hckrnws
The author of TFA and a few others like it is Marc Morris. To get his viewpoint at greater length, see his The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England (2012).
Since at least the 19th century, there has been sharp controversy among English academics over whether the Norman invasion was a good or bad thing. Morris is strongly on the "good" side. For a view from the other direction, try the short and readable The Norman Conquest: A Very Short Introduction by George Garnett (2009).
It's kind of weird to think of historians coming down on "good" and "bad" sides. But even if they do, it's hard to imagine anyone looking at the reign of William and saying "yeah that was awesome". At least from the point of view of the losers. I don't imagine even the slaves enjoyed the Harrying of the North.
"Mixed" seems reasonable. "Good" seems a lot to ask.
The day of William's coronation in London, Christmas Day 1066, the city was on edge. It had surrendered peacefully to William after he had slowly, systematically cut off every road to the city.
When the city people cried out in celebration at the new king William's men — being Normans, Bretons, Flemish and other continentals — did not understanding what was said in English. They misinterpreted the crowd as if they had assassinated William. Suddenly they attacked the townspeople and set fire to nearby houses.
The cries of alarm and the smell of acrid smoke could be heard and smelled from within the church as William was crowned king.
Eventually peace would be restored, but that moment was forever emblematic of the uneasy reign William would have over England.
A skeptical read would be that the economics of Norman style feudalism heavily relies on the peasants to work the land. Obviously you need the peasants to stay in their place. If all the warrior caste have the same perspective, you can't be carting off the population and selling them off overseas, without some major friction. And if you are trying to "take" some land from another warlord, it's not going to be very economical for you to sell off the peasants, cause then who is going to work the land?
The Normans were pretty harsh in their treatment of rebellious areas - the "Harrying of the North" being particularly brutal:
Yeah but that region wasn't as economically important. And it had a critical problem where it was the border region with Scotland and a preferred entry point for the Danes. Depopulating the area makes sense from a medieval military perspective because invaders won't have crops and infrastructure to pull from as they transverse the region. Other states in this time period had similar state-directed depopulated areas on the border for the same reasons.
What are some other examples? That's such a fascinating practice. Was it done in the ancient world as well? What about in other places (Asia, Americas)?
Off the top of my head, China’s Great Clearance [1] and the Desert of the Duero in Spain [2]. IIRC the area north of Hadrian’s wall was also kept depopulated.
The Habsburg Military Frontier [3] could probably qualify too but the area was somewhat populated by soldier-settlers.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Clearance
The British did it to the Boers about a hundred years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_...
It was pretty common practice from ancient through to modern times for a resisting or rebellious population (especially a city) to be slaughtered or enslaved. A few examples would be the Roman massacres in Judea, the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols or the wars against Native Americans.
Right, but I was specifically asking about the practice of slaughtering/enslaving or otherwise depopulating an area specifically for the purpose of creating an economically/politically undesirable buffer zone against invaders.
It was pretty common practice .. by some extremely aggressive groups .. from ancient through to modern times .. by war-like nations. Yes Romans.. not everyone did this worldwide. The world has been wounded repeatedly by the extreme brutality of some armed groups. It is simply false to ascribe this behavior to "pretty common" without distinction, and IMO makes the horrible into some kind of banality.
I would argue that the groups you label extremely aggressive were just the winners, and the other “less brutal” groups would have done the same thing if the boot was on the other foot.
yes, I am arguing that is exactly not the case
Other folks may have more apt examples to share, but I would examine the history of Dacia and also the Sasanian fortification lines both east and west (but especially east) of the Caspian Sea -- both of which separated the empire from nomadic tribes of the steppe.
I believe these involved depopulated regions both north and south of the main defensive structures to allow harrying of invading forces while denying access to plundered resources.
Eventually, they were overcome by the Hephthalites (aka White Huns) following heavy Sasanian losses north of the limes in the AD 484 Battle of Herat, but it's interesting to note that the defensive structures separating southern 'civilization' from the steppe were considered a joint responsibility of the predominant (Roman/Sasanian) empires in spite of their generally being at war with each other, as the nomads were a shared threat.
Edit: Another great example is drawn from Caesar's description of Helvetian practices in his Gallic Wars; the Helvetians, a Germanic tribe located in modern Switzerland, had deliberately depopulated a wide area around their territory for defensive purposes.
tl;dr: "Genocide is good, actually."
I'd go slightly further than "pretty harsh". It was basically ethnic cleansing. Albeit an incomplete and fairly moderate one as these sorts of genocidal things go
A really thorough ethnic cleansing is generally more difficult without modern government structures and mass media to really gin up the hate: in Rwanda, ordinary Hutu slaughtered half a million Tutsi in three months -- 2/3 of the entire Tutsi population at the time -- and they did it with garden tools[1].
That kind of death used to take a standing army backed by decades, if not centuries, of training and discipline: Caesar's slaughter of the Helvetii is the first that comes to mind, maybe followed by the Qin wiping out the Song during China's Warring States period.
Song was eliminated by Qi. I imagine you are referring to the Battle of Changping where the Qin buried 400,000 of Zhao’s surrendered armies.
A very interesting article, especially in that historians still aren't sure why war-based slavery died out completely in Britain in only 60 years -- between 1066 and 1120. You have to wonder if there was mostly an economic reason for it, like making more money from renting to serfs than owning them and having to house and upkeep them (as the article suggests). I can't believe the angels of lords' better natures was the catalyst. The uptake of Christianity thereabouts begat 800 years earlier with Charlemagne; that's a heck of a long gestation to develop a moral conscience.
The timeline overlaps with the Peace of God movement and the Gregorian reforms which legal historian Harold Berman calls the Papal Revolution in his book Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Also coincides with the beginnings of renavatio that Charles Taylor mentions in A Secular Age. You could argue though that perhaps it took some time until the population fully Christianized; it is precisely in this time period we start seeing the use of familiar Biblical along with a set of standardized Germanic first names all across Europe while old Germanic naming conventions start to disappear.
Thanks for this Berman reference.
The article stated that Williams tutor urged him to end the sale of slaves. William complied and also made him archbishop.
I understand analysis of structural forces is a thing. But the great persons of history had a fair impact too.
> You have to wonder if there was mostly an economic reason for it, like making more money from renting to serfs than owning them and having to house and upkeep
You wouldn’t be enslaving your own peasant but rather buying foreigners or capturing people outside of your territory in raids etc.
If the slave populations were self-sustaining I’d assume just banning the slave trade would had a significant effect
> that's a heck of a long gestation to develop a moral conscience.
True, but there were many reformist movements around ~1000 AD and the church was finally able to assert its independence from secular authorities around that time. Before that it had somewhat limited power to force anyone to do anything so they just usually went along with stuff like slavery, polygamy etc. while occasionally criticizing it.
Around 800 AD with Charlemagne. He was not 800 years before 1066, or even 1120.
Sorry. Meant Constantine (350 AD) -- far more significant to the rise of Christian morals than Charlemagne.
Um, Charlemagne was emperor from 800 to 828, only a bit more than 200 years earlier, not 800. Still plenty long enough though.
Well, they hadn't invented progress yet, there was no hurry.
Promising an end to slavery is a great way to conquer a place. Napoleon followed the same game plan, and in a way, so did Lenin.
Comment was deleted :(
Can someone explain what the deal was with selling slaves to Ireland? It makes it seem like Ireland was some wealthy nation buying slaves.
At the time, Ireland was indeed a wealthy country, having made its fortune selling leather to the Romans three centuries before, because the semi-nomadic Irish cultivated large herds of cattle roaming on unfenced plains, while the settled Britons kept sheep. This permitted the establishment of a culturally sophisticated Gaelic Order so stable that it was able to assimilate the invading Vikings and the first wave of Normans, who actually went native and began speaking the Irish language.
Ireland had viking settlement activity in the 800s and 900s. Newly formed settlements/kingdoms were consumers of slaves to further develop. But also, maybe they were named simply because Irish viking rulers had close ties with York, and therefore, there was more trade between nearby and politically close viking kingdoms.
The local Irish had a long tradition of engaging in slave trade (and raiding) themselves, though e.g. St. Patrick
Ireland was colonized by the vikings from the 8th century onward, who continued their long history of seaborne trade even after they abandoned the practice of raiding for which they are more famous. So they had the liquid wealth (primarily gold and silver) and the cultural willingness to acquire slaves. The viking settlements became the first large towns in Ireland, and supported the first sophisticated cash economy on the island capable of generating the liquidity for purchasing slaves from abroad. While the native Celtic Irish also had a history of slave-holding and raiding (see, e.g., the life of St. Patrick), they produced and held significantly less liquid wealth than the viking settlers and never established the large scale trading communities necessary for slave markets to emerge. As a result, pre-viking native Irish slavery did not involve large scale cash-based slave trading.
Also worth mentioning that the scale of the medieval British slave trade was likely small relative to the total populations of either England or Ireland, because it disproportionately consisted of the sale of young women as concubines. Note that there is a difference between the size of the enslaved population and the size of the slave trade. While as much as 30% of the population of Anglo-Saxon England may have been enslaved and the vast majority of those were economic slaves, only a small portion were ever bought or sold on the slave markets, and an even smaller portion sold to the foreign market.
There was simply less demand for purchasing economic slaves because Ireland did not have a robust cash economy for agricultural goods that would have generated the revenue necessary to acquire slaves. That is, acquiring economic slaves for cash only makes sense if those slaves can be used to generate further cash. Concubinage was an exception because in economic terms it is a form of consumption rather than investment. Economic slaves were more likely to be acquired via raiding or conquest, which effectively converts a surplus in defense spending into an economic investment.
Which isn't to say economic slaves weren't bought and sold, just that demand for them was weak and likely the trade only existed because acquiring them was a "free" byproduct for a seller who acquired them while conducting raids aimed at acquiring liquid wealth and potential concubines. As in, a viking group may have raided a village with the specific intent of seizing any valuables and young women, but figured that they might as well take the young men too because they could at least get something in exchange for them. Demand for agricultural economic slaves was low because the productivity of early medieval agricultural workers was extremely low. Once the Christian church turned against concubinage and extra-marital relationships in general, the demand for slaves disappeared, reducing the incentive to raid and thus the incidental production of economic slaves. Which is a corollary of the argument the OP article proposes for the decline in Norman slavery.
Bottom line, a relatively narrow class of wealthy traders and viking raiders in Ireland would have been purchasers in the slave markets, even though the country as a whole wasn't especially wealthy and did not need to be for the slave trade to exist.
The Normans were the great "levelers" of society. Yes, they may have raised up the slave, but they also deprived many others of their historical rights, say, of "sake and soke."
Sake was the right to hold low court on your own land.
Soke was the right to pay your taxes and infeudate yourself to the lord of your choice. There was an entire class of Anglo-Saxons known as "sokesmen." They practically disappeared overnight, historically-speaking.
Normans placed severe restrictions on your infeudation. None of this "I'll withhold my allegiance simply because my local baron is a tyrant" thing. Nope. Doesn't matter. Good, bad or evil, you owe your fealty to the local ruler.
So, while the Normans may have been a relief for the very, very bottom, they were very, very bad for the equivalent of the "middle class" of commoners.
As I read, this is pretty much what the article says. The very very bottom may have been as many as 30 % of the total population.
I was clarifying because the word "sokesman" doesn't appear in the article.
Nor does "cottar/cotter [cotarius/cotarii]" nor "bordar [bordarius/bordarii]" nor even "villein [villanus/villani]." There are a many levels of commoners in Domesday, almost all of whom suffered greatly under the Norman yoke.
Estimates vary, but...
35% of Domesday population were villeins
30% cotters and bordars
12% freeholders
~5% burghers (townspeople)
Which would leave ~20% at maximum to be slaves (servii).
but did "the middle class" exist back then?
I thought "middle class" arose out of the bourgeois class later on?
It's like when I realized that slaves under christianity were not horribly abused as they were part of the church but simply didn't own very many things
slavery became awuful around things like deciding black people were closer to animals so it was ok to exploit them but really they were competing, or rather, trying to keep up with steam-based looms which were much faster at processing cotton so pick that cotton faster *cracks whip *
> "the middle class"
I assume small landholders, yeomen etc. and such would be the equivalent of the middle class in such a society.
> slaves under christianity were not horribly abused as they were part of the church
I'm not sure that's strictly true. It of course varied by time and place and the Church tried to somewhat limit the worst abuse.
Also a clear workaround was to enslave infidels. Muslims enslaved Christians (and basically depopulate many coastal areas across the Mediterranean), in turn Christians were fine with enslaving Muslims (all though they didn't necessarily have that many opportunities) and East European pagans were fair game to everyone.
As an Eastern-European, I can definitely say that after year 1000 we were not pagans, but Christian-Ortodox, but it’s true that the Genoese and the Venetians trading us around the Black Sea called us “schismatics”, i.e. just one step above pagans.
> called us “schismatics”, i.e. just one step above pagans.
I guess technically it was a "hack" though, the Genoese bought anyone the Mongols were selling and shipped them to Egypt and other Muslim states without anyone back at home asking too many questions..
Until of course the Ottomans got right of the middle men and took over the slave trade themselves.
Depends which Eastern Europeans- Lithuania stayed pagan until the late 14th century, with some areas not being Christianised until the early 15th century.
Of course, the Lithuanians themselves might well say they're not Eastern European...
Why would they? They're Balts, and quite homogenously so. Their ancestors were likely centered a bit further East, but not that far out. And their language appears to have split off from a common ancestor of the the Slavic languages.
Wanted to add an aside about the Lithuanians and them not becoming Christian until the 1300s, but, as you said, some Lithuanians themselves might have said that they're not Eastern-Europeans :)
If being raped, castrated or stoned to death was not horribly abused, I don't know what is.
> but did "the middle class" exist back then?
Not as we would recognize it today, but there were always merchants, craftsman and petty gentry that would have a measure of freedom and earning that serfs did not have the ability to achieve.
when I read Road to Wigan Pier I realized that the 20th Century British term "middle class" had an almost unrecognizable meaning compared to what Americans think of as "middle class"
So the first thing you need to figure out, to answer the question "did the middle class exist back then" is: which cultural definition of middle class are we even using to begin with?
You don't need to answer that, in fact, I explicitly handwaved it away. The question is - is there a class between the elites and the serfs, and the answer is always yes. There are always people that the elites need in order to operate a successful polity, but those people are not part of the ruling class.
What’s that definition?
I’ve always heard that it was the class in between the upper class/nobility, and the working class. That is, the class that isn’t able to just indefinitely stop working and sustain itself by things they own. But also isn’t living paycheck-to-paycheck and forced to work. Professionals in lucrative careers and successful small business owners. This makes more sense to me that the sort of typical misapplication to people around median income in the US.
Around median income is already a thing we have a name for (we can call it median income), and it tells us approximately nothing about their position in terms of labor relations or social class.
Working class people should unionize, they should band together to prevent exploitation. Middle class people don’t have to worry about exploitation, they can walk if they want to. They should form guilds and professional societies, to keep unqualified pretenders out of their fields.
"Middle class" is super-poorly defined. Marxists use it to mean petit bourgeoisie (ie people who own capital, plus professionals, so right from the start you have an anomaly, in that, say, a doctor is middle class even if they don't own anything; it's not purely capitalists). As you say Americans tend to use it to mean 'practically everybody'. The British definition has always been complex and is at this point probably complex enough that it's impossible to fully pin down; a huge part of it is _self-identification_ (there are plenty of British millionaires who consider themselves working class).
I mean, I kinda get it, if you want to retire in the US you probably need a million dollars at least (although, not just in the bank, spread throughout retirement funds and real estate). So I could see a working class millionaire. Technically a retiree is living off their wealth, but IMO that’s an edge case.
"Middle class" is often used as a translation of "bourgeoisie" from "bourgeois" which literally means "town dweller" ie. a city dweller.[0] It also means "someone who belongs to neither the aristocratic, clerical, nor military classes."[0] This distinction was useful because the Three Estates system grouped both city dwellers and peasants into a single class (the third estate).[1] Similarly the English word "middle class" was at one point used by Marxists to describe non-aristocratic, non-working class urbanites and equated middle class directly with "bourgeoisie."[2] This class included factory owners who could be richer than the average noble. Our modern usage of "middle class" would never include factory owners, bankers etc. but this definition did.
You end up with something like this:
Old: Nobles -> "Middle class" -> Peasants
Marxist: -> Nobles -> "Middle class" -> Working Class
In both of these, "middle class" means "Not a noble. Could be a rich merchant"
Modern: Rich -> "Middle class" -> Working class
Here, "middle class" means "Middle income. Owns a house or an expensive apartment." "Working class" is the common term used here but also includes people that do not work.
>Around median income is already a thing we have a name for (we can call it median income),
Nobody uses this term. For example, nobody would say they are a "median income" family. Additionally, not all of what people today would consider "working class" work for other people, and cannot join a union. For example, street vendors often do not make much money[3] and it does not make much sense to categorize them as "middle class" because they are not being exploited by their employer (as they have no employer). Unions exist for highly skilled jobs as well, such as air traffic controllers, which make $137,380 per year on average.[4][5] Defining "middle class" as someone who "doesn't need a union" (taking how to qualify that as given) also leaves open the question of what the "upper class" means in that scenario, being that we are not using income as the barometer for class in favor of union status. Would the street vendor be "upper class" if he had a worker? If anything, I would say we already have a term for what you are essentially describing: "unskilled labor." Unskilled laborers need unions more than skilled ones. This is a direct effect of unskilled laborers making less money due to lack of a marketable skill.
>it tells us approximately nothing about their position in terms of labor relations or social class.
It actually tells us a great deal about social class. People of similar incomes will live in their own neighborhood whether or not they have that money from being in a union or from a non union job (leaving the definition of that aside). It is all decided by income level. Living in a middle class suburb is a vastly different experience from living in an apartment in a poor neighborhood in the city.
Lastly, the "right" definition is not really important as much as explaining what you mean by that word when you use it. In the context of history, as in this article, the definition definitely matters.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeois#French
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estates_of_the_realm#Third_Est...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class#History_and_evolu...
[3] https://hunterurbanreview.commons.gc.cuny.edu/the-smallest-o... - this article says the average salary for street vendors in NYC is $14,000 which I think is too low to be correct but I can imagine many are making less than average salary.
[4] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/a...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Air_Traffic_Controlle...
Hot take: slavery was actually always awful.
Hard agree. It is true that being a slave in one culture is much better experience than others. But that’s only a matter of degree.
Example: You intentionally killed someone and are convicted of it. You have done a bad thing. The how and why only determines your sentence, not whether or not you committed a crime
This is certainly a popular modern narrative.
>‘I prohibit the sale of any man by another outside of the country,’ says the ninth law of William the Conqueror
preventing "hands drain" so to speak. They did Doomsday book, kind of stabilized the land ownership and revenue/taxes extraction based on it, and the land needs hands to produce the revenue.
I really want to send the author to, say, Saudi Arabia to lobby for erecting slavery memorials.
I wonder how colloquial "scumbags" is in the translation from norman english.
Isn't this a quite common pattern in history repeating itself? Including the reaction of the historians, to gloss over it?
The pattern that, a cohort of a society that under previous rule didn't have any right nor representation, acquire that as a side-effect during invasion of competing faction. Often under brutal circumstances, but the effect can be clearly seen if you how a society change during such over-hauling effect.
Japans invasion of South-east Asia comes to mind. Mostly for their own benefit, installing puppet-government, but it seems to be a contributing factor to decolonization of SEA of European influence. Depending on the source you read, this is probably glossed over to great deal.
I assume you can probably find similar cases in places like Spain (Reconquest), Christianization of East/North Europe, Islamic conquest of Middle East/Indus etc.
Comment was deleted :(
[flagged]
this wikipedia page is long and imperfect, but does cover a lot of material https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery
we just read the whole linked article about the subtopic of slavery around Norman times and realms, and you think an article that barely mentions even that topic is going to somehow slake my thirst for a more detailed/nuanced explication?
Comment was deleted :(
Comment was deleted :(
[flagged]
It both stupid and offensive to compare student debt to slavery.
> Some would probably even prefer being beaten once in a while, than to have no hope of ever getting free of the debt after a decade of trying.
You are missing that slavery means your owner can beat you up and rape you as much as they want and you still have no hope of getting free.
Not to mention the hereditary nature of American slavery that ensured your grandchildren would be slaves the moment you were even born, and the erasure of your history and culture to further untether you from anything but the utility of your labor.
There's nothing uniquely American about that. Chattel slavery in Africa goes back uninterrupted to ancient Egyptian times.
Heck, if you just want to look at the Atlantic slave trade, the United States was _second to last_ among nations in terms of trade volume.
North America was at the end of the logistics chain which resulted in higher prices, though.
Also Native American slavery in the 1600s and 1700s was pretty huge (relative to the size of European populations) so there wasn't as much demand for African slaves until that "source" was depleted.
e.g. most of Carolinas and the area between Spanish Florida and English colonies up the coast was almost entirely depopulated largely due to slave raids (and at least by then the Spanish and English had a very different attitude towards enslaving natives so British-American colonies were somewhat unique in that respect).
And this extended to the North as well. Supposedly the proportion of households that owned Native American slaves in Rhode Island in the early 1700s was comparable to that in Virginia in the 1860s (of the average number of slaves per household was probably much lower)
The world back then was very physically violent to the underclasses. I would argue our world is very mentally violent to our underclasses.
Slavery is physically and mentally violent. Imagine your owner can do literally anything they want with not just you but also your spouse and kids, including selling them off at any time.
[flagged]
Comment was deleted :(
> Slaves were generally expensive
That varied extremely relative to time and place but yeah there was a pretty clear prelateship between that and how they were treated (e.g. Ancient Romans treated as slaves as entirely disposable during the Republican period but began introducing various laws protecting their rights etc. when the supply dried out by the 100s AD).
Also you're disregarding the massive societal disruption and loss of life the slave raids themselves had (historically slave populations were almost always non-self sustaining, besides a few exceptions like the Antebellum US). Victims of the Atlantic, Islamic, Mediterranean, East European etc. had a 15-50% chance of dying before ever reaching their final destination), at the start of the "logistics chain" their lives were almost entirely worthless.
> most slaves, it was farm labor. In which case, there would absolutely be a few horrible traumatic events
I would suggest you read about slavery in Haiti and other Caribbean colonies. The life expectancy for newly arrived slave might have been as low as 4-5 years (they were basically disposable "tools" since the prices of new slaves were quite low).
And this wasn't really that exceptional (about 2x more slaves were imported to Haiti alone than to British North America/US).
> I am daring to suggest that life for the lowest classes
> right now isn't as much of an improvement as we would like to believe.
That's extremely delusional.
> True, but I think it’s possibly exaggerated (if that were possible).
There are documented examples, if you care to educate yourself.
Comment was deleted :(
Holy shit are you serious.
[flagged]
[flagged]
There are plenty of first-hand testimonies of slaves available. For example Frederick Douglas:
> The wife of Mr. Giles Hicks, living but a short distance from where I used to live, murdered my wife's cousin, a young girl between fifteen and sixteen years of age, mangling her person in the most horrible manner, breaking her nose and breastbone with a stick, so that the poor girl expired in a few hours afterward.
I am, perhaps, missing the parent's argument, but GP (to my previous comment) seems to cover this case. In that framing, either the wife or Mr. Giles Hicks was well off and could murder a slave with financial and legal (given lax enforcement of slave codes, if even applicable) impunity, or it was a significant financial loss for her to have done so.
I don't think GP ever argued that murder of slaves didn't happen, just that its occurrence was likely rare due in part to the financial incentives involved.
Maybe I should ask you for evidence then? I have provided a source, as requested, which shows first hand that horrible mistreatment was widespread. You counter seem to be…your own gut feeling?
You may not know it, but you and GP are parroting a common slavery-apologist myth that slaves were treated well becuse they were expensive. This a blantantly contradicted by first hand accounts by former slaves and by mortality statistics.
Comment was deleted :(
What an privileged, entitled, disconnected, and insulting opinion you have.
A student _loan_ is nothing at all like being a non-person OWNED by someone who can do whatever he/she wants with you, even use you as alligator bait.
Here's from the Jim Crow museum: https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2013/may.htm
Enjoy.
This sounds more like indentured servitude, but it's not even as bad as that. As frustrating as this situation is, in the USA you are not sent to prison for this unpaid debt and still have agency over your time. But of course human trafficking throughout the world is still a problem today and I very much want to see it ended (as much as possible).
:edited my first sentence to clarify it's not quite indentured servitude :)
This is an example of conflating slavery and poverty.
It is very common in these discussions, and makes it very hard to communicate.
Outside the extremes there is a significant overlap, though.
Historically, outside of race/religion/ethnicity based slavery (where slaves were generally kidnapped foreigners/outsiders or their descendants), it was a generally a continuum. Most societies were extremely hierarchical so there were various different tiers of unfree individuals who had different rights (or none at all if you were at the bottom) rather than some extremely clear boundary (like in North America). e.g. chattel slavery coexisted just fine with various types of serfdom in Early medieval Europe.
In many societies even "voluntary" slavery wasn't that uncommon because people were forced to chose between starving to death and giving up their (and usually their descendants) liberty.
Comment was deleted :(
If you could've just stopped at your first paragraph.
I think we should be extremely careful with this thinking. People in debt that work eight hours a day and go home to play video games, watch tv, and eat delicious food are a universe away from slaves in classical times which owned nothing.
https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/nero-man-behind-my...
I absolutely agree; I am using this as an indictment of our predatory college loan system than a defense of the conditions then.
However, to quote you:
> work eight hours a day and go home to play video games, watch tv, and eat delicious food
Many people in this condition in the US work way more than 8 hours a day and have a diet of very low-quality food, especially in rural areas.
Additionally, there’s no hope for the future. A good master at the time meant marriage and children and providing for them was all on the table. Our modern system leaves nothing of the sort on the table for anyone.
Marriage? What time do you have in mind by "at that time"?
>Sadly, every culture has had a slave or slave-like underclass. Even the US has one - anyone with 50K in student loan debt, working a minimum wage job, with the debt growing faster than the payments, can tell you it feels awfully close to slavery. Some would probably even prefer being beaten once in a while, than to have no hope of ever getting free of the debt after a decade of trying.
This is not slavery nor is it slave-like. You diminish the evils of owning people when you jump on your anti-pay-back-the-money-you-borrowed hobby horse and claim it's slave-like.
Stop reading here.
$50,000 is an outlier for student borrowers. The mean debt for a graduate in 2023 is around $30,000. For someone a decade ago it was 20% less according to a brief search. A person a decade into their career who has $50,000 in debt and is working a minimum wage job needs to take a hard look at their choices. The majority of borrowers have less than $20,000 in loans to pay back.
Comment was deleted :(
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code