How would you define slavery?

In one sense, slavery is very easy to define.  In another way, it is much more difficult.  Let us examine how this is so.

It is very easy to define slavery in broad terms.  We can simply say that slavery is when a person is owned by another and is not free to come and go as they please.  We can say that the slave is bound to obey the owner, no matter what the owner wants them to do.  In general, this means that the slave has to work for the person who owns them.  Slavery, then, exists when Person A owns Person B so Person B has to do whatever Person A says.

Outside of this broad definition, however, things get more complicated.  I will set out three questions about slavery that you will need to answer for yourself when you write your own definition.  First, is a person a slave if slavery is not legal in the country where they live?  If I buy you illegally and control you by my own force, are you still a slave even though the laws do not acknowledge that you are my property?  Second, is a person a slave if they are completely controlled by someone who does not technically own them?  For example, if a person is smuggled into Canada by human traffickers and then forced to work for the traffickers to pay off a debt, is that person a slave?  What if the traffickers keep tacking on charges to the debt, thus forcing the person to work for them for a very long time?  Finally, do you have to be enslaved for your entire life in order to be a slave?  What if you are like an indentured servant in the old days, where someone owns you, but only for a given number of years?  Are you a slave during the time that they own you or are you something else because there is a time when you will be free?

When you write your own definition of slavery, you will have to fill in these details.  Clearly, slavery is when one person is owned by and must obey another person.  However, you will have to decide how to answer the other three questions I set out in order to have a really comprehensive definition of slavery.

What is slavery?

Slavery is an economic/legal status in which a person is seen as the property of another person.  The slave is typically required to work for the person who owns them.  Slavery can take many forms.

The thing that is common to all forms of slavery is that the slaves are not free.  They are treated as property and therefore can be bought or sold.  Because they are property, they do not have any of the rights that they should expect to have because of their status as human beings.  The point of enslaving them is to require them to work for their owners.

Slavery was very common throughout much of history.  We know, for example, that the Greeks and the Romans had slaves.  Their slaves were typically people who had been captured in battle, but they also bought slaves from slave traders.

Beginning in the 1500s, slavery came to the Americas.  Slavery in the New World soon came to be based on race.  People were brought from Africa against their will and sold into slavery in the Americas.  Slavery came to be associated with black people in a way that had not previously been the case.

Today, slavery still exists, though it is typically illegal.  People are often coerced into slavery by others who take advantage of their poor economic circumstances.