Slavery

Four millenia separate us from the first hard copies that we have existence of slavery : a shelf sumérienne entitled the Sin of the gardener , deposited with the museum of Eastern Antiquities of Istanbul. Since the appearance of rural civilizations until XVIIIe century in Europe, until XIXe century in the majority of the other continents, slavery constituted the most widespread form of the organization of work, the base of the structure of the economy. To feed the markets of men, the traders had to organize very vast migrations, which reached their paroxysm in the Mediterranean basin during Antiquity, then on banks of the Atlantic after the discovery of the New World and the creation of the colonial plantations. It is in this direction that Werner Sombart could tell :« We became rich because whole races died for us : it is for us that continents were depopulated. »

Jonathan Swift denounced, at the beginning of XVIIIe century, the absurd character of the constraint by caricaturing the having classes, represented by deformed beings, domestic animals, learned instructors, even of the technocrats. At that time , indeed, a moral crisis started to shake the Christian slave companies which disturbed the coexistence of the right to the génocide and the duty of évangéliser, need for emphasizing the wealth of the colonies, but, at the same time, to prepare the kingdom of God .

Is this the language or is this the color of the skin which draws the true border between the man and the animal ? or did God create the negro simultaneously with the birds or the reptiles, or the sixth day at the same time as the man ? Such were the questions which endeavoured to answer, at the end of XVIIIe and the beginning of XIXe century, the men, increasingly many, that the lack of precision of the Genesis worried, at one time when the men of science were concerned with inventory and to classify the alive beings. The memory of these quarrels is well forgotten today. Moreover, that of the institution which caused them, is also lost to him. In spite of the economic importance of slavery, gravity of the philosophical and moral problems that it posed, one cannot miss, indeed, being struck by the small number of historical facts to report.

The dates of some unhappy revolts, the memory of the war of Secession, the text of international resolutions, here all that reached us of the work of these men towards which the Occident is indebted, despite everything , of most of its economic power and of its current standard of living.

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