Indenture people that where basically slaves but for an temporary amount of time? Also enuchs and such?
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I think he means serfs or debt peons. People who live on small farms who owe debts to the land owner that they can't really pay back and have no legal way to clear.
I don't know of something like indentured servitude existed in China. But debt peonage certainly did
That's a bold claim, considering that the Huns, Avars and Golden Horde all presided over a flourishing trade with slaves in their respective territory.
And the Persians hadn't been "steppe nomads" since they left the steppe a few generations before Kurush.
While something like "steppe nomads weren't too fond of slavery" is a gross oversimplification, there is the point that the steppes tended to be more sources/transit points for slaves rather than destination.
Alcidamas of Elaea in the 4th century BC expressed the sentiment, "God has left all men free; nature has made no man a slave". He was a teacher and orator in Athens at the time. Musonius Rufus was a Roman philosopher, around the time of Augustus, and his Discourses sometimes suggest he was opposed to slavery (though not explicitly as that was sometimes treated as a criminal offence due to inciting a slave revolt).
never get high on your own supply
edit: also there's not really any major benefits that slaves bring with nomadic cultures
And most likely out of practical considerations, rather than any kind of value judgement towards "the concept of slavery" as was previously claimed.
The previous claim was akin to argueing that because you can't really use slaves on a sailing boat in the Atlantic, the Atlantic slave trade wasn't really significant.
Yes - it was practical issues that tended to discourage steppe nomads from keeping large numbers of slaves - not religious, moral or ethical ones.
it's like nukes and imperial japan, if they had the means to then the entire american east-coast would have lit up like fireworks
They still kept large numbers of slaves, they just used them as trade goods primarily, rather than exclusively as forced labor.
Yes - that seems accurate to me. Indeed, steppe nomads would often be slavers - raiding one area to get slaves, then selling them to another area. They just didn't keep them for their own use very often.
Even well after Europe had begun phasing out slavery by forbidding the employment of Christians as slaves, there were still incidents of Europeans (including the Church hierarchy during the Reformation) selling other Christians to Moslem slavers. Keeping non-Christian slaves was then steadily phased out because NOT converting them to Christianity was deemed to be un-Christian. It wasn't until the late 1700s and early 1800s that most European countries totally outlawed slavery. The USA, being primarily an agricultural society at that point, lagged at least half a century behind, largely because it was still economically beneficial there, in South America, and in the Caribbean long after it had ceased to be profitable in Europe.
To put things in perspective, there are still quite a few countries, including several fairly technologically advanced countries in the Middle East, where slavery is technically legal. As a leading government official in one such country put it, they don't outlaw it because it's "not a problem". He didn't say that it doesn't happen there....
To put things in perspective, there are still quite a few countries, including several fairly technologically advanced countries in the Middle East, where slavery is technically legal. As a leading government official in one such country put it, they don't outlaw it because it's "not a problem". He didn't say that it doesn't happen there....
Debt peonage was extensive to the point of being very common in much of China in the medieval and early modern period. It generally worked by using loans during famines combined with relatively high levels of taxation which meant that many peasants ended up owing far more than they could ever repay. They then end up with the local nobility owning their land and working it as tenant farmers. The remaining debt could then be used to tie the peasant to the land - any attempt to move could be construed as an attempt to flee their debt.
Various governments attempted to regulate the debts of the peasants, seeing it as undermining the Confucian ideal, with mixed results. In general, however, the trend was towards greater control by the large landowners. The effect of this was reduce much of the rural population to conditions that are hard to differentiate from serfdom in a practical sense.
All of this goes to the complexity of slavery as an institution. Rural slaves in a peasant society may live lives that are virtually indistinguishable from the 'free' peasants around them and that are often better than that of the landless tenant farmers. In such a situation most people will view slavery as a part of the society and not a moral issue. Particularly in any society where differences are rigid and you are born into your role, slavery is just another stratum of society.
In contrast, the kind of exploitative slavery typified by Caribbean sugar farming or a Roman quarry generally only survives as in institution where the slaves are separate from the normal population and/or the slaves are seen as an other. In much of the ancient world the long term survival of mine and quarry slaves was very low, so effectively all the slaves were recently taken or sold as low value (e.g. troublemakers). As such they are seen as either the enemy (recently captured) or deserving of their fate (troublemakers).