African, New World, and Ottoman Empire Slavery Compared

Introduction: Slavery Across Three Worlds

Slavery existed in Africa long before it began in the New World. In many cases, the Europeans who initiated the slave trade did so after observing the practice already in place in Africa, and it had been occurring in the Arabic world of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. A comparison of African slavery, New World slavery, and Ottoman slavery reveals three distinct systems that differed profoundly in their origins, social structures, and the treatment of enslaved people.

Slavery in Africa: Origins and Social Structure

In African slavery, most people who became enslaved had been conquered in battle and were made slaves to their new leaders. As in many other societies and cultures, slavery had very deep roots in Africa and was known in antiquity. Africans had enslaved other Africans, although there were chronic injunctions against such practices. Some of the African kingdoms that fought wars throughout the continent were extremely powerful and acquired many slaves from their conquered neighbors.

These slave societies helped form the backbone of the slave trade to the New World because they already had a system of slavery in place, possessed the ability to capture new slaves, and were eager to develop trade of any kind with the Europeans arriving in Africa. There was also some slave trade between kingdoms, as certain kings would sell off enslaved people they were displeased with as a form of punishment.

Slaves were often treated as part of the family in African culture, which helped them assimilate into society more easily. In Africa, slaves were generally integrated into the larger community and regarded as extended family members. However, when trade began with Europe and other nations, the consequences for African slaves were disastrous. The trade in African slaves by Western nations between the late fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries severely affected the social, cultural, economic, and political life of African societies, and those societies never fully recovered from the blow.

New World Slavery: The Harshest System

When enslaved Africans began arriving in the New World, their lives were utterly transformed. New World slavery became the worst example of the institution in recorded history. The Middle Passage — the ocean crossing from Africa to the Americas — was horrific; it has been estimated that millions of enslaved people died during the voyage. In America, slaves had no legal rights, could not marry without their owner's permission, their families could be separated and sold, they had no voice in government, they could not own property, and they labored under difficult and harsh conditions. They were regarded as property rather than human beings and were frequently punished through beatings, whippings, and other forms of torture.

Enslaved Africans were actually the largest group of immigrants to arrive in America during the colonial era. Their greatest numbers were concentrated in the plantation system of the southern United States, where large plantations grew labor-intensive crops such as tobacco, cotton, and rice — crops that demanded enormous amounts of human labor to cultivate and harvest. Planters often employed hundreds of enslaved workers to ensure their plantation's profitability, and this system represents the most well-known dimension of slave history in the United States.

The lives of enslaved people were sharply separated from those of white people on the plantation. Enslaved workers lived apart from the main house in the slave quarters, and only house slaves were permitted inside the main residence. Beyond fieldwork, slaves were required to tend their own gardens for food and were typically granted only Sundays off. During planting and harvest seasons, they worked from sunrise to sunset and faced harsh retribution for any complaint. They were the most brutally treated of any group within these comparative slave systems, and they suffered the most as a result.

Slavery in the Ottoman Empire

Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was quite different from both the African and New World systems. The Ottoman model, in which the practice of large-scale slavery had deep historical roots, operated according to fundamentally different social rules. Within the Empire, enslaved people could rise to very high social positions. Many were officials in the Ottoman government who had been purchased, raised as free persons, and trained for sophisticated administrative work. Enslaved women in the imperial harem represent another category of individuals who sometimes rose to positions of considerable influence. Slaves could also gain their freedom — an outcome that occurred in New World slavery as well, but far less frequently.