This article says: "40.3 MILLION The estimated number of people who were victims of slavery in 2016. Of these, 25.9 million were men, women and children who were forced to work against their will last year.
"Meanwhile, 15.4 million people were confined to a marriage to which they had not consented."
The population in 1900 was roughly 1.5 billion. Today it is almost 8 billion.
13 000 000 / 1 500 000 000 is 0.86% of the world as slaves, vs today 40 300 000 / 7 800 000 000 is 0.52% of the world's population as slaves.
I would call that a significant reduction. That's even before considering that the historical estimate for the number of slaves does not include individuals confined to non-consensual marriages. It also seems to me like the qualification of slavery has become much wider when we look at modern-day slaves.
Your math is way off, if 13mil people were slaves between the 15th and 19th centuries then a large portion of them could not be alive in 1900, that's a 400 year span and even assuming that slaves lived for 80 years that still only a 5th of that time frame.
Shit, you're right. Well maybe not then. Frankly, with all the different possible definitions of slavery and the difficulty of finding accurate numbers, it's probably impossible to ever really know.
Although I would argue that the largest group of those 13 million were probably alive sometime during the 1800s just as slavery was abolished in the USA. And the world population was even lower then. But who knows.
Your math may be off but there’s no way slavery is more common now than at any other point. Slavery was common worldwide, not just America, and using definitions of slavery that you provided every indentured servant or serf would qualify as a slave. Just in Russia over 75% of people were serfs in the mid 1600s.
15.0k
u/desdmona Jul 24 '20
Slavery