Slaves

This category records the treatment of human beings as property: bought, sold, inherited, pledged, insured, and compelled to work, with no right to leave, to refuse, or to be paid, whether held from the moment of capture, of purchase, or of birth. The commodity is a legal fiction imposed on people rather than anything about the people themselves, and the category's name is the word the trade used. The Atlas records the trade; it does not adopt the trade's description of persons, and entries should say "enslaved people" rather than use the noun.

One structural feature separates this category from every other on the list, and it is the reason the category belongs in a history of capital. Everything else here is either a thing produced or a thing that produces — ore or furnace, seed or field. A person held as property is both at once: the workforce stands on the owner's balance sheet as an asset, and can therefore be mortgaged, insured, and pledged as security for a loan. That is how slave economies financed themselves. A plantation's largest asset was commonly not its land but its people, and the credit that planted next year's crop was advanced against them.

Supply came from three sources with distinct economics. Capture, in war or in raiding. Purchase, through trades reaching inland from the coasts and paid in goods — textiles, firearms, metalware — each of which belongs to its own category here. And birth, since the status was made heritable, which turned natural increase into a source of supply and, wherever the external trade was closed, into the principal one. The category also carries a cost of production that no other commodity has: resistance. Overseers, patrols, slave codes, and the whole apparatus of coercion are an expense specific to holding a commodity that does not consent to being one.

Abolition, in the British case, was accomplished by purchasing the property right. The Act passed on 28 August 1833; the government agreed a package of £20 million for the owners, part of it paid in 3.5 percent government annuities and administered by the Bank of England; more than 800,000 enslaved people were emancipated; and none of the compensation went to them. That is the only case on this list in which ending a commodity required the state to indemnify those who had held it rather than those who had been held.

Slavery is now outlawed in most jurisdictions and persists in other forms: debt bondage, indentured servitude, serfdom, domestic servants kept in captivity, children compelled to work, child soldiers, forced marriage, and trafficking. The International Labour Organization, Walk Free, and the International Organization for Migration estimated some 50 million people in modern slavery in 2021 — 28 million in forced labor and 22 million in forced marriage, including about 3.3 million children in forced labor. One of their findings corrects a common assumption: 52 percent of forced labor occurs in upper-middle and high-income countries, so the condition is not confined to the poorest places.

The boundaries turn on consent and on the distinction between the labor and what it produced. Hired work under a contract the worker is free to leave is a service; a person held as property is here. The price paid, and any credit instrument secured on enslaved people, is money, while the collateral is here. A slaving voyage is freight transport and the people carried on it are here. The plantation is land. The crops produced — sweeteners, cotton and other fibers, tobacco, cocoa, coffee — are each their own category, and what is tagged here is the labor regime rather than its output. The date is c. 3000 BCE, on Sumerian records.