The history of slavery predates back to pre-historic times. Many cultures, nationalities and religion from ancient times to present day indulged or are indulging in slavery till today. Nevertheless, the social, economic and legal positions of slaves differ from different times, generation to generation, kingdom to kingdom, empires to empires, places to and even systems.
We know from records, and evidence documented that slavery had been institutionalized way back as 1860BC (Mesopotamia: the code of Hammurabi. Archived from the original on 14 may 2011).
If I want to discuss the history of slavery, it will be a vast writing of several pages and a volume discussions because slavery has been known from the first civilization such as Sumer in Mesopotamia which dates as far as 3500BC, also the likes of Byzantine-Ottoman wars, and the Ottoman wars of Europe.
Slavery was well known during the dark ages and middle ages, which later the Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, British, Arabs and some West African Kingdoms playing the role in the Atlantic Slave trade from the 1600 (David P. Forsythe).
Denmark-Norway was the first European country to abolish slave trade in 1802 [David P. Forsythe (2009). “Encyclopedia of Human rights volume 1”. Oxford University press. P.399. ISBN 0195334027].
Slavery today is no longer acceptable, or legal in any society, however, we see and experience a modern slavery in some sort through human trafficking, private organizations and employment of labor. Today we still have people who takes undue advantage of their employees or people who supposedly are helpless and have no voice or any sort of influence in the society we live in; these we call the bunch of nobodies.
This system of undue exertion of will and taking of advantage or disguised slavery is seen in practice when an employer engages an employee and refuses to give him or pay him the wages due for the labor rendered. Also some who may seem to be paying something substantial decide to over-burden their employee to do a task 5 times what they are paid for.
In human trafficking, we see forced labor where some people take undue advantage of the less privilege by engaging them in prostitution against their will, force them into working in factories and plantations, because these employees seem to have no voice or power to speak, in other-words are helpless against this ravenous an ferocious beings who are members of gang stars, drug peddles or organized crime syndicates, who will at some times go extra miles to threaten, torture or exercise their will against the helpless individuals.
They withhold their passports, deny them the basic need like food, put them into torture, use drugs to gain control over the will of the individual and even kill people just to bend them to do what they may want for their own gratification and exertion of undue authority and power on these helpless faces.
Well, in private organizations in places like Africa and Nigeria, we see a lot of manipulations by employers, because they know that the population of people compared to the number of jobs available are high, so they take advantage of the system and the employee, they subject them to inhumane job conditions, pay them pennies to do the job and if the employee attempts to seek a raise or better condition, they are sacked, or dismissed from the already scarce job opportunities.
An employer I know won’t even an employee any liberty to step out of the premises to attend any other interview or opportunity just because he won’t want an employee to get a better offer with a much better pay grade or condition of labor.
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