文档介绍：Slave Trades
The trading of slaves had its origins when agri- and things connected with real property) in eastern
cultural societies increasingly needed to defend Asia.
lands and borders; it proliferated as growing Empires transmitted both slavery and slave trades.
empires expanded their own. Transatlantic The Mediterranean world witnessed upsurges in
slave trade, with its infamous Middle Passage, the number of people in bondage with the imperial
ensnared roughly 11 million people between expansion of Athens, of Alexander III of Macedon
1443 and 1870; historians caution that using (Alexander the Great), and then of Rome. Prisoners
only slave-ship records to account for such num- whose families could not afford or arrange a ransom
bers leaves out millions who perished in forced were quickly sold and resold. Slave trades came to
marches to factories on the African coast. Gaul, in what is now western Europe, and Britain.
Thanks to senatorial policy, the center of Mediterra-
lave trades began with the onset of agricultural nean slave trading moved from the island of Rhodes
S societies. As hunter-gatherers also became farm- to the smaller yet more accessible island of Delos to
ers, they settled down at least temporarily, defending the even more convenient Rome itself. In addition,
their lands from both nomads and other farmers. The
ensuing wars yielded prisoners, who then became
convenient forced labor for the victors. More wars
in an area meant more available slaves, who then
could be sold to others in exchange for food, copper,
and later money. This exchange was particularly true
in Mesopotamia, India after the Aryan migrations,
China under the Zhou dynasty (1045–256 BCE), and
the Greek city-states. For example, in Sumeria in
southern Mesopotamia this labor was used to per-
form the constant maintenance of irrigation canals as
well as to build ziggurat temples. Egypt and Harappa
(in the Indus River valley of modern Pa