I was sincerely wondering if you had come across an expert judiciously weighing different forms and making the conclusion that the US had by far the most brutal in history; that would surprise me, but I like changing my mind due to evidence. What I'm hearing is more that…
I was sincerely wondering if you had come across an expert judiciously weighing different forms and making the conclusion that the US had by far the most brutal in history; that would surprise me, but I like changing my mind due to evidence. What I'm hearing is more that you have recently been exposed to some especially wrenching examples from US history.
From what I've come across, slavery has always been pretty bad, everywhere. While the average treatment of the compliant subset of slaves varies across cultures, it seems pretty universal that (1) the treatment of escaping or rebelling slaves is almost always brutal, and (2) individual owners can have unbounded cruelty if they "own" somebody else.
I consider slavery near the top of pernicious practices that our species has adopted, due to a combination of how terrible it is on average and the prevalence of the practice. Sadly, it paid off and so was very widely practiced on large scale. When humans got the idea that they could "own" other humans like they would "own" a donkey, and thus gain control and rights to the fruits of their labor, it was a terrible path.
If you had recently read about how slaves were treated in the Caribbean, you might for a while believe that was the worst form the world had ever known - until you read the gory details of another example elsewhere.
Anecdotes about the worst recorded examples of some single system, or even of several systems, are not a good yardstick for general comparisons of slavery across cultures.
So rather than compare, let's just stick to what you said - we know it was terrible - without need to compare. Finding that someplace else was worse, or better, would not in any way make US slavery any more acceptable.
The only function I've seen for comparison, is in making a case that the worst behavior in human history deserves the most generous compensation in human history. Other than that sort of case making, I see no gain to making dubious comparisons.
Like I mentioned before, I haven't made a comprehensive study of slavery, and probably never will, it's not my wheelhouse. I'm reading more on race issues than I was before but avoid the 'woke' crap. I'll table my assessment for now because I can't provide a lot of historical analysis for my position, it's assembled over many years of the slavery issue occasionally passing my eyes. I also don't know enough about pre-colonial slavery, and particularly pre-European slavery in Africa, something I've tried to find information about but have not found much except for a Wikipedia article about it. Google it, and almost every result is about post-contact slavery and how bad it was. Since Africa is *still* the centre of slavery today, within as well as without, that would be a quite interesting comparison.
> "American slavery was pretty bad, for sure"
Let's agree on that.
I was sincerely wondering if you had come across an expert judiciously weighing different forms and making the conclusion that the US had by far the most brutal in history; that would surprise me, but I like changing my mind due to evidence. What I'm hearing is more that you have recently been exposed to some especially wrenching examples from US history.
From what I've come across, slavery has always been pretty bad, everywhere. While the average treatment of the compliant subset of slaves varies across cultures, it seems pretty universal that (1) the treatment of escaping or rebelling slaves is almost always brutal, and (2) individual owners can have unbounded cruelty if they "own" somebody else.
I consider slavery near the top of pernicious practices that our species has adopted, due to a combination of how terrible it is on average and the prevalence of the practice. Sadly, it paid off and so was very widely practiced on large scale. When humans got the idea that they could "own" other humans like they would "own" a donkey, and thus gain control and rights to the fruits of their labor, it was a terrible path.
If you had recently read about how slaves were treated in the Caribbean, you might for a while believe that was the worst form the world had ever known - until you read the gory details of another example elsewhere.
Anecdotes about the worst recorded examples of some single system, or even of several systems, are not a good yardstick for general comparisons of slavery across cultures.
So rather than compare, let's just stick to what you said - we know it was terrible - without need to compare. Finding that someplace else was worse, or better, would not in any way make US slavery any more acceptable.
The only function I've seen for comparison, is in making a case that the worst behavior in human history deserves the most generous compensation in human history. Other than that sort of case making, I see no gain to making dubious comparisons.
Like I mentioned before, I haven't made a comprehensive study of slavery, and probably never will, it's not my wheelhouse. I'm reading more on race issues than I was before but avoid the 'woke' crap. I'll table my assessment for now because I can't provide a lot of historical analysis for my position, it's assembled over many years of the slavery issue occasionally passing my eyes. I also don't know enough about pre-colonial slavery, and particularly pre-European slavery in Africa, something I've tried to find information about but have not found much except for a Wikipedia article about it. Google it, and almost every result is about post-contact slavery and how bad it was. Since Africa is *still* the centre of slavery today, within as well as without, that would be a quite interesting comparison.