User:Ttocserp/Slave-owning slaves

In some human societies there were slaves who owned slaves. Although details varied from place to place and time to time, there were two broad cases: peculium slavery, and elite political slavery.

In ancient Rome, although the status of slaves generally was abysmal, some were used as business administrators, or allowed to go into business themselves, their masters taking a share of the proceeds. To incentivise these slaves, masters allowed them to accumulate a capital, called a peculium. Hence astute slaves, who were often ethnic Greeks, might grow quite rich, acquiring sub-slaves of their own, called servi vicarii. By an extension of the process there could even be sub-sub-slaves. Despite his wealth, the head slave (servus ordinarius) was a slave in every respect: if suspected of embezzlement he could be examined under torture. It seems Jewish law had a concept similar to peculium, including slaves of slaves. In slave-era Brazil there was a practice similar to peculium, where slaves (quite often, women) could acquire slaves of their own, and even use them to pay for their manumission. Peculium slavery, with slave-owning slaves, has been found in other countries of the world and there were cases, though few, in North America.

In some polities rulers preferred to appoint slaves as government administrators since they could control them better. In its most developed form, the slave had been separated from his parents while young — in some cases, castrated — and brought up in the royal household, knowing no other loyalty. Accordingly, talented slaves were gradually promoted to positions of great trust, including military command, management of palace affairs, and even high political office. Hence some powerful slaves had slaves of their own. Nevertheless, unless manumitted, the head slave remained a slave in every respect, and could be degraded at the whim of the ruler. Societies of this kind existed in the Islamic world including the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, Islamic India and parts of Africa. Imperial Rome itself had a similar institution, since some slaves of the Emperor were made senior civil servants, owning slaves of their own. So did Imperial China and early modern Russia.

Contradiction
The legal status of slaves was abysmal and they could be treated with great cruelty (see below). Yet it was a standing joke in Rome that some managed to buy their freedom and retire as rich men. There was even a law that said what was supposed to happen if an ex-slave died worth more than 100,000 sesterces. Some retired slaves bought their way into the upper ranks of society; it has been estimated that "about one fifth of the local aristocracy of Italy was descended from slaves". Since slaves were not supposed to be capable of owning property at all, the seeming contradiction should now be explained.

Status
In traditional Roman law (ius civile) slaves were not persons: they were things. They could not own property, contract a valid marriage, sue or be sued in a court of law nor give evidence (except under torture). In criminal cases slaves could not testify against their owners at all.

Slaves could be sold, sexually abused or accidentally beaten to death with impunity, or exposed to die when too old and worn out to serve. According to Jennifer Glancy,"An inscription from Puteoli details the job description of a manceps, a public official whose duties included torturing and even executing slaves on demand. Private citizens could hire the manceps to conduct the desired torture of their slaves; the manceps would supply the necessary equipment."

Ordinary human decency, or enlightened self-interest, might well produce humane treatment; but there were practically no effective laws that could enforce it. If there were laws that said a master could not deliberately kill or disable his own slave without cause, it was not out of pity for the slave: what was objected to was the wanton damage to property.

In the Eastern Roman Empire under Christian emperors conditions improved in some respects; for example, slaves were forbidden to be forcibly prostituted, though they remained open to abuse and exploitation.

Slaves as business administrators
Large numbers of slaves were employed in a vast array of economic activities, including managing a business.

In Rome it was unseemly for the upper classes of society to engage in commerce. Yet some had enormous fortunes they meant to increase. Accordingly they invested in agriculture and, as they acquired more farms, put in confidential slaves to manage them; or they invested in town houses and employed slaves as rent-collectors and property managers, or even set up slave physicians or theatrical performers. "In Rome, clerks, accountants, commercial agents, teachers, doctors, rhetoricians, and even superintendents, were predominantly slaves". Still other slaves were put to manage shops or factories, or supervise a moneylending business. "As a general rule, supervision of the master's holdings was entrusted to an entire hierarchy of financial agents working in both city and country, who carried out the wishes of their dominus and whom we know from inscriptions".

If a master suspected his slaves were cheating him, he had the right to interrogate them under torture; he did not need a court order. Hence rich men increasingly relied on slaves to administer their affairs: "slaves even became the absolute rule when it came to the administration of money". It has been pointed out that most of the unjust servants mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew were managerial slaves of this class; the author takes it for granted they will be tortured with "weeping and gnashing of teeth". Yvon Thébert thought that, nevertheless, there were some free men (not many) who deliberately sold themselves into slavery in order to get lucrative jobs as business managers. An American economist could not believe managers were appointed from the enslaved classes and argued that they must have been free men who had volunteered for slave status.

A slave who was good at business management was much more valuable; hence some bright slave children were educated as skilled administrators, being taught to keep accounts and so forth.

There were slaves who were allowed to go into business for themselves, see next section, the master getting a cut of the profits. In this way masters indirectly benefited from activities which they could not, or would not, perform themselves. For example, Cato the Elder, being a senator, was legally forbidden to be a shipowner, so he appointed confidential slaves to do it for him, making a lot of money that way. According to the historian Plutarch, Cato"used to lend money also to those of his slaves who wished it, and they would buy boys with it, and after training and teaching them for a year, at Cato’s expense, would sell them again. Many of these boys Cato would retain for himself, reckoning to the credit of the slave the highest price bid for his boy."

Slaves' informal property: the peculium
Already in the Roman Republic slaves were allowed to earn a peculium, which at first was just an informal fund, like a child's allowance. A peculium was whatever surplus a master allowed his slave to accumulate on the side, and could be inferred from his keeping a separate account with his master's permission. The fund could consist of any kind of wealth, including sub-slaves, who were called servi vicarii. (The head slave was called servus ordinarius.)

Masters believed that slaves, if allowed a peculium, would work harder. Also, slaves might be allowed to purchase their freedom one day; and those with large peculia could afford to pay more. Still further, and as noted, some masters allowed their slaves to go into business on their own, taking a share of the proceeds. A 2nd century text mentions venaliciarii: slaves who were in the business of buying and selling enslaved persons as merchandise. But a slave was unlikely to work hard and take business risks in order to increase his peculium, if he thought his master might confiscate it in the end. Masters could see this. Accordingly, in order to uphold their mutual expectations the peculium must become more than an informal concession, it must harden into a legal right. Yet slaves had no rights. To reconcile the contradiction was part of the subtlety of Roman law.

The peculium recognised in praetorial law
The starting point was that a master who allowed his slave to go into business for himself was not liable for his slave's debts. So the slave's creditors had no recourse against the master. But since they could not sue the slave for non-payment either (for he was a non-person) this was deeply unattractive to third parties and discouraged commerce. The law had to be practical. Accordingly, the praetor evolved new legal remedies. One of these, called the actio de peculio, allowed creditors to sue the master himself, but only up to the value of the slave's peculium. Therefore, although there was nothing resembling modern company law in Rome, a similar advantage — trading with limited liability — could be achieved by using a slave to do the trading. It was possible for the slave to be owned jointly by a group of investors, making him even more like a modern corporate vehicle."No wonder, therefore, that many Roman business enterprises — banks, factories, shops and even schools — were run by slaves acting as grantees of a peculium."

Be that as it may, the law had now formally recognised the existence of the slave's peculium. It has been said that the law created a fictitious person with legal identity: not the slave himself, but his peculium, which took on a life of its own. Nevertheless the peculium was attached to the slave. That said, only a small fraction of Roman legal literature has survived, and the law of peculium is still poorly understood.

What sort of master would allow his slave a large peculium — thus exposing himself to large liability? "Probably only a man of means, used to dealing with well-tested, trustworthy servants, and looking for business opportunities allowing for little — if any — supervision": men like Cato.

Retirement and manumission
Managerial slaves were often manumitted at the end of their careers, and were expected to show gratitude to their patrons e.g. by naming them in their funerary inscriptions. Typically these freedmen have Greek names. Most slaves in urban Rome originated from the Greek East, and were relatively well educated. Their fate was very different from the slaves who laboured in the Roman latifundia or mines.

It seems that masters and promising slaves took to making bargains. They agreed how much the slave would have to pay to be freed, and the slave proceeded to accumulate his peculium accordingly. Any surplus would represent the slave's retirement fund. "The Romans made a business out of the granting of freedom". But since in law the peculium belonged to the master anyway, theoretically there was nothing to stop him from confiscating the peculium and refusing to liberate the slave. In reality, though, such a breach of faith would be deeply damaging to the master's financial credit, since it was to his interest that his slaves' peculia were known to be scrupulously honoured. Apparently, there is no record of such a confiscation. According to Tacitus an outraged slave killed his owner when he refused to free him at the agreed price.

Sub-slaves as part of a slave's peculium
As noted, slaves could themselves acquire slaves (servi vicarii), who might conceivably be put out to trade and earn a peculium of their own, perhaps acquiring sub-sub-slaves.

The future Pope Callixtus I started as a sub-sub-slave. While young, he was given a sum of money by his enslaved owner and told to "bring him profits from banking deals", which he did. He became Pope in 217 CE.

To be owned by an enslaved person by no means guaranteed kind treatment. "Pomponius, a second-century jurist, mentions a slave who prostituted the ancillae (women-servants) who were part of his peculium".

In 1994 there was dug up in the City of London the remains of a Roman writing tablet. It proved to contain a fragment of a legal contract for the sale of a Gaulish girl called Fortunata. The buyer, who could afford to pay 600 denarii — two years' salary for a Roman soldier — was not only a slave himself, but the slave of a slave. The vendor warranted that she was healthy and not "liable to wander or run away". The contract was dated to about AD 81-96.

The Swiss scholar Erman wrote a book called Servus Vicarius: L'Esclave de L'Esclave Romain (The Roman Slave's Slave) (Lausanne, 1896), still the only monograph on the subject. He thought a similar institution existed amongst the Egyptians, the Persians and the Greeks.

Jewish law
According to Talmud scholar Boaz Cohen, Jewish law had a concept somewhat similar to Roman peculium, called segullah. Thus the slave Ziba of King Saul had an estate of his own including 20 sub-slaves. (2 Samuel 19:17.) In ancient Hebrew society a slave counted in some respects as a member of the family. When Jerome came to translate the Hebrew Bible into Latin he rendered the word segullah as peculium, probably on the advice of Jewish scholars.

Brazil
Brazil abolished slavery in 1888; in the accompanying euphoria, many slave records were destroyed. It is only fairly recently that scholars have begun to recover the surviving documents. An important source is letters of manumission. These documents were crucial proof of liberation, so freed people took care to file them in public registries. They have been investigated most for the state of Bahia, one of the major slaveholding regions of the Americas.

In Brazil it was "not rare" for slaves to own slaves as part of an informal peculium. However, the institution was not inherited from Roman law nor was it mentioned in Brazil's vague and anachronistic slave laws. It was a custom that had evolved independently, seemingly amongst the slaves themselves, though they considered it specially demeaning to be the slave of a slave.

Investing in enslaved persons was the main road to prosperity and prestige. In this society negotiation — albeit between highly unequal beings — was a favoured strategy, more effective than beating, though that too was employed, often.

Slaves who owned sub-slaves used various tactics to achieve recognition for their property. One method was to have their sub-slaves baptised. It was a pious Catholic custom for white owners to take their slaves to church to be baptised, and when this was done the priest would issue a certificate. Slave-owning slaves did the same, relying on the certificate as informal proof of ownership.

How sub-slavery was enforced e.g. if the sub-slave refused to obey her slave owner, or tried to run away, research has not yet revealed.

City of Salvador
Nishida studied 3,516 letters of manumission registered at Salvador de Bahia between 1808 and 1884. In this port city whites were in a minority, being perhaps 30% of the population. Of the slaves, although most had been born in Brazil, many had been born in Africa. The Africans were not a homogenous people; they associated according to their various African ethnicities. Thus each nação (nation, ethnic group) met at its favourite street corner, conversed in its own language and had a mutual aid association.

In Salvador, slavery was characterised by the hiring out system:"Wage-earning slaves called escravos de ganho were hired out on either a full-time or part-time basis. They were obliged to return to their owners a mutually agreed portion of their daily or weekly wages. Some even lived outside their owners' houses. The most visible examples of escravos de ganho were peddlers of both sexes, male porters working in gangs, male artisans, and female market-stall keepers called quitandeiras. The city also permitted domestic slaves to hire themselves out as peddlers or prostitutes at night and on Sundays and holidays."

From their earnings enterprising slaves saved up to buy their freedom. Most paid cash, but Nishida found 35 cases of self-purchase through slave substitution. For example, Francisco, an African-born Nagô slave, paid for his freedom by substituting his slave Joǎo, another Nagô man.

It has been noticed that freedperson and substitute-slave in this era tended to belong to the same nação. The reason was that the cheapest slaves to buy were negros novos (newly arrived Africans), since they neither spoke Portuguese nor were acculturated to the slave society in any way; they had to be broken in. Slaves purchased sub-slaves from the same language group. "With the owner's consent, a slave purchased the substitute, acculturated and trained the newcomer in special occupational skills, and finally 'traded in' the substitute for the slave's own freedom". Owners willingly accepted these trade-ins. In place of an ageing slave, they got a young one. One shopkeeper agreed to liberate his slave Gertrudes on condition that she found and trained a replacement, also to be called Gertrudes, as nearly as possible to the same standard.

Reis suggested that some slaves may have been crewmen on Brazilian slaving-ships, hence were able to purchase Africans on favourable terms.

Schwartz studied 1,015 manumission letters for a much earlier period (1684-1745). He found that, of those set at liberty, nearly half had to pay for it. A significant proportion of these slaves paid not in cash but in substitute slaves. It struck him that females were far more likely to be manumitted than males, a finding echoed by other scholars ("Every recent study of manumission in Latin America has found that a sizeable majority of those freed were females".) Schwartz did not theorise why, but he noted that in 1735 a Brazilian claimed that manumissions were paid for by prostitution and crime.

Schwartz found a legal record that suggested that some slaves, in order to purchase sub-slaves cheaply, by-passed the regular system and imported direct from Africa."A [Brazilian-born] slave, Lucianna Maria da Conceição, wished to purchase a slave as a dowry for her granddaughter. She gave money to a friend to be sent to Africa for this purpose, and a Nagô woman named Jeronima was purchased and delivered to her. The newly acquired slave was conducted to the [sugar mill] where Lucianna resided but was eventually sent to the city to be 'hired out' (por ao ganho). Jeronima then sent her earnings to her mistress, who continued to labor as a slave on the plantation."

State of Pernambuco
The Benedictine Order owned several sugar plantations in Pernambuco with many slaves, but their numbers gradually fell and few monks were left to supervise them. The monks evolved a strategy of encouraging slaves to buy their freedom by offering to take “one slave for another” (a substitute), which may have contributed to the formation of a group of slave-owning slaves. It was studied by Pedrosa Costa.

At the Jaguaribe plantation the overseer was one Nicolau de Souza. As was commonplace for generations, he was a slave himself. Rarely supervised by the absentee monks, he was in charge of perhaps a hundred labourers. In 1812 the English traveller Henry Koster lived nearby and he wrote about Nicolau, whose efficient administration he admired. According to Koster, Nicolau had a wife and children, slaves like himself, and he was able to buy their freedom. He was unable to buy his own freedom, however, despite offering "two Africans" in exchange, since the monks thought he was irreplaceable. Nicolau otherwise enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle, rode about like a rich planter, was allowed to remain seated in their presence, and owned at least nine slaves of his own. Few free Brazilian men owned that many. Koster made it quite clear that Nicolau longed to be a free man, however.

Elite plantation slaves
In eighteenth-century Barbados some plantations had elite slaves who enjoyed far better living standards than the mass of field labourers, including the right to accumulate property and the use of slaves for their own purposes. At Newton Plantation the family of Old Doll, "a retired housekeeper matriarch" was given preferential treatment for many years. Upwardly mobile, literate, disdaining menial tasks, if sent to work in the fields they stirred up trouble; otherwise, they co-operated in the smooth running of the estate. "Not only did Doll's family have access to slave attendants, they also 'possessed' their own slaves who waited on them". Mary Ann, a member of Doll's family, had a white companion who willed her a slave called Esther; in time Esther had five children, all of whom slaved for Doll's family. Effectively, Old Doll's family were slave-owning slaves.

The low country task system
Most plantations in the American South used the gang system, in which slaves were worked in groups from sunrise to sunset and had no leisure to acquire property. In the low country rice lands of South Carolina and Georgia, however, the task system prevailed. Slaves were required to perform certain specific tasks; once completed, the rest of the day was theirs. Thus incentivised, slaves finished their tasks quickly, perhaps by early afternoon. They proceeded to farm fields of their own, which were customarily allowed them for the purpose. Hence slaves acquired livestock and other property. Morgan reviewed the records of the Southern Claims Commission, from which it was apparent that at the outset of the Civil War field hands in some counties owned horses, cows, buggies, wagons, hogs, sheep and trading commodities; these they bought, sold, hired out, or bequeathed to kinfolks. Despite their servile status, their right to own those things was unquestioned in the slave society. However, few cases have been found of slaves owning slaves in the United States.

Slaves buying slaves
An exception is revealed by the lawsuit Guardian of Sally, a Negro v. Beaty (1792), Supreme Court of South Carolina. The defendant Beaty owned "a negro wench slave", not otherwise identified, whom he hired out for wages, part of which she was allowed to keep for herself. She gradually saved up "a considerable sum of money". Out of this fund she paid Beaty to purchase another of his female slaves, named Sally (who may have been her own daughter). She then let Sally go free. Beaty tried to repudiate the transaction, arguing that a slave could not acquire property — he cited Roman law — so Sally must be his slave still. The court, which obviously thought Beaty was behaving despicably, recognised the purchase and held Sally was free.

But for Beaty's unusual behaviour this instance (of a slave owning a slave) would have gone unrecorded. Another instance is Free Frank, a slave who had a salpetre business in Kentucky; from the profits he purchased his wife and let her go free; two years later (1819) he purchased his own freedom. It is likely there were similar incidents, if only because "some African American slaveholders owned relatives and friends not to exploit them but because manumission either was too difficult to obtain or would not bring much benefit". Lightner and Ragan found that, while this was generally so, in a substantial minority of cases African Americans who owned slaves did so to exploit them for their labour.

Hausaland, Africa
The anthropologist Polly Hill found that a kind of farm-slavery flourished among the people of Hausaland, North Nigeria, resembling peculium slavery as described in this section. Slaves laboured for their masters on farms "during a 'long morning' only"; the rest of the day was theirs, during which they could cultivate plots of land for themselves. It saved owners the expense of feeding their slaves. In their spare time, however, some of these slaves acquired wealth, and even purchased slaves of their own. In 1901 the new British colonial authorities declared slavery null and void, but their proclamation was ignored. In 1906 it was reported that "many farm slaves became rich and owned many slaves of their own". The institution persisted for another two decades before it was eradicated.

Yunnan, China
Amongst the ethnic minority Yi people of Yunnan, southwest China there existed a form of slavery in which there were slave-owning slaves. In 1957 the author Alan Winnington visited a mountainous area where, despite the Chinese Communist Revolution, the government had not yet succeeded in eradicating the practice. As described by Winnington, these people, whom he knew as "the Norsu" (presumably Mosuo) existed in four castes: nobles, commoners, "separate-slaves" and house-slaves.

The separate-slaves were assigned wattle huts and sexual mates, being bred like cattle. Their children were taken from them, becoming the noble's house-slaves, the lowest status of humanity in the region and "maybe anywhere in the world", since they were treated abominably. As they grew up they were inherited by the nobles' sons and daughters, who in due course sent them to breed as separate-slaves; hence the cycle repeated.

The separate-slaves were made to cultivate land but were allowed some spare time to do so for their own benefit. From the proceeds, including opium-growing, some were able to save up and buy slaves of their own, and perhaps their freedom. "Slaves possess slaves, and even the slaves of slaves possess slaves". The nobles, who called themselves the "Black-bone Yi" ('black-bone' denoted aristocracy) had strict marriage laws meant to ensure racial uniformity for themselves, and were a warlike people whose tradition was to go on slaving raids in which they captured members of the Han (Chinese majority ethnic group). The slaves they owned were thus mainly of Han descent.

Belonging to politically powerful slaves
In some circumstances slaves had slaves of their own because of their status as politically powerful actors.

Roman imperial slaves
First-century Rome was confronted with a novel problem: how to administer a large, newly acquired empire. The solution was to fill government posts with the emperor's own slaves and freedmen. Called the Familia Caesaris, we know many of them by name, since they were commemorated in inscriptions which are found all over the empire.

Slaves were appointed to these posts for two reasons. First, "no [free] Roman of standing would have demeaned himself by becoming the Emperor's personal servant". Secondly, slaves had the advantage that, if suspected of corruption, they could be examined under torture. Indeed, the emperor Augustus degraded some rascally senior officials and had them tortured to death.

Important imperial slaves had slaves of their own. A few were just private property. The most spectacular case was the imperial slave Musicus Scurranus, a provincial administrator, who on his last journey to Rome was attended by a retinue of sixteen personal sub-slaves including cooks, butlers, footmen and secretaries.

But we know from the surviving inscriptions that most slaves of imperial slaves were official appointments. A head slave (ordinarius) belonged to the Emperor himself, and was given a deputy — a slave of his own — called a vicarius; both of these handled public monies. (These government vicarii should not be confused with the low-status individuals of the same name, already considered in this article, who were just part of a richer slave's peculium.) Government vicarii, despite being slaves of slaves, were quite prestigious. Free women were willing to marry them. Most were provincial administrators. Vegetus, the purchaser of the slave girl Fortunata in Roman London (above) was an imperial vicarius.

Torture or not, some slave administrators were bold enough to extort money from the populace."According to Suetonius, Vespasian, a strong emperor, deliberately appointed his most rapacious freedmen to proconsulships in the provinces with the expectation that they would amass as great a fortune as possible — fortunes that he would later appropriate by the simple expedient of execution." How Musicus Scurranus could afford sixteen sub-slaves on his official salary was not explained; and there were other notorious cases. Most administrators could look forward to manumission after serving a number of years. A few retired with truly colossal fortunes.

Islamic world
Richard Francis Burton, who travelled to Mecca disguised as a pilgrim on the Hajj, observed that the official in charge of his caravan had been the slave of a slave, and "he is but a solitary instance of cases perpetually occurring in all Moslem lands", where a slave might arrive at the highest rank in the empire. The institution was common in the Islamic world because of a form of government, strange-seeming to Western eyes, explained by Berkeley historian Ira M. Lapidus as follows:"The Mamluk or slave military system is one of the most exotic phenomena in Muslim political history. Slaves were first systematically employed in ninth-century Baghdad to make up the armies of the Abbasid Caliphate, and from there the system spread to all of the Abbasid succession states in the Middle East and to North Africa, Spain, Iran, India, and the Ottoman Empire. Slave soldiers constituted the military and administrative aristocracy of most post-Abbasid Middle Eastern societies; in some cases, such as in the Ghaznavid dynasty of Afghanistan and the Mamluk regime in Egypt, the head of state was himself a slave." Since elite slaves would not be expected to perform menial tasks themselves, it would not be surprising if they possessed inferior slaves to wait on them. The following instances are mentioned in the sources.

Ottoman Empire
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Muslim India
The Mughal successor state of Awadh, North India (1722-1856), was remarkable for the number of its eunuch slaves and the power some of them wielded. Eunuchs (Persian: khwājasarā; lit., “lord of the palace”) served not only as guardians of the women's quarters but as military commanders, tax farmers, administrators and advisers to the ruling nawabs.

It was forbidden in Islam to castrate Muslims and (theoretically) anyone else. Nawabs like Safdar Jang and Shuja-ud-daula purchased boys, often Hindus, from local "eunuch-makers"; the castrated boys were converted to Islam and trained in their duties. Some of these eunuchs, acquiring wealth, evaded the usury laws by lending money through their Hindu relatives.

A powerful eunuch might have a large establishment of his own, called a sarkār, employing hundreds of scribes, servants and slaves, where he raised young eunuch slaves, who might hope to emulate him some day. Such high-ranking men were slaves nevertheless, and were rarely manumitted by the rulers.

Sokoto Caliphate, West Africa
The Sokoto Caliphate was a Muslim polity founded 1804-1809 as a result of a jihad or holy war. With a population around 10 million, about a quarter of whom were slaves, an important city was Kano.

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Ibadan, West Africa
Ibadan (1850-1900) was a military state in Yorubaland, West Africa. Starting as a war-camp it grew to become the capital of an empire, a transformation which required a very large number of slaves, which it obtained by warfare and raiding expeditions. Slaves served as soldiers, agricultural labourers and menials.

The war chiefs promoted some slaves to privileged positions, such as ajele (governor of a colony), farm village chief, toll collector, diplomat or spy. They were preferred over free men because they were thought to be more loyal: if not, they would be instantly degraded or sold. These privileged slaves acquired slaves of their own, buying them in the market or capturing them in war, and had enormous power over them, which they frequently abused. Toyin Falola found that they had a reputation for extravagance and cruelty, and were hated and feared by the slaves they controlled. "[S]ince they were not sure of when their privileges would be withdrawn, or when they would die or fall out of favor with their masters, some believed they should have the best out of life by engaging in excessive eating and drinking and also in a reckless exercise of power."Slaves fled en masse from Ibadan in the 1890s when British colonial power intervened.

Imperial China
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Russia
In early Muscovy a substantial part of the population were designated kholoptsvo. Although the legal status of these people is a matter of debate, Richard Hellie had no doubt they were slaves according to most definitions. Thus they could be beaten by their owners — sometimes to death — and their children could be sold separately. The vast majority were ethnic Russians and were owned by the landed service classes (gentry).

A few of these slaves were skilled managers. Some were government administrators, running palace offices or assisting provincial governors. Others managed country estates, and were in fact crucial, because their owners were obliged to be absent on government service."The Muscovite records are full of the activities of these people, who purchased other slaves for their owners, negotiated tax and postal levies with governmental officials, defended their owners' peasants and ordinary slaves from other landholders and official depredations, collected the rent due from the peasants, represented their owners (and others) in court, and fulfilled many other duties." This class of slave could and did own slaves of their own. They were sometimes called dokladnoe, or registered, slaves. By the 1630s, however, discrimination had set in, and they were forbidden to own slaves or land, a privilege now reserved for the middle and upper service classes and townsmen.

Unclassified
Some cases of slave-owned slavery have not been classified for the purpose of this article for lack of sufficient information in the sources.

Bundu, West Africa
In Bundu, Senegambia there was a class of slave-owning slaves. Though the French colonial authorities were supposed to stop slavery (and told Paris they had succeeded), the practice survived long enough to be recalled by old people interviewed as recently as 1991. "A strong moral code, which reflects the dominant, free-born Fulbe ideology, underpins the narratives... Slaves are frequently portrayed as 'knowing their place', or faithfully serving their masters". Because of the recency of slavery, in some West African countries it is illegal to refer to a person's servile origins.

Malaya
According to A Descriptive Dictionary of British Malaya (1894), "In Malay there are six different names for a slave, and there is even one for the 'slave of a slave'". This is supported by other sources. The British colonial officer Sir William Maxwell, confronted with the problem of abolition, told Parliament slavery in Malaya was a local custom, established long before the introduction of Islam, and frequently defying its precepts. For example, there was a form of debt-bondage, almost impossible to escape thanks to extortionate compound interest, "wholly opposed to Muhammadan law, which is most lenient to debtors". It was sometimes cruel. Maxwell transcribed from Arabic and Malay a Perak law which ordained that a slave who assaulted a free man should have his hands nailed down while his wife could be violated.

Rhetorical
The expression "slave of a slave" has been used with reference to those who were neither slaves nor owned by slaves, as a metaphor for their downtrodden way of life, or as a form of Oriental politeness (akin to English "your humble servant"). Such rhetorical usages are outside the scope of this article.