Slavery was the norm worldwide until Christians in the West had it banned and made it illegal. Something that had never been done on a wide scale in recorded human history.
Discussion
Create the problem and solve it then pat self on the back
Are you implying that a 2000 year old religion started a practice that goes back to the earliest records of civilization?
No not the religion. The people. Westerners.
If it's a "western" thing, why do pretty much all cultures on all continents have millennia of slavery recorded? Some of the oldest texts we have contain passages on slavery (hammurabi). Mostly, people are evil. East, west, north, south. Slavery is an endemic evil throughout all of humanity.
Fair. I was just being picky about last 5k ish years.
Even still, there was slavery throughout the Americas before European contact. Korea, China and Japan had rotating power dynamics with slavery involved. India's caste system has slaves on the bottom and is a several thousand year old system. The Arab world has been full of slavery going back to biblical times and continuing to today. Africa had slavery throughout.
Even the slavery the west promulgated in the last 5k years has often been a multi-party, multi-ethnic practice. The transatlantic trade was Africans and Arabs kidnapping and trading Africans and selling them to Europeans. And during the same time period, there was a large Arabic trade in European slaves.
It's never been one culture that was responsible for most or all slavery and it is objectively true that Christians in the west spearheaded the end of chattel slavery.
Slavery is an economic problem, so yeah, the numbers (in real terms) add up fine at this point in our progress.
I agree. Voyages and colonies are just a by product of economics. Coincidence that they were all westerners.
People explore and travel (and compete) because of curiosity, need, and fulfilment. Christ came long after all of that had been established. The "west" is only a few hundred years old anyway, so, dumb name.
One could argue that slavery remained, only the master changed.
"They made [slavery] illegal..."
...and then systematically rebuilt it through financial engineering with modern technology and monopoly credits!
