Slaves sold

Sugar soon became the cornerstone of the infamous triangular trade. New England sailing ships picked up molasses, a by-product of sugar refining, from the West Indies. Then they took it to New England to make rum, sold the rum to slave traders in Africa, and transported slaves back to the... 

Africa was no stranger to the slave trade. Human bondage is one of man s earliest atrocities. It was commonplace throughout the ancient and early medieval worlds. But until the coming of the Europeans, slavery had existed on only a relatively small scale. Once the people of Western Europe "discovered" the continent, however, slavery became big business. Approximately ten million natives were taken from their homes between the middle of the fifteenth to the end of the nineteenth century to destinations sometimes halfway around the world, to be dispassionately sold like chattel. 

The Christian Bible is chock-full of fragrance descriptions, from the early days of the tribes of Israel, when Joseph s brothers sold him as a slave ... 

Two thousand years ago, in a distant land, a man who believed in dreams was thrown into a dungeon and then sold as a slave," the old man said, now in the dialect the boy understood. "Our merchants bought that man, and brought him to Egypt. All of us know that whoever believes in dreams also knows how to interpret them."... 

The expression not worth his salt had its origin in the ancient Creek slave trade, in which people were bought and sold for measures of salt. 

See Ivan Watson, Treated like cattle, Yazidi women sold, raped, enslaved by IS, CNN (30 October 2014) http //edition.cnn.eom/2014/10/30/world/meast/isis-female-slaves/index.html (accessed 1 July 2015). 

And yet Jefferson was himself lord and master of some two hundred black slaves whom he bought and sold. He knew that slavery was an evil institution but he remained immersed in and indebted to the very institution whose evils he so eloquently condemned. The ardent champion of republican liberty denied that liberty to his human property. What to modern eyes looks like a rank contradiction between Jefferson s political theory and his personal practice was not universally so regarded in Jefferson s day. Many an ante helium Southern writer noted that just as the republics of antiquity -Athens, Sparta, Rome - had relied on the labor of slaves, so would and should the American Republic. The right to liberty belongs to citizens only to deny that liberty to non-citizens women, resident aliens, and slaves is therefore quite consistent with republican principles and no violation of anyone s rights. ... 

The high seas offered no refuge, however. Moslem pirates attacked the boat, killed the governess, and then sold Guerrino, still in swaddling clothes, as a slave in the Byzantine port of Thessalonike. Epido-nios, the man who purchased Guerrino, lived in Constantinople and soon took the baby to the Byzantine capital where the kindly man raised him as his own son. ... 

Although it is perhaps misleading to try to compare present-day prices for lead with those prevailing even 200 years ago, let alone in the ancient world, it can be an instructive exercise in some respects. The fragmentary evidence that is available certainly seems to support the view that lead prices are much lower now then ever before. In Greece in the 4th century BC, for instance, a talent (30-35 kg) of lead sold for five drachmae, and thus a ton would have been worth about 150 drachmae, roughly equivalent to the market value of a mining slave. ... 

Possidius, Vita Augustini 24, states that A. used church funds, even ordering sacred vessels to be sold on occasion, so that slaves could be re-pur-chased and legally manumitted. 

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