slavery

slavery Social system in which people are the property of their owner, and are compelled to work without pay. Slavery of some kind was common to practically all ancient societies, and to most modern societies until the 19th century. Common in ancient Egyptian, Roman, and Greek societies, an extreme form of slavery also existed in the Americas from the 16th century, where the need for cheap labour in European colonies was not satisfied by enslaving Native Americans or by acquiring poor Europeans as servants. This situation gave rise to the highly organized and profitable Atlantic triangular slave trade. Ships sailed from ports such as Liverpool with guns and other goods that were exchanged for slaves in states on West African coasts. The slaves were sold in markets in the Caribbean, Brazil, and North America, mainly to work on farms and plantations. On the return journey, the ships carried colonial produce from the Americas to Europe. An estimated 15 million Africans were sold into slavery. Millions more died on the voyage across the Atlantic. By the late 18th and early 19th century, slavery had been abolished throughout much of Europe; it was declared illegal in Britain in 1807, and outlawed in 1833. Most South American states abolished it soon after gaining independence. In the USA, slavery was one cause of the Civil War, and was formally ended when the aims of the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) were incorporated in the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution (1865). Isolated cases of slavery were discovered in China and some areas of Africa in the 1990s, and it is likely that some form of slavery will be discovered periodically.

http://www.antislavery.org