Slavery, Then and Now

One of the most interesting things about writing about a time when people viewed slavery as normal is that I didn’t know the value of human property based on age and experience. For instance, children and young women often worked in the house, young teenage boys often worked in the fields in an agrarian society or in a factory in a mechanized setting. With the Mamluks of Egypt, the sultan, who represented the government, would buy teenagers to become slave-warriors. Slaves were property to be bought and sold for profit. Which meant, to make money was to buy low and sell high. Buy children, have them work until they reach an age where selling them made a profit. Slave-brokers used newspaper advertisements in the early 1800s to get the word out about humans for sale. Free labor made Nazi Germany strong, and it helped Adolph Hitler pave the way to World War 2. But he wasn’t alone in using slaves to build nations. Many dynasties employed slaves throughout the world for eons. Even today, China, some reports say, uses up to a million enslaved Uyghurs to make goods for big Western companies without compensation or freedom of choice, religion, or speech. Those that resist disappear. How our biggest corporations have made shoes, clothing, phone parts, and many other goods with contracts with China with no real or sustained outcry about the Uyghurs is telling.

           One last thought. When I wrote The Woman of a Thousand Veils and am now working on the sequel to the series, a new book entitled, Topaz Spotted Blue, slavery is one of the most important subjects I explore for the reader. I try to present it as it really was in the 13th century. Although horrible, despicable, I try not to show my bias. Entire societies throughout history have found ways to look the other way. It didn’t make them evil. Perhaps ignorant or compliant, but not worthy of condemnation. For to condemn is to forget what we wear on our feet or the phone we use made in part by slaves. Still, it’s vital to show the despair someone must have experienced then, as I expect now when bonded to another or a nation-state. Despair like no other.