Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

16 8 DEBT
At the very least, there was always seen to be something disreputable
and ugly about slavery. Anyone too close to it was tainted.
Slave-traders particularly were scorned as inhuman brutes. Throughout
history, moral justifications for slavery are rarely taken particularly
seriously even by those who espouse them. For most of human history,
most people saw slavery much as we see war: a tawdry business, to be
sure, but one would have to be naive indeed to imagine it could simply
be eliminated.
Honor Is Surplus Dign ity
So what is slavery I've already begun to suggest an answer in the last
chapter. Slavery is the ultimate form of being ripped from one's context,
and thus from all the social relationships that make one a human
being. Another way to put this is that the slave is, in a very real sense,
dead.
This was the conclusion of the first scholar to carry out a broad
historical survey of the institution, an Egyptian sociologist named Ali
'Abd al-Wahid Wafi, in Paris in 1931.3 Everywhere, he observes, from
the ancient world to then-present-day South America, one finds the
same list of possible ways whereby a free person might be reduced to
slavery:
r) By the law of force
a. By surrender or capture in war
b. By being the victim of raiding or kidnapping
2) As legal punishment for crimes (including debt)
3) Through paternal authority (a father's sale of his children)
4) Through the voluntary sale of one's self4
Everywhere, too, capture in war is considered the only way that
is considered absolutely legitimate. All the others were surrounded
by moral problems. Kidnapping was obviously criminal, and parents
would not sell children except under desperate circumstances.5 We read
of famines in China so severe that thousands of poor men would castrat
themselves, in the hope that they might sell themselves as eunuchs
at court-but this was also seen as the sign of total social breakdown.6
Even the judicial process could easily be corrupted, as the ancients were
well aware--especially when it came to enslavement for debt.
On one level, al-Wahid's argument is just an extended apologia for
the role of slavery in Islam-widely criticized, since Islamic law never