Misplaced Pages

Diatribe

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

A diatribe (from the Greek διατριβή ), also known less formally as rant , is a lengthy oration , though often reduced to writing, made in criticism of someone or something, often employing humor , sarcasm , and appeals to emotion .

#763236

80-507: The terms diatribe and rant (and, to a lesser extent, tirade and harangue ) have at times been subtly distinguished, but in modern discourse are often used interchangeably. A diatribe or rant is not a formal classification of argument, and religious author Alistair Stewart-Sykes notes that "[t]he form of the diatribe is difficult precisely to ascertain". It has been proposed that the terms diatribe , tirade , harangue , and rant "are similar, but offer different shades of meaning": Tirade

160-432: A diatribe is neither inspiring, informative, nor entertaining. It has been suggested that a rant is merely one kind of diatribe, with one explanation stating that "[a] rant can be defined loosely as an emotionally charged narrative or diatribe often expressing a strong distaste or anger on the one hand, or a declamatory, often pompous, assertion on the other". A number of notable works have been described as diatribes, such as

240-407: A fixed period of time after which they would be granted freedom . Although slavery is usually involuntary and involves coercion, there are also cases where people voluntarily enter into slavery to pay a debt or earn money due to poverty . In the course of human history , slavery was a typical feature of civilization , and was legal in most societies, but it is now outlawed in most countries of

320-679: A hypothetical other person, but more fully intended to persuade the reader or listener. A noted historical example of a religious diatribe can be found in Paul 's Epistle to the Romans . With respect to that usage, a diatribe is described as an oration in which the speaker seeks to persuade an audience by debating an imaginary opponent, "typically using second person singular". The speaker "raises hypothetical questions and responds to them or states false conclusions and goes on to refute them". The literary historian and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin notes that it

400-504: A kinship group and those related to the master. Slavery was practiced in many different forms: debt slavery, enslavement of war captives, military slavery, and criminal slavery were all practiced in various parts of Africa. Slavery for domestic and court purposes was widespread throughout Africa. When the Atlantic slave trade began, many of the local slave systems began supplying captives for chattel slave markets outside Africa. Although

480-517: A legal right to counsel, freedom from double jeopardy , a right to trial by jury in graver cases, and the right to grand jury indictment, but they lacked many other rights such as white adults' ability to control their own lives. Slavery predates written records and has existed in many cultures. Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations because it requires economic surpluses and a substantial population density. Thus, although it has existed among unusually resource-rich hunter gatherers, such as

560-580: A limited set of legal rights. For example, in the Province of New York , people who deliberately killed slaves were punishable under a 1686 statute. And, as already mentioned, certain legal rights attached to the nobi in Korea, to slaves in various African societies, and to black female slaves in the French colony of Louisiana . Giving slaves legal rights has sometimes been a matter of morality, but also sometimes

640-427: A man who "treats of ordinary human problems in a common-sense spirit, though for emphasis employing all the devices of contemporary prose style. ... The situations dealt with are those that may confront any person, from the universalia of old age , poverty, exile , slavery , the fear of death , down to the more particular case of a nagging wife." His influence is distinctly traceable in succeeding writers, e.g. in

720-548: A marriage where a girl, usually, is married off to a man to settle debts owed by her parents. The Chukri system is a debt bondage system found in parts of Bengal where a female can be coerced into prostitution in order to pay off debts. The word slavery has also been used to refer to a legal state of dependency to somebody else. For example, in Persia , the situations and lives of such slaves could be better than those of common citizens. Forced labour, or unfree labour,

800-420: A matter of self-interest. For example, in ancient Athens , protecting slaves from mistreatment simultaneously protected people who might be mistaken for slaves, and giving slaves limited property rights incentivized slaves to work harder to get more property. In the southern United States prior to the extirpation of slavery in 1865 , a proslavery legal treatise reported that slaves accused of crimes typically had

880-413: A permanent part of a master's lineage and the children of slaves could become closely connected with the larger family ties. Children of slaves born into families could be integrated into the master's kinship group and rise to prominent positions within society, even to the level of chief in some instances. However, stigma often remained attached and there could be strict separations between slave members of

SECTION 10

#1732780612764

960-517: A social institution, chattel slavery classes slaves as chattels ( personal property ) owned by the enslaver; like livestock, they can be bought and sold at will. Chattel slavery was historically the normal form of slavery and was practiced in places such as the Roman Empire and classical Greece , where it was considered a keystone of society. Other places where it was extensively practiced include Medieval Egypt , Subsaharan Africa, Brazil,

1040-441: A statement of the speaker's own view". Although a diatribe or rant is not inherently humorous , rants have become a staple of modern comedy, performed as "over-the-top ramblings with a single point of view on a wide variety of subjects". Stewart-Sykes proposes that there is a difference between pagan diatribes, which he suggests are directed against a present individual, and Christian diatribes, which he suggests are directed against

1120-497: Is a form of unfree labour in which a person works to pay off a debt by pledging himself or herself as collateral. The services required to repay the debt, and their duration, may be undefined. Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation, with children required to pay off their progenitors' debt. It is the most widespread form of slavery today. Debt bondage is most prevalent in South Asia. Money marriage refers to

1200-610: Is chiefly remembered. He satirized the foolishness of people, attacked religion, and eulogized philosophy. Bion was from the town of Olbia on the north coast of the Black Sea by the mouth of the river Borysthenes (modern-day Dnieper ). He lived c. 325-c. 250 BC, but the exact dates of his birth and death are uncertain. Strabo mentions him as a contemporary of Eratosthenes , who was born 275 BC. Diogenes Laërtius has preserved an account in which Bion describes his parentage to Antigonus II Gonatas , King of Macedonia . His father

1280-597: Is estimated that by the 1890s the largest slave population of the world, about 2 million people, was concentrated in the territories of the Sokoto Caliphate . The use of slave labour was extensive, especially in agriculture." The Anti-Slavery Society estimated there were 2 million slaves in Ethiopia in the early 1930s out of an estimated population of 8 to 16 million. Slave labour in East Africa

1360-491: Is nothing in his life or thought suggesting an affinity with Platonism and modern scholars regard him as a Cynic , albeit an atypical one with strong Hedonistic or Cyrenaic leanings. Much of what Laërtius has to say about Bion seems to have been drawn from hostile sources so care has to be taken in using his account to reconstruct Bion's life and thought. Laërtius reveals to us a man of considerable intellectual acuteness, but quite ready to attack everyone and everything. He

1440-487: Is often used as a pejorative to describe any activity in which one is coerced into performing. Some argue that military drafts and other forms of coerced government labour constitute "state-operated slavery." Some libertarians and anarcho-capitalists view government taxation as a form of slavery. "Slavery" has been used by some anti-psychiatry proponents to define involuntary psychiatric patients, claiming there are no unbiased physical tests for mental illness and yet

1520-517: Is sometimes used to describe an individual who is forced to work against their own will, under threat of violence or other punishment. This may also include institutions not commonly classified as slavery, such as serfdom , conscription and penal labour . As slavery has been legally outlawed in all countries, forced labour in the present day (frequently referred to as " modern slavery ") revolves around illegal control. Human trafficking primarily involves women and children forced into prostitution and

1600-463: Is the fastest growing form of forced labour, with Thailand, Cambodia, India, Brazil and Mexico having been identified as leading hotspots of commercial sexual exploitation of children . In 2007, Human Rights Watch estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 children served as soldiers in then-current conflicts. More girls under 16 work as domestic workers than any other category of child labour, often sent to cities by parents living in rural poverty as with

1680-427: Is the most general of these, describing any long, critical speech; a harangue is particularly bombastic, usually inflaming the passions of listeners, and is the primary tool of the demagogue; a rant is primarily an instrument of catharsis, allowing the speaker to blow off steam, but not necessarily persuade or do harm; a diatribe is more tiresome—while a harangue can arouse passion, and a rant can be entertaining to watch,

SECTION 20

#1732780612764

1760-607: The American Indian peoples of the salmon -rich rivers of the Pacific Northwest coast, slavery became widespread only with the invention of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution about 11,000 years ago. Slavery was practiced in almost every ancient civilization. Such institutions included debt bondage, punishment for crime, the enslavement of prisoners of war , child abandonment , and

1840-547: The Congo Free State and French ruled Ubangi-Shari , labour was demanded as taxation; private companies were conceded areas within which they were allowed to use any measures to increase rubber production. Convict leasing was common in the Southern United States where the state would lease prisoners for their free labour to companies. Depending upon the era and the country, slaves sometimes had

1920-525: The Diatribes of Greek philosopher Bion of Borysthenes , in which he satirized the foolishness of people; the Diatribes of Teles of Megara written circa 235 BC, which present the basis of the philosophy of Cynicism ; and the Diatribes , or Discourses , of Epictetus , circulated by Arrian circa 108 AD, introducing aspects of Stoicism . An examination of the use of diatribe by the 4th century BC Greek philosopher Euripides states: The peculiarity of

2000-518: The Indian subcontinent , and later to the Americas. These traders captured Bantu peoples ( Zanj ) from the interior in present-day Kenya , Mozambique and Tanzania and brought them to the coast. There, the slaves gradually assimilated in rural areas, particularly on Unguja and Pemba islands. Some historians assert that as many as 17 million people were sold into slavery on the coast of

2080-1197: The League of Nations and the United Nations, such as the Temporary Slavery Commission in 1924–1926, the Committee of Experts on Slavery in 1932, and the Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery in 1934–1939. By the time of the UN Ad Hoc Committee on Slavery in 1950–1951, legal chattel slavery still existed only in the Arabian Peninsula: in Oman , in Qatar , in Saudi Arabia , in the Trucial States and in Yemen . Legal chattel slavery

2160-563: The Muslim empire and claimed over "tens of thousands of lives in lower Iraq". The Zanj who were taken as slaves to the Middle East were often used in strenuous agricultural work. As the plantation economy boomed and the Arabs became richer, agriculture and other manual labour work was thought to be demeaning. The resulting labour shortage led to an increased slave market. In Algiers ,

2240-621: The Peripatetic . After the manner of the sophists of the period, Bion travelled through Greece and Macedonia , and was admitted to the literary circle at the court of Antigonus II Gonatas . He subsequently taught philosophy at Rhodes , and died at Chalcis in Euboea . Because of his early association with the Academy , Diogenes Laërtius placed Bion among the Academics, but there

2320-730: The Sahara desert to North Africa to be sold to Mediterranean and Middle eastern civilizations. During the Red Sea slave trade , slaves were transported from Africa across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula. The Indian Ocean slave trade , sometimes known as the east African slave trade, was multi-directional. Africans were sent as slaves to the Arabian Peninsula , to Indian Ocean islands (including Madagascar ), to

2400-405: The bombardment of Algiers by an Anglo-Dutch fleet in 1816. Under Omani Arabs, Zanzibar became East Africa's main slave port , with as many as 50,000 African slaves passing through every year during the 19th century. Some historians estimate that between 11 and 18 million African slaves crossed the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara Desert from 650 to 1900 AD. Eduard Rüppell described

2480-522: The separation of powers , or what Comte called the "separation of the spiritual and the temporal" during the Middle Ages and the end of slavery, and Smith's criticism of masters, past and present. As Smith stated in the Lectures on Jurisprudence , "The great power of the clergy thus concurring with that of the king set the slaves at liberty. But it was absolutely necessary both that the authority of

Diatribe - Misplaced Pages Continue

2560-646: The Atlantic slave trade was not the only slave trade from Africa, it was the largest in volume and intensity. As Elikia M'bokolo wrote in Le Monde diplomatique : The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from

2640-549: The Haitian restaveks . Forced marriages or early marriages are often considered types of slavery. Forced marriage continues to be practiced in parts of the world including some parts of Asia and Africa and in immigrant communities in the West. Marriage by abduction occurs in many places in the world today, with a 2003 study finding a national average of 69% of marriages in Ethiopia being through abduction. The word slavery

2720-509: The Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa, and approximately 5 million African slaves were bought by Muslim slave traders and taken from Africa across the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara Desert between 1500 and 1900. The captives were sold throughout the Middle East. This trade accelerated as superior ships led to more trade and greater demand for labour on plantations in the region. Eventually, tens of thousands of captives were being taken every year. The Indian Ocean slave trade

2800-576: The Nazis and the Soviet Union placed increasing importance on the labor provided in those camps, leading to a growing tendency among historians to designate such systems as slavery. A combination of these include the encomienda where the Spanish Crown granted private individuals the right to the free labour of a specified number of natives in a given area. In the "Red Rubber System" of both

2880-781: The Umayyad Caliphate in Iraq. The Zanj Rebellion , a series of uprisings that took place between 869 and 883 near Basra (also known as Basara), against the slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate situated in present-day Iraq, is believed to have involved enslaved Zanj that had originally been captured from the African Great Lakes region and areas further south in East Africa . It grew to involve over 500,000 slaves and free men who were imported from across

2960-545: The United States, and parts of the Caribbean such as Cuba and Haiti. The Iroquois enslaved others in ways that "looked very like chattel slavery." Beginning in the 18th century, a series of abolitionist movements saw slavery as a violation of the slaves' rights as people (" all men are created equal "), and sought to abolish it. Abolitionism encountered extreme resistance but was eventually successful. Several of

3040-472: The aristocracy. In the 2020s, in North Korea , Kippumjo ("Pleasure Brigades") are made up of women selected from the general population to serve as entertainers and as concubines to the rulers of North Korea. "Tribute labor" is compulsory labor for the state and has been used in various iterations such as corvée , mit'a and repartimiento . The internment camps of totalitarian regimes such as

3120-496: The capital of Algeria, captured Christians and Europeans were forced into slavery. In about 1650, there were as many as 35,000 Christian slaves in Algiers. By one estimate, raids by Barbary slave traders on coastal villages and ships extending from Italy to Iceland, enslaved an estimated 1 to 1.25 million Europeans between the 16th and 19th centuries. However, this estimate is the result of an extrapolation which assumes that

3200-401: The century from 1580 to 1680. By extension, for the 250 years between 1530 and 1780, the figure could easily have been as high as 1,250,000. Davis' numbers have been refuted by other historians, such as David Earle, who cautions that true picture of Europeans slaves is clouded by the fact the corsairs also seized non-Christian whites from eastern Europe. In addition, the number of slaves traded

3280-400: The condition of some or all human-owned animals, arguing that their status is comparable to that of human slaves. The labour market, as institutionalized under contemporary capitalist systems, has been criticized by mainstream socialists and by anarcho-syndicalists , who utilise the term wage slavery as a pejorative or dysphemism for wage labour . Socialists draw parallels between

Diatribe - Misplaced Pages Continue

3360-459: The course of which study he embraced the tenets of almost every sect in succession. First he was an Academic studying under Xenocrates and Crates of Athens , then he became a Cynic , (perhaps under Crates of Thebes ), afterwards he attached to Theodorus , the Cyrenaic philosopher whose alleged atheism is supposed to have influenced Bion, and finally he became a pupil of Theophrastus

3440-407: The crime of slavery in language by reducing its victims to a nonhuman noun instead of "carry[ing] them forward as people, not the property that they were" (see also People-first language ). Other historians prefer slave because the term is familiar and shorter, or because it accurately reflects the inhumanity of slavery, with person implying a degree of autonomy that slavery does not allow. As

3520-512: The dialogue form, and is usually traced to the Platonic dialogues. The opponent assumed to be argued against in a diatribe is "a fictitious individual introduced by the speaker merely as a part of the rhetorical machinery of his discourse", who states the position of the opponent before providing "indication of the untenability of that position by means of illustration, rhetorical question, proverb, argumentum e contrario , etc., and in conclusion

3600-402: The diatribe as distinct from other forms of popular moralizing lies in the assumed presence of an opponent. He is not permitted to reply, but his position is indicated by statements or rhetorical questions put into his mouth by the speaker, and thus the introduction of an objection in the form of a question becomes one of the characteristic features of the diatribe. It is evidently a development of

3680-604: The enslavement of slaves' offspring. Slavery was widespread in Africa, which pursued both internal and external slave trade. In the Senegambia region, between 1300 and 1900, close to one-third of the population was enslaved. In early Islamic states of the western Sahel , including Ghana , Mali , Segou , and Songhai , about a third of the population were enslaved. In European courtly society, and European aristocracy, black African slaves and their children became visible in

3760-506: The focus is on increasing the number of slaves doing simple tasks rather than upgrading their efficiency. For example, it is sometimes argued that, because of this narrow focus, technology in Greece – and later in Rome – was not applied to ease physical labour or improve manufacturing. Scottish economist Adam Smith stated that free labour was economically better than slave labour, and that it

3840-444: The gang to a task and made each worker's performance dependent on the actions of the others. The slaves chopped out the weeds that surrounded the cotton plants as well as excess sprouts. Plow gangs followed behind, stirring the soil near the plants and tossing it back around the plants. Thus, the gang system worked like an assembly line . Since the 18th century, critics have argued that slavery hinders technological advancement because

3920-597: The interior of West Africa. These expeditions were typically carried out by African kingdoms , such as the Oyo Empire ( Yoruba ), the Ashanti Empire , the kingdom of Dahomey , and the Aro Confederacy . It is estimated that about 15 percent of slaves died during the voyage , with mortality rates considerably higher in Africa itself in the process of capturing and transporting indigenous peoples to

4000-415: The king and of the clergy should be great. Where ever any one of these was wanting, slavery still continues..." Even after slavery became a criminal offense, slave owners could get high returns. According to researcher Siddharth Kara , the profits generated worldwide by all forms of slavery in 2007 were $ 91.2 billion. That was second only to drug trafficking, in terms of global criminal enterprises. At

4080-572: The late 1300s and 1400s. Starting with Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor , black Africans were included in the retinue . In 1402 an Ethiopian embassy reached Venice . In the 1470s black Africans were painted as court attendants in wall paintings that were displayed in Mantua and Ferrara . In the 1490s black Africans were included on the emblem of the Duke of Milan . During the trans-Saharan slave trade , slaves from West Africa were transported across

SECTION 50

#1732780612764

4160-522: The late 16th and early 17th century observers, account for around 35,000 European Christian slaves held throughout this period on the Barbary Coast, across Tripoli, Tunis, but mostly in Algiers. The majority were sailors (particularly those who were English), taken with their ships, but others were fishermen and coastal villagers. However, most of these captives were people from lands close to Africa, particularly Spain and Italy. This eventually led to

4240-476: The losses of Sudanese slaves being transported on foot to Egypt: "after the Daftardar bey's 1822 campaign in the southern Nuba mountains, nearly 40,000 slaves were captured. However, through bad treatment, disease and desert travel barely 5,000 made it to Egypt." W.A. Veenhoven wrote: "The German doctor, Gustav Nachtigal , an eye-witness, believed that for every slave who arrived at a market three or four died on

4320-402: The meaning "to strip the enemy (killed in a battle)" or "to make booty / extract spoils of war". This version has been criticized as well. There is a dispute among historians about whether terms such as " unfree labourer " or "enslaved person", rather than "slave", should be used when describing the victims of slavery. According to those proposing a change in terminology, slave perpetuates

4400-401: The meaning 'prisoner of war slave', 'slave' in the 8th/9th century, because they often became captured and enslaved. However this version has been disputed since the 19th century. An alternative contemporary hypothesis states that Medieval Latin sclāvus via * scylāvus derives from Byzantine σκυλάω ( skūláō , skyláō ) or σκυλεύω ( skūleúō , skyleúō ) with

4480-574: The ninth to the nineteenth).... Four million enslaved people exported via the Red Sea , another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean. The trans-Atlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of slaves were captured on raiding expeditions into

4560-502: The number of European slaves captured by Barbary pirates was constant for a 250-year period: There are no records of how many men, women and children were enslaved, but it is possible to calculate roughly the number of fresh captives that would have been needed to keep populations steady and replace those slaves who died, escaped, were ransomed, or converted to Islam. On this basis it is thought that around 8,500 new slaves were needed annually to replenish numbers – about 850,000 captives over

4640-522: The opposite holds true, then it is more costly for landowners to guard the slaves than to employ paid workers who can demand only low wages because of the degree of competition. Thus, first slavery and then serfdom gradually decreased in Europe as the population grew. They were reintroduced in the Americas and in Russia as large areas of land with few inhabitants became available. Slavery is more common when

4720-480: The party that holds them in bondage. Enslavement is the placement of a person into slavery, and the person is called a slave or an enslaved person (see § Terminology ). Many historical cases of enslavement occurred as a result of breaking the law, becoming indebted, suffering a military defeat, or exploitation for cheaper labor; other forms of slavery were instituted along demographic lines such as race or sex . Slaves may be kept in bondage for life, or for

4800-406: The psychiatric patient must follow the orders of the psychiatrist. They assert that instead of chains to control the slave, the psychiatrist uses drugs to control the mind. Drapetomania was a pseudoscientific psychiatric diagnosis for a slave who desired freedom; "symptoms" included laziness and the tendency to flee captivity. Some proponents of animal rights have applied the term slavery to

4880-411: The satires of Menippus . Horace alludes to his satires and caustic wit. Examples of this wit are his sayings: One saying is preserved by Cicero : Another is cited by Plutarch : Slavery Slavery is the ownership of a person as property , especially in regards to their labour. Slavery typically involves compulsory work, with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by

SECTION 60

#1732780612764

4960-412: The slaves were not treated as chattel slaves and were given certain rights in a system similar to indentured servitude elsewhere in the world. The forms of slavery in Africa were closely related to kinship structures. In many African communities, where land could not be owned, enslavement of individuals was used as a means to increase the influence a person had and expand connections. This made slaves

5040-598: The states of the United States began abolishing slavery during the American Revolutionary War. The French Revolution tried to abolish slavery in 1794, but a permanent abolition did not occur until 1848. In much of the British Empire, slavery was subject to abolition in 1833, throughout the United States it was abolished in 1865 and in Cuba in 1886. The last country in the Americas to abolish slavery

5120-445: The tasks are relatively simple and thus easy to supervise, such as large-scale monocrops such as sugarcane and cotton , in which output depended on economies of scale . This enables systems of labour, such as the gang system in the United States, to become prominent on large plantations where field hands toiled with factory-like precision. Then, each work gang was based on an internal division of labour that assigned every member of

5200-524: The time the weighted average global sales price of a slave was estimated to be approximately $ 340, with a high of $ 1,895 for the average trafficked sex slave, and a low of $ 40 to $ 50 for debt bondage slaves in part of Asia and Africa. The weighted average annual profits generated by a slave in 2007 was $ 3,175, with a low of an average $ 950 for bonded labour and $ 29,210 for a trafficked sex slave. Approximately 40% of slave profits each year were generated by trafficked sex slaves, representing slightly more than 4% of

5280-419: The trade of labour as a commodity and slavery. Cicero is also known to have suggested such parallels. Economists have modeled the circumstances under which slavery (and variants such as serfdom ) appear and disappear. One theoretical model is that slavery becomes more desirable for landowners where land is abundant, but labour is scarce, such that rent is depressed and paid workers can demand high wages. If

5360-408: The way ... Keltie ( The Partition of Africa , London, 1920) believes that for every slave the Arabs brought to the coast at least six died on the way or during the slavers' raid. Livingstone puts the figure as high as ten to one." Systems of servitude and slavery were common in parts of Africa, as they were in much of the ancient world . In many African societies where slavery was prevalent,

5440-469: The world despite slavery being illegal. In the modern world, more than 50% of slaves provide forced labour , usually in the factories and sweatshops of the private sector of a country's economy. In industrialised countries, human trafficking is a modern variety of slavery; in non-industrialised countries, people in debt bondage are common, others include captive domestic servants , people in forced marriages , and child soldiers . The word slave

5520-433: The world's 29 million slaves. A widespread practice was branding , either to explicitly mark slaves as property or as punishment. Slaves have been owned privately by individuals but have also been under state ownership. For example, the kisaeng were women from low castes in pre modern Korea, who were owned by the state under government officials known as hojang and were required to provide entertainment to

5600-547: The world, except as a punishment for a crime . In chattel slavery , the slave is legally rendered the personal property (chattel) of the slave owner. In economics, the term de facto slavery describes the conditions of unfree labour and forced labour that most slaves endure. Mauritania was the last country in the world to officially ban slavery, in 1981, with legal prosecution of slaveholders established in 2007. However, in 2019, approximately 40 million people, of whom 26% were children, were still enslaved throughout

5680-584: Was "the diatribe, not classical rhetoric, that exercised a defining influence on the generic characteristics of the ancient Christian sermon." [REDACTED] The dictionary definition of diatribe at Wiktionary Bion of Borysthenes Bion of Borysthenes ( Greek : Βίων Βορυσθενίτης , gen .: Βίωνος; c.  325  – c.  250  BC) was a Greek philosopher. After being sold into slavery , and then released, he moved to Athens , where he studied in almost every school of philosophy. It is, however, for his Cynic -style diatribes that he

5760-624: Was Brazil, in 1888 . Chattel slavery survived longest in the Middle East . After the Trans-Atlantic slave trade had been suppressed, the ancient Trans-Saharan slave trade , the Indian Ocean slave trade and the Red Sea slave trade continued to traffic slaves from the African continent to the Middle East. During the 20th century, the issue of chattel slavery was addressed and investigated globally by international bodies created by

5840-424: Was a freedman and a dealer in salt fish, with which he combined the occupation of smuggling. His mother, Olympia, was a Lacedaemonian prostitute. The whole family were sold as slaves, on account of some offence committed by the father. In consequence of this, Bion fell into the hands of a rhetorician , who made him his heir. Having burnt his patron's library, he went to Athens, and applied himself to philosophy, in

5920-569: Was borrowed into Middle English through the Old French esclave which ultimately derives from Byzantine Greek σκλάβος ( sklábos ) or εσκλαβήνος ( ésklabḗnos ). According to the widespread view, which has been known since the 18th century, the Byzantine Σκλάβινοι ( Sklábinoi ), Έσκλαβηνοί ( Ésklabēnoí ), borrowed from a Slavic tribe self-name *Slověne, turned into σκλάβος , εσκλαβήνος ( Late Latin sclāvus) in

6000-578: Was drawn from the Zanj , Bantu peoples that lived along the East African coast. The Zanj were for centuries shipped as slaves by Arab traders to all the countries bordering the Indian Ocean during the Indian Ocean slave trade . The Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs recruited many Zanj slaves as soldiers and, as early as 696, there were slave revolts of the Zanj against their Arab enslavers during their slavery in

6080-542: Was essentially a popular writer, and in his Diatribes he satirized the foolishness of people. While eulogizing poverty and philosophy, he attacked the gods, musicians, geometricians , astrologers , and the wealthy, and denied the efficacy of prayer . Laërtius claims Bion was an atheist (which he allegedly renounced at the time of his death) but the surviving fragments reveal only a religious skepticism concerning mystery religions , oracles , etc. The quotations of Bion recorded by Teles , and preserved by Stobaeus reveal

6160-473: Was finally abolished in the Arabian Peninsula in the 1960s: Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, in Dubai in 1963, and Oman as the last in 1970. The last country to abolish slavery, Mauritania , did so in 1981 . The 1981 ban on slavery was not enforced in practice, as there were no legal mechanisms to prosecute those who used slaves, these only came in 2007. Indenture, also known as bonded labour or debt bondage,

6240-469: Was hyperactive, with exaggerated estimates relying on peak years to calculate averages for entire centuries, or millennia. Hence, there were wide fluctuations year-to-year, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, given slave imports, and also given the fact that, prior to the 1840s, there are no consistent records. Middle East expert, John Wright, cautions that modern estimates are based on back-calculations from human observation. Such observations, across

6320-646: Was multi-directional and changed over time. To meet the demand for menial labour, Bantu slaves bought by east African slave traders from southeastern Africa were sold in cumulatively large numbers over the centuries to customers in Egypt, Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India, European colonies in the Far East, the Indian Ocean islands , Ethiopia and Somalia. According to the Encyclopedia of African History , "It

6400-446: Was nearly impossible to end slavery in a free, democratic, or republican form of government since many of its legislators or political figures were slave owners and would not punish themselves. He further stated that slaves would be better able to gain their freedom under centralized government, or a central authority like a king or church. Similar arguments appeared later in the works of Auguste Comte , especially given Smith's belief in

#763236