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Originally Posted by B0rsuk
Interesting stuff there, HoneyBadger. Speaking of other sources of slaves, European rulers avoided Arabs on purpose. The reason: religion ! Islam would unite slaves, they could organize and fight for freedom. Even worse, they might be able to spread the religion.
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I do not think this does a good job in describing the origins of slavery in the New World. Long story short, a handful of crops proved to be so profitable that plantations owners did whatever the hell it took to get bodies to work the fields. Sugar was by far the most important of these crops, and something like 80% of all slaves brought to the New World. So why Africans? Because the Portuguese set up a trade network on the African coast, and found buying slaves from other Africans to be more reliable than subjugating the natives on the Canary islands. This precedent set, others followed and it kept proving cheaper and more reliable than any other form of labor. If you want to trace the origins of slavery, economics illuminates the way. I think the dehumanizing racism that followed very quickly (within 50 years in the case of Barbados) is better explained as an after the fact justification for working hundreds of slaves to death to make sugar.
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Now that I've read the book I have an interesting observation. It appears the most intolerant, xenophobic religions are the monotheistic ones. Greeks, Romans* simply added gods to their pantheons, at least until they converted to Christianity. The intolerance granted by monotheistic Christianity and Islam made them strong factors in uniting people (often using very brutal or very devious measures, but that's not the point). Now I'm thinking about modeling these things in a game like Civilization or preferably Master Of Magic. They could make interesting, or at least fresh game mechanics. I would include shamanism (belief in minor, local deities rather than a number of strong global ones a.k.a. polytheism) and atheism.
* Romans and Chinese are good examples of major powers who avoided mixing religion and government. Apparently it can be done.
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Borsuk, you are all kinds of wrong here. You do know that the Romans persecuted and martyred thousands of Christians? The exact offense was usually refusing to burn an offering to the Emperor. That is neither tolerant, nor seperating governance from religion. And for that matter, "intolerant and xenophobic" are great words to describe the Chinese throughout history. Actually, they probably describe 95% of all human societies. Christianity and Islam are both exceptions that argued all humans could earn divine favor by joining the faith. Well, Islam was harder on women. However, Christianity gave women an enormous amount of equality. If you look at some of the big name converts to Christianity, they often had mothers or wives who converted before them and played a large role in their conversion (Constantine's mother was Christian, for example). I do not think monotheism lends itself to this kind of unity on its own face. Judaism, for example, puts an enormous emphasis on its adherents being "God's chosen," or a special people apart from the rest. They further emphasized these differences with strict labor, dietary, and bodily alteration.
Long story short, history is complicated. Especially when dealing with over 2,000 years of it. Just think about how quickly things have changed in the past 100 years. The ancient world was not any more stable, we modern observers looking back upon it just tend to clump and generalize more.