Earlier abolitionism

The modern abolitionism movement appeared around the 1700s-1800s. However slavery has existed as long as human recorded history. How can we make earlier abolitionism movements sucessful? The more ancient the better.
 
The modern abolitionism movement appeared around the 1700s-1800s. However slavery has existed as long as human recorded history. How can we make earlier abolitionism movements sucessful? The more ancient the better.

People arguing against slavery existed in Antiquity (the was an Athenian thinker called Antisthenes for example), although it would be hard to define that a "movement".
 
Slavery as a Crime against humanity has it's punishment built in:
It utterly rots a Societies ability to innovate by removing the need to make things go more efficient through having cheap labour available.

Or in other words a society without slavery even if it's still hardly egalitarian will always outperform slave-societies over time unless the slave-society has a much larger resource-base giving it more fat to burn.

So IMO Abolitionist movements could start in societies who are neighbouring a no-slavery society and see themselves continuously outperformed. Add in a defeat in a war, despite having a significant numerical advantage to really drive the lesson home.

Candidate: A best case Goryeo, which after allowing emancipation in 958 continues on to get rid of it over the next decades and then continues on to punch even more out of it's weight than OTL. Handwave away the Mongols and have the Song eventually figure out that being a no-slavery society makes you stronger. Once China goes Abolitionist, Abolitionism will spread to the rest of Asia.
 
Slavery as a Crime against humanity has it's punishment built in:
It utterly rots a Societies ability to innovate by removing the need to make things go more efficient through having cheap labour available.

Or in other words a society without slavery even if it's still hardly egalitarian will always outperform slave-societies over time unless the slave-society has a much larger resource-base giving it more fat to burn.

So IMO Abolitionist movements could start in societies who are neighbouring a no-slavery society and see themselves continuously outperformed. Add in a defeat in a war, despite having a significant numerical advantage to really drive the lesson home.

Candidate: A best case Goryeo, which after allowing emancipation in 958 continues on to get rid of it over the next decades and then continues on to punch even more out of it's weight than OTL. Handwave away the Mongols and have the Song eventually figure out that being a no-slavery society makes you stronger. Once China goes Abolitionist, Abolitionism will spread to the rest of Asia.

The problem is that, while I am fully aware that slavery existed in East Asia, is hard to characterize the area as a slave society, one where widespread slavery was an integral part of the fundamental economic processes like it was the case in the Confederacy or Rome.
Moreover, slave societies have outperformed non-slave ones historically (Rome being a case in point). It could be even argued that it would, in some contexts, be a way to broaden the resource base. I am not sure that slavery necessarily makes a society stagnant, at least not on such timescales that would impress decision-makers. Classical Greece was pretty innovative, and they were fairly big on slavery. Athens, which was probably the most dynamic polis for several generations, had quite a lot of slaves and I'd say it qualifies as another slave society. I don't think the East Asian patterns are comparable, though.
 
The problem is that, while I am fully aware that slavery existed in East Asia, is hard to characterize the area as a slave society, one where widespread slavery was an integral part of the fundamental economic processes like it was the case in the Confederacy or Rome.
Moreover, slave societies have outperformed non-slave ones historically (Rome being a case in point). It could be even argued that it would, in some contexts, be a way to broaden the resource base. I am not sure that slavery necessarily makes a society stagnant, at least not on such timescales that would impress decision-makers. Classical Greece was pretty innovative, and they were fairly big on slavery. Athens, which was probably the most dynamic polis for several generations, had quite a lot of slaves and I'd say it qualifies as another slave society. I don't think the East Asian patterns are comparable, though.

I don't know about East Asia to comment, but Carl Sagan argues in Cosmos (the book) that the reason for the Greek stagnation in technology and science (not philosophy) was their reliance on slaves for manual labor and their rejection of it as the lower classes' place. This led to philosophy concentrating in the abstract, and killing the emerging scientific method on its cradle. Just throwing that out there, not sure how much truth is there to it, but Sagan makes some good points.
 
I don't know about East Asia to comment, but Carl Sagan argues in Cosmos (the book) that the reason for the Greek stagnation in technology and science (not philosophy) was their reliance on slaves for manual labor and their rejection of it as the lower classes' place. This led to philosophy concentrating in the abstract, and killing the emerging scientific method on its cradle. Just throwing that out there, not sure how much truth is there to it, but Sagan makes some good points.

While there's a grain of truth in that (and it's often repeated) I think that it should be noted that Greek technology and science was emphatically not stagnant. That the Greeks did not create a mechanized industrial revolution, I would say, is in a sense something that does not need to be explained. They had not a modern scientific outlook, of course, and yes, manual labor was largely despised, of course technical advances were not the result of a concentrated R&D program led by top intellectual, but I don't see any reason to think it should have been otherwise. Slavery was part of that mindset and social structure, but it's excessive in my opinion to see it as the cause of some specific backwardness, which would be backwardness only relative to ourselves after all.
I would go as far as saying that projecting the roots of our scientific mentality to the Greeks is, in part, a Western misconception that feeds on the post-Renaissance long affair Western cultures have been having with their memory.
By the way, with this I don't mean to imply that Greek thought was unimportant.
 
I don't know about East Asia to comment, but Carl Sagan argues in Cosmos (the book) that the reason for the Greek stagnation in technology and science (not philosophy) was their reliance on slaves for manual labor and their rejection of it as the lower classes' place. This led to philosophy concentrating in the abstract, and killing the emerging scientific method on its cradle. Just throwing that out there, not sure how much truth is there to it, but Sagan makes some good points.

Except Carl Sagan really wasn't a historian. He was a scientific idealist. I personally find that his historical observations will always be colored by coming from that kind of point of view. He's very wiggish about what he believes history is working towards.
 

tenthring

Banned
While there's a grain of truth in that (and it's often repeated) I think that it should be noted that Greek technology and science was emphatically not stagnant. That the Greeks did not create a mechanized industrial revolution, I would say, is in a sense something that does not need to be explained. They had not a modern scientific outlook, of course, and yes, manual labor was largely despised, of course technical advances were not the result of a concentrated R&D program led by top intellectual, but I don't see any reason to think it should have been otherwise. Slavery was part of that mindset and social structure, but it's excessive in my opinion to see it as the cause of some specific backwardness, which would be backwardness only relative to ourselves after all.
I would go as far as saying that projecting the roots of our scientific mentality to the Greeks is, in part, a Western misconception that feeds on the post-Renaissance long affair Western cultures have been having with their memory.
By the way, with this I don't mean to imply that Greek thought was unimportant.


All of that and more.

To the extent labor market dynamics affect technological progress (among many other factors) overall wage rates is the issue your getting at. While its true slave labor has a pretty low wage rate you can get the same equilibrium effect in slave free societies. Many believe China didn't industrialized because they fell into a "high level equilibrium trap". That is they were so good at what they did that population density was high and wage rates were so low that why bother with all these inventions when you can just hire people. It's really a low value of labor relative to capital that matters, whether the institution of slavery is present it only one part of that.

Slavery was abolished in the ancient world in many places, including the Persian empire that the Greeks fought. While I do ascribe some moral credit to the abolitionists the relative value of unfree labor seems to be the driving force behind when slavery was abolished (and stuck). In cases where unfree labor still retain market value (sex slavery) we will see the practice, even in the first world.
 

katchen

Banned
I think the best way to abolish slavery early on would have been for one of the Popes (perhaps even before the discovery of the New World) issue an Encyclical declaring the enslavement of human beings to be a mortal sin. Serfdom permissible. Bonded servitude for a period of years. Permissible. Slavery for life, forbidden.
I wonder. If the Portuguese had to do without slavery to grow sugar cane in Brazil, instead of Africans, might they have brought in Indians from Goa and Diu (Gujurat) as bonded servants, free after a period of 7-10 years as long as they converted to Christianity to grow the sugar? Would the Dutch and then the English have copied them even though they were Protestant?
 
I think the best way to abolish slavery early on would have been for one of the Popes (perhaps even before the discovery of the New World) issue an Encyclical declaring the enslavement of human beings to be a mortal sin. Serfdom permissible. Bonded servitude for a period of years. Permissible. Slavery for life, forbidden.

That already happened historically. Heck, you even have stuff like this:

Papal Bull Sublimis Deus - 1537 said:
...The enemy of the human race, who opposes all good deeds in order to bring men to destruction, beholding and envying this, invented a means never before heard of, by which he might hinder the preaching of God's word of Salvation to the people: he inspired his satellites who, to please him, have not hesitated to publish abroad that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom We have recent knowledge should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable of receiving the Catholic Faith.

We, who, though unworthy, exercise on earth the power of our Lord and seek with all our might to bring those sheep of His flock who are outside into the fold committed to our charge, consider, however, that the Indians are truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it. Desiring to provide ample remedy for these evils, We define and declare by these Our letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, to which the same credit shall be given as to the originals, that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

It wasn't enough.
 

katchen

Banned
That already happened historically. Heck, you even have stuff like this:



It wasn't enough.
Yes. That Papal Encyclical did prevent the enslavement of the NATIVE AMERICANS in Spanish America. But it left a loophole big enough to sail a galleon through when it came to Africans, which apparently it did not mention. And it was not issued soon enough.
Such an encyclical should have been issued in the 1300s, when Slavs from Russia were being sold as slaves in Italy and Iberia and generalized to all mankind by another Pope as soon as the Portuguese started bringing back Africans from Sub-Saharan Africa--which would be about the 1440s-1450s. By the time Popes attempted to restrain Catholics from enslaving Africans and Native Americans, Iberians had already been doing it for several generations and vested interests had developed around it. Nip it in the bud and the Portuguese find other ways to get cheap labour for the New World --and the Spanish. Bound servants from India for Portugal and perhaps from China and for a time Japan, for Spain. Who knows? Properly motivated, the Spanish might even open up Korea before Hideyoshi invaded and set Korea on it's path to seclusion.
 
Yes. That Papal Encyclical did prevent the enslavement of the NATIVE AMERICANS in Spanish America. But it left a loophole big enough to sail a galleon through when it came to Africans, which apparently it did not mention. And it was not issued soon enough.

Well, it states " and other people of whom We have recent knowledge" and "all other people who may later be discovered by Christians". That doesn't sound particularly ambiguous.
 

katchen

Banned
Well, it states " and other people of whom We have recent knowledge" and "all other people who may later be discovered by Christians". That doesn't sound particularly ambiguous.
It isn't. And it DID restrain the Spanish to a large degree when it came to slavery, which is why the SPANISH colonies had relatively few slaves. But it did not restrain the Portuguese, who had a long established African slave trade for 80 years before this encyclical. And by the 17th Century, the French were totally ignoring this encyclical and the British and the Dutch, Protestant as they were, did not recognize the authority of Rome at all.
It's not that the Pope's authority was not enough in this matter, as it turned out, it just came too late.
 
But it left a loophole big enough to sail a galleon through

Quoted for truth.
I gather that it was about not enslaving Christians, or people that could be reasonably presumed to be going to become Christians.
The Native Americans were sometimes supposed to be under the "tutelage" of the Iberian crowns, which gave said crowns a right to administer the American lands, but logically not to enslave the people therein; the Natives were seen as equivalents of minor orphans whose education was entrusted to the Catholic monarchs. *
No such tutelage principle was explicitly stated about Africa as far as I know.

* Who, of course, couldn't care less most of the time.
 
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