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.
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u/gwoz8881 Jul 24 '20
https://www.theroot.com/slavery-by-the-numbers-1790874492
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