[This entry is taken from a chapter of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]
1.1. Introduction: Slavery
Slavery is as old as civilization and the appearance of stratified
societies a mere 4,000 years ago at the beginning of the bronze age. Mesopotamians,
Egyptians, and Hebrews practiced slavery well before Greeks and Romans did. That
the Jews practiced slavery is evidenced all over in the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament
of Christians, as well as in the Christian Bible, the Christians’ New Testament.[i]
Earlier hunter-gatherer societies had no use for slavery, but its practice was an
important part of all ancient civilizations, including those of Greece and Rome
that the West embraces as its foundational civilizational sources. Slavery was less
common in the early Middle Ages in Europe and in the modern age, from 1500 to the
present, with some glaring exceptions. Also, we must not forget that some forms
of slavery persist even today in the world, although the practice is no longer legal.[1]
A slave is by definition ‘one who is the property of, and entirely
subject to, another person, whether by capture, purchase, or birth; a servant completely
divested of freedom and personal rights’ (OED). Slavery is not the only form of
human bondage, however. A distinction is often made between chattel or
traditional slavery, in which the person is the personal property or chattel of
the owner, and other types of bondage, such as debt bondage, serfdom, as well
as other types of forced labor, including forced marriage.
In antiquity, those who were defeated in wars of conquest and
plunder were often turned into slaves, though people could also become enslaved
through debt, and children could be sold into slavery by their parents, usually
also to pay back debts incurred to buy food during a bad harvest, for instance.[2]
Even free individuals who were captured and kidnapped by pirates were sold into
slavery, unless they were high-value hostages, in which case they could be
ransomed, which is what happened for instance to Julius Caesar, St. Patrick (patron
saint of Ireland), King Richard I of England, and Miguel de Cervantes, the writer
of Don Quixote, among many others.
In many societies, such as that of Ancient Rome, the child of
a slave woman was also a slave, regardless of who the father was. Abandoned (‘exposed’)
children were also often collected to be raised as slaves in Roman society, as
well as criminals, who were also often turned into slaves.
The Arab slave trade from the 7th to the 20th centuries and the
Atlantic African slave trade from the 17th to the 19th centuries are two well-studied
examples of this practice. Actually, slavery was endemic in the African continent
well before Europeans started to send African slaves to the Americas around 1600
for the following 250 years in order to work in the Spanish, Portuguese, and English
colonies to provide Europe with things like cotton and sugar for the enrichment
of a few individuals, but also of society as a whole. One major difference about
slavery in the Americas is that it was based on ‘race’ or ‘skin color’ (African
origin), something that had not been the case in the past.
Pretty much all the societies or civilizations of the Mediterranean
of around two millennia ago were slave societies. A slave society is not
merely one in which there are slaves. Rather, a slave society has been defined as
one whose economy depends on slaves to exist, with at least 30 percent of the population
being slaves and slave labor accounting for a major part of production.[iii]
Ancient Greece was a slave society too. Slavery was a very common
practice in the Greek city-states, though it was much more common in the rich
ones. Most slaves were barbarians (non-Greeks) and all barbarians were
considered slave material, though occasionally Greeks were also enslaved.[iv]
The Spartans (Sp. espartanos) could devote themselves to their well-known
bellicose pursuits because all the work was done by a people they had enslaved,
the helots (Sp. ilotes), who were seven times as numerous as the Spartans
at one time, in the 5th century BCE, according to Herodotus.[v]
In classical Athens (5th and 4th centuries BCE), a very powerful city-state
that some view as the birthplace of democracy, about one third of the population
were slaves.[vi]
Most philosophers of Greek antiquity, whom we view as our intellectual ancestors,
defended slavery as a natural institution. Greek philosophers of that period that
we greatly admire today, such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, all justified slavery,
though some think that the Stoics were an exception. Justification of slavery continued
by Christian theologians in the Middle Ages, such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas
Aquinas, though with some qualifications.
In the Roman world, as much as one third of the population of
the Italian peninsula consisted of slaves at the end of the Roman Republic and the
beginning of the Roman Empire, due to the many wars of conquest that had taken place.
According to Roman law, ius gentium or ‘law of nations’ (Sp. derecho de
gentes), a victor in war had the right to enslave a defeated population.[vii]
For example, during the Third Punic War (146 BCE; Sp. Tercera Guerra Púnica),
after the Romans destroyed the city of Carthage (Sp. Cartago), only on the
last day did they take prisoners, at which time all 50,000 survivors were sold into
slavery. Likewise, when Julius Caesar (Sp. Julio César) defeated the Atuatuci
people (Sp. Aduáticos), a Gallic (Celtic) people in what is now France in
57 BCE, 4,000 were killed during a siege and the remaining 53,000 were all reduced
to slavery. It has been estimated that a million Gallic Celts or one tenth of the
Celtic population of Gaul were enslaved during Caesar’s Gallic Wars (58-50 BCE).
Another great source of slaves during the Roman Republic came after the destruction
of the Seleucid Empire by the Romans (100-63 BC). Such wars of conquest were, no
doubt, justified by the Romans as defensive, retaliatory, or even preventive, just
like all wars are justified today. Still, slavery in Rome is said to have started
quite early on, at first consisting of parents selling their children into slavery,
mostly to pay their debts.
In this chapter we are going to explore the vocabulary used to
refer to slaves and slavery in English and Spanish, including the many terms that
are cognate in these two languages, but also a few that are different. The first
set of cognates that we should look at is Eng. slave ~ Sp. esclavo,
of course. These words derive from the ethnonym of a people, the Slavic peoples,
or Slavs (Sp. eslavos) and thus in the next section we will introduce
these peoples and their languages before moving on to analyze the history of
the words themselves.
[1] Modern
slavery takes the form of human trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage, and forced
and early marriage, among others. According to a report published in The Guardian
in 2019, ‘an estimated 40.3 million people—more than three times the figure during the transatlantic
slave trade—are living in
some form of modern slavery, according to the latest figures published by the UN’s
International Labor Organization (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation. Women and girls
comprise 71% of all modern slavery victims. Children make up 25%… of all the slaves
worldwide’ (2009.02.25).
[2] The term
antiquity (Sp. antigüedad) refers to ‘the distant past,
especially the classical and other civilizations before the Middle Ages’
(COED). In the West, this term is typically used in regards to the classical
antiquity, which includes the periods in which Ancient Greece and Rome were
in the ascendancy in Europe.
[i] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_slavery,
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esclavitud_en_la_Biblia
[ii] Source: By Jean-Léon
Gérôme - Hermitage Torrent(.torrent with info-hash), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=296018
[iii] The 30% standard was
proposed by the influential scholar Moses I. Finley (1912-1986), cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Finley.
Mentioned in Phillips, William D. , Jr. Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern
Iberia. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia, US: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2013
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