Slave raiding
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Slave raiding is a crime sometimes seen as a normal part of warfare. It is possibly as old as humanity itself, attested to in the earliest surviving written records able to be translated, from Sumer in Iraq and Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan.
The act of slave raiding involves an organised and concerted attack on a settlement such as a village or region and the collection of the region or settlement's people. The people collected are impressed, ie enslaved, and once turned into slaves, often kept in some form of coffle or slave pen. From the coffle, the force that has enslaved the people will then move the slaves to a mass transport system such as a ship or camel caravan.
Slave raiding was a big business on the coasts of Africa, in ancient Europe and Mesoamerica and in medieval Asia.
Slave raiding was a violent form of economic development where a resource shortage was addressed with the violent acquisition of the desired resource, in this case a labor shortage. Other than the element of slavery being present such violent taking of a resource does not differ from similar wars or raids to gain territory, oil, food, water or any other scarce commodity.
The many alternative methods of obtaining human beings to work in indentured or other involuntary conditions has reduced the need for slave raiding and it is no longer widely practiced except on the governmental level such as in some South American countries where state-sanctioned captivity of indentured workers still takes place (Erickson on Guatemala, 2004).
American slavery was predicated on a stream of European countries endorsing slave raiding between African tribes to supply the mass quantities of Africans who were then turned into living farm and factory machines in American plantations.
