Slavery, in the fullest sense of the term, implies that the slave is the property or at the disposal of another, who has a right to employ or treat him as he pleases; but the system has been subjected to innumerable limitations and modifications. Slavery probably arose at an early period of the world's history out of the accident of capture in war. Savages, in place of massacring their captives, found it more profitable to keep them in servitude. All the ancient oriental nations of whom we have any records, including the Jews, had their slaves. The Hebrews were authorised by their law to possess slaves, not only of other races, but of their own nation. The latter were generally insolvent debtors who had sold themselves through poverty or thieves who lacked the means of making restitution; and the law dealt with them far more leniently than with stranger slaves. They might be redeemed, and if not redeemed became free in the space of seven years from the beginning of their servitude; besides which there was every fiftieth year a general emancipation of native slaves.
Greek Slavery.—In the Homeric poems slavery is the ordinary destiny of prisoners of war; and the practice of kidnapping slaves is also recognised—Ulysses himself narrowly escaping a fate of this kind. None of the Greek philosophers considered the condition of slavery objectionable on the score of morals. Aristotle defends its justice on the ground of a diversity of race, dividing mankind into the free and the slaves by nature; while Plato only desires that no Greeks should be made slaves. One class of Greek slaves were the descendants of an earlier and conquered race of inhabitants, who cultivated the land which their masters had appropriated, paid rent for it, and attended their masters in war. Such were the Helots in Sparta, the Penestæ in Thessaly, the Bithynians at Byzantium, &c., who were more favourably dealt with than other slaves, their condition somewhat resembling that of the serfs of the middle ages. They could not be sold out of the country or separated from their families, and were even capable of acquiring property. Slaves obtained by purchase were the unrestricted property of their owners, who could dispose of them at pleasure. In Athens, Corinth, and the other commercial states they were very numerous, and were mostly barbarians. They were employed partly in domestic service (some being pædagogi, employed to accom- pany the boys to school, &c.), but more as bakers, cooks, tailors, or in other trades, in mines and manufactories, as labourers on country estates, and as seamen and oarsmen; and their labour was the means by which the owner obtained profit for his outlay in their purchase. These slaves were for the most part purchased; but many were born in their master's family. The Athenian state employed public slaves as police, as soldiers, public criers, gaolers, &c. An extensive traffic in slaves was carried on by the Greek colonists in Asia Minor with the interior of Asia; another source of supply arose from the practice common among Thracian parents of selling their children. In Greece in general, and especially at Athens, slaves were mildly treated, and enjoyed a large share of legal protection. According to Demosthenes, a slave at Athens was better off than a free citizen in many other countries. Manumissions were frequent. A master could obtain damages if a slave was maltreated. The slave was not allowed to wear his hair long, was prevented from entering the gymnasia and public assemblies, but had access to temples and festivals. In the palmy days of the Athenian state there were, according to Wallon, 200,000 slaves in Attica; about three times the number of freemen!
Roman Slavery differed in some particulars from that of Greece. All men were considered by the Roman jurists to be free by natural law; while slavery was regarded as a state contrary to natural law, but agreeable to the law of nations, when a captive was preserved, instead of being slain (the name was believed on doubtful etymological grounds to be 'servus, quasi servatus'); or agreeable to the civil law, when a free man sold himself. In earlier times there was no restriction on the master's power of punishing or putting to death his slave, which was generally carried out by crucifixion; and even at a later period, when the law on this head was much modified, slaves were used with great rigour. The estimation in which their lives were held is illustrated by the gladiatorial combats. Old and useless slaves were often exposed to starve in an island of the Tiber. Under Spartacus (q.v.) a rebellion of slaves attained alarming dimensions. In the time of the empire the cruelty of masters was in some degree restrained by law. It was enacted that a man who put to death his own slave without cause should be dealt with as if the slave had been the property of another; and that if the cruelty of the master was intolerable he might be compelled to sell the slave. Slaves could contract a kind of marriage called Contubernium; and ultimately this relation was regarded as indissoluble. The children of a female slave followed the status of their mother. There were various ways in which a slave might be manumitted, but the power of manumission was restricted by law. The harbouring of a runaway slave was illegal. The number of slaves in Rome, originally small, was increased much by war and commerce; and the cultivation of the soil came in the course of time to be entirely given up to them. During the later republic and empire persons in good circumstances kept an immense number of slaves as personal attendants; and the possession of a numerous retinue of domestic slaves was matter of ostentation—200 being no uncommon number for one person. A multitude of slaves were also occupied in the mechanical arts and the games of the amphitheatre. Originally a slave was incapable of acquiring property, all his acquisitions belonging to his master; but when slaves came to be employed in trade this condition was mitigated, and it became the practice to allow a slave to consider part of his gains, called his peculium, as his own, a stipulation being sometimes made that he should purchase his freedom with his peculium when it amounted to a specific sum. Having no legal standing, a slave could not give evidence.
Though the introduction of Christianity did not do away with slavery, it tended to ameliorate the condition of the slave. The fathers taught that the true slavery is not that of the body, but the slavery of sin; and Chrysostom thought the apostle did not insist on the suppression of slavery because it was desirable that men should see how truly the slave could enjoy liberty of soul. Constantine allowed poor parents to sell their children into slavery. Justinian, though his Constitution (529 A.D.) drew a very sharp line between slaves and freemen, did something to promote the eventual extinction of slavery; the church excommunicated slave-owners who put their slaves to death without warrant from the judge. But it was not till the reign of Basil (867-886) that the slaves' contubernium was hallowed by the blessing of the church. The number of slaves again increased; multitudes being brought with them by the barbarian invaders, who were mostly Slavonic captives (whence our word slave); and in the countries which had been provinces of the empire slavery continued long after the empire had fallen to pieces. The doctrine of Von Maurer and Sir Henry Maine has till of late found almost universal acceptance—that the original basis of Germanic societies was a Village Community (q.v.) of freemen owning the land in common, and that slavery arose by degradation of this social condition. But the researches of Fustel de Coulanges and others tend to show that the evidence for Von Maurer's view is slender, and that probably the earliest state of landed property amongst the Teutonic tribes was manorial lordship with slavery as an adjunct. In Britain great numbers of the Celtic or other natives were enslaved by the Anglo-Saxons; and the Christian Anglo-Saxons had a regular trade with the Continent in Irish slaves, Bristol being a great slaving port. After the Norman Conquest slaves as in a separate class ceased to exist, and slavery eventually merged into the mitigated condition known as serfdom, which prevailed all over Europe in the middle ages, and has been gradually abolished in modern times. But though the practice of selling captives taken in war as slaves ceased in the Christian countries of Europe, a large traffic in slaves continued among Mohammedan nations, by whom Christian captives were sold in Asia and Africa; and in the early middle ages the Venetian merchants traded largely in slaves, whom they purchased on the coast of Slavonia, to supply the slave-markets of the Saracens. The history of the achievements of the Barbary corsairs is not to the glory of the Christian nations of Europe. These professional sea-robbers continued for centuries—down to 1812, indeed—to harry the coasts and the commerce of Europe, carrying large numbers of Christians into all but hopeless captivity. When Cervantes was for five years a slave he had about 25,000 fellow-captives in Algiers alone, some treated fairly well, some with great barbarity. Cervantes was ransomed for about £100; £30 or £40 was a more usual price. Another famous slave was St Vincent de Paul. The order of Trinitarians (q.v.) was founded in 1198 for the purpose of redeeming captives (especially French) out of the hands of the infidels, sometimes bringing away several hundreds at a time; and in the 18th century it was not unusual in English and Scottish churches to make collections for a like purpose (see CORSAIR, GALLEY). Christians sent to the galleys by their own or foreign authorities were worse off than domestic slaves. English convicts used to be transported to what was practically slavery in His Majesty's Plantations (see PRISONS, Vol. VIII, p. 417); and convict labour is still a kind of judicial slavery for life or a term of years.
Serfdom—A numerous class of the population of Europe known as serfs or villeins were in a state of what was almost tantamount to slavery during the early middle ages. In some cases this serf population consisted of an earlier race, who had been subjugated by the conquerors; but there were also instances of persons from famine or other pressing cause selling themselves into slavery, or even surrendering themselves to churches and monasteries for the sake of the benefits to be derived from the prayers of their masters. Different as was the condition of the serf in different countries and at different periods, his position was on the whole much more favourable than that of the slave under the Roman law. He had certain acknowledged rights—and this was more particularly the case with the classes of serfs who were attached to the soil. In England, prior to the Norman Conquest, a large proportion of the population were in a servile position, either as domestic slaves or as cultivators of the land. The humblest was nearly a slave—the theow; the other the Ceorl (q.v.), an irremovable tiller of the ground. The powers of the master over his serf were very extensive, their principal limitations being that a master who killed his serf was bound to pay a fine to the king, and that a serf deprived of his eye or tooth by his master was entitled to his liberty. And English serfdom was always territorial rather than personal. After the Norman Conquest there were various names used for the serfs, who seem ultimately all to have been confounded in one class, though originally different. The villein (villanus) was the Anglo-Saxon ceorl; less favourably situated were the bordarii; but the Anglo-Saxon theow (the servus) was no longer part of the system of society. Other names in the Norman period were rustici and nativi. Soon the difference became at most one of degree; and serf and villein are used almost indiscriminately for the great group of non-freemen. They were incapable of enjoying anything like a complete right to property, inasmuch as it was held, in accordance with the principles of the Roman law, that whatever the slave acquired belonged to his lord, who might seize it at his pleasure. The master could transfer them to any other master with the land they tilled. They could not even buy their freedom; and they could not educate their sons for the church without the consent of the lord. If the villein ran away he could be pursued and carried back. But if his lord maltreated him he might have remedy in the king's court; and the law defended him fully against injury from strangers. His oath was accepted as evidence. He was often kindly used by his lord, and generally allowed to lay by his savings. He was free from military service, and had a powerful friend in the church. It used to be said that as distinguished from these villeins regardant there were also a distinctly lower class of villeins in gross who had no political rights, and might be sold away from the land as absolute chattels of the lords; but this is now denied on good evidence. By a peculiarity in the usages of Britain, the condition of a child as regards freedom or servitude followed the father, and not the mother, and therefore the bastards of female villeins might be free.
The abolition of serfdom in western Europe was a very gradual process, various causes having combined to bring it about. The church did not as such denounce the practice of keeping Christians in bondage; indeed, churches and monasteries were amongst the largest proprietors of serfs. But churchmen insisted on humane treatment and practised manumission to a large extent. In the course of time usage greatly modified the rights and liabilities of the serf, whose position must have been considerably altered when we find him making stipulations regarding the amount of his services, and purchasing his own redemption. The towns afforded in more than one way a means of emancipation. A serf residing a year in a borough without challenge on the part of his lord became ipso facto a free man. The serf's condition improved gradually but steadily, until he had all the rights of a citizen save against his lord, who required from him the customary services in cultivating the lord's lands; and his hold on his land became a kind of definite tenure of villeinage. The Black Death (q.v.) checked the progress, but only for a time. But the serf's position became by custom more secure and more independent. Serfdom died out in England without any special enactment; yet it was not wholly extinct in the later half of the 16th century, for we find a commission issued in 1574 by Queen Elizabeth, to inquire into the lands and goods of all her bondsmen and bondswomen in the counties of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, and Gloucester, in order to compound with them for their manumission, that they might enjoy all their lands and goods as freedmen. In a few rare instances liability to servile duties and payments in respect of lands seem to have continued down to the reign of Charles I. In Scotland as in England serfdom disappeared by insensible degrees; but a remarkable form of it continued to survive down to the closing years of the 18th century. Colliers and salters were bound by the law, independent of pacton, on entering to a coal-work or salt-mine, to perpetual service there; and in case of sale or alienation of the ground on which the works were situated, the right to their services passed without any express grant to the purchaser. The sons of the collier and salter could follow no occupation but that of their father, and were not at liberty to seek for employment anywhere else than in the mines to which they had been attached by birth. Statutes 15 Geo. III. chap. 28 and 39 Geo. III. chap. 56 restored these classes of workmen to the rights of freemen and citizens, and abolished the last remnant of slavery in the British Islands.
In France, though a general edict of Louis X. in 1315 purported to enfranchise the serfs on the royal domain on payment of a composition, this measure seems never to have been carried into effect, and a limited sort of villeinage continued to exist in some places down to the Revolution. In Italy one great cause of the decline of villeinage was the necessity under which the cities and petty states found themselves of employing the peasant population for their defence, whom it became expedient to reward with enfranchisement. In the 11th and 12th centuries the number of serfs began to decrease, and villeinage seems no longer to have had an existence in Italy in the 15th century. Joseph II. abolished serfdom in Bohemia and Moravia in 1781, and in the German lands in 1782. Over a large portion of Germany the mass of the peasants had acquired their freedom before the end of the 13th century, but in some parts of the Prussian dominions a modified villeinage (leibeigenschaft) continued to exist until swept away by the reforms of Von Stein in the 19th century.
In Russia serfdom remained a part of the social system until 1861; see RUSSIA, pp. 44, 47.
Negro Slavery existed from the earliest times; the Carthaginians seem to have brought caravans of slaves from various parts of North Africa; but in this the negroes suffered no more than other contemporary barbarians. The negro slavery of modern times was a sequel to the discovery of America. Prior, however, to that event the negroes, like other savage races, enslaved those captives in war whom they did not put to death, and a considerable trade in slaves from the coast of Guinea was carried on by the Arabs. The deportation of the Africans to the plantations and mines of the New World doubtless raised the value of the captive negro, and made slavery rather than death his common fate; while it may also have tempted the petty princes to make war on each other for the purpose of acquiring captives and selling them. The aborigines of America having proved too weak for the work required of them, the Portuguese, who possessed a large part of the African coast, began the importation of negroes, in which they were followed by the other colonisers of the New World. The first part of the New World in which negroes were extensively used was Hayti in St Domingo. The aboriginal population had at first been employed in the mines; but this sort of labour was found so fatal to their constitutions that Las Casas (q.v.), Bishop of Chiapa, the celebrated protector of the Indians, interceded with Charles for the substitution of African slaves as a stronger race. As early as the beginning of the 16th century a good many Africans were already in Hispaniola; the emperor accordingly in 1517 authorised a large importation of negroes from the establishments of the Portuguese on the coast of Guinea. Sir John Hawkins (q.v.) was the first Englishman who engaged in the traffic, in which his countrymen soon largely participated, England having exported no fewer than 300,000 slaves from Africa between the years 1680 and 1700; and between 1700 and 1786 imported 610,000 into Jamaica alone. At first the trade was in the hands of special companies, one of which long enjoyed the special right or Assiento (q.v.) from Spain of supplying slaves. Most of the English slaving ships belonged first to Bristol, and from 1730 onwards to Liverpool (q.v.). The slave-trade was attended with extreme inhumanity; the ships which transported the negroes from Africa to America were overcrowded to such an extent that a large proportion died in the passage; and the treatment of the slave after his arrival in the New World depended much on the character of his master. Legal restraints were, however, imposed in the various European settlements to protect the slaves from injury; in the British colonies courts were instituted to hear their complaints; their condition was to a certain extent ameliorated, and the flogging of women was prohibited. But while slavery was thus legalised in the British colonies, it was at the same time the law of England (as decided in 1772 by Lord Mansfield in the case of the negro Somerset, and less emphatically by other judges at earlier dates, without any actual statute on the subject) that as soon as a slave set his foot on English soil he became free; though, if he returned to his master's country, he could be reclaimed. Up till this date the contrary impression was the usual one, though public opinion was strongly setting against the custom of keeping slaves. In 1764 there were believed to be thousands of negro slaves in London; and advertisements of 'black boys' for sale were frequent, as also rewards offered for runaways. As late as November 1771 the Birmingham Gazette advertised the public sale of a negro boy, sound, healthy, and of a mild disposition.
Before the idea of emancipation was contemplated the efforts of the more humane portion of the public were directed towards the abolition of the traffic in slaves, mainly under the influence of a sense of Christian duty. In 1787 a society for the suppression of the slave-trade was formed in London, numbering Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp among its original members. The most active parliamentary leader in the cause was William
Wilberforce, and Zachary Macaulay was one of its most zealous friends. The Quakers were the only religious body who as such petitioned the House of Commons on the subject. Many not unkindly people defended slavery. Thus Boswell, who on this point opposed his master, speaking of 'so very important and necessary a branch of commercial interest,' says: 'To abolish a status which in all ages God has sanctioned and man has continued would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects, but it would be extreme cruelty to the African savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre and introduces to a much happier life' (Life of Johnson, chap. xxxv.). In 1788 an order of the crown directed that an inquiry should be made by a committee of the Privy-council into the state of the slave-trade; and an act was passed to regulate the burden of slave-ships and otherwise diminish the horrors of the middle passage. A bill introduced by Wilberforce for putting an end to the further importation of slaves was lost in 1791, but in 1792 Wilberforce, supported by Pitt, carried a motion to gradually abolish the slave-trade. And it is noteworthy that the anti-Christian French convention, influenced by the teaching of Rousseau, decreed (4th February 1794) that slavery should be abolished throughout the French colonies, and all slaves admitted to the rights of French citizens. Meanwhile, conquest of the Dutch colonies having led to a great increase in the British slave-trade, an order in council in 1805 prohibited that traffic in the conquered colonies; and in the following year an act was passed forbidding British subjects to take part in it, either for the supply of the conquered colonies or of foreign possessions. In the same year a resolution moved by Fox for a total abolition next session was carried in the Commons, and, on Lord Granville's motion, adopted in the Lords; and the following year the general abolition bill, making all slave-trade illegal after 1st January 1808, was introduced by Lord Howick (afterwards Earl Grey) in the House of Commons, was carried in both Houses, and received the royal assent on 25th March 1807. British subjects, however, continued to carry on the trade under cover of the Spanish and Portuguese flags; the slave-ships were more crowded than ever, to reduce the chances of capture, and the negroes were not unfrequently thrown overboard on a pursuit. The pecuniary penalties of the act were discovered to be inadequate to put down a traffic so lucrative as to cover all losses by capture. Brongham therefore in 1811 introduced a bill, which was carried unanimously, making the slave-trade felony, punishable with fourteen years' transportation, or from three to five years' imprisonment with hard labour. An Act of 1824 declared it piracy, and, as such, a capital crime, if committed within the Admiralty jurisdiction; and the statute of 1837, mitigating the criminal code, left it punishable with transportation for life. The Anti-slavery Society practically established the colony of Sierra Leone in 1787 as a home for destitute negroes.
The United States of America abolished the slave-trade immediately after Great Britain (1808), and the same was in the course of time done by the South American republics of Venezuela, Chili, and Buenos Ayres, by Sweden, Denmark, Holland, and, during the Hundred Days after Napoleon's return from Elba, by France. Great Britain, at the peace, exerted her influence to induce other foreign powers to adopt a similar policy; and eventually nearly all the states of Europe have passed laws or entered into treaties prohibiting the traffic. The accession of Portugal and Spain to the principle of abolition was obtained by treaties of date 1815 and 1817; and by a convention concluded with Brazil in 1826 it was declared piratical for the subjects of that country to be engaged in the slave-trade after 1830. By the conventions with France of 1831 and 1833, to which nearly all the maritime powers of Europe have since acceded, a mutual right of search was stipulated within certain seas, for the purpose of suppressing this traffic. The provisions of these treatises were further extended in 1841 by the Quintuple Treaty between the five great European powers, subsequently ratified by all of them except France. The Ashburton treaty of 1842 with the United States provided for the maintenance by each country of a squadron on the African coast; and in 1845 a joint co-operation of the naval forces of England and France was substituted for the mutual right of search.
The limitation of the supply of negroes naturally led, among other good results, to a greater attention on the part of the masters to the condition of their slaves. But the attention of British philanthropists was next directed towards doing away with slavery altogether in the colonies. Societies were formed with this end, an agitation was set on foot, and attempts were made, for some time without success, to press the subject of emancipation on the House of Commons. At length in 1833 a ministerial proposition for emancipation was introduced by Mr Stanley (Earl of Derby), then Colonial Secretary, and an emancipation bill passed both Houses, and obtained the royal assent 28th August 1833. This act, while it gave freedom to the slaves throughout all the British colonies, at the same time awarded an indemnification to the slave-owners of £20,000,000. Slavery was to cease on 1st August 1834; but the slaves were for a certain duration of time to be apprenticed labourers to their former owners. Objections being raised to the apprenticeship, its duration was shortened, and the complete enfranchisement took place in 1838. The serious decadence of trade and commerce in the British West Indies has been commonly attributed to emancipation; but though the change in the position of the negroes unquestionably contributed to the result, it is clear that before a slave had been manumitted by law the industry of Jamaica and the other islands had already begun to fall off.
The French emancipated their negroes in 1848; as did most of the new republics of South America at the time of their establishment; while the Dutch slaves had freedom conferred on them in 1863. In Hayti slavery ceased as far back as 1791, its abolition having been one of the results of the negro insurrection of that year. In Brazil (q.v.) slavery was not abolished until 1888.
The history of negro slavery in the United States is partly dealt with at Negroes (q.v.); the steps that hindered or prepared the way for its final abolition in 1862-65 are part of the history of the United States (q.v.), and are dealt with in such articles as ABOLITIONISTS, BROWN (JOHN), DRED SCOTT CASE, GARRISON, LINCOLN, MISSOURI (for the 'Missouri Compromise'), &c. Here it may be noted that in 1800 there were in the United States 893,041 slaves; that Vermont, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey emancipated their slaves before 1840, most of them by gradual measures. The average value of slaves was about this period stated at $600. The 3,953,760 slaves at the census of 1860 were in what were known as the Southern States. Eminent leaders of public opinion from the earliest period of the national existence—such as Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Jay, Hamilton—regarded slavery as a great evil, and inconsistent with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. The Society of Friends uniformly opposed slavery, and agitated against it. The Presbyterian Church made six formal declarations against it between 1787 and 1836. The Methodist Episcopal Church always cherished strong anti-slavery views; though when in 1844 one of their bishops was suspended for refusing to emancipate slaves he had inherited through his wife, a secession took place, and the Southern Methodist Episcopal Church was formed. Individuals and groups of persons of almost all churches were found defending slavery. In 1835 the Charleston Baptist Association resolved that the right of masters to dispose of their slaves had been distinctly recognised by the Creator. In 1836 a North Carolina bishop strongly commended for publication a sermon which declared that without a new revelation from heaven no man was authorised to pronounce slavery wrong. In 1838 the New School Presbyterian Church in Petersburg, Virginia, protested against a resolution of the General Assembly declaring slavery a sin against God, pronounced that resolution irreconcilable with American civil institutions, and affirmed that the relation of master and slave had been recognised by the great Head of the Church. Yet, on the whole, anti-slavery views grew steadily; but until the crisis of the civil war very many of those who personally held strong anti-slavery opinions hesitated to join actively in abolitionist agitation, as unwilling to invade what many of their fellow-citizens held to be their indisputable rights. To this halting attitude the war put an end.
Mohammedanism (q.v.) recognises the institution; Mohammed's own precepts insist on the kindly usage of the slave; and Moslem slavery is mainly domestic slavery, household slaves being on the whole well treated. But there is no more awful chapter in the history of human callousness and human misery than the story of the slave-trade as carried on by 'Arab' or Moslem slave-traders, its main tracks from the interior of Africa to the coast being still in many places marked by the whitened bones of slaves who during the ages have sunk in the way, fallen out of the caravans in spite of the lash, and have died or been slaughtered to save trouble. The main regions from which slaves were procured for the Moslem East were, or still are, the Soudan proper, the Egyptian Soudan, or Valley of the Upper Nile, Somali Land, and the borders of the Portuguese East African territory. English and other men-of-war have long been employed in capturing slave-dhows on the east coast. In 1869 the Egyptian Khedive Ismail gave Sir Samuel Baker large powers for the suppression of the slave-trade, a crusade carried on by Gordon Pasha. The sultan of Zanzibar signed a treaty for the suppression of the trade in 1873. By occupying Caucasias, Russia stopped an important supply for the Turkish harems; it also closed the slave-markets of Khiva and Bokhara, and by crushing the Turkomans (Tekkes and others) freed at once 40,000 slaves. Cardinal Lavigerie, who became archbishop of Algiers in 1867, made the suppression of the slave-trade and slavery his life work, and secured the help of many zealous fellow-workers, men and women. The progress of the Congo Free State, the foundation of missions in the Nyassa country, and the encouragement of legitimate trade by the British East Africa Company and the German settlements will, it is hoped, tend still more effectually to put an end to this curse of mankind. It has been said that the African slave-trade will not finally cease till the African elephant is extinct, as the carrying of ivory to the coast has heretofore only been practicable by slave labour. Conferences of the civilised powers have repeatedly been held with a view to the further restriction of domestic slavery (the entire suppression of which at once is hopeless) and the total prevention of the slave-trade.
See Wallon, Histoire de l'Esclavage dans l'Antiquité (2d ed. 1879); Grote's History of Greece; Lightfoot's Commentary on Colossians; Hallam's Middle Ages; Sugenheim, Geschichte der Aufhebung der Leibeigenschaft in Europa (1861); Engelmann, Die Leibeigenschaft in Russland (1884); Fustel de Coulanges, The Origin of Property in Land (Eng. trans. 1891); Freeman's Norman Conquest; Stubbs's Constitutional History (1874-78); Thorold Rogers' Work and Wages (1885); Seebohm's English Village Community (1883); Vinogradoff, Villainage in England (1891); the article FEUDALISM; Buxton's Slavery and Freedom in the British West Indies; Clarkson's History of the Slave-trade; Sir L. Playfair, The Scourge of Christendom (1884); S. Lane-Poole, The Barbary Corsairs (1890); French histories of slavery by Larroque and Villard; Theodore Parker's Discourses on Slavery; W. E. Channing's Slavery; Mrs Beecher Stowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853); J. E. Cairnes, The Slave Power (1862); Goldwin Smith, Does the Bible Sanction American Slavery? (1863); H. C. Carey, The Slave-trade (New York, 1853); O. B. Frothingham, The Abolition of Slavery (1878); H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872); G. W. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America (1882); E. W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (1887); Klein, Cardinal Lavigerie (Paris, 1890). See also the works of Burton, Baker, Barth, Gordon, Stanley, Thomson, &c.; and for 'blackbirding' in the Pacific, see COOLIES.