Was American slavery an anomaly that never occurred anywhere else?

Was American slavery an anomaly that never occurred anywhere else?

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It was unique because the slave trade continued between states after the US closed itself off to the international trade. They began focusing on "breeding" because that was the only legal way to increase the country's total slave population, slaves could no longer be as easily or as cheaply replaced. People started viewing them as more of an investment, like an expensive tool or a work animal, and so work was less intensive and punishments less... maiming I guess? than in other countries. This is not to say slavery in the US didn't still suck ass, it was just different. Other countries in the Western Hemisphere continued the international slave trade into the late 1800s (IIRC, in Cuba it lasted until as recently as the 1880s. Mostly because plantation owners were making bank with sugarcane). Cuba and Brazil, both slave societies, had intensive labor and punishments because they could always buy more slaves. However, there was also a chance for some slaves to earn manumission (if they lived long enough). This meant that people couldn't just assume free/slave status of someone based on the color of their skin, and led to different race relations than in the Southern US, which passed laws making it difficult for people to gain freedom even if their masters wanted to grant it to them.

I'm not sure how black slaves in Europe were treated. There were people who bought African slaves, but not nearly as much as in the Americas.

The comment in your picture ignores modern human trafficking, which is illegal but does still have a market. Also, some would argue that serfdom (present in russia until the mid 1800s) was white slavery.

Slavery as practiced by classical Western Europeans was a different beast than slavery practiced by modern west colonialists because chattel slavery is founded upon pseudoscientific racialist theories which simply did not exist in a codified form in the ancient world. By the time that western colonialism was taking off, white on white slavery had been totally eradicated from their society.

But even this form of slavery was unsustainable and simply ill-equipped for the realities of an industrial economy, so all across the western world, slavery was gradually eradicated through compensationary emancipation at the end of the 18th century. Napoleon was considered a monster for re-legalizing it, and once he was out of power, the French promptly reversed course.

Meanwhile, in the antebellum south, whites doubled down on expropriation culture and kept slavery going for many decades after everyone else in the west had come to their senses. Northern Industrialists found that the free labor model upon which capitalism depends was being threatened by expropriated labor from southern plantation owners and the men that they employed. Antebellum southerners, in stark contrast to everywhere else, rejected compensatory emancipation, and tore their country apart trying to maintain their slave based economy, which by the 1860’s had been a major outlier in a rapidly industrializing west.

Once they were defeated in war, slavery permanently lost all official legitimacy in the west, and to his day is considered a crime to do to someone

Slavery died out in Western Europe at some point in between 500 AD and 1000 AD due to some combination of

>trades routes collapsing
>states collapsing
>Christianity
>ample supply of serfs means you don't need slaves

So yes, the reintroduction of slavery in the New World was a reversal of course that directly contravened the moral and legal standards of Western Europe.

>white on white slavery had been totally eradicated

>is founded upon pseudoscientific racialist theories

Pretty sure that came after as a means to justify it. Pretty sure the original thought process was:

>We need people to work the farms
>We can get a bunch of these people for cheap, let's use them

Institutionalized Slavery continued well into the 20th century in Ireland
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_asylum

Which is why I used the term “codify”

In the classical world, slavery was just considered the natural way of things and a means of civilizing peoples who traditionally weren’t used to a society built around a civil authority. Racism did exist, but it would have been justified through religious, rather than naturalistic terms.

Latter day slavery was opposed by Christian abolitionists who believed slavery to be a mortal sin, so the theory of racial supremacy was developed as a means of justifying their behavior.

No such justification was necessary in the ancient world: if you were powerful and mighty it was because the gods favored you, and every one else just needs to pray harder

The Irish weren’t even considered proper white people until the 20th century, but rather as some sub-white race that’s totally cool to persecute and screw over

Slavery in Brazil had the exact same characteristics as in America and continued all the way up to 1888.

In fact slave owners were so influential, you could argue Brazil is like a dystopian version of America where the "South" won.