Slavery in Historical Perspective: Why Singling Out the United States Misses the Bigger Picture

Who Is Actually Leading the Accusation?
 

Before delving into history, it is worth noting a point that much of the public debate tends to overlook: many of the states and actors most eager to frame slavery as a uniquely “American sin” are themselves countries that not only have a long history of slavery, but also maintain systems of modern forced labor on a massive scale today, in the 21st century.

According to the Global Slavery Index by Walk Free, Russia ranks among the world's top ten countries in terms of the prevalence of modern slavery, with approximately 1.9 million people living in conditions classified as modern slavery. China has the second-largest number of people in this category after India, with approximately 5.8 million people, including well-documented cases of forced labor involving Uyghurs in detention and labor facilities in Xinjiang. And Qatar, which itself maintained formal slavery until 1952, continues to operate the kafala system — a system in which employers have historically exercised extensive control over the fate of millions of migrant workers, a system that human-rights organizations and UN bodies have compared to forms of modern slavery.

In other words, much of the international criticism comes from countries where modern forms of exploitation and forced labor are not merely historical memories, but contemporary realities.

This does not mean that criticism of America's past is illegitimate. But it should raise a question: Why does the United States — a country that abolished slavery in 1865 and fought a bloody civil war in which slavery was ultimately destroyed — repeatedly become the almost exclusive focus of the discussion, while countries where slavery or slavery-like systems still exist today receive comparatively little attention?

The answer, more often than not, has less to do with history and more to do with contemporary political agendas aimed at undermining the legitimacy of the United States and the West.

Slavery Was a Universal Phenomenon, Not a Western Invention

Slavery accompanied almost every major human civilization, long before Europeans arrived in the Americas and long afterward:

• Indigenous tribes in North America enslaved one another even before the arrival of Europeans. War captives were turned into slaves among peoples such as the Creek, Cherokee, and Iroquois, and some Native American groups later went on to own African slaves themselves.

• African kingdoms such as Dahomey, Ashanti, and Oyo systematically captured and sold prisoners from rival tribes. This infrastructure was essential to the transatlantic slave trade on the scale at which it existed — without local African intermediaries, individual Europeans would not have been able to penetrate the interior and capture slaves on their own.

• The Arab-Muslim slave trade operated alongside the Atlantic slave trade and continued for considerably longer — through the enslavement of Africans in East Africa and across the Sahara, as well as the capture of white Europeans by Barbary pirates in North Africa, who carried hundreds of thousands of people from Italy, Spain, France, and even Iceland into slavery over the course of centuries.

• The Ottoman Empire maintained the devshirme system, in which Christian boys from the Balkans were forcibly taken and trained for state service and military roles, including as Janissaries.

• In Japan, Korea, and Asia more broadly, various forms of slavery and forced labor existed throughout history. One of the best-known episodes of forced labor involving Koreans belongs primarily to the 20th century, during Japan's colonial occupation of Korea.

The conclusion is straightforward: slavery was not a “Western invention.” It was an almost universal human practice that existed across the world, in most cases long before and independently of modern Western racial ideology.

The United States Was Not the Primary Destination of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

A fact that is almost entirely absent from much of the public discussion is that only about 5 percent of all enslaved Africans transported through the transatlantic slave trade were brought to the territory that would eventually become the United States — approximately 300,000 to 400,000 people.

By contrast, Brazil received between 4 and 5 million enslaved Africans — roughly ten times the number transported to North America — making it the largest destination in the Western Hemisphere. The Caribbean, including Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba, also received vastly larger numbers than the United States.

Brazil also formally maintained slavery until 1888, more than two decades after the United States had abolished it.

The Northern United States Began Abolishing Slavery Before the Union Was Fully Established

The Northern states did not suddenly “discover morality” on the eve of the Civil War.

Pennsylvania enacted a gradual abolition law as early as 1780, while Massachusetts effectively abolished slavery through judicial decisions in 1783 — less than a decade after the Declaration of Independence. By the beginning of the 19th century, most Northern states had enacted laws providing for gradual or immediate abolition.

The conflict between North and South over slavery was therefore not something that emerged in 1861. It had accompanied the American republic almost from its founding.

The Civil War: The Conflict Was About Slavery, Even Though the Initial Official Framing Was Different

Here, two points need to be distinguished because both are true.

Slavery was at the root of the conflict. This is not merely a later interpretation by historians — it is explicitly stated in the secession documents themselves.

States such as South Carolina, Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia explicitly cited the protection of slavery as a central reason for leaving the Union in their official declarations of secession in 1860–1861. They viewed the election of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories, as a direct threat to the institution.

Compromise proposals that would have protected existing slavery and even expanded its constitutional protection, such as the Crittenden Compromise, were rejected by Lincoln and the Republicans. The Republican leadership was therefore unwilling to surrender on the question of slavery's expansion in order to preserve the political status quo.

At the same time, the immediate official political objective of the federal government after the war began was preservation of the Union, not the immediate abolition of slavery.

The reason was partly political and strategic: Lincoln wanted to preserve the loyalty of border states such as Kentucky and Maryland, which were slave states that had remained in the Union, and did not want to push them into the Confederacy.

But as the war progressed, emancipation became an increasingly central and explicit war aim. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, issued in January 1863, formally transformed the war by declaring freedom for enslaved people in the areas under Confederate control.

More than 360,000 Union soldiers died during the war, including African-American soldiers who had escaped slavery or were otherwise eligible to serve in the Union Army. Ultimately, slavery was abolished throughout the United States through the 13th Amendment in 1865.

Few countries in history have paid such an enormous price in blood to destroy the institution of slavery within their own borders.

The West Was a Pioneer of Abolition — Not the Sole Party on Trial

Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery throughout most of its empire in 1833. It then deployed the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron throughout the 19th century to intercept slave ships and liberate enslaved people — an operation that cost Britain enormous resources and human lives.

The United States banned the importation of slaves in 1808, as soon as the Constitution permitted, and abolished slavery itself in 1865.

Elsewhere, however, slavery continued for many decades longer, in some cases almost until the present day:

• In Zanzibar and East Africa, the Arab slave trade continued long after the West had begun actively opposing it. In 1873, under direct British pressure, Sultan Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar signed a decree banning the slave market in Zanzibar.

• Tippu Tip (Hamad bin Muhammad al-Murjebi), a Black Muslim, was not a ruler who led the abolition of slavery. Quite the opposite: he was one of the largest, wealthiest, and most notorious slave traders in East Africa. He personally owned thousands of slaves and continued operating decades after the British began imposing restrictions on the trade.

• Saudi Arabia formally abolished slavery only in 1962.

• Qatar abolished formal slavery in 1952, under British pressure, but, as noted above, the kafala system that replaced it has been widely criticized for creating conditions of extreme dependency and exploitation among migrant workers.

• Mauritania was the last country in the world to formally abolish slavery, doing so only in 1981, and did not criminalize the practice until 2007. Human-rights organizations continue to report the existence of hereditary slavery and slavery-like practices there.

The historical record therefore shows that the West did not invent slavery. Rather, Western societies became central to the development of the modern abolitionist movement and ultimately used political, economic, and military power to suppress the slave trade internationally, even while slavery continued elsewhere for decades or centuries.

Conclusion

The history of slavery is not a story of one civilization confronting the rest of the world. It is the story of a tragic human institution that existed across virtually every region and civilization.

Choosing to blame the United States or the West exclusively — while ignoring the scale and longevity of slavery in other societies, ignoring the fact that Western powers became the leading force behind the international abolitionist movement at enormous human and financial cost, and ignoring the fact that some of the loudest voices in contemporary criticism come from states where modern forms of forced labor and exploitation still exist — does not constitute a balanced historical analysis.

Too often, it serves a contemporary political agenda aimed at creating divisions within Western societies rather than encouraging an honest examination of the historical record.