Human Bondage
Human Bondage (1996) A fine History Channel video on an historical perspective of slavery. Starting with the Middle East, this documents the long tradition of slavery in the Western and Middle Eastern world. Though it skips over the slave revolts in Mesopotamia, it records the Spartacus revolt against Rome in which 70,000 gladiators rose up, and 6,000 were crucified. Most surprising was the estimate that Near Easterners took 18 million slaves from Africa, compared with perhaps 14 million that were sent from Africa to the New World. This is discussed, with limited specific documentation, in Ronald Segal’s Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora(2001). I found that the caliber of the film wavered in its broad brush treatment of slavery in the United States. In fact, the British anti-slavery movement, which led to abolition of slavery in the British Empire, was not focused primarily on American slavery, when imports were legally banned in 1808. The video concludes that there are perhaps 22 million people today living in some form of slavery.
