User:OnBeyondZebrax/sandbox/History of slavery

Evidence of slavery date back to the Neolithic Revolution about 11,000 years ago.

Slavery was known in civilizations as old as Sumer, as well as almost every other ancient civilization. Records of slavery in Ancient Greece go as far back as Mycenaean Greece. Romans inherited the institution of slavery from the Greeks and the Phoenicians. Celtic tribes of Europe are recorded as owning slaves. In medieval Europe, the chaos of invasion and frequent warfare also resulted in victorious parties taking slaves throughout Europe. The Vikings took the most slaves in raids on the British Isles and in Eastern Europe. The Byzantine-Ottoman wars and the Ottoman wars in Europe resulted in the taking of large numbers of Christian slaves. Similarly, Christians sold Muslim slaves captured in war. Slavery became common within the British Isles during the Middle Ages. The Islamic World was a main factor in slavery. Muslims continued to trade in European slaves into the Modern time-period. The 15th-century Portuguese exploration of the African coast is commonly regarded as the harbinger of European colonialism. The Spaniards were the first Europeans to use African slaves in the New World. Britain played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade, especially after 1600. Slavery was a legal institution in all of the 13 American colonies and Canada (acquired by Britain in 1763). Slavery was endemic in Africa and part of the structure of everyday life.

Denmark-Norway was the first European country to ban the slave trade. Slavery in the French Republic was abolished on 4 February 1794. The Haitian Revolution by its slaves and free people of color established Haiti as a free republic in 1804 ruled by blacks, the first of its kind. Although slavery was illegal inside the Netherlands it flourished in the Dutch Empire, and helped support the economy. During World War II (The Holocaust), the Germans used slave labor from across occupied Europe to support their war effort, and numbering perhaps 6 million people. The Soviet Union had about 14 million people working in Gulags during its existence. Escaped slaves formed Maroon communities which played an important role in the histories of Brazil and other countries such as Suriname, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica. Many slaves in British North America were owned by plantation owners who lived in Britain.

In modern times, the trading of children has been reported in modern Nigeria and Benin. During the Second Sudanese Civil War people were taken into slavery. In Mauritania it is estimated that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are currently enslaved, many of them used as bonded labor. Slavery in Mauritania was criminalized in August 2007. Evidence emerged in the late 1990s of systematic slavery in cacao plantations in West Africa; see the chocolate and slavery article.