The Slavs of Eastern Europe and The Word Slave

The word slave has its origins in the word slav. The term originates from the Middle Greek word slavos/sklavenos (Slav).

Slaves were people without personal rights. 

Slavery operated from the beginning of civilisations (such as Sumer in Mesopotamia).

The Romans accepted slavery as the norm. Sources of slaves might be captives from war or piracy, or by birth. Roman slaves were mostly Greek captives of war. 

After Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul (modern-day France and parts of Belgium, western Germany, and northern Italy) in the 50s B.C.E, about 500,000 Gauls were enslaved.

The Slavic people of Eastern Europe were once a major source of slaves.

During the 9th century AD, people living in "scattered settlements" of Eastern Europe and the Baltic areas were trafficked as slaves to Byzantium and the Islamic world.

Africans, before the 16th century, were mostly shipped from East Africa to the Arabian peninsula and enslaved. 

Massachusetts legalised slavery in 1641.

Slavery was legal in the United States of America upon its founding in 1776.  Ninety-five percent of black people lived in America's South, comprising one third of the population.

Between 1777 and 1804, every Northern state of the United States provided for the immediate or gradual abolition of slavery. 

In the 1840s, King Gezo of Dahomey (part of present day Benin) said: "The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth...the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery."

In the 1800s, as many as 50,000 enslaved people passed through the city of Zanzibar each year.

Underground room of the Slave market Zanzibarthar, where slaves were kept, before being taken to the market for auctioning.ZoomViewer

The Confederacy (seven slave states) seceded from the United States, resulting in the American Civil War of 1861-1865. The central cause was slavery.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1865) abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.

Matilda McCrear died in Selma, Alabama, January 1940, at the age of eighty-three. (c. 1857 – January 1940). She was the last known living survivor in the United States of the transatlantic slave trade and the ship Clotilda. McCrear was captured as a young child in West Africa with her mother and sister by the army of the Kingdom of Dahomey and taken to Mobile County, Alabama, at the age of two with her mother and older sister. She and her sister were sold away from their mother and never reunited. Matilda was granted freedom and American citizenship by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

Much later, during WWII, the Nazis planned to kill between ten and twenty million Slavs and to deport millions of other slavic people out of Eastern Europe.

Based on the German concept of Lebensraum (living space), the Nazi government planned to repopulate Eastern Europe with Germanic colonists.

The use of slave labour greatly increased throughout the war. Prisoners of war and "undesirables" were transported from occupied territories, including millions of Jewish and Slavic people, to work as slave labourers.

The use of slave and forced labour in Nazi Germany operated on an unprecedented scale. During World War II, the Nazis conducted several different categories of Arbeitslager (labour camps). 

In 1999, the Middle East Quarterly reported that slavery is endemic in Sudan.

In 2015, Islamic State used the Koran to reinstate sex slavery.

About 40.3 million individuals today are slaves, with 71% of those being female, and 1 in 4 being children.