Transcipt

(196) Religion and Slavery - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nTo-FcrEQY

Transcript:

(00:01) okay so slavery and religion um please uh this we didn't set ourselves you know with a very narrow or easily or focused uh thing between these these are two topics i would say a vast scope both globally and also throughout time in human history and so we're going to have to narrow it in order to actually talk about this a little bit i mean the two of them together also have a considerable amount of overlap and if we were to look at for example the one we've always said before and we have a bunch of examples where when you take religion there is a dividing line between formal

(00:44) organized religion and then some of these informal customary religious spiritual ritual activities that i guess aren't necessarily formal or organized religion but maybe are in that same sphere and so we've talked before about this it's easy to take that formal religion and stick churches in there or mosques or temples or synagogues or gujarats you can stick those all inside that pretty easily and draw the little bottom line about it but then there's all these other things that people do like crossing your fingers

(01:16) knocking on wood celebrating christmas i mean it's got the word christ in it it doesn't mean that it's religious in a certain sense but anyway there's some things about it doing yoga yoga it comes out of you know religious tradition even if a lot of practitioners of it in the west um don't consider themselves what they're doing to be religious yoga actually means to yoke yourself to a deity two yogurts there you go so you're doing yoga well you know and christmas means [Laughter] participating in a wedding ceremony right ceremonial all of these symbolic things that you do

(01:58) you know your dad leads the daughter down an aisle holding you know giving you know her to the to the guy there's a white dress you know there's all these other kinds of things flowers in the western tradition doing charity work going to a raptors game i mean we've seen that um in past when we've looked at the history of this um all sporting events all athletic competition were originally religious festivals right and lots of what happened still um it's almost just like very similar stuff that's happening in a raptors game you know as what's happening in ancient

(02:42) rome at a chariot race where you know the cities you know you have the different teams the reds and the blues or something like that and the cities you know absolutely is broken into factions about whether you're on the one side of the one or not um and i don't know you're doing everything still like the wave you're still interested when the ball is going you still you still do this sympathetic magic where everybody goes you know because they want to make if you do this then that'll make the ball go in right

(03:10) there's all these things where you have to you've you've worn the one jersey and that's when they won so now you've been wearing that this entire year so that they keep winning and it worked okay without washing the jersey without watching the jersey don't watch it yeah if you yeah you have to do all those kind of ritualistic activities so what i want to kind of just say here is that religion is a bigger foggier category or whatever than just a little thing that we sometimes like to draw inside this dotted line and put in a pen right

(03:41) let's see i'm going the wrong way now okay this way so the same thing is going to be probably true with slavery you know as a topic so on the one hand when we had the uh the picture uh advertising this we're really thinking we're thinking of this formal definition of when it was legal chattel slavery is the technical definition we'll talk about that or the technical term for it definition and sometimes drawing the line between that and other oppressive practices that might be akin to slavery sometimes people some of these that are ongoing today are called maybe neo slavery or modern

(04:17) or 21st century slavery so we know the one and when we think of it in our head historic or traditional or chattel slavery but there's also of course human trafficking there's debt bondage forced labor that's ongoing that people experience there's child labor including things like child soldiers or forced or under age marriages and maybe prison labor right so now that's also a thing there's an amazing percentage um totally historically unprecedented percentage of the population of the united states is uh

(04:52) is now incarcerated and and ever more of the people that are in these prisons you know are actually now in prison labor where they're essentially uncompensated for it so um although this is not the topic of tonight's lecture just we want to touch on this this kind of neo-slavery or modern things that are akin to slavery the global slavery index indicates anyway that 40 million inhabitants i'm sorry individuals are currently trapped in some form of modern slavery um according to them the graphics that they put out the prevalent these

(05:35) areas in the globe where there's the most prevalence of these kinds of um modern slavery of these 71 of the individuals trapped in modern slavery are female 29 are male there's some 100 000 or more child soldiers right now in the world 15.4 million especially girls are in forced marriages and then there's some 24.

(06:05) 9 million people in forced labor of some type or other for example debt bondage is apparently like very prevalent in in south asia for example where you have you have to pay off even inherited debt that you can never get out of so um so beyond those though i want to go to that inner cordon pen just so that we can kind of narrow what we're talking about in this particular presentation so we're going to look at some particular organized religions in in this case this is a very vast topic so we'll look at the west we're going to look at paganism christianity judaism and islam

(06:42) and we're going to look specifically at that at this kind of not the current 21st century slavery but especially ancient slavery medieval serfdom that evolves out of ancient slavery medieval slavery and then modern slavery all of which are connected to each other and by modern i use the term modern anything was after after 1492.

(07:08) and so that means because i'm a medieval i'm a medievalist right so anyway okay so traditional slavery um so illegal today in all the world's countries that are recognized there are places where um that aren't recognized as countries it may not be the case traditional slavery however was legal in most societies until the 19th century it's also called chattel slavery because the people are considered to be chattel which is word for personal property of a legal owner i'm sorry of a legal owner so in this kind of slavery child slavery enslaved people are legally redefined as

(07:50) property that can be bought and sold and indeed the part of the whole idea of the system is dehumanizing the other so that whereas in modern times now we we are very cognizant in saying things like enslaved people enslaved persons but the argument of people within the system and indeed their their blind spot often of their paradigm and world view is that the people who are enslaved aren't people at all and they do everything in their power to make themselves think that right okay so this kind of slavery this traditional slavery it's illegal in all the world's

(08:29) countries as we say so in what year did the last country to criminalize slavery do so 1861 1861 elizabeth guesses anybody else gene early to mid-20th century any other guesses the 1970s 2007 thank you mauritania [Laughter] if you can imagine actually 2010 western sahara but it's not a weather it's not a recognized country so um so western sahara uh would be more recently even than this but anyway of the generally recognized countries mauritania 2007 if you can imagine no well so criminalized for the people that are holding slaves those are the criminals in this case so the slaves are

(09:25) not people who've been enslaved are not criminals it's people who are enslaving other people who are crim you know are engaged in criminal activity um globally now in every recognized country right so thinking of brazil yeah yeah so elizabeth was thinking brazil so yeah there is in fact um we're saying 1888 here is where uh brazil then is john remember to use the clicker for the people watching online thank you i forgot to have my clicker okay so here's a map so we saw so we were thinking of brazil so in the late 1880s here 1888 that's the end of

(10:01) slavery the abolition of slavery in brazil you know we had over here mauritania this is uh the abolition of slavery in 1981 it's the criminalization of slavery is the 2007 thing in mauritania and western sahara i point out here is in 2010 is when they've criminalized slavery so uh the earliest um uh in this case in terms of abolishing slavery is in kind of in some of the northern european countries uh and then east asia you know as it's sort of spreading slowly into the modern era abolition but it's really quite recently

(10:39) that all of this has occurred and i was starting to even think you know i mean if we think about it even you know um here where we're at i mean 1865 is not that long ago sheen quick question i'm looking at the the map for the nordic countries and i'm just wondering that um it says like the medieval ages for them but wouldn't didn't they still continue to have slaves in their colonies so so the vikings had slaves but this is after the vikings are gone right so this is they get christianized and they and they um what they've done here is abolish slaves it doesn't mean it doesn't mean

(11:21) that you can't bring a slave to the country and so um and so in some of these so this is the abolition of slavery it's not the criminalization with what we had done in that previous thing i didn't have a map for criminalization so i wasn't able to find that um so that thing with the 2007 that's criminalization um so so i'll just have a couple examples of this so in terms of abolition this is an example of how this happened so louis the tenth the king of france uh in the late you know the early 14th century he abolished slavery in france

(11:57) using the etymology of the word frank which actually means free he says france signifies freedom and he also decreed that any slave setting foot in the kingdom would be freed and so that's an early example of abolition um but there's also economics behind this and so um so one of the things that had happened through the course of the middle ages is that so whereas in the late roman empire there were large populations of what um were called slave what we would now we use the word slave in modern english latin that is sarawi so servant serous service

(12:41) and so the the serwee acquire more and more rights and they become less slaves and they become more serfs and so there ends up being in the um in the in the west in the christian west this population of what we think of peasants serfs who don't have all of the same um they don't have all of they aren't subject to all the same things that a slave would be but they are still not free because they are attached to property so the difference between what we'll talk about chattel slavery where people can be bought and sold and serfdom serfdom is you're part of the the real estate

(13:23) and so the the the property can be bought and sold and you're kind of like the the house that's built on it because again you're tied to the land and all your descendants and everything like that so you owe certain obligations to the landowner you're supposed to farm it on certain days you maybe have rights to certain portion of the harvest yourself and this kind of a thing and so this is essentially what serfdom happened and so so by this point essentially um the uh the french king is able to say slavery which is this uh has evolved into is actually different practice than

(13:55) what they have in terms of serfdom um we don't we we're abolishing we're not going to allow that in in france they're also fairly early on in getting rid of um serfdom and the reason for it though economically as opposed to morally or religiously is is that when you have um pop huge population boom and so the population of france in the 14th century um this is right before the black death right so it had grown to uh 17 million and so then when the black death hit in the middle of the century and a third or half of the people

(14:33) ultimately over the course of multiple uh recurrences of the plague uh died just like two-thirds two-thirds survived ultimately population shrinks then france's population didn't recover to um uh what it had been here in the central middle ages until like the 1700s or something like that and so and so as a result of that what ends up happening is you only have so much land and if you start having all of these people you can imagine that that depresses wages right and so so the land becomes much more valuable than the people and you and and so if you have to do this thing where you have to raise a slave

(15:10) from baby and pay for you know all that cost that isn't helping you one bit as a landowner and so actually at a certain point throughout the middle ages and um into the early modern times noble landowners in europe actually wanted to get rid of all of their surfs where humanly possible is when it by hook or by crook however they could expel them from the land so that they could instead rent it out and things like that and get cash instead of just having agricultural produce from their from their tenants david foote says that demography can explain three quarters of everything

(15:46) yeah yeah he's a demographer of course yeah well and and whereas i don't i'm not i'm not gonna always say that economics are the only motivator there's often a very powerful motivator and sometimes we can look at what the economic and demographic background to a story particularly is and so this is certainly you know kind of part of the timing here of northern and western european early moves into this idea of abolition they they're abolishing slavery so they could get you to pay rent because otherwise you got to get you get to live there for free as a surf right

(16:22) okay okay despite then the fact that the word france signifies freedom so fran france does mean that nevertheless um when france established itself as an overseas empire so in the imperial age on the modern era france like the other european powers built that colonial empire on the backs of slave labor and so colonial empires if we just look at that same demographic or economic equation have exactly the opposite issue in the labor um equation and labor slash land equation right so when you go around with guns and and cannons and boats and

(17:04) you just fat steal vast tracts of land from indigenous peoples all around the entire planet you have all the free land in the world you know but you don't have any people to do the labor and so getting any french people to move uh to canada was almost impossible which is why you know this is why the population of canada was so small by the time of the french and indian war right and so it's likewise trying to get french people to move to the west indies which was much more valuable uh french colony uh haiti for

(17:36) what's now haiti um was was actually quite difficult they couldn't get the french people to go move there because you'd die of malaria and things like that and so um the landowners then uh imported then slave labor uh because they didn't have any i mean that was their how they were able to exploit all this free land that they had right so it's the complete opposite economic issue okay so that's why i just bring this map back here again so we can kind of see how this works economically so in places that develop large populations early

(18:13) you can see where that's where um you know there's early abolition china had a very early period of evolution abolition too it's just that it it didn't take entirely and so this is why this is a later abolition but it also had a very early one so some of those oops anyway some of that happens whereas in places that are less developed economically and poorer that's when these come come later okay so we had the year when slavery was finally criminalized everywhere what year did slavery begin those are sumerians you can see the

(18:48) sumerians there having slaves did they start it well everything starts in sumeria in terms of history but in fact we have to say a big goal question mark in terms of history because slavery is a prehistoric institution slavery is well established in all um historic ancient civilizations when they first become historic so in other words as soon as there begin to be written records anywhere um they already just kind of casually mentioned slavery as something that they just assume as a natural part of existence that they've

(19:24) had from time immemorial they have no memory of it it's not starting or any such thing that's something that it was always was so it's an inherited institution for historic civilizations as we've looked at it through anthropology and other kinds of things archaeology looking at hunter-gatherer remains and things like that although slavery does in some rare circumstances exist in hunter-gatherer societies it generally isn't very pronounced or widespread in these because you need to have in order for slavery to be economically viable

(20:01) you need to have both economic surplus so hunter-gatherers are pretty much hunting and gathering mostly for themselves and having a pretty good time at it usually comparatively um whereas it once you start in on agriculture then you can you know to get a lot more immediate you get a lot more surplus and also you can concentrate population and so where there's a big concentration of population where there's surpluses then they can have slavery so with the invention and spread of in the neolithic era so this is again prehistoric times in the 7000s before

(20:39) the common era slavery was already then widespread and therefore established when those societies become literate and start to give us records for the first time so i have here for example the code of hammurabi so the babylonian the ancient babylonian law code from 1754 bce so it just includes quite casually mentions about slaves and slavery and things like that there's not anything about we just thought this thing up some of these people are going to be slaves now isn't this a great idea or anything like that rather it's something

(21:12) that they have right and they're just simply talking about it and so quite and this is one of the very earliest uh complete legal complete texts we have of anything certainly like things like a law code okay so where do they get people get slaves so um all across the ancient world but as we have recorded for example in the ancient greeks homer uh other pre-classical authors from the oral tradition in ancient greece they saw slavery as an inevitable consequence of war so we have that um phrase to the victors go the spoils so in this particular case often when

(21:52) you're talking about a victory you're not just plundering the people's property or taking over their land in their city and now it's your land and city you are often also taking the person uh yeah that looks like the rape of cassandra um is it cassandra it's it looks like could be yeah it does look like it looks like she's holding a statue of athena yeah you're right so yeah it's um it's ajax the lesser and uh like you say i think it's cassandra and so um essentially though this is from homer right is the idea so from the iliad this is a mythological scene you know of this idea

(22:31) though um that these ancient greek heroes could take as booty um captured trojan women who then are very clearly they're not only slaves but obviously sexual slaves so that's one of the the main components of of slavery going all the way back to when history begins right and so uh yeah um there is evidence to suggest that chimpanzees do this as well so chimpanzees are known to wage war they will go into neighboring territories where other chip groups are and they will kill them they will kill the males and they will take the females

(23:10) okay yeah so when we say you know before like we're talking about an inherited institution um so there's a whole bunch of things that people do you know that despite the fact that we in the modern and now post-modern era um have inherited ideas like social contract theory from uh modern philosophers which more or less come up with this idea that individual cavemen are inventing things by you know sitting around you know doing a brainstorming session well let's invent slavery now actually most of these things there are things that they're doing before they have the capacity to think and talk about anything right and

(23:48) so these are you know inherited from time immemorial and so in including this practice right but this practice is totally ingrained um as far as the ancient greeks are concerned in their heroic past and as it's described in in homer in the iliad and the odyssey um so uh and this was continued to be contemporary practice for the ancient greeks when they enter the historic times and so one of the things that could happen is if you had they had all these different city-states and one of the things that could happen is that your city-state could go to war with

(24:23) another city-state and it's and if it wins potentially enslave the entire population and so a very um famous example of that is in again in the essentially in the pre-history um sparta going to war you know with its uh neighboring uh uh city uh and reducing them all to the status of being helots which is not the same ultimately i didn't put this in a slide because it's actually a little complicated so a helot although is a kind of slave it's actually also kind of a surf and so as opposed to being a chattel slavery where helets helets can't be sold they're part of the land uh of the the the spartans control

(25:04) through their kind of unique system but essentially there would be it would also be possible the the citizens of thebes which is another one of the greek city-states also got conquered at one point and then they all got subjected to be slavery although it subjected to become slaves enslaved although they were liberated and that was considered to be a big boon by the person who liberated them so um anyway so that whole thing you could lose you could lose the whole city the whole game otherwise it would happen is that you could uh you simply would go

(25:33) to war so athens had this disastrous exposition to sicily um it's one of the major failures of the athenian democracy when they lost the sicilians took all of the athenian troops that they captured or surrendered and sold them all into into slavery and so that's um just how slavery would happen so as the pre-socratic philosopher heraclitus says when he's talking about it war is the father of all the king of all he turns some people into slaves and he sets others free right so some people through revolt or revolution get away in terms of war from slavery but a lot of

(26:12) others get enslaved in antiquity so what are the kind of conditions of slavery in antiquity um throughout everywhere in the ancient world just as everybody was mostly engaged in agriculture we are so removed from it now in our own uh world and time we don't think about it but a huge proportion of the entire population was engaged in agriculture and indeed that's where most of the slaves would be too but beyond doing agricultural work which was the kind of work that everybody was doing slaves were also singled out for

(26:46) particularly horrific professions that included things like being down in the mines which you don't have a very long life span generally speaking if you're a mine worker and uh and also being subject to brothels especially really bad brothels and so anyway so those would tend to often be quite brutal conditions um by contrast with the um though there was also you know at the other end of the spectrum of still the condition of uh being a chattel slave there would be slaves that had highly skilled trades so

(27:26) there'd be everything from craftsmen to even bankers who uh to like domestic servants they might live in actually relatively better conditions than let's say the poorest landless peasants so one of the things that happens in societies when there's massive power and wealth inequality the people that are controlling the wealth um having access to them means that you also have access to like a lot more power let's say than if you're just in the big masses of people that don't have any power right and so if you let's say are the kings um chief

(28:04) eunuch you're a unfree person you're a slave you've been made a eunuch in a lot of ways this is a bad um lot in life nevertheless you're talking to the king every day you know this is um that's like game of thrones it's like lord varys right and so there's lord various guys gotta he he ultimately didn't get killed the spoiler i'm sorry if you haven't seen that but anyway there's a um but you know you are able to suggest a lot of things with spring into the king's ear you may well be able to control so much more than you otherwise would this is going to be true for um you know house servants of nobles you

(28:39) know at a lower scale and that kind of a thing and indeed if you have a slave that has this particular skill or craft that could be very valuable and make all kinds of income for for whoever owns you and so therefore be better treated than a mine slave for sure okay so one of the um you know ironies is that on the one hand while athens classical athens was this innovator who's looked back upon uh as you know essentially one of these beginnings of democracy it was also very much a slave society and indeed there were more slaves in ancient athens than any other ancient greek uh city state

(29:20) and so so maybe 80 000 slaves they had maybe so about 30 percent of the population and apparently the majority of free athenians at least owned one slave and if you didn't own a slave that was a real sign that you were a real poor athenian you know and so people pitied you a lot um there's a guy named lysius who has a discourse which in which he has a poor athenian who's become an invalid and who uh he essentially is writing his complaint and one of the characteristics this isn't a real athenian but um just as a as to kind of just explain local expectations and and social customs that

(29:59) the person complains my income is very small now and i'm required to do uh these things myself and i do not even have the means to purchase a slave who could do these things for me so this poor person you know has to do all this i don't know combing their hair and stuff like that that they would normally you know be able to have a slave to right or for example in this case the you know you're you've hear you've gotten drunk you know and and you're right you have to you know you want to vomit and the slave holds your hair for you and helps you get the

(30:32) bucket and that kind of a thing and picks up the vomit so there's a depiction of that right so anyway if you're poor athenian you don't have that so it's so ubiquitous um that then the philosophers began to conclude that it had to be part of the natural order of the universe so in the politics there's several developments up to this state but aristotle tends to put the big golden stamp on it here with um writing the politics he that can foresee with his mind is naturally ruler and naturally master and

(31:09) he that could do these things with his body is subject and naturally a slave and so uh he essentially creates a theory of natural slavery where essentially the thinker is like the philosopher kings these guys obviously should be uh the natural masters and if you're just um essentially a physical laborer you have a natural condition of being a slavery as for a slave as far as aristotle is concerned and as he goes on he argues that if you are then someone who is naturally a slave you might be able to comprehend reason so you can someone can tell you

(31:47) something you may be able to understand unlike a dumb animal you nevertheless he says that natural slave has not the good has not got the deliberative part at all so they you can't be thinking of the ideas you can maybe only be receptive of them and so this is again part of the whole um uh greek idea in roman two ancient idea especially of active and passive and we'll talk about this in two weeks when we talk about um greek ideas and roman ideas about homosexuality but it also ultimately ends up figuring into

(32:24) um a whole bunch of things that's the undergirding for patriarchy so one of the issues um is that uh throughout all of this and as i'm doing this entire lecture as i was doing it all the reading for it um one of the other bits of overlap that we aren't getting to is the condition of of women and the status of women often is also sort of intimately connected with this power structure i mean women aren't i mean women are as we see right now in terms of modern times of all the 40 million people enslaved they were 70

(32:58) some percent um and and likewise um uh even women constituted a large percentage of the slave population in antiquity and women who weren't slaves nevertheless were subject to lots of the same sorts of controls that slaves are in in highly hierarchical societies that are undergirded by these these kind of ideas right okay uh so that's the background of slavery let's talk about slavery and religion so so looking at slavery in the hebrew bible so one of the main things that we maybe think about in terms of the hebrew bible is we think of that the fact that in the in the origin story in exodus of the

(33:44) israelites the israelites are essentially coming out of egypt having been enslaved and so in some sense um there is the story of emancipation from slavery so that slavery had been this bad condition for us and now we have been freed and we are our own people because of god's direct intervention nevertheless although that is a central narrative of exodus the hebrew bible does not actually condem or forbid slavery in more general terms so there are some prohibitions about enslaving fellow israelites in levitical

(34:22) law in torah and there are rules for freeing enslaved israelite men anyway especially um the biblical law treats slavery in ways that are actually very very similar to other ancient law codes so things like the code of hammurabi that we saw before would have been an earlier example and this is a more more recent example of of those kind of law codes so let's look at a little bit so from the book of leviticus and torah here the pentateuch the holiness code it here is specifically uh condoning or legalizing slave trade so we read

(34:58) as for the male and female slaves whom you may have it is from the nations around you that you may acquire male and female slaves so gentiles you can go ahead and acquire through war or however you're going to do a purchase you can get male and female slaves you may also acquire them from the aliens residing with you so there are canaanites and midianites and things like that that live in the land with you you can you can make them your slaves and from their families that are with you uh who have been born in your land

(35:31) and they may be your property you may keep them as a possession for your children after you so there you can send them an inheritance uh for them to inherit as property these you may treat as slaves but as for your fellow israelites no one shall rule over the other with harshest okay so um in another portion of the law here in exodus the covenant code it's called um so you're to you are to free your male israelite slaves eventually although there's a loophole that you can get out of it but you can also then keep any children born into slavery permanently under

(36:11) certain circumstances so let's read this one so these are the ordinances that you shall set before them when you buy a male hebrew slave so if you buy an israelite who is already a slave who's a male he shall serve you six years but in the seventh year he shall go out a free person without debt so essentially this is essentially you're not supposed to keep um israelite slave males as slaves um for you know but you get to keep him for six years right so uh if he comes in single so if he's unmarried he shall go out single if he comes in married then his wife shall go

(36:49) out with him if his master gives him a wife you know while he you know when he comes in so he came and signal and you got any and you gave him a wife if you're the master and she bears him sons or daughters the wife and her children shall be her masters and he shall go out alone so those kids are slaves you know to be as in here property inherited according to levitical law here exodus law covenant code okay goes on to say here's the uh way in which if you want to if you could want to sell your israelite daughter into slavery

(37:25) so when a man sells his daughter as a slave she shall not go out as the male slaves do but if she does not please her master who designated her for himself then he shall let her be redeemed he shall have no right to sell her to foreign a foreign people since he has dealt unfairly with her if he doesn't if he designates her for his son he shall deal with her as a daughter you can see what what this kind of slavery is being used for right so this is concubinage right so sexual slavery so if you're using if

(38:03) you're if the man who buys her is using her as a as his own concubine this is what happens if if he designates for the sun it that's a different circumstances so so if he takes another wife to himself he shall not diminish the food clothing or marital rights of the first wife and if he does not do these things for her she should go out without debt without payment of money right so we can see um there's a i mean there's a bunch of different ways for which um this was this thing i was thinking about in terms of this crossover between slavery and just being a woman in antiquity in the middle ages

(38:39) um the custom of marriage although we have this idea of marriage as being you know founded on love and all these kind of things in so many cases it's actually founded on on property rights and controlling patriarchy controlling bloodlines and and all through the middle ages of the burgundian law for example uh specifies uh that when you are you're buying a wife you know you give the money to the the dad and at the payment number one when the on the wedding day and then on the next morning then you pay the the residue the rest that you owe

(39:21) because the burgundian law here is specifying as you're buying a wife uh that you know she has to be a virgin and so you would that's when the payment you tell on the next day right and so i mean that's all the way through to the through the middle ages you know anyway so these are anyway that's marriage okay this though even though okay this is maybe appalling to read this out of the bible um this is actually quite though similar to all of the ancient neighbors so the earliest parts of the hebrew bible the

(39:51) stuff we're reading right here is written during the first temple period of ancient judaism so the sixth and fifth centuries before the common era it's the iron age kingdom of judah prior to the destruction of jerusalem and the destruction of solomon's temple so judah at this time iron age judah like all of his contemporary neighbors practiced slavery and you know as appalling as these verses uh seem today the biblical law treats the institution uh in ways that are very similar to all contemporary ancient legal codes so it's not especially bad

(40:21) it's bad but same bad okay so fast forwarding a little bit what does jesus have to say so jesus is a jew of the second temple period so some 500 600 years later now at this point judea is a province in the roman empire or a client kingdom in certain parts of his life um jesus announced in what he was talking about a heavenly kingdom where the last would be first and the first would be last teaching things like whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant and whoever wishes to be first among you

(41:00) must be your slave just as the son of man which is to say himself jesus came not here not to serve i'm sorry not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many so that's um at least attributed words attributed to jesus that are found in the canonical gospel of matthew so the idea anyway of the kingdom in this particular idea is that everybody's to be slaves or that the slaves anyway are to come first in the heavenly kingdom of heaven right so jesus also tells numerous parables about slaves for example this painting from the

(41:38) renaissances indicate is a depiction of jesus um roman centurion has come to jesus and and asked to have uh his slave boy be healed and so the healing occurs at a distance jesus doesn't actually go to the household or anything like that but the thing that interesting thing that happens here is that the roman custom here of a centurion or whatever having a slave boy i mean is really you know also a indication of a you know a sexual relationship um that jesus doesn't do anything like in saying you must now free that boy or you

(42:14) shouldn't be doing this or anything like that just free the the um it's just part of the background information here as the as the slave boy is freed um so jesus uses this a relationship that exists ubiquitously in the background of roman society of master and slaves is analogy for the relationship between god and humans and so christians then are envisioning themselves as slaves in these analogies slaves to god in this heavenly kingdom a king a just kingdom as opposed to the roman kingdom roman empire jesus himself promoted things like debt

(42:51) forgiveness so there is in for example um uh the lord's prayer forgive us our depths as we forgive those who are indebted to us and so in an agricultural um peasant society like jesus comes from galilee where everybody is essentially a either a slave or a small agricultural worker you get fairly quickly into debt bondage which we talked about as something that is still ongoing where essentially you might own your land but because agriculture has got such fickle backgrounds cycles you can have to borrow money in order to get

(43:34) seed or something like that and a certain point you were in in debt bondage and so having essentially a cancellation of debts is one way of alleviating a particular kind of slavery but it's this debt slavery as opposed to chattel slavery right so it's not the stuff inside the dotted line that we were talking about before so he has nowhere um does he call for an ending of slavery in general so that's not on in within the wheelhouse of anybody really in antiquity hardly anybody is imagines that such a thing is even possible

(44:07) when plato is envisioning utopia uh um you know his republic there are slaves you know in the republic you know when any of these theoretical um even mythological lands uh they they think of the lands of um uh kenya it's called the middle ages cuckoo cloud land and they make that in the um it's ancient it's an ancient greek idea but it's uh also in the lego movie right so in cuckoo cloud land um they're slaves you know in the cloud land because they just can't think of not having slaves you know so so the birds have slaves in that in cuca cloud land

(44:44) but anyway so so jesus is not calling for an end to slavery in general in in the bible so in the canonical gospels jesus heals slaves but he does not free them right in any kind of physical literal sense maybe he's freeing them in a christian sense of some kind oh but it gets worse though so what does paul have to say so writing in the 50s and 60s paul of tarsus is christianity's earliest surviving author he also penned the largest number of texts that made it into the canonical new testament so while paul at his best promoted a community where there is

(45:23) quote neither slave nor a free person because you're all one in christ jesus there's no longer gentile or greek male or female we're all one but anyway especially here in this society of rome it was impossible to think of this neither slave nor free nevertheless he accepted the reality that many members of the christian community were legally slaves owned by other christians and that's something that he talks about a bunch of different places in his in his letters um so one of the um occasions the smallest book in the new testament is a letter to philemon

(45:58) and um uh paul writes to a christian named philemon who owns uh this fugitive slave named uh onisimus uh and so uh onisimus has actually run away from his master filament and has been working with paul as kind of a missionary companion sort of as probably like a freedman kind of servant relationship with paul although he's not actually technically a freedman because he's a fugitive slave so paul writes this letter where he is very circumspectly hinting to uh feel him and hey you really ought to free this guy who's so helpful to me because wouldn't that be really a boon

(46:42) to everybody and we shouldn't we be freeing our fellow christians and all these kind of things and i'm kind of a big deal i'm paul and i could order you to do this but i'm not but i mean wouldn't you want to do it and and then wouldn't it also be nice if we'd wrap this whole thing up in a bow if once you free him you send him back to me so that he can continue to help me out here and that's kind of what the what that letter has so whereas that though that letter exists paul also and paul also counsels christian masters to treat your slaves fairly unjustly but not that you have to

(47:12) free them or anything like that he nevertheless repeatedly instructed there's multiple occasions slaves obey your earthly masters with respect and fear and with the sincerity of heart just as you would obey christ so there's lots of these slaves oh by your master's lines which um christian slave owners throughout history have been able to use to justify um maintaining you know the institution of slavery okay so let's just switching over to pre-islamic arabia again like everywhere else so pre-islamic arabia is the now the late

(47:51) antiquity the early middle ages um uh also like all the rest of the ancient medieval worlds slavery is part of the society right so like jesus muhammad lived in this slave-owning society and he interacts with slaves there's all kinds of different anecdotal examples um through uh both in quran and also the other traditions about muhammad one of the examples is this guy zaid who as a young man was captured by raiders um and this is one of the ways that everybody's enslaved it's not just if your city goes to war and you um get

(48:30) captured as part of a giant soldiering group if you get on a boat and go on a trip pirates will come and attack your boat and everybody on the boat is now a slave you know on your boat likewise if you were ever traveling in antiquity it's just amazingly dangerous to go on a road or anything bandits capture you and now you're a slave and this certainly happened to zai and so um he's got takes gets taken to mecca somebody buys him gives it as a gift to this woman khadijah who when she marries muhammad and as a gift on their wedding

(49:07) as a wedding gift she gives saeed to muhammad and he ultimately then frees aid and adopts him as a son in a ceremony so even though he's actually older than muhammad he adopts some i think he's 10 years older i was reading my mom anyway so it's a it's a it's an example though of um doing a good act in other words not muhammad banishing or abolishing slavery but showing by example uh manumission right that it's a good deed to free free slaves that you have she which is the city that actually says that the which is a reference to the the steep pass of of

(49:56) righteousness or sleep or or of goodness and yeah there we go you beat me to it yeah we can no no this isn't the one that's the wrong one no this is not the one okay i got the wrong one yeah so sure alvarez and it says the and it says word for word it's freeing of the slave is included in the things that you were supposed to do on this path of righteousness is it though sorry i'll read it it's okay we'll get to it yeah exactly no there's a bunch of passages so we'll get to those um so the quran slavery and the quran then

(50:34) so just as the ancient greek philosophers the torah jesus or the christians took slavery as a given the quran likewise regulates rather than abolishes the practice however the quran like paul urges masters to be kind to their slaves and actually recommends their liberation by purchase or a manumission the freeing of slaves is recommended both if you want to get do expiation of your own sins and so there's multiple surahs that are like that or simply just it's a good thing to do and there's multiple actually surahs

(51:06) that do that this is another example uh bilal here who is an ethiopian slave who is emancipated on their instructions from muhammad and then ultimately is becomes one of the first people that do the what's what's called moisty yeah so okay so here's a couple of the verses okay and what will make you comprehend uh what the up road uphill road is so there's two paths there's one that's the ones that's the road less taken you know and then and there's one that's the wide road that's the bad road right or the

(51:43) wrong way um so what's the the uphill road it is setting free of a slave so if you're doing all of these benevolent things and the first one on the list here is setting free a slave giving food giving up the food of i'm sorry give the giving of food in a day of hunger to an orphan having relationship or to the poor man lying in the dust then he is of those who believe and charge one another to show patience and charge one another to show compassion these are the people of the right hand and as for those who

(52:17) disbelieve in our communications they are the people of the left hand of them is fire closed over so there's good things you can do and the first one on the list that he that comes to mind is free slaves right okay and then this is the one that i accidentally i went too far in okay this is a different one so also though so we have been talking about this idea of chattel slavery where we are dehumanizing um uh the people who are enslaved and not considering them to be people but the quran is accepting that people

(52:51) are slaves but they are still people who have beliefs and also should be treated with kindness right so let those who do not find the means to marry keep chaste until allah makes them free from want out of his grace and as for those who ask for a writing from among those whom your right hands possess give them the writing if you know any good in them and give them of the wealth of allah which he has given you and do not compel your slave girls to prostitution when they desire to keep chaste in order to seek the frail good of this world's life and whoever compels them then surely after their compulsion allah is

(53:33) forgiving and merciful so it's a given in slavery we need to just mention all the way backwards and forwards it's a given that when you have slave girls and indeed when you have slave boys um uh they're used for sexual purposes but what um the quran here is arguing is if they don't want to then um then you know don't and we're saying don't do that um and but and if you do you know uh then god's gonna forgive their any that's not their fault and so god is quite merciful to them right okay so um kind of going forward and so

(54:17) we now have not much time and we're going to try to race forward to now to the present as we kind of set those kind of groundwork so when we read in torah when we read in in leviticus and in exodus the torah held out consideration for especially male israelite slaves but to some extent for the female the daughters not really anyway so in other words in terms of when we're looking at slavery there's a lot of idea that people don't like to enslave your own group so enslave the israelites enslave the gentiles likewise the greeks at different times um had you

(54:57) know didn't like you know at least foreigners to own greek slaves although at a certain point when the romans you know it did have a bunch of greek slaves likewise medieval muslims christians and jews attempted to avoid having slaves of their own religion or were counseled against it or some like cases there were rules and laws against it and so there were plenty of um uh in the west church councils that uh forbid owning christians as slaves but that didn't forbid you from owning people who aren't christians as slaves likewise

(55:33) muslims had the same owning muslim slaves but you could have christian slaves jewish slaves but especially then everybody also could all have pagan slaves right so you could have what they would consider at the time heathens or pagans so anybody you could capture who isn't already a christian a muslim or a jew right so in that same way that for example kind of famously that prohibition on usury so christians can't charge interest on loans to other christians according to canon law that was actually obeyed a little bit to some extent in the middle ages which is why

(56:12) jews although jews also can't charge interest on loan to other jews according to uh you know again the the rabbinic interpretation levitical law and everything like that what they could do was loan to each other right and so because jews represented a very small percentage of population throughout the christian world that and because loaning money is so important to just basic economy and everything like that that became a specialized function as you could clone to the other right uh you can't do it within your own community and likewise for example the uh the idea of uh doctrines and things

(56:52) like that of just wars so medieval knights you know their entire function was going around was fighting it was understood to be that as a god-ordained function and yet going around and pillaging other christians was viewed to be um you know that people talked about and they thought theoretically well that doesn't seem very good and so they there was whole bunches of movements throughout the central middle ages called the truce of god the peace of god trying to get knights um not to just go around and plunder other christians all the time um that's not particularly successful

(57:24) but there was lots of church councils that forbid it and the church then had this idea well what if we could get the knights to go attack other people who aren't christians and so the crusades right and so and other kinds of things like that and that was you know anyway somewhat effective but you can see that same um that same kind of thinking well that same kind of thinking is also there for for slavery so um prohibition prohibiting enslaving co-religionists created then an economy for um getting the others

(57:56) right and so um in the islamic world there's a desire to get you can get christian slaves and then also pagan or heathen you know people who aren't christian muslim or jewish slaves and then vice versa as well so through the central uh middle ages in this period of time that is kind of like the dark ages as western europe is on its lowest ebb in terms of demographically and economically and in terms of its power this is like the um this is uh the the the 9th 9th century 10th century 9th and 10th century

(58:37) essentially the europe western europe is kind of down to the northern bits of spain italy france germany you know and not the scandinavian britain right and so the vikings are coming in and raiding uh all the british isles they're settling in normandy uh they are raiding actually all the way around in up this way one one time essentially like the vikings came all the way down and got a monastery this way and they the monks moved here and then they they got them all the way back there the next day essentially nowhere was safe right so that's happening and

(59:12) so those guys are raiding up and so what the what the vikings are doing is they have a less developed economy they have a high they have a high degree of military technology in terms of the boats are are really quite good um but essentially the christians have built all of these monasteries that are filled with treasures and they don't have anybody protecting them in terms of troops and so the the vikings are just whoa this is free stuff everywhere and so they grab all of that and they also bring the monks and the other peasants

(59:42) and everything like back as slaves so slavery is going back to there and they're getting even more slaves from all across slavonia which is to say the slavic territories which is why we even have the word um slave so our word slave in english comes from the fact that so many slavic people were enslaved at this time likewise the raids are coming here throughout the middle here from the hungarians the maguris but in terms of raiding down so the muslim world down here is much more uh economically and otherwise um statewide and everything else politically sophisticated uh at this point and so they actually

(1:00:27) aren't getting they're raiding uh the western europe to get stuff they are specifically waiting to get people usually and so um some of the huge things of this this time period southern italy is just called it's more or less said to be depopulated as uh essentially the boats come and they fill up uh you know they grab all the peasants they just put them all the boat and then they take them back you know and so that's what um people are essentially looking for so you're the rating up or rating down depending on those things and that's more or less now

(1:00:59) this is pretty well the history going all the way back before that but there's a special economy of it here for christians and muslims because you're trying not to enslave your own group right and so this sets up this dynamic that continues on all the way up through um you know into modern times where uh christians and muslims are are are raiding less developed places where where people aren't christian or muslim right and bringing slaves back um i want to make one little example here of an interesting

(1:01:40) another interesting quirk that happened so in the islamic world in the muslim world the practice that muslim rulers had of importing all of these non-muslim slaves from areas like the caucuses of places like georgia and abkhazia and that kind of thing that area between russia and persia from turkmenistan so the central asia and then especially though also that from slavic europe as we've said is a major area of raiding and bringing them back to the central uh heartlands of the islamic world so the levant iraq and egypt

(1:02:21) led to the development of a very specialized institution of elite slaves um who are called mamluk soldiers or i think the word just means property so in arabic but anyway it's this idea that i was mentioning before where if you actually um even though you're a slave if you're actually connected right up with the um the ruler you might have a you know a much higher status than you than just a regular poor person right who's technically free so in this particular case in order to have control uh the leaders

(1:02:57) the sultans who are leaders or emirs who are leaders of these territories in order to control their own populations or have armies to do all this kind of fighting they um imported boys uh foreign boys christians or pagans or heathens to become a powerful nightly cast and so again if you watched game of thrones and you've seen the um the slavers bay they had those slave armies you know this is the same kind of idea where you bring in and trade chain train a um kind of elite military cast who serves as the nucleus of of of

(1:03:36) a cavalry in our army uh and this is especially true and happened in egypt uh where the mamluks actually um ultimately took over took control in 1250 of the country and the leading mamluk became the sultan of egypt and then this um completely foreign so not not egyptian i mean the egyptians have had uh non-egyptians rule them for a whole long time but this was one of those um one of those long periods uh where mamluks continued to they didn't continue to import slave boys into the cast and the leadership you know of the dynasty came from um again that that cast and so that

(1:04:16) they ruled egypt as a major power the most important power in the muslim world for a few centuries then after 1517 when ottoman turkey uh conquered egypt they nevertheless uh continued to be the the local guys on the ground that the that were subject to the to the ottoman sultan so they were there through the 19th century so it's kind of an amazing um history the muslim the ottomans then also went on to have their own system like this called the janissary system where again they created their own kind of elite military of you know getting christian slavic slave boys

(1:05:00) as a as you know into these kind of camps of of soldier slaves and so it's a strange um we think of boy the last thing you'd think you'd want to do is arm a bunch of slaves but it's a different kind of a system at that point okay so this same kind of thing like we had with the map with the muslims and the vikings the same kind of raiding down then continues through the modern era and it goes all around it's not simply africa but obviously into the modern era the huge component of it is the african slave trade which continues in part in smaller numbers in the

(1:05:41) islamic trade as slaves continue to be imported into muslim countries from africa but in much bigger numbers uh in the west in the christian imperial colonial places where slaves were quite famously as we know oh i could have used this thing imported into virginia and the americas you know which set up the stage for the american civil war and uh american racial problems and tensions all the way up to this day but actually vast numbers more into places like brazil and especially the west indies which were economically

(1:06:24) uh for the european colonial empires worth just oodles more so all of north america the colonies as far as as far as the british were concerned in the in the 18th century were worth less than just a couple sugar islands in the west indies because the the revenue that could be gained from the sugar plantations was just staggering but it was also this you see all of this transportation happening of all of these african slaves to those places because the mortality rates was also in those places so especially amazingly high so

(1:07:02) elizabeth yeah two things that i've read one is that um the american revolution was kind of the british gave up north america in order to keep the caribbean yeah uh and the other is that the american north american united states slaver the slaves after a while they didn't have to import them anymore they could dispense with the slave trade yes because they reproduced but they didn't do that in the caribbean and in brazil i'm not sure if this is part well i think this was partly because it was mostly men and not enough women

(1:07:46) but it was also because they just worked them so hard that the women were not fertile yeah and humans we are a weed species we can reproduce in almost any circumstance and if you consider conditions where we cannot reproduce my god yeah yeah and so this is something that um has happened frequently in slave societies so where the society gets very very oppressive so one of the reasons for the fall of the western roman empire is because there was so much slavery that the large roman landowners had that the population just suffered kind

(1:08:32) of an ongoing collapse so by the time the west roman empire fell there were just way less people there than there had been 300 years before that um the same thing was true so when we were talking before about ancient greek slavery the athenians were not breeding slaves they would just sim because they wouldn't let them even they wouldn't let them largely yeah they couldn't marry and all that kind of thing and so in general um uh because it actually isn't too expensive to raise the kids and that kind of thing compared

(1:09:06) to how easy it was to just go and capture a whole bunch of new slaves and that and so anyway so that was um you know part of the thing in terms of depopulation and so uh yeah and so that's you know part of what's happening here so as elizabeth said um the british actually in terms of financial calculus losing north america in terms of overall crown revenues was almost nothing compared to keeping hold of at the time the sugar trade from the from the west indies that calculus was done um specifically the french empire made that

(1:09:40) so if you're familiar with napoleon selling louisiana to the united states you know this vast territory so he you know um you know all you know almost this whole chunk of north america technically the french empire sold it's so that it was so that he could keep hold of haiti because haiti was so you know just amazingly valuable it was just they put so much more into those and they got so much more out in terms of the colonial empire so i do want to conclude you know here in the end we've talked a lot about um you know in the course of this obviously christians and muslims who are engaged

(1:10:23) in the slave trade there were also many christians and muslims who opposed uh this both the slave trade and slavery which led to abolitionism and the eventual abolition and now total abolition of all of this kind of traditional legal chattel slavery obviously not the end to all kinds of human trafficking and new kinds of slavery that we have but one of these specifically these groups that could be singled out for special praise is the quakers um who stood up and were abolitionists very very early on this is just a picture of henry brown who was a slave from virginia who mailed himself

(1:11:02) to the abolitionists in pennsylvania so just a box got in it not nailed it and he was there for 27 hours by wagon steamboat until he arrived in philadelphia they opened it and like he got away you know from from virginia yeah so and so anyway so through the course of that uh um what i want to say i guess is that obviously um all of these uh religions that we've looked at and actually the other religions of the world too emerged in time periods when this institution chattel slavery you know had existed and inherited from time and memorial

(1:11:44) largely you know the you know what what password you know the scientists essentially the natural philosophers of the day that they relied on for understanding the physical world or natural world or how the world worked like aristotle you know had decided and decreed this is just part of the natural order and nothing can be done about it in a lot of sense we think of all of these groups as being let's say new things but in so many ways those were all inheritances too so in that sense i'm not trying to excuse them but it's also a

(1:12:19) way that we can see anyway how this context is interwoven and unfortunately how between the groups are internally fought on the one hand to maintain the practice and to and to exp you know we saw with the map expand it and have exploited on the other hand we also have seen there is also the story of how members of these groups also uh help to abolish it just a couple of completely disparate notes one is about the quakers it took a hundred years for american quakers to reach unity on the subject of slavery from a base basically from 1700 to 1800

(1:13:09) and by that only by that time uh uh were quakers not allowed to own slaves if you were a quaker and you had slaves and you did not free them you were turfed out of your meeting okay and the other i'm not sure how many people realize this how the habits of deference and of fear last is i think exemplified by the fact that barack obama barack obama is most certainly an amer african-american what he is not is the descendant of slaves his children are his wife is but he is not well in terms of the you know this

(1:13:58) evolving context it took the quakers a long time to get to the place where they were to take the forefront and the underground railroad and and and legal the legal changes and abolition um i can say that in our own tradition uh here in community of christ the church that i'm a pastor of said we were founded in 1830 so right in the heart of when this was a a big mess and we were anticipating the end of the world very soon and so people moved off to missouri from mostly from new england they move off to missouri in order to build the new jerusalem in missouri the

(1:14:33) local missourians are are very leery of these northerners um and and we kind of in our newspaper you know published an article about uh you know wanting to baptize free people of color and things like that and the missourians freaked out they destroyed the paper press ultimately they kicked my my ancestors got kicked out of missouri and everything like that and uh um and and we moved to got anyway moved to illinois but and we weren't even abolitionists so in other words that was the kind of thing that can happen even

(1:15:08) when you weren't doing you know what the this bold stand that the the quakers were doing you by just even talking about it you know um uh this was how charged it was um i just wanted to make a point that it's not just religions that benefited or you know sort of also propagated the institution of slavery it's also science and people do not realize just huge how huge of a debt science owes the modern slave trade so a lot of uh you know with the discovery of the americas a lot of the plants and animals that were brought back for cataloging

(1:15:46) to europe were brought on slave ships and the naturalists and the botanists and zoologists that sent out people on expeditions did so knowing that they were slavers wow well that's what part of the story that i'm not as familiar with wow thank you yes what kind of apology or compensation do you think it would be applicable or enough to leave the past behind i'm not talking just about the atrocity against the african slaves we also have here the first nations yes and we have lots of refugees in the world

(1:16:32) from many other conflicts yes but talking just about the african slaves many people benefit from their uh free work so how could we some at some point say let's heal leave the past behind but let's make a proper compensation a proper and genuine apology what do you think would be enough yeah um the probably i guess i don't think that anything's ever enough because the level of um setback is is staggering and it goes on into this day right um i think that the attempt to address this i mean wasn't meant to be political and to say where where my my view um was

(1:17:24) personally um i i would have been very much in favor of the kinds of things that were began to be done in the 1960s and 70s with affirmative action because when you're in a system of inherited privilege and inherited stigma and also disadvantage um there has to actually be you know affirmative act actions on the parts of governments and other institutions in order to address these things um one of the things that we've done in the case of that i think is ongoing and just started in the case of first nations as you're

(1:18:02) talking about is truth and reconciliation and some of the affirmative things that are being done the problem with any any of these people tend to then there tends to be in the majority a a reaction or a political reaction where people start to imagine that there's such a thing as reverse discrimination which isn't a thing or special rights or any type of thing rather what we have to be aware of or i think more cognizant of is that that there is all of this inheritance and i certainly myself have benefited massively from it by being a

(1:18:46) descendant of european americans for 14 generations and so all of these things that we are doing for truth and reconciliation and affirm affirmative action or any other thing need to be we need to further them instead of say enough is enough or anything like that that has to be ongoing i think in my view and then well that's not enough to even say but anyway also just be awareness of it so that's one of the things that we're doing here is to try to get people to understand it this isn't that long ago we saw at the beginning of this the the the legal thing ended in 2007

(1:19:20) right you know that's this is as close as it is you know valerie hasn't come in our question yeah yeah if you could john if you could go back to that map that showed the um modern era of slavery just you know back yeah that one um another area in which in effect slavery existed was in large parts of eastern europe even unto prussia because um a serfdom media had been continued as a as an economic uh uh kind of a condition uh well past in eastern europe well past the time that uh it had dissipated in western europe

(1:20:05) and uh the condition of the surf in eastern europe deteriorated legally to the point where they in effect became slaves they were bought and sold yeah they had they had no freedom and one of the reasons for that is that um as uh or the russian imperium was uh uh moving southward into the black sea area for instance well and elsewhere and pushing back the uh the regime of of the ottomans um they they were forming large um estates yeah that were in effect like like american southern plantations yeah and

(1:20:43) so they needed people to work those estates but but and then and they had as i said serfs but the search tended to run away so they illegally bound them to the estates yeah in effect in in slavery and then i'm thinking of other instances elsewhere in the world like uh in china they had corvae labor which was i mean where um people were bound to work on large uh infrastructure projects like let's say the great wall of china right and that was in effect slavery and under horrible conditions um and then i'm thinking too that when you think of the early parts of the

(1:21:18) industrial revolution and the condition under which people who had moved from rural areas into the big city the growing cities during the early industrial era how could it be said that you know it for most of the day okay and most of the week they were not anything other than slaves i mean we use the term wage slaves yeah but they could hardly go anywhere else hunger and you know the need to survive kept them bound to these horrible jobs where they were working 12 14-hour days absolutely uh you know for

(1:21:48) for a pittance and you know almost six seven days a a week and i'm thinking of you know dickens and the christmas carol right and you know where you know even somebody who was a clerk was still had very precious little freedom to do whatever um and there were worse jobs than that coal mines etc and then two i'm thinking uh in the present day uh there's a huge amount of slavery right now uh uh you know like the chocolate plantations in africa um sex trafficking i mean there are slaves being held in toronto right now even as i speak yes you know sex

(1:22:25) trafficked women people uh brought in to do sweat sweatshop work who have whose passports are taken away and they you know they don't go anywhere yep so it's it's i mean i mean absolutely so yeah this is i mean we talked to at the very beginning we talked about all of the other you know like how vast this topic of slavery like things are yeah um and because the topic is so enormous and obviously uh we don't want to only say that none of that has we this is ongoing and horrible right yeah um uh it was only just in the course of because the topic is so vast that we decided to

(1:23:00) limit the particular presentation to chattel slavery but i in no way want to have come away here with the message oh isn't it nice that we solved this problem yeah this is not you know this problem is not solved there are ongoing um conditions with everything that you've already talked about as we've also talked about prison uh labor other kinds of forced labor and again the um the problem of ongoing inheritance that you see you're talking about in other words um people who that some groups have profited in

(1:23:33) through inheritance by the labor of other people who have been disinherited because their labor you know uh was was they were in you know their descendants of slaves so yep tomorrow's things i think children that were brought over as orphans from britain etc yeah were in effect left in the condition of slavery like on farms and also i think people who were indebted yeah you know for been brought over and in fact were slaves yep yep valerie reminds me of this movie that this documentary film that we watched with gene at eastmaster united church i don't know gene if you remember

(1:24:12) the name of this this movie yeah jean runs a where's gene there he is yeah uh gene runs a uh cinema yeah you can explain it but we went and watched one about um essentially slave station agricultural workers or you know oh yes in ontario well very close to home here the film called um migrant dreams which we showed a few months ago and uh and uh it's uh makes quite a case for many of the situations you're saying that we we bring people from countries like uh in in mexico and southern southern american countries central american countries to uh the niagara peninsula primarily and uh

(1:24:55) take away their passports keep them in warehousing kind of situations and uh they are uh in effect slaves yeah to this thing yeah quick commercial comment here the film is made by minsok lee who is anybody who lives in toronto down forth areas i do will be your federal ndp candidate in the coming election so uh vote minsk cool i mean and um i don't know so so anyway there's lots of this that we you know still can have as a you know topics for future discussion um one that i'm reminded of that you were talking about even as a so when i

(1:25:35) was a graduate student at the university of michigan there was a crazy practices that the university had in terms of bringing especially south asian indian um graduate students in the math and sciences department and if they they had to pay their own way over and all these kind of things but they didn't have their their teaching appointments and all their funding and things like that guaranteed until after the university could decide whether it they um people could unders you know americans could understand their english well enough and

(1:26:03) so then they would cancel it and the person would be left with all this debt uh and have to go and have to go home you know where the the the dollar exchange and everything like that you know they put so much to be able to go to be in order to get paid pittance uh as an international uh ta anyway but with the opportunity potentially if you if you did go through all the different hurdles you know of winning you know doing well but anyway so i remember so anyway as a graduate student we all went on strike in order to protest those

(1:26:31) conditions for what the university was doing yeah i i i my recollection of it is is that we they changed the policy a little so any as a result of our strike so june had a question or comment yeah i just wanted to comment on modern day modern day slavery um so in the late 90s in the early 2000s i worked in strip clubs in toronto and the strip club owners had petitioned the government saying there weren't enough like canadian born women who are willing to do this job so they opened it up as a needed profession so that actually opened it up for people to come in and bring girls in and hold

(1:27:14) their pros their passports oh my goodness so it actually kind of like in a way the government was in a way encouraging this kind of behavior and i remember working in a club where one day it was like all these romanian girls came in and they're like oh yeah no we're here but we have to earn so much and then we're free wow yeah and that happened all across strip clubs all across all across toronto at that time so there was like an influx of foreign workers and a lot of them were on this system where it was like they had to pay back

(1:27:43) whatever whatever amount they paid to come over yeah and they had to dance until they were through that and some some people actually did it like they paid it out and like or some of them are still in toronto but that's kind of like the whole system changed because because they'd lobbied the government to make it a needed profession wow well thank you government well we'll go ahead and conclude but oh unless unless you wanted to say something urgent no you just grabbed the microphone back okay very good well anyway so there's a lot like i say lots

(1:28:14) more we can discuss and we can discuss more online offline over snacks and so we'll say that's it for now and thank you well thank everybody who joined us online and i'll let landra do the sign-offs oh there's one question you guys can start getting snacks monica taylor do we know the earliest expression of the idea of total slavery as a moral evil chattel slavery as a as a moral evil i mean i don't know about in terms of it being and we've had the earliest expression of it where it's intrinsically so um there is okay so so in the same way that um

(1:29:08) i don't know outside of outside of the west but um more familiar with ancient greece but in the same way that um uh there are ancient greek philosophers that are on both sides of absolutely every question you know so on the one hand uh uh you know is there immortality or you know all these different questions you know uh is there such there is somebody who's opposing plato and aristotle right for everything well there's also somebody who uh was an ancient greek thinker who who wasn't as followed afterwards who definitely um came out against slavery as being

(1:29:46) completely unnatural so so that is also one of the contemporary thinkers so even though that wasn't the majority or mainstream philosophical thought it was definitely as philosophers were on all sides of different questions and thinking about different things there was a proposal anyway that one philosopher had and i'm not remembering the particular philosopher's name um that did come out in opposition to slavery so i that may be one of the earliest examples of that that i'm aware of thank you all right and now we're snacks

(1:30:18) thanks again [Music] you