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"Aristotle talks of slaves as 'living tools' and developed an argument that some humans were 'natural slaves,' positively advantaged by having decisions taken for them by others, while other humans became slaves by accident but could and should be free. We know that Aristotle did not himself act as if this were true—he freed his slaves in his will, which was either too late (if they were slaves by accident), or inappropriate (if they were better off being slaves)." Robin Osborne   "Seneca's eloquent defence of the freedom of the slave's soul has often been contrasted with Aristotle's doctrine of total inferiority. The difference, while significant, can easily be exaggerated. Aristotle had admitted that some slaves had the souls of free men, though of course he had assumed a closer correspondence between inner slavishness and external condition than did Seneca. Yet Seneca had no doubt that some men, as the result of sin and corruption, had the souls of slaves. Moreover, he was far more concerned with the pride of masters than with the sufferings of slaves. He associated the maltreatment of bondsmen with luxury, arrogance and gluttony. Discussion of slavery was thus a vehicle for preaching simplicity and humility, and for reminding the well-to-do of how much they owed to fortune. When Seneca wanted to give evidence of his own simplicity of life, he told of taking only a few personal slaves on one of his trips." David Brion Davis   "Some slaves were stolen by Europeans—'panyared,' as the English word was—and some, as occurred often in Angola, were the victims of military campaigns mounted specifically by Portuguese proconsuls in order to capture slaves. But most slaves carried from Africa between 1440 and 1870 were procured as a result of the Africans' interest in selling their neighbours, usually distant but sometimes close and, more rarely, their own people. 'Man-stealing' accounted for the majority of slaves taken to the New World, and it was usually the responsibility of Africans. Voltaire's sharp comment that, while it was difficult to defend the conduct of Europeans in the slave trade, that of Africans in bartering each other was even more reprehensible, deserves to be better remembered. But then there was no sense of Africa: a Dahomeyan did not feel that he had anything in common even with an Oyo." Hugh Thomas   "In the world of states, hunter-gatherers and nomads, one commodity alone dominated all others: people, aka slaves. What agrarian states needed above all else was manpower to cultivate their fields, build their monuments, man their armies and bear and raise their children. With few exceptions, the epidemiological conditions in cities until very recently were so devastating that they could grow only by adding new populations from their hinterlands. They did this in two ways. They took captives in wars: most South-East Asian early state chronicles gauge the success of a war by the number of captives marched back to the capital and resettled there. The Athenians and Spartans might kill the men of a defeated city and burn its crops, but they virtually always brought back the women and children as slaves. And they bought slaves: a slave merchant caravan trailed every Roman war scooping up the slaves it inevitably produced." James Scott   "Most people no longer live, but only exist, be it as slaves of an 'occupation,' wearing themselves out mechanically in the service of large companies; be it as slaves of money, mindlessly given to the delirium of stocks and promotions, be it finally as slaves of the addiction to entertainment in the big cities; just as many dimly feel the collapse and growing joylessness." Ludwig Klages   "Their object seems to be to disgust their slaves with freedom by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation. For instance, the slaveholders not only like to see the slave drink of his own accord, but will adopt various plans to make him drunk. One plan is to make bets on their slaves as to who can drink the most whisky without getting drunk; and in this way they succeed in getting whole multitudes to drink to excess. Thus when the slave asks for virtuous freedom, the cunning slaveholder, knowing his ignorance, cheats him with a dose of vicious dissipation, artfully labelled with the name of liberty. The most of us used to drink it down, and the result was just what might be supposed; many of us were led to think that there was little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt, and very properly too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum. So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field—feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery." Frederick Douglass   "The prosperity, if it came—which it wouldn't, and wouldn't stay if it did—meant only that our country was to be the world's great workhouse, our green fields soiled with soot from steam-engines, the fair old England, the 'gem set in the silver sea,' was to be overrun with mushroom factory towns, our flowery lanes turned into brick lanes, our church spires into smoky chimneys. We were to be a nation of slaves—slaves of all the world, slaves to mechanical drudgery and cozening trade, and deluded into a dream that all this was the glory of freedom, while we were worse off than the blacks of Louisiana. It was another England that Carlyle looked forward to—an England with the soul in her awake once more—no longer a small island, but an ocean empire, where her millions and tens of millions would be spread over their broad inheritance, each leading wholesome and happy lives on their own fields, and by their own firesides, hardened into men by the sun of Australia or the frosts of Canada—free human beings in fact, and not in idle name, not miserable bondsmen any more." James Anthony Froude   "We were stolen from our mother country, and brought here. We have tilled the ground and made fortunes for thousands, and still they are not weary of our services. But they who stay to till the ground must be slaves. Is there not land enough in America, or 'corn enough in Egypt?' Why should they send us into a far country to die? See the thousands of foreigners emigrating to America every year: and if there be ground sufficient for them to cultivate, and bread for them to eat, why would they wish to send the first tillers of the land away? Africans have made fortunes for thousands, who are yet unwilling to part with their services; but the free must be sent away, and those who remain must be slaves. I have no doubt that there are many good men who do not see as I do, and who are for sending us to Liberia; but they have not duly considered the subject—they are not men of colour. This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood is now our mother country, and we are well satisfied to stay where wisdom abounds and the gospel is free." Richard Allen   "Jefferson's draft of the Declaration included a long condemnation of George III for his support of the slave trade. 'He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.' Here is a recognition, on Jefferson's part, that the slave trade violated the 'most sacred rights of life and liberty.' And, Jefferson continued, the king was 'determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought and sold.' In his draft of the Declaration, Jefferson applied the term men to slaves at the same time he affirmed that all men are created equal, and he asserted that the natural rights that provided the basis for the Declaration also applied to slaves." James Fishkin   "They know nothing about religion, and yet they have more piety than their masters. They are not so deficient in intellectual energy, as is sometimes asserted. A West Indian slave is every whit as rational a creature as a Scots peasant or mechanic, and tinged with less vulgarity. I have conversed with slaves who could reason on right and wrong with as much, and sometimes more good sense than some philosophers—slaves who were conscious of the birth-right of human nature, and eyed their own degradation with just but silent indignation." Charles Campbell   "For the owners, disdain and sadism sat side by side with a degree of fear and anxiety about their dependence and vulnerability, which numerous popular sayings and anecdotes capture. 'All slaves are enemies' was one piece of Roman wisdom. And in the reign of the emperor Nero, when someone had the bright idea to make slaves wear uniforms, it was rejected on the grounds that this would make clear to the slave population just how numerous they were." Mary Beard   "By assigning two white men to kidnap Kunta Kinte, Haley wasn't just distorting African history (in which the majority of slaves were captured and sold to whites by blacks); he was juggling European archetypes, borrowing Western literary themes meant to appeal to whites as well as blacks. He formulated sub-Saharan Africa's diffuse cultural attitudes into a Western myth of 'exile' or 'pilgrimage' for a black American audience that had internalized such notions from the Old Testament and for other Americans who needed to understand, in both Christian and Enlightenment terms, what their own forebears had perpetrated or suborned. But the African slaves had no signs that an African god was punishing them for their sins with an exile like that of the Jews, or blessing their 'errand into the wilderness' like that of the Puritans. Roots wasn't a product of its protagonists' own mother culture; it was the work of a thoroughly Western, Christian, American writer who took as much from Hebrews and Puritans as from Africans. The novel is a Western account of a monstrous Western crime—a crime only according to Western religious and political standards—that triumphed later to abolish slavery, as no African authority had done and as the Sudan hasn't done yet." Jim Sleeper   "Greeks described slaves as andrapoda, 'man-footed things.' Aristotle called them 'living objects,' explaining that 'the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different; for both with their bodies minister to the needs of life.' Homer understood the dehumanizing effects of slavery: 'Zeus takes half the goodness out of a man when he makes a slave of him.'" Peter Jones   "Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free, are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries where it is a common blessing, and as broad and general as the air, may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude, liberty looks, amongst them, like something that is more noble and liberal. I do not mean, Sir, to commend the superior morality of this sentiment, which has at least as much pride as virtue in it; but I cannot alter the nature of man. The fact is so; and these people of the southern colonies are much more strongly, and with a higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty, than those to the northward. Such were all the ancient commonwealths; such were our Gothic ancestors; such in our days were the Poles; and such will be all masters of slaves, who are not slaves themselves. In such a people, the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible." Edmund Burke   "The slaves who were emancipated in 1863 were largely illiterate. They owned almost no land. They had virtually nothing. By the time you get to 1910, we see one of the historically most impressive transformations of literacy in a population that have been observed in the modern world. Go to south-eastern Europe and find some population of poor white people and you can't find anything comparable to that. We actually made ourselves—this is Booker T. Washington's language, but it's actually accurate—'fit for citizenship.' The newly emancipated slaves were a very disadvantaged and underdeveloped population. By the time you get to 1910, you've got a wholly different profile of the African American population, although there's still a long way to go. We faced up to the challenge of emancipation because we actually had something to prove. There were a lot of doubters who said black folks are not going to make it in the modern world, the European immigrants are going to outcompete them and marginalize them, they're going to die off from disease, et cetera. And that was all proved to be wrong." Glenn Loury   "Slavery was widespread in Atlantic Africa because slaves were the only form of private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law. By contrast, in European legal systems, land was the primary form of private, revenue-producing property, and slavery was relatively minor. Indeed, ownership of land was usually a precondition in Europe to making productive use of slaves, at least in agriculture. Because of this legal feature, slavery was in many ways the functional equivalent of the landlord-tenant relationship in Europe and was perhaps as widespread." John Thornton   "Young boys would be taken from mostly Christian families, often in the Balkans, raised as Muslims and as slaves, and trained as soldiers. The system, despite its oddity, was highly effective. The Mamluks, one of several versions of these military slaves, defeated the Mongols and ousted the Crusaders. The institution decayed from the very danger it was designed to prevent: weak sultans allowed the soldiers' sons to succeed their fathers in office, whereupon the soldiers' loyalty reverted to their families instead of the state." Nicholas Wade   "Fathers sometimes sold their own children into slavery, and brothers sold brothers. Maybe half of the slaves who ended their days in foreign lands or regions had been enslaved by the African group or society of which they were a member. Slaves were usually debtors, criminals, misfits or rebels and they were especially prisoners taken in war." Geoffrey Blainey   "Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defences only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free. We tax ourselves unjustly. There is a part of us which is not represented. It is taxation without representation. We quarter troops, we quarter fools and cattle of all sorts upon ourselves. We quarter our gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former eat up all the latter's substance." Henry David Thoreau   "The Benin kingdom was an unusually cruel, tyrannical regime by African standards, notorious for brutalities that ranged from widespread slavery to the most gruesome forms of ritual, mass human sacrifice, including women and children. The blood-soaked bronzes, to which western collectors have given their current financial value, were made from brass quite literally acquired by Benin in return for slaves. A sobering thought perhaps for the 'decolonisers,' so anxious to return them to the descendants of Benin's rulers, but not of the slaves whose blood-money they represent." Zareer Masani