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Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than Indigenous populations and indentured servants, who...
Slavery typically involves compulsory work, with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by the party that holds them in bondage. Enslavement is the placement of a person into slavery, and the person is called a slave or an enslaved person (see § Terminology ).
Under slavery, an enslaved person is considered by law as property, or chattel, and is deprived of most of the rights ordinarily held by free persons. Learn more about the history, legality, and sociology of slavery in this article.
Slavery was institutionalized by the time the first civilizations emerged (such as Sumer in Mesopotamia, [5] which dates back as far as 3500 BC). Slavery features in the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BC), which refers to it as an established institution. [6]
The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which began as early as the 15th century, introduced a system of slavery that was commercialized, racialized and inherited. Enslaved people were seen not as...
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas.
The transition from slavery to freedom included many roadblocks as the country confronted the question of how resources could reach newly freed African Americans. The end of the Civil War in 1865 ushered in major changes in the U.S., including the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime.
