Slavery

Every civilization had had the institution of slavery although one may get the impression that only the whites have enslaved blacks, and that the Americans in particular are guilty of the crime of slavery. The end of traditional chattel slavery (legal ownership of people as property, inheritable across generations) began to end in the Western world around the beginning of the 19th century but did not end in the Islamic world until the middle of the 20th century. A clue to what explains the end of slavery is contained in the fact that the beginning of the end of slavery coincided with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England and then spread to the rest of the industrialized world, and then to the developing world.

Author: Atanu Dey

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