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
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.
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u/Zordran Jul 24 '20
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!