Slavery Across Civilizations: Systems, Resistance, and Abolition
Slavery has existed in societies across continents and throughout recorded history, taking forms that differed dramatically according to time, place, culture, and economic system. Understanding its history requires looking beyond any single civilization or era and examining the institutions, experiences, resistance, and movements that shaped the lives of enslaved people.
Slavery Across Civilizations: Systems, Resistance, and Abolition provides a broad historical examination of slavery from the ancient world through the modern era.
The book explores systems of enslavement in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Africa, the Islamic world, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. It examines how enslaved people were acquired, transported, sold, controlled, and incorporated into different societies, while also highlighting the many ways they resisted exploitation and sought freedom.
Readers will discover the economic and political forces that sustained slavery, the role of warfare and trade, the development of large-scale slave markets, and the complex relationships between slavery, empire, agriculture, and commerce.
The book also examines resistance, rebellion, escape, abolitionist movements, emancipation laws, and the individuals and communities who challenged systems of enslavement. Particular attention is given to the Atlantic slave trade and the abolition movements that eventually transformed laws across much of the world.
Rather than presenting slavery as a single historical system, this book emphasizes its diversity and evolution across civilizations while keeping the experiences and agency of enslaved people at the center of the story.
For readers interested in world history, social history, human rights, and the forces that have shaped societies across centuries, Slavery Across Civilizations offers a comprehensive introduction to one of humanity's most important and difficult historical subjects.
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