. There is something for everyone.
Pizza anyone? The pizza bar is open 24 hours a day.
Day One (Sunday) at sea
Since we left Miami Saturday afternoon, the sailing has been nearly glass smooth. We are on our way to Cozumel, Mexico. The ship hardly moves around at all even though we are moving at a speed of 21 knots. Of course, it would take quite a choppy sea to disturb a ship weighing 200,000,000 pounds! We will be sailing all day today and through the night and will reach Cozumel about 8:00 in the morning.
Since we have an inside cabin, there is nothing to wake us at daybreak. We do, however, have to get up in time to eat breakfast and then make it to the opening Legacy class at 10:30 in the Rome Lounge. We ate at the breakfast buffet in the South Beach Club. It is great food. I had a nice omelet from the Omelet Bar.
We had two Legacy class sessions planned for each of the three "at sea" days when we were heading for the next port of call. One in the late morning and one in the early afternoon. Most of the classes were taught by Geoff Rasmussen, although we had some others taught by Jan Gow, Robert Carneal, and Rick Stone on various other subjects. All the classes were well attended and each one ended with a couple door prizes being given away.
Tonight was our first of two formal dining nights during the cruise. Everyone was encouraged to dress up as fancy as they could. It was a lot of fun. After dinner, there were many photography stations around the ship that would take pictures of us in front of various backgrounds. The backgrounds were just about anything you could think of, from a picture of our ship, to the staircase of the Titanic. The pictures are developed and then put out the next day in the Photo Gallery for people to buy if they want to.
Day Two (Monday) Cozumel, Mexico
We docked about 7:00 in the morning. People then started getting off the ship to participate in the many tours and activities available there. We debarked at 7:30 to go on the Helaman tour of the ancient Mayan ruins in Chichén Itzá and Tulum.
Our tour started with a short taxi ride from the dock to downtown Playa de Carmen which is the port city on the island of Cozumel off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. From there we boarded a ferry that would take us to the mainland. We then got on two busses that took all 100 or so of us on a two-hour ride to Chichén Itzá.
Chichén Itzá is a fantastic place to explore. Helaman, our guide, is extremely knowledgeable about the culture and practices of the ancient Mayans and explained all the carvings and symbols they used. The highlight was the huge central Pyramid of Kukúlcan. The steps have been restored on two sides of the pyramid so we all got to climb to the top. (My legs were sore for three days!)
The landscape is very flat so we could see "forever." We then got back in the busses and headed for Tulum, about an hour away. Tulum is on the coast and is quite spectacular. When the tour was over we all returned to the ship via bus, ferry, and taxi. We had to be back on the ship by 9:30 so it could leave port by 10:00.
Day Three (Tuesday) Costa Maya
The fourth day was originally supposed to be another "day at sea" while we headed for Grand Cayman. However, hurricane Ivan had done tremendous damage there so we went to Costa Maya instead. Costa Maya is only one night's cruising south of Cozumel so we arrive this morning. This port was specifically built for cruise ships and is fairly new...and fairly small, consisting of mostly small shops. There was also a beach where you could snorkel and swim. Scuba diving was also available from an enterprising family down the coast a ways.
Day Four (Wednesday) at sea
We left Costa Maya last night and are now headed to Ocho Rios, Jamaica. This was another Legacy class day.
We had lunch in the Paris Dining Room at the stern of the ship. Our table overlooked the water where we could "see where we used to be." Again, the food and entertainment on the ship was unforgettable.
Day Five (Thursday) Ocho Rios, Jamaica
Ocho Rios is on the north coast of the island and wasn't affected too much by hurricane Ivan. With the exception of a couple of boats peaking sideways up out of the water, you would not know that a hurricane had gone through. Ken and I started the day by doing some scuba diving. It was fantastic. The water was warm and the underwater landscape was intoxicating. After the diving we joined up with our wives and some others and rented a taxi to take us to the famous Dunns Falls. The day was hot and it was luxurious to be in the cool water of the falls. None of us wanted to leave.
We left port about 4:30 and headed back towards Miami.
Tonight was the second
formal dining night. Before dinner we arranged to have a group photo of all the
Legacy folks. I think that about 100 of us showed up for the picture. (See the
photo at the top of this page.)
Day Six (Friday) at sea.
Again, another Legacy class day. The final session in the afternoon was a question and answer period with Ken and I.
During the cruise we have been hearing about the path and progress of hurricane Jeanne. When we started the cruise, everyone thought that she would be long gone before we got back to Miami. However, when she got up off the coast of Florida, she decided to do a big loop out to the east and then back towards the coast again. The captain of the Triumph, of course, had been watching this development during the entire cruise and had decided to try and beat the hurricane to Miami so that we could all get off and get home before she hit. This is why we left Jamaica earlier than normal yesterday. So, today we all noticed that we were going faster than normal. About 23 or 24 knots. Of course, we were all secretly hoping that we would not be able to get back in time and would have to stay on board a day or two longer...
This evening things got a little tense. Some people had called the airport and found out that all flights after 9:00 a.m. tomorrow were cancelled and the airport was closing. Our current arrival at Miami was supposed to be 4:30 in the morning so some people changed their flights to get out before 9:00. An announcement was made on the ship that we were trying to get back into port but they didn't know if the port would be open when we got there. Pegi and I decided to just wait and see what happened...again hoping that we would have to stay on the ship.
Day Seven (Saturday)
At about 4:30 in the morning an announcement was made on the ship's intercom that the seas were too rough to transfer the Miami pilot on board to take the ship into port so we would be turning around and heading back out to sea for at least another day. Yes! So, off we went to the southwest, out off the end of the Florida Keys about 170 miles away. We could see four other cruise ships going with us. A free vacation extension...
Day Eight (Sunday) at sea
We cruised in a huge circle out in the ocean all day long with the other ships. Another announcement was made during the day that we would try and go back to Miami Monday morning.
We initially wondered if there was enough food on board for the extra days but were informed that they had plenty for three more days. The fancy dining continued. The entertainment continued. What a life!
Day Nine (Monday)
We arrived in Miami about 7:00 in the morning. All in all the ship had traveled over 2,400 miles during our trip. It took until about noon to get off the ship. In the mean time we called the airlines and found that the soonest we could get a flight back to Seattle was early Tuesday morning. So, we booked a night at the Fairfield Inn, where we had stayed a week earlier. It turns out that several of the Legacy cruisers did the same.
Pegi and I rented a Ford Explorer and took several other people from the motel out to the everglades and went on an airboat ride among the crocodiles.
Day Ten (Tuesday)
We got up early (2:00 a.m.) and headed to the airport to catch our flight home, arriving in Seattle at 10:30 a.m. Now we are back in the normal grind, refreshed by our experiences - and we can't wait for next year's cruise!
It was so nice to be able to meet so many Legacy users on the cruise and to
get to know them. I would never want to go on a cruise alone! Having
lots of people in the group made it so much fun. Everywhere we would go on
the ship we would see people we knew. It was an unforgettable experience.
See you all next year...
Dave Berdan
President of MyHeritage Ltd.
The Legacy 2004 cruise was a seven day Western Caribbean cruise which set sail on 17 September 2004 to the ports of Cozumel, Mexico; Costa Maya, Mexico and Ocho Rios, Jamaica. We had a huge success selling out our 100 reserved cabins very quickly. In Cozumel about half of our group (about 100 of us) took the tour of the Mayan ruins. This was a dream come true as I have always wanted to visit the ancient ruins. Seeing pictures of them is fun but you cannot comprehend the splendor of them without being there to see for yourself the amazing architecture and culture that they had. Our tour guides brought the ruins to life with their stories and knowledge they shared of the ancient inhabitants.
Our shore excursions were a lot of fun. Many went snorkeling or hung out on the beach or visited the shops. Some went sailing or swimming with the dolphins and a few even took a submarine ride. The authentic Mexican food was great, especially the guacamole dip. In Costa Maya there was Scuba Diving with incredible visibility with incredible canyons of coral and we even ended up swimming upstream in what seemed like a never ending school of fish. With all the diving I have done I have never experienced anything so spectacular as seeing millions of sparkling fish swimming past completely surrounding us in an array of vivid colors all in synchronized movement. Costa Maya was a very natural tropical jungle without all the commercialism. Ocho Rios was another great place to visit. I heard from many about all of the shore excursions they took. Because of the crystal clear water which was about 85 degrees I just had to go scuba diving once again. I thought that would be all the time we had but we ended up getting back in plenty of time to take a taxi to the Ocho Rios water falls. The falls are something you just have to experience. I could have spent the whole day playing in the cool water. You get to climb up the falls and there are all kinds of pools that you can sit in or swim in. It was a little slippery and I fell a couple times but usually just into a pool of water which was so refreshing. You have to see the pictures.
We had three days of Legacy classes and everyone there whether new to Legacy or very experienced all learned new things. I heard even a couple of our beta testers who know Legacy very well say they had learned several new things about Legacy. Geoff, Jan Gow and Rick Stone taught some great classes and the last class users were able to ask questions of Ken McGinnis and Dave Berdan the developers of Legacy. All who were in the classes came away with a new excitement of Legacy and lots of great ideas to help them progress their research.
Our group had so much fun that I didn't want to come home. In fact most were wishing we could spend a couple extra days and because of hurricane Jeanne we were able to spend two extra fun filled days at sea. You heard that right! They were headed back but Jeanne hit about the same time we were supposed to dock in Miami so the ship spent two extra days off at a safe distance. We ended up with a 9 day cruise!!! The only reason I got off the boat was because I felt like I'd explode from all that I had eaten and couldn't chance any more temptations. We had so much fun. It was a memory of a lifetime, one I'll never forget and will always treasure.
Ken McGinnis
Vice President of MyHeritage Ltd.
Here are a few comments we received about the cruise.
Wow, it's hard to top the
Cruise we just had! (With two extra days to top it off!)
I really liked the classes.
Barbara Weed
I did enjoy the experience
of going on a cruise like this. And I don't think I would have
done so, if we did not have the Legacy participation. That is,
I don't think I would have gone on the cruise without Legacy,
and if I had, I don't think I would have enjoyed it without
Legacy. So thanks so much team for thinking of this!!
Jan Gow, New Zealand
We enjoyed very much the
Legacy cruise sep 18th - sep 25th 2004. Learning about
genealogy research was great. Though lectures where focusing
on US situations in general it provided many things applicable
to us Europeans also with respects to using timeliness,
setting up your research etc. Learned a whole set of
things hidden so far in using Legacy. The whole
experience certainly exceeded our expectations.
Cor Visser
Here are some pictures. Looking through them I have decided that I need to take a lot more pictures of the ship and all of the activities we enjoyed. There were fun shows, karaoke, dancing, swimming or laying by the pool. Lot's of music. I even found a few winning money (I hope) in the casino.
I truly enjoyed the classes
presented by Geoff and the guest lecturers. I certainly
learned several new methods of research and the capabilities
of Legacy software, which I've under utilized to date. It was
great also talking to other users, sometimes I feel like the
only one serious about genealogy.
It was also great not to have to make my bed worry about what I was
cooking, and not to have my cell-phone ringing at the most in opportune
Doug and Val Connell
What was my favorite thing - Decisions, decisions? Hard to really say, but I so enjoyed meeting everyone and realizing the enormity of Legacy Users. What a great group!
Everything was so well
organized, thanks to Christy & Steve Downing and the Legacy
I found the classes very refreshing and informative.
Also enjoyed the
"pampering" - no beds to make, no meals to prepare, no
dusting, etc. I had a wonderful time chatting with all the
various members of the Truimph Crew - finding out where
everyone came from and something about their lives. How very
blessed we are in the USA - and how very much we take it all
for granted.
Elizabeth Kohler
My husband and I enjoyed
just about everything, especially the two extra days. We were
just not ready to go back on Saturday. I liked the classes
and Dennis liked the relaxation while I was in class. He is
not the Genealogist but he really needed a break from work! I
especially liked dinning with marvelous people who had the
same interests as I do. Since I am poor at names I would like
to see more people wearing name tags. But everyone was
friendly and approachable. I liked the way Ken, Dave and Geoff
jotted down all suggestions and ideas that we threw out. With
such an outlook Legacy can only get better.
Barbara and Dennis Weed
I was really glad to get to
meet those I got a chance to meet and was disappointed I
didn't get to meet the rest of you. I've received support
emails from a couple of you and it's been fun to have a face
behind the emails I've received!
I sure enjoyed the pampering too! It's so hard to be back to reality - having to make my own bed, cook my own meals, hearing phones ring, no pool to swim in (or even lounge by), no live entertainment.
I also miss all the walking in climate-controlled, safe comfort! I think by the end of the week we covered just about every inch of the ship and climbed just about every flight of stairs and I think that really helped me to be able to fit into my jeans when we got back home.
Sherry Holthe, MyHeritage Ltd. Technical Support
The best part of the cruise
for me was no telephone ringing all the time and no board
meetings to prepare for, it was the most relaxing vacation I
have ever taken. Geoff and all of the instructors did a great
job. I don't think I will be able to do next years but am
planning for the Alaska one.
Donna J. Porter
My favorite thing was the
times we spent together, classroom, dinning, shore excursions,
Robert Carneal
I'm glad that I was on the
cruise meeting some of the people I knew from the
[LegacyTest]-list but not some I'd have liked to meet and many
new members of the great Legacy-Family.
Meeting Dave, Ken and their families was one of the many highlights.
The cruise confirmed my opinion that Legacy is a great international family which is something we shouldn't forget.
This "week" was a great time for me. Unforgettable!!
The best part for me was the last part (two days) of the cruise. It was a great for me to be able to help members of the Legacy-Family I had never knew to work with their Legacy or research problems. That was "Family" research.
Bernhard Scholz
Great website. Tells the
whole story, but you really have to be there to fathom the
wonderful experience. All the more reason to sign up for
the 2005 cruise.
Elizabeth Kohler
Click here for a multitude of pictures from the cruise. (This is a large page and will take a while to load for people with slow Internet connections.)
See Cruise 2005 Information for everything you need to know about next year's cruise!


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I have a lip gloss problem. The problem? I can never have enough! Just ask my purse, filled with about 12 different types of the same shade of gloss!
I recently saw this Rimmel Moisture Renew Lip Gloss and was drawn to it for the SPF 15 + vitamins in it, who can't use more SPF and vitamins to boot? This gloss is not at all sticky, which I enjoy, but that also means it is not long wearing, requiring frequent re-application. I am finding it is best suited to summer, pool, hiking, day drinking, etc. I think this gloss is a fun option and a great way to a little something to your look, by the pool, on the golf course, whatever your sun-drenched poison may be. My lips tend to get wind/sunburned and this is a great way to protect them with a little sheer color.
The only con I have for this gloss, and it is a big one, it tastes and smells like sunscreen. It does not keep me from using it, but it is a little unpleasant. That might be a deal breaker for some of you out there, but I can deal with it for the protection, price and shine.
Have any of you out there tried it? What are your verdicts on this gloss?

subset: commoncrawl


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Slavery, condition in which one human being was owned by another. A slave was considered by law as property, or chattel, and was deprived of most of the rights ordinarily held by free persons.
There is no consensus on what a slave was or on how the institution of slavery should be defined. Nevertheless, there is general agreement among historians, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and others who study slavery that most of the following characteristics should be present in order to term a person a slave. The slave was a species of property; thus, he belonged to someone else. In some societies slaves were considered movable property, in others immovable property, like real estate. They were objects of the law, not its subjects. Thus, like an ox or an ax, the slave was not ordinarily held responsible for what he did. He was not personally liable for torts or contracts. The slave usually had few rights and always fewer than his owner, but there were not many societies in which he had absolutely none. As there are limits in most societies on the extent to which animals may be abused, so there were limits in most societies on how much a slave could be abused. The slave was removed from lines of natal descent. Legally, and often socially, he had no kin. No relatives could stand up for his rights or get vengeance for him. As an "outsider," "marginal individual," or "socially dead person" in the society where he was enslaved, his rights to participate in political decision making and other social activities were fewer than those enjoyed by his owner. The product of a slave's labour could be claimed by someone else, who also frequently had the right to control his physical reproduction.
Slavery was a form of dependent labour performed by a nonfamily member. The slave was deprived of personal liberty and the right to move about geographically as he desired. There were likely to be limits on his capacity to make choices with regard to his occupation and sexual partners as well. Slavery was usually, but not always, involuntary. If not all of these characterizations in their most restrictive forms applied to a slave, the slave regime in that place is likely to be characterized as "mild"; if almost all of them did, then it ordinarily would be characterized as "severe."
Slaves were generated in many ways. Probably the most frequent was capture in war, either by design, as a form of incentive to warriors, or as an accidental by-product, as a way of disposing of enemy troops or civilians. Others were kidnapped on slave-raiding or piracy expeditions. Many slaves were the offspring of slaves. Some people were enslaved as a punishment for crime or debt, others were sold into slavery by their parents, other relatives, or even spouses, sometimes to satisfy debts, sometimes to escape starvation. A variant on the selling of children was the exposure, either real or fictitious, of unwanted children, who were then rescued by others and made slaves. Another source of slavery was self-sale, undertaken sometimes to obtain an elite position, sometimes to escape destitution.
Slavery existed in a large number of past societies whose general characteristics are well known. It was rare among primitive peoples, such as the hunter-gatherer societies, because for slavery to flourish, social differentiation or stratification was essential. Also essential was an economic surplus, for slaves were often consumption goods who themselves had to be maintained rather than productive assets who generated income for their owner. Surplus was also essential in slave systems where the owners expected economic gain from slave ownership.
Ordinarily there had to be a perceived labour shortage, for otherwise it is unlikely that most people would bother to acquire or to keep slaves. Free land, and more generally, open resources, were often a prerequisite for slavery; in most cases where there were no open resources, non-slaves could be found who would fulfill the same social functions at lower cost. Last, some centralized governmental institutions willing to enforce slave laws had to exist, or else the property aspects of slavery were likely to be chimerical. Most of these conditions had to be present in order for slavery to exist in a society; if they all were, until the abolition movement of the 19th century swept throughout most of the world, it was almost certain that slavery would be present. Although slavery existed almost everywhere, it seems to have been especially important in the development of two of the world's major civilizations, Western (including ancient Greece and Rome) and Islamic.
There have been two basic types of slavery throughout recorded history. The most common has been what is called household, patriarchal, or domestic slavery. Although domestic slaves occasionally worked outside the household, for example, in haying or harvesting, their primary function was that of menials who served their owners in their homes or wherever else the owners might be, such as in military service. Slaves often were a consumption-oriented status symbol for their owners, who in many societies spent much of their surplus on slaves. Household slaves sometimes merged in varying degrees with the families of their owners, so that boys became adopted sons or women became concubines or wives who gave birth to heirs. Temple slavery, state slavery, and military slavery were relatively rare and distinct from domestic slavery, but in a very broad outline they can be categorized as the household slaves of a temple or the state.
The other major type of slavery was productive slavery. It was relatively infrequent and occurred primarily in Classical Athenian Greece and Rome and in the post-Columbian circum-Caribbean New World. It also was found in 9th-century Iraq, among the Kwakiutl Indians of the American Northwest, and in a few areas of sub-Saharan Africa in the 19th century. Although slaves also were employed in the household, slavery in all of those societies seems to have existed predominantly to produce marketable commodities in mines or on plantations.
A major theoretical issue is the relationship between productive slavery and the status of a society as a slave or a slave-owning society. In a slave society, slaves composed a significant portion (at least 20–30 percent) of the total population, and much of that society's energies were mobilized toward getting and keeping slaves. In addition the institution of slavery had a significant impact on the society's institutions, such as the family, and on its social thought, law, and economy. It seems clear that it was quite possible for a slave society to exist without productive slavery; the known historical examples were concentrated in Africa and Asia. It is also clear that most of the slave societies have been concentrated in Western (including Greece and Rome) and Islamic civilizations. In a slave-owning society, slaves were present but in smaller numbers, and they were much less the focus of the society's energies.
Slavery was a species of dependent labour differentiated from other forms primarily by the fact that in any society it was the most degrading and most severe. Slavery was the prototype of a relationship defined by domination and power. But throughout the centuries man has invented other forms of dependent labour besides slavery, including serfdom, indentured labour, and peonage. The term serfdom is much overused, often where it is not appropriate (always as an appellation of opprobrium). In the past a serf usually was an agriculturalist, whereas, depending upon the society, a slave could be employed in almost any occupation. Canonically, serfdom was the dependent condition of much of the western and central European peasantry from the time of the decline of the Roman Empire until the era of the French Revolution. This included a "second enserfment" that swept over central and some of eastern Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. Russia did not know the "first enserfment"; serfdom began there gradually in the mid-15th century, was completed by 1649, and lasted until 1906. Whether the term serfdom appropriately describes the condition of the peasantry in other contexts is a matter of vigorous contention. Be that as it may, the serf was also distinguished from the slave by the fact that he was usually the subject of the law—i.e., he had some rights, whereas the slave, the object of the law, had significantly fewer rights. The serf, moreover, was usually bound to the land (the most significant exception was the Russian serf between about 1700 and 1861), whereas the slave was always bound to his owner; i.e., he had to live where his owner told him to, and he often could be sold by his owner at any time. The serf usually owned his means of production (grain, livestock, implements) except the land, whereas the slave owned nothing, often not even the clothes on his back. The serf's right to marry off his lord's estate often was restricted, but the master's interference in his reproductive and family life ordinarily was much less than was the case for the slave. Serfs could be called upon by the state to pay taxes, to perform corvée labour on roads, and to serve in the army, but slaves usually were exempt from all of those obligations.
A person became an indentured servant by borrowing money and then voluntarily agreeing to work off the debt during a specified term. In some societies indentured servants probably differed little from debt slaves (i.e., persons who initially were unable to pay off obligations and thus were forced to work them off at an amount per year specified by law). Debt slaves, however, were regarded as criminals (essentially thieves) and thus liable to harsher treatment. Perhaps as many as half of all the white settlers in North America were indentured servants, who agreed to work for someone (the purchaser of the indenture) upon arrival to pay for their passage. Some indentured servants alleged that they were treated worse than slaves; the economic logic of the situation was that slave owners thought of their slaves as a long-term investment whose value would drop if maltreated, whereas the short-term (typically four years) indentured servants could be abused almost to death because their masters had only a brief interest in them. Practices varied, but indenture contracts sometimes specified that the servants were to be set free with a sum of money, sometimes a plot of land, perhaps even a spouse, whereas for manumitted slaves the terms usually depended more on the generosity of the owner.
Peons were either persons forced to work off debts or criminals. Peons, who were the Latin American variant of debt slaves, were forced to work for their creditors to pay off what they owed. They tended to merge with felons because people in both categories were considered criminals, and that was especially true in societies where money fines were the main sanction and form of restitution for crimes. Thus, the felon who could not pay his fine was an insolvent debtor. The debt peon had to work for his creditor, and the labour of the criminal peon was sold by the state to a third party. Peons had even less recourse to the law for bad treatment than did indentured servants, and the terms of manumission for the former typically were less favourable than for the latter.
Historical survey
The origins of slavery are lost to human memory. It is sometimes hypothesized that at some moment it was decided that persons detained for a crime or as a result of warfare would be more useful if put to work in some way rather than if killed outright and discarded or eaten. But both if and when that first occurred is unknown.
Slave-owning societies
Slavery is known to have existed as early as the Shang dynasty (18th–12th century bce) in China. It has been studied thoroughly in ancient Han China (206 bce–25 ce), where perhaps 5 percent of the population was enslaved. Slavery continued to be a feature of Chinese society down to the 20th century. For most of that period it appears that slaves were generated in the same ways they were elsewhere, including capture in war, slave raiding, and the sale of insolvent debtors. In addition, the Chinese practiced self-sale into slavery, the sale of women and children (to satisfy debts or because the seller could not feed them), and the sale of the relatives of executed criminals. Finally, kidnapping seems to have produced a regular flow of slaves at some times. The go-between or middleman was an important figure in the sale of local people into slavery; he provided the distance that made such slaves into outsiders, for the purchasers did not know their origins. Chinese family boundaries were relatively permeable, and some owners established kinlike relations with their slaves; male slaves were appointed as heirs when no natural offspring existed. As was also the case in other slave-owning societies, slaves in China were often luxury consumption items who constituted a drain on the economy. The reasons China never developed into a slave society are many and complex, but certainly an abundance of non-slave labour at low prices was one of the major ones.
Korea had a very large slave population, ranging from a third to half of the entire population for most of the millennium between the Silla period and the mid-18th century. Most of the Korean slaves were indigenously generated. In spite of their numbers, slaves seem to have had little impact on other institutions, and thus the society can be categorized as a slave-owning one.
Slavery existed in ancient India, where it is recorded in the Sanskrit Laws of Manu of the 1st century bce. The institution was little documented until the British colonials in the 19th century made it an object of study because of their desire to abolish it. In 1841 there were an estimated eight million or nine million slaves in India, many of whom were agrestic or predial slaves—that is, slaves who were attached to the land they worked on but who nevertheless could be alienated from it. Malabar had the largest proportion of slaves, about 15 percent of the total population. The agrestic slaves initially were subjugated communities. The remainder of the slaves was recruited individually by purchase from dealers or parents or by self-sale of the starving, and they can be classified as household slaves. Slavery in Hindu India was complicated by the slave owners' ritual need to know the origins of their slaves, which explains why most of them were of indigenous origin. Although there were exceptions, slaves were owned primarily for prestige.
Slavery was widely practiced in other areas of Asia as well. A quarter to a third of the population of some areas of Thailand and Burma (Myanmar) were slaves in the 17th through the 19th centuries and in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, respectively. But not enough is known about them to say that they definitely were slave societies.
Other societies in the Philippines, Nepal, Malaya, Indonesia, and Japan are known to have had slavery from ancient until fairly recent times. The same was true among the various peoples inhabiting the regions of Central Asia: the peoples of Sogdiana, Khorezm, and other advanced civilizations; the Mongols, the Kalmyks, the Kazakhs; and the numerous Turkic peoples, most of whom converted to Islam.
In the New World some of the best-documented slave-owning societies were the Klamath and Pawnee and the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, that lived along the coast from what is now Alaska to California. Life was easy in many of those societies, and slaves are known to have sometimes been consumption goods that were simply killed in potlatches.
Other Amerindians, such as the Creek of Georgia, the Comanche of Texas, the Callinago of Dominica, the Tupinambá of Brazil, the Inca of the Andes, and the Tehuelche of Patagonia, also owned slaves. Among the Aztecs of Mexico, slavery generally seems to have been relatively mild. People got into the institution through self-sale and capture and could buy their way out relatively easily. Slaves were often used as porters in the absence of draft animals in Mesoamerica. The fate of other slaves was less pleasant: chattels purchased from the Mayans and others were sacrificed in massive numbers. Some of the sacrifices may have been eaten by the social elite.
In England about 10 percent of the population entered in the Domesday Book in 1086 were slaves, with the proportion reaching as much as 20 percent in some places. Slaves were also prominent in Scandinavia during the Viking era, 800–1050 ce, when slaves for use at home and for sale in the international slave markets were a major object of raids. Slaves also were present in significant numbers in Scandinavia both before and after the Viking era.
Continental Europe—France, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia—all knew slavery. Russia was essentially founded as a by-product of slave raiding by the Vikings passing from Scandinavia to Byzantium in the 9th century, and slavery remained a major institution there until the early 1720s, when the state converted the household slaves into house serfs in order to put them on the tax rolls. House serfs were freed from their lords by an edict of Tsar Alexander II in 1861. Many scholars argue that the Soviets reinstituted a form of state slavery in the Gulag camps that flourished until 1956.
Slavery was much in evidence in the Middle East from the beginning of recorded history. It was treated as a prominent institution in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi of about 750 bce. Slaves were present in ancient Egypt and are known to have been murdered to accompany their deceased owners into the afterlife. It once was believed that slaves built the great pyramids, but contemporary scholarly opinion is that the pyramids were constructed by peasants when they were not occupied by agriculture. Slaves also are mentioned prominently in the Bible among the Hebrews in Palestine and their neighbours.
Slaves were owned in all Islamic societies, both sedentary and nomadic, ranging from Arabia in the centre to North Africa in the west and to what is now Pakistan and Indonesia in the east. Some Islamic states, such as the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Khanate, and the Sokoto caliphate, must be termed slave societies because slaves there were very important numerically as well as a focus of the polities' energies.
Slaves have been owned in black Africa throughout recorded history. In many areas there were large-scale slave societies, while in others there were slave-owning societies. Slavery was practiced everywhere even before the rise of Islam, and black slaves exported from Africa were widely traded throughout the Islamic world. Approximately 18 million Africans were delivered into the Islamic trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades between 650 and 1905. In the second half of the 15th century Europeans began to trade along the west coast of Africa, and by 1867 between 7 million and 10 million Africans had been shipped as slaves to the New World. Although some areas of Africa were depleted by slave raiding, on balance the African population grew after the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade because of new food crops introduced from the New World, particularly manioc, corn (maize), and possibly peanuts (groundnuts). The relationship between African and New World slavery was highly complementary. African slave owners demanded primarily women and children for labour and lineage incorporation and tended to kill males because they were troublesome and likely to flee. The transatlantic trade, on the other hand, demanded primarily adult males for labour and thus saved from certain death many adult males who otherwise would have been slaughtered outright by their African captors. After the end of the transatlantic trade, a few African societies at the end of the 19th century put captured males to productive work as slaves, but this usually was not the case before that time.
Slave societies
The first known major slave society was that of Athens. In the early Archaic period the elite worked its estates with the labour of fellow citizens in bondage (often for debt). After the lawgiver Solon abolished citizen slavery about 594 bce, wealthy Athenians came to rely on enslaved peoples from outside Attica. The prolonged wars with the Persians and other peoples provided many slaves, but the majority of slaves were acquired through regular trade with non-Greek peoples around the Aegean. At the time of Classical Athens (the 5th through the 3rd century bce) slaves constituted about a third of the population. A particularly noteworthy locus of slave employment was the Laurium silver mines, where private individuals could pick out a lode and put their slaves to mining it. As in all other slave societies, it was the profitability of slavery that determined its preeminence in Athens. (Also important were political conditions that made the gross exploitation of citizens impossible.) Slaves were responsible for the prosperity of Athens and the leisure of the aristocrats, who had time to create the high culture now considered the beginning of Western civilization. The existence of large-scale slavery was also responsible, it seems logical to believe, for the Athenians' thoughts on freedom that are considered a central part of the Western heritage. Athenian slave society was finally destroyed by Philip II of Macedonia at the battle of Chaeronea (338 bce), when, on the motion of Lycurgus, many (but not all) slaves were freed.
The next major slave society was Roman Italy between about the 2nd century bce and the 4th century ce. Initially, Rome was a polity consisting primarily of small farmers. But the process of creating the empire took them away from their farms for extended periods, and the prolonged wars of conquest in Spain and the eastern Mediterranean during the 3rd and 2nd centuries bce created a great flood of captives. Nothing was more logical than to put the captives to work farming, especially the olives and grapes that created much of the prosperity of the late republic and the principate. Slaves and freedmen were responsible for much of the empire's commodity production, and in the early principate they ran its governmental bureaus as well. The conditions were right to put the captives to work: private ownership of land; developed commodity production and markets; a perceived shortage of internal labour supply; and an appropriate moral, political, and legal climate. Roughly 30 percent of the population was enslaved. Roman slave society ended as the slaves were legally converted into coloni, or serfs, and the lands became populated and the frontiers so remote that finding great numbers of outsider slaves was increasingly difficult.
Some lesser Islamic slave societies are also of interest. One is the Baghdad caliphate founded in the 7th and lasting through the 10th century. Many tens of thousands of military captives were imported from Sogdiana, Khazaria, and other Central Asian locales. In the 9th and 10th centuries several tens of thousands of black Zanj slaves were imported from Zanzibar to Lower Iraq, where they constituted more than half the total population and were put to work to clear saline lands for irrigation and to cultivate sugar. More long-term was the slavery practiced in the Crimean Khanate between roughly 1475 and its liquidation by the Russian empress Catherine the Great in 1783. The Crimean Tatar society was based on raiding the neighbouring Slavic and Caucasian sedentary societies and selling the captives into the slave markets of Eurasia. Approximately 75 percent of the Crimean population consisted of slaves or freedmen, and much of the free population was highly predatory, engaged either in the gathering of slaves or in the selling of them. It is known that for every slave the Crimeans sold in the market, they killed outright several other people during their raids, and a couple more died on the way to the slave market. The reasons for the transition of the Crimean Khanate from a slave-owning society to a slave society have not been studied in detail. Probable reasons, however, include the combination of high demand for slaves throughout the Islamic world, the defenselessness of the sedentary agricultural Slavs and others, and the existence of a relatively poor class of Crimean horsemen, who were led by a predatory elite that got rich by slave raiding. Crimean Tatar slave raids into Muscovy were greatly curtailed by the building of a series of walls along the frontier in the years 1636–53 and ultimately by the liquidation of the khanate in 1783.
It is probable that the Ottoman Empire, and especially its centre in Turkey, should be termed a slave society. Slaves from both the white Slavic north and the black African south flowed into Turkish cities for half a millennium after the Turks seized control of much of the Balkans in the 14th century. The proportion of the population that was slave ranged from about one-fifth in Istanbul, the capital, to much less in remoter provincial areas. Perhaps only people such as the slave owners of the circum-Caribbean sugar islands and the American South were as preoccupied with slaves as were the Ottomans.
Slaves in the Ottoman Empire served in various capacities. They were janissary soldiers (see below), and they ran the empire, manned its ships, generated much of its handicraft product, and served as domestic servants and in harems. Contemporaries believed that the absolute power of the ruler was based on his military and administrative slaves. The Tanzimat enlightenment movement of the mid-19th century initiated the abolition of slavery; by the 1890s only a few slaves were being smuggled illegally into the empire, and the slave population was greatly reduced.
Other prominent Islamic slave societies were on the east coast of Africa in the 19th century. The Arab-Swahili slave systems have been well studied, and it is known that, depending on the date, 65 to 90 percent of the population of Zanzibar was enslaved. Close to 90 percent of the population on the Kenya coast was also enslaved, and in Madagascar half the population was enslaved. It may be assumed that similar situations prevailed elsewhere in the vicinity and also earlier, but studies to verify the proposition have not been undertaken.
Another notable Islamic slave society was that of the Sokoto caliphate formed by Hausas in sub-Saharan Africa (northern Nigeria and Cameroon) in the 19th century. At least half the population was enslaved. That was only the most notable of the Fulani jihad states of the western and central Sudan, where between 1750 and 1900 from one- to two-thirds of the entire population consisted of slaves. In Islamic Ghana, between 1076 and 1600, about a third of the population were slaves. The same was true among other early states of the western Sudan, including Mali (1200–1500), Segou (1720–1861), and Songhai (1464–1720). It should be noted that slavery was prominent in Ghana and Mali, and presumably elsewhere in Africa in areas for which information is not available, long before the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade. The population of the notorious slave-trading state of the central Sudan, Ouidah (Whydah), was half-slave in the 19th century. It was about a third in Kanem (1600–1800) and perhaps 40 percent in Bornu (1580–1890). Most slaves probably were acquired by raiding neighbouring peoples, but others entered slavery because of criminal convictions or defaulting on debts (often not their own); subsequently, many of those people were sold into the international slave trade. After the limiting and then abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, a number of these African societies put slaves to work in activities such as mining gold and raising peanuts, coconuts (palm oil), sesame, and millet for the market.
Among some of the various Islamic Berber Tuareg peoples of the Sahara and Sahel, slavery persisted at least until 1975. The proportions of slaves ranged from around 15 percent among the Adrar to perhaps 75 percent among the Gurma. In Senegambia, between 1300 and 1900, about a third of the population consisted of slaves. In Sierra Leone in the 19th century close to half the population was enslaved. In the Vai Paramount chiefdoms in the 19th century as much as three-quarters of the population consisted of slaves. Among the Ashanti and Yoruba a third were enslaved. In the 19th century over half the population consisted of slaves among the Duala of the Cameroon, the Ibo and other peoples of the lower Niger, the Kongo, and the Kasanje kingdom and Chokwe of Angola.
Slavery in the Americas
The best-known slave societies were those of the circum-Caribbean world. Slave imports to the islands of the Caribbean began in the early 16th century. Initially the islands often were settled as well by numerous indentured labourers and other Europeans, but following the triumph after 1645 of the sugar revolution (initially undertaken because superior Virginia tobacco had left the Barbadian planters with nothing to sell) and after the nature of the disease climate became known to Europeans, they came to be inhabited almost exclusively by imported African slaves. In time the estate owners moved to England, and the sugar plantations were managed by sometimes unstable and unsavoury Europeans who, with the aid of black overseers and drivers, controlled masses of slaves. About two-thirds of all slaves shipped across the Atlantic ended up in sugar colonies. By 1680 in Barbados the average plantation had about 60 slaves, and in Jamaica in 1832 about 150. The sugar plantations were among the contemporary world's largest and most profitable enterprises, paying about 10 percent on invested capital and on some occasions, such as in Barbados in the 1650s, as much as 40 to 50 percent. The proportions of slaves on the islands ranged from more than a third in Cuba, which went into the sugar and gang labour business on a large scale only after the local planters had gained control in 1789, to 90 percent and more on Jamaica in 1730, Antigua in 1775, and Grenada up to 1834.
Slaves were of varying importance in Mesoamerica and on the South American continent. Initially slaves were imported because of a labour shortage, aggravated by the high death rate of the indigenous population after the introduction of European diseases in the early 16th century. They were brought in at first to mine gold, and they were shifted to silver mining or simply let go when gold was exhausted in the mid-16th century. In Brazil, where sugar had been tried even before its planting in the Caribbean, the coffee bush was imported from Arabia or Ethiopia via Indonesia, and it had an impact similar to that of sugar in the Caribbean. Around 1800 about half the population of Brazil consisted of slaves, but that percentage declined to about 33 percent in 1850 and to 15 percent after the shutting off of imports around 1850 combined with free immigration to raise the proportion of Europeans. In some parts of Brazil, such as Pernambuco, some two-thirds of the population consisted of Africans and their offspring.
The final circum-Caribbean slave society was what became the southern United States. Slaves first were brought to Virginia in 1619. Subsequently, Africans were transshipped to North America from the Caribbean in increasing numbers. Initially, however, the English relied for their dependent labour primarily on indentured servants from the mother country. But in the two decades of the 1660s and 1670s the laws of slave ownership were clarified (for example, Africans who converted to Christianity did no longer have to be manumitted), and the price of servants may have increased because of rising wage rates in prospering England; soon thereafter African slaves replaced English indentured labourers. Tobacco initially was the profitable crop that occupied most slaves in the Chesapeake. The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 changed the situation, and thereafter cotton culture created a huge demand for slaves, especially after the opening of the New South (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas). By 1850 nearly two-thirds of the plantation slaves were engaged in the production of cotton. Cotton could be grown profitably on smaller plots than could sugar, with the result that in 1860 the average cotton plantation had only about 35 slaves, not all of whom produced cotton. During the reign of "King Cotton," about 40 percent of the Southern population consisted of black slaves; the percentage of slaves rose as high as 64 percent in South Carolina in 1720 and 55 percent in Mississippi in 1810 and 1860. More than 36 percent of all the New World slaves in 1825 were in the southern United States. Like Rome and the Sokoto caliphate, the South was totally transformed by the presence of slavery. Slavery generated profits comparable to those from other investments and was only ended as a consequence of the War Between the States.
The international slave trade
Organized commerce began in the Neolithic Period (New Stone Age), and it may be assumed that slaves were not far behind high-value items such as amber and salt in becoming commodities. Even among relatively simple peoples one can trace the international slave trade. Thus such a trade was going on among the peoples of Siberia before the arrival of the Russians in the 16th and 17th centuries. The slaves so traded were neighbouring people captured in warfare, who were then shipped to distant points where they would be without kin and whence they would be unlikely to flee. Similar commerce in slaves occurred on nearly all continents and provided the bulk of household slaves throughout the world.
The international slave trades that provided much of the chattel for the slave societies flowed out of the great "population reservoirs." Two such reservoirs were the Slavs and contiguous agriculturalist Iranians from antiquity to the 19th century and the sub-Saharan Africans from around the beginning of the Common Era to the middle of the 20th century. A third such reservoir probably was the Germanic, Celtic, and Romance peoples who lived north of the Roman Republic and Empire and who half a millennium later became the victims of the Vikings' slave raids. The dynamics of these raids were as follows: A large demand for slave labour prompted neighbouring peoples (typically migratory or nomadic in habit) to prey on the sedentary agriculturalists living in the reservoir. The raiders developed techniques, of which surprise was perhaps the major one, that put the settled peoples at a disadvantage, for they never knew when and where the raiders might strike. Populations in the reservoir could be completely depleted, as happened to the East Slavs living in the steppe south of the Oka and between the Volga and the Dnepr rivers from 1240 to the 1590s, or they could migrate half a continent away to escape the slave raiders, as did the Ndembu in Africa. Ruthenians, frontier Poles, Caucasians, and numerous African peoples were sorely depleted by slave raids. One alternative was to fight back, as did the Muscovite Russians and the Baya of Adamawa (now northern Cameroon in West Africa), and the consequence in both instances was the creation of an authoritarian garrison state.
The international slave trades developed into elaborate networks. For example, in the 9th and 10th centuries Vikings and Russian merchants took East Slavic slaves into the Baltic. They were then gathered in Denmark for further transshipment and sold to Jewish and Arabic slave traders, who took them to Verdun and León. There some of the males were castrated. From those places the slaves were sold to harems throughout Moorish Spain and North Africa. In the 9th century the Baghdad caliphate got slaves from western Europe via Marseille, Venice, and Prague; Slavic and Turkic slaves from eastern Europe and Central Asia via Derbent, Itil, Khorezm, and Samarkand; and African slaves via Mombasa, Zanzibar, the Sudan, and the Sahara. The Mongols in the 13th century brought their slaves first to Karakorum, whence they were sold throughout Asia, and then later to Sarai on the Lower Volga, whence they were retailed throughout much of Eurasia. Following the breakup of the Golden Horde, the Crimean Tatars took their chattel to Kefe (Feodosiya) in Crimea, whence it was transported across the Black Sea and sold throughout the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere. Arabs developed similar supply networks out of black Africa across the Sahara, across the Red Sea (from Ethiopia and Somalia), and out of East Africa, which supplied the Islamic world and the Indian Ocean region with human chattel.
Beginning about 1500, a similar process occurred along the coast of West Africa to supply the transatlantic slave trade. The Africans were captured by other Africans in raids and then transported to the coast; one may assume that the number of casualties of African slave raiding was nearly as high as that of Crimean Tatar slave raiding. The captives, primarily adult males, were assembled on the coast by African rulers and kept in holding pens until wholesaled to European ship captains who sailed up and down the coast looking for slave cargo. (As stated above, the women and children often were not sent to the coast for export but were kept by the Africans themselves, often for incorporation into their lineages.) African rulers, who did not allow the Europeans to move inland, often conducted their wholesale business on the coast, such as at Ouidah in Dahomey (now Benin). (Because of the disease climate the Europeans also were reluctant, even unable, to move inland until the mid-19th century.) But African rulers did everything they could to encourage the European sea captains to come to their port.
Once a ship was loaded, the trip, known as "the Middle Passage," usually to Brazil or an island in the Caribbean, was a matter of a few weeks to several months. Between 1500 and the end of the 19th century the time of the voyage diminished considerably. That change was important, because death rates, which ranged from around 10 to more than 20 percent on the Middle Passage, were directly proportional to the length of the voyage. The ship captains had every interest in the health of their cargo, for they were paid only for slaves delivered alive. The death rates among the European captains and crew engaged in the slave trade were at least as high as those among their cargo on the Middle Passage. Of the slave-ship crews that embarked from Liverpool in 1787, less than half returned alive.
Arriving in Brazil or the Caribbean islands, the slaves were sold at auction. The slave auctions were elaborate markets in which the prices of the slaves were determined. The auctions told the captains and their superiors what kind of cargo was in demand, usually adult males. Credit almost always was part of the transaction, and inability to collect was one of the major reasons companies went bankrupt. After the auction the slave was delivered to the new owner, who then put him to work. That also began the period of "seasoning" for the slave, the period of about a year or so when he either succumbed to the disease environment of the New World or survived it. Many slaves landed on the North American mainland before the early 18th century had already survived the seasoning process in the Caribbean.
It can be assumed that the other international slave trades were comparable in many respects to the transatlantic one, but they have not been adequately studied.
Ways of ending slavery
Slavery came to an end in numerous ways. Household slavery ended because of an exhaustion of supplies, because slavery evolved into some other system of dependent labour, because it withered away, or because it was formally abolished. Productive slavery came to an end for the additional reasons that it ceased to be profitable or that it was abolished by warfare or the threat of warfare.
Throughout history there have been people who in one way or another believed that slavery was not a good or natural condition. Jean Bodin (1530–96), the French founder of antislavery thought, for example, condemned the institution as immoral and counterproductive and advocated that no group of men should be excluded from the body politic. Nevertheless, remarkably few people found the institution of slavery to be unnatural or immoral until the second half of the 18th century. Until that time Christians commonly thought of sin as a kind of slavery rather than slavery itself as a sin. When concern was expressed for slaves, it was for their good care, not for their unfree status.
Frequently, when slavery passed from the scene, it did so with little fanfare. In most societies, such as ancient Babylonia, Israel, Egypt, or Athens, the institution of slavery had little or no connection with the society's rise or demise. In Rome, on the other hand, slavery began to yield to tenancy and the antecedents of serfdom before the fall of the empire, as the diminishing supply of slaves and the rise of their price coincided with the disintegration of the olive oil- and wine-producing plantations of southern Italy and loss of markets in the face of competition from Spain, Gaul, and North Africa. (This standard interpretation has been challenged, however.) In the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) serfdom was the predominant form of dependent labour, and slavery was definitely secondary. Manumitting slaves became much easier, according to the laws, and the Ecloga and the Procheiron Nomos (see below) prescribed that the slaves of persons who died without testament had to be freed. Throughout most of Europe household slavery persisted well into the late Middle Ages and even later and only gradually died out. Slavic slaves were plentiful, for example, in the Italian city-states as late as the 14th century, and African slaves could be found in Spain and Portugal in the 16th century. Serfdom replaced slavery in medieval Germany. By the end of the Middle Ages slavery no longer existed in England, and the famous Cartwright decision of the reign of Elizabeth I (1569) held that "England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in."
Slavery persisted longer in eastern Europe. In Poland it was replaced by the second enserfment; the sale and purchase of slaves were forbidden in the 15th century. A similar process occurred in Lithuania, where slavery was formally abolished in 1588. In Russia it came to an end with the first enserfment: agricultural slaves were formally converted into serfs in 1679, and household slaves were converted into house serfs in 1723. In the Caucasus and in Central Asia slavery persisted until the second half of the 19th century. As the Russian Empire grew and its hegemony spread, it adopted the tendency of 19th-century imperialist powers to enforce abolition when embarking upon colonization. Thus the conquest of the Caucasus led to the abolition of slavery by the 1860s and the conquest in Central Asia of the Islamic khanates of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Khiva by the 1870s.
The reexportation of slaves from England was challenged by a group of humanitarians led by Granville Sharpe. Chief Justice Mansfield ruled in 1772 that James Somerset, a fugitive slave from Virginia, could not be forcibly returned to the colonies by his master. The fate of slavery in most of the rest of the world depended on the British abolition movement, which was initiated by the English Quakers in 1783 when they presented the first important antislavery petition to Parliament. They were following the Pennsylvania Quakers, who had voiced opposition to slavery in 1688. The Vermont constitution of 1777 was the first document in the United States to abolish slavery. Another sign of the spread of antislavery feeling was the declaration in the U.S. Constitution that the importation of slaves could be forbidden after 20 years (in 1808). An act of March 2, 1807, forbade trading in slaves with Africa. Well before the rise of cotton some people hoped that natural processes combined with a prohibition on infusions would put an end to slavery.
In 1807 the British abolished the slave trade with their colonies. In the Caribbean, slavery was abolished by British Parliamentary fiat, effective July 31, 1834, when 776,000 slaves in the British plantation colonies were freed. The British imperial emancipation can be attributed to the growing power of the philanthropic movement and a double switch in the focus of the British Empire, geographically from west (the Caribbean) to east (India) and economically from protectionism to laissez-faire.
The British move in 1807 to abolish the slave trade had an immediate impact on the juntas struggling for independence in Spanish America. The slave trade was declared illegal in Venezuela and Mexico in 1810, in Chile in 1811, and in Argentina in 1812. In 1817 Spain signed a treaty with Britain agreeing to abolish the slave trade in 1820, but the trade continued to the remaining Spanish colonies until 1880. Chile freed its black slaves in 1823; Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, and Peru in 1854.
The American antislavery movement, linked to the "Second Great Awakening," succeeded in arousing immense hostility between the non-slave North, where most states had voluntarily abolished slavery by 1804, and the slaveholding South, where the "peculiar institution" became even further entrenched because of the spread of cotton cultivation. By the 1850s, however, the old abolition movement had flagged. It took political developments and forces (especially the emergence of the Free-Soil movement and the conflict over the expansion of slavery), the South's secession, the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, to put slavery on the road to extinction in the United States. The proclamation was confirmed by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which put an end to slavery.
Puerto Rico abolished slavery (with provisions for periods of apprenticeship) in 1873 and Cuba in 1880. Brazil was the last Western Hemisphere nation to abolish slavery. The British antislavery movement of the 1810s had almost put an end to the institution, but a thriving world market for coffee revitalized it in the 1820s. In 1850 Britain declared that a squadron would enter Brazilian territorial waters to seize vessels carrying slaves, and later that year Brazil responded by equating the slave trade with piracy. On May 13, 1888, all Brazilian slaves were manumitted. Initially there was some opposition by the coffee growers, but their resistance crumbled immediately.
The European colonization movement of the second half of the 19th century put an end to slavery in many parts of Africa, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. The abolition of slavery in both Hindu and Muslim India by Act V of 1843 meant only that the British courts would not enforce claims to a slave, but the Penal Code of 1861 made holding a slave a crime. Having seen to the abolition of slavery in most of Latin America and South Asia, the British turned their attention back to Africa. They moved onto the continent, took control of those governments that were thriving on slavery, and attempted to abolish the institution. Lagos was annexed in 1861, and all of Nigeria followed. In the 1870s British missionaries moved into Malawi, the place of origin of the Indian Ocean Islamic slave trade, in an attempt to interdict it at its very source. In 1890 Zanzibar was made a British protectorate after the sultan's authority had been destroyed by the struggle over the slave trade. In Dahomey the French abolition of slavery resulted in the cessation of ceremonial human sacrifice.
The imperial government formally abolished slavery in China in 1906, and the law became effective on January 31, 1910, when all adult slaves were converted into hired labourers and the young were freed upon reaching age 25. Slavery was legally abolished in Korea in the Gap-o reform of 1894 but remained extant in reality until 1930.
Some parts of Africa and much of the Islamic world retained slavery at the end of World War I. For this reason the League of Nations and later the United Nations took the final extinction of slavery to be one of their obligations. The league had considerable success in Africa, with the assistance of the colonial powers, and by the late 1930s slavery was abolished in Liberia and Ethiopia. After World War II the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention of Human Rights proclaimed the immorality and the illegality of slavery. Slavery was abolished in most Islamic countries, although it persisted in Saudi Arabia into the 1960s. It finally was made illegal in the Arabian Peninsula in 1962. It is probable that slavery no longer exists as a legal phenomenon recognized by a political authority or government any place in the world.


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The Loud American Roadhouse in Downtown Sturgis is always bringing you the best in live entertainment and is Home of the Legendary steak Tip Dinner. We are the premier restaurant and live concert venue in the Black Hills during the Sturgis Rally and the whole year!
Succulent, melt-in-your-mouth beef tenderloin lightly dusted in herbs and spices and flash-fried to a golden brown, Steak Tips served dozens of ways plus big burgers, pastas, fajitas, charbroiled steaks, wraps, homemade soups, sands and signature sides. We've got all of your favorite domestic and import bottles and taps, select handcrafted beers, a surprising wine list and everyone's favorite cocktail.