| Summary: | Slavery and similar forms of unfreedom were normative everywhere in the world during these centuries, including Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Indigenous American societies from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and much of Mediterranean and eastern Europe. In most of Asia and Africa, society was stratified into more diffuse “spectrums of unfreedom,” a system that created various levels of dependency, some of which were analogous to Western and Islamic notions of slavery. In the Christian and Islamic worlds, the opposition of “slave” and “free” was often more stark, though in the Islamic world slaves might have higher-status roles than was common in Christendom. In the Christian world, the status of “serfdom” likewise blurred the line between freedom and extreme dependency, especially in the East, where serfdom grew stronger during this period. The only part of the world that did not ostensibly tolerate institutionalized slavery during the centuries under question were those parts of western Europe that developed a “free soil” principle by the later Middle Ages. In that territory, slavery, serfdom, and labor obligations were crowded out by wage labor, and slavery was positively proscribed by the sixteenth century, with some exceptions. The (trans-)Atlantic slave trade remained small-scale during these centuries, picking up only at the very end of our period, while the trans-Saharan trade was already ancient by 1350, and orders of magnitude more extensive. North African and Egyptian merchants acted as middlemen for sub-Saharan African slaves, selling them to the Ottomans and other Middle Easterners in increasing numbers throughout our period. Before 1453, Black Sea markets selling Caucasian and Asiatic “pagans” provided the major source of slaves for Italian middlemen, who passed them on to Italian, Levantine, and Egyptian buyers. With the Balkans, the Black Sea region remained a significant source of high-value slaves for the Ottomans. After 1440, Iberians sailed directly to West African slave markets. After 1500, ...
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