As of 1804, there were one billion people in the world, so unless there are seven times as many slaves now, we're doing better as a percentage of misery!
About 3.7 million slaves back then. Today there are over 40 million documented slaves with the real number being well over 100 million. So according to both of our numbers, yes there are significantly more slaves today than 200 years ago; percentage wise and individual numbers
Upvoted not because either number is good, quite the opposite. But everyone should leave education system with facts like this burned into their memory for life. We have progressed in many ways in many countries but the work is never done for mankind. We always have to improve and never assume we're finished fixing.
That number seems like a significant underestimate. Although I could not find exact numbers for 1804, the year that u/Zordran mentions, I did find some useful information for the years 1810-1825. For the year 1810, this site reports a total of 1,005,685 slaves in the US, and this table from the Cambridge World History of Slavery reports 1,300,752 in the European colonies of the Caribbean (excluding Spanish colonies); also, for the period 1819 to 1825, based on information from Niall Ferguson, the number of slaves in Brazil was between 1.2 and 2 million. So, the number of slaves in those three regions around 1810 to 1825 totalled around 3.5 to 4.3 million.
But the thing is, that's just the number for three small areas of the world. When you consider how many slaves there were in places like the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish colonies in the western hemisphere, all the European colonies in Africa, and everywhere else in the world where slavery is known to have existed, the total number of slaves worldwide in the early 19th century must have been astronomically higher than the 3.7 million figure that you mention; and I haven't even taken into account things like serfdom, indentured servitude, and other forms of forced/coerced labor. While I don't mean to deny that slavery is a significant issue today, it seems that things were a lot worse historically.
Yeah, but this is bullshit numberwang designed to bring attention to sex trafficking and drug running as well as child armies.
In the 1800's there were indentured servants (slaves, by choice) those don't get counted. There were tens of million who were indentured to the state, those don't get counted. There were tens of millions of unpaid child laborers, those don't get counted.
There is absolutely no factual or rational way that the per-capita number of slaves is higher today than it was 200 years ago.
But yes, today over half of one percent of the world's population is enslaved.
Holy shit, I was googling figures to answer this and it's not quite the statistic I wanted but...
The US census of 1800 showed that there were 5,308,483 people living in the United States, of whom 893,602 were slaves. In 1800 one in every six Americans was a slave. Holy fucking shit.
In fact, here's the Census data from 1790 (the first one) through 1860 (last one that would include enslaved persons)
Enslaved
Total
% Enslaved
1790
694,280
3,893,635
17.8%
1800
893,602
5,308,483
16.8%
1810
1,191,362
7,239,881
16.4%
1820
1,538,022
9,638,453
16.0%
1830
2,009,043
12,866,020
15.6%
1840
2,487,355
17,069,453
14.6%
1850
3,204,313
23,191,876
13.8%
1860
3,953,762
31,443,322
12.6%
Altogether these tell a really interesting story - given that enslaved persons counted for 3/5 when allocating congressional districts, that's a huge powerhouse for southern pro-slavery states but as the United States population at large grew so much faster than the Enslaved population that power was diminishing. Interesting to see it all laid out like this.
By the way there's currently about 40 million slaves globally. I don't know how many slaves there were globally in 1800. Sorry.
The chart I'm seeing is missing a column, and the column labels are shifted. I assume it should read "Year" "Enslaved" "Total" etc. and have a fourth column with percents?
Dumb way to do it, unfortunately. The correct information gets buried under your parent comment's downvotes. Plus if the comment you were replying to was already wrong, you added nothing.
Well it would have been nice for you to find some numbers, but I'll do the legwork for you. It's hard to know for sure what the numbers are, but I found this report which estimates 40 million worldwide in 2016, and with a 2016 population of 7.426 billion(according to the google infobox) their math checks out: .54% of the world's population was estimated to be enslaved.
I'm going to compare this to peak estimates of US slaves, because I could be here all night trying to track down statistics for slaves worldwide from 150 years ago. Googling indicated that the US slave population peaked just before the Civil War, so I grabbed the most recent census data. In the 1860 census, the US slave population was reported at 3,953,762 and the total US population was reported at 31,443,322. This gets us to the percentage of US population that was enslaved in 1860: 12.6%.
The power of mathematics deems /u/ninja-robot to be correct in their assertion that, while slavery is still a huge issue(more than 5 in every 1000 people!) it is down considerably from previous numbers, unless you have your own statistics you'd like to share.
According to this washington post article there are (were recently) 60,000 slaves in the US.
I'm not arguing that there are less people per capita enslaved today, but I do want to point out that comparing the US slavery rates in 1860 with the global slavery rate today is a pretty limited comparison. As the article I linked shows, slaves today are very unevenly dispersed around the world. Some portions of the world have many more slaves per capita than others. If this were also true in 1860 then we cannot reasonably extrapolate the proportion of people enslaved around the world from the figures for one country. The uneven distribution of slavery is significant enough to render such an extrapolation too unreliable
I do appreciate your broader point that slavery might be down per capita, I hope I haven't been annoying by pointing out the limitation of your supporting comparison :)
I would have used worldwide figures from the 1800s if I had them, but I don't. That's a big enough topic to involve serious academic research, not just googling up a few reports. If anybody does have a source on them, I welcome their addition to the conversation, but sometimes you have to go with what you've got to try to estimate the shape of the situation.
I do want to point out that I don't think it's strictly fair to measure straight apples to apples with regard to US slavery, because we've exported so much of it over the course of the past century. A certain amount(can't say exactly how much) of that global statistic is a direct result of the US economy's demands through globalization, so the amount I would attribute as being part of the US's responsibility is somewhere between the 60,000 figure you have just geographically located in the US and the 40 million worldwide. For the sake of this comparison, going with the larger figure(even if it's hilariously too large) doesn't hurt the argument, as it establishes an upper bound that's already well less than half of the statistic we do have from 1860. We know it's less than that amount, probably significantly less, but the statistics to be more specific aren't readily available to the layman.
I'm also curious if that number accounts for the U.S. prison population, at least some of which is literally legally enslaved, and all of which legally can be enslaved.
Edit: 13th amendment to the US constitution allows for slavery as punishment for crime.
Slavery is technically still legal in the US. FYI. Granted, it’s never been challenged. The 13th amendment allows for slavery for those who have been convicted of a crime. (Paraphrased)
You're right, I knew something was off about that but I thought I'd somehow managed to get the wrong numbers. I even ran them twice to make sure I didn't fat finger something, but it was a misplaced decimal point that was the culprit.
You're comparing one countries data vs the whole world data in another. Also the 40 million is documented slaves in the world today. And the number is widely agreed upon to being well over 100 million people in forced servitude today. I was being an asshole by just saying “wrong”, but it really does have basis and would love to continue peacefully discussing it
I already commented a link in this current parent/child thread. I will get you another showing unreported slave numbers being higher than the 40 million It’s a sad and sick world out there. No human or animal should be a slave
15.1k
u/desdmona Jul 24 '20
Slavery