Slavery's Global Impact and Economic Justiications, Today

Slavery’s Global Impact and Economic Justifications, Today and Yesterday

Slavery has existed in some form in every region of the world. During the earliest

civilizations, slave labor built nations and empires in Europe, Egypt, Greece, Asia and Africa. Thousands of years later, the Portuguese, Dutch and English realized the profit value that a market in human flesh would provide, thus, Africans were exported from their native homeland and imported to the New World under the most miserable conditions imaginable, treated as less than human, and used as labor for the sugar cane fields of the Caribbean and the building of a country in the New World…a country that was nearly torn apart by abolition, civil war and slave revolts as a result of state’s rights and the slavery issue.

The story of the history of slavery is firmly rooted in our consciousness from pre-Columbian to colonial days, and it is left to the viewer to wrestle with and contextualize the complexities of slavery’s history. While slavery has historically been the catalyst that has brought about outrage and racial unrest, slave owners have justified a need for slavery as beneficial to the country for economic reasons. Abraham Lincoln once said “Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of a man who wishes to take the good of it by being a slave himself.”

The inhumanity of slavery subjected Africans to much suffering upon their arrival to the New

World as the illustration depicts below:

[pic]

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/clipart/default.aspx

Slavery has taken several forms since its inception over the centuries and has been practiced in all the ancient civilizations of Africa, Asia, Europe and pre-Columbian America. During ancient times, slaves were regarded as one of the spoils of war and became the property of kings, priests and temples. Rome was the victor against Carthage in the first and last of the three Punic wars fought...