So here’s a prediction for you: There were things going on in the Dark Ages that were worse than either Roman or early Victorian slavery. The problem is, I can’t think of anything worse. There’s something particularly terrible about mass industrial slavery. Maybe some passing atrocitologist can help.
Well, I’m not exactly an atrocitologist, but I have studied the early medieval period in some detail. There are some problems in comparing it to other periods, especially in subjective terms—the Dark Ages were called “dark” precisely because they left a relative dearth of subjective material—but here’s what I can remember off the top of my head.
There was a widespread slave trade, beginning during or before Roman times and ending in Britain around 1100 AD. It was not racially motivated or justified, as we’d understand race; slaves came from all the European ethnic groups, including those of their holders. Taking slaves seems to have been more common in conflicts between ethnic groups, however. Unransomed captures in wartime and freemen who fell into various kinds of legal trouble could both become slaves; the former seem to have been more common. They generally could be bought and sold and didn’t have legal independence. The law codes of the time prescribed punishments for mistreating other people’s slaves but not your own.
Slave labor was not usually highly concentrated or regimented (there were, for example, no galley slaves in that period); slaveholders came from all free social classes, and slaves performed much the same work as freemen (though usually the harder and dirtier shares of it, where division of labor was possible). At the time of the Domesday Book, slaves made up about 9% of the population.
From what I know of it, this seems more comparable to Roman slavery than to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Early medieval Europe was a poorer place than either Rome or the early modern colonies, and its people probably led harsher lives, but in social terms I don’t see much in the way of unique awfulness.
Well, I’m not exactly an atrocitologist, but I have studied the early medieval period in some detail. There are some problems in comparing it to other periods, especially in subjective terms—the Dark Ages were called “dark” precisely because they left a relative dearth of subjective material—but here’s what I can remember off the top of my head.
There was a widespread slave trade, beginning during or before Roman times and ending in Britain around 1100 AD. It was not racially motivated or justified, as we’d understand race; slaves came from all the European ethnic groups, including those of their holders. Taking slaves seems to have been more common in conflicts between ethnic groups, however. Unransomed captures in wartime and freemen who fell into various kinds of legal trouble could both become slaves; the former seem to have been more common. They generally could be bought and sold and didn’t have legal independence. The law codes of the time prescribed punishments for mistreating other people’s slaves but not your own.
Slave labor was not usually highly concentrated or regimented (there were, for example, no galley slaves in that period); slaveholders came from all free social classes, and slaves performed much the same work as freemen (though usually the harder and dirtier shares of it, where division of labor was possible). At the time of the Domesday Book, slaves made up about 9% of the population.
From what I know of it, this seems more comparable to Roman slavery than to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Early medieval Europe was a poorer place than either Rome or the early modern colonies, and its people probably led harsher lives, but in social terms I don’t see much in the way of unique awfulness.