Where does slavery fit within the range of dependent relationships that have existed in history, and more particularly in the early modern era, and how did it differ from the others?

Résumé du document

Chattel slavery has not always been the alternate of free labor, as it appears these days. Indeed, different forms of dependency has seen through many centuries and including the early modern period. People were not simply slaves or free men, and different intermediary status existed in many societies: from the so-called contract labor, also known as indenture labor, to convict labor and even serfdom. Slavery was not as simple as people perceived it. For instance, serfs did not usually consider themselves as slaves. Jerome Blum illustrates this idea when he writes about the Russian serfs of the eighteenth century:

Extraits

[...] Chattel slavery is an extreme dependency situation since a person has some property rights over another. Indeed, if slavery was theoretically an inherited, unintended (by the slave) and perpetual situation, like serfdom, it remained a very specific position since the slave was often an outsider and he had no real social status. The first major difference between chattel slavery and some other kinds of dependency was that chattel slavery was most of the time not chosen by the human who had to live under the rule of a master. [...]

[...] In that case, slaves still depended on the will of another but their status could evolve in the long run. Convicts and indenture workers had more or less chosen their position whereas somebody who was born as a slave or as a serf did not. Indeed, a convict worker had violated a social rule that he should have known and he “deserved” his sanction. An indenture worker, on the other hand, knew what would happen to him when he signed the contract that bound him to the will of his employer. [...]

[...] Moreover, mobility was an important aspect of indenture labor because people used such contracts in order to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Chattel slavery seems sometimes very hard to distinguish from other types of dependencies such as convict labor, indentured labor or serfdom. Yet, slavery was a very specific status. While convict labor or indenture servitude was temporary, a slave usually remained slave from his birth to his death; he (or she) had no prospect of improving his social position and could not expect any social mobility. [...]

[...] Thus, slaves were often “outsiders”: people who were coming from a different country, whose cultural backgrounds were completely different and who had no connections, no social status in the society they were discovering. The serfs were at the bottom of the Russian society but they still had a social status. The society in which they lived was theirs. Richard Hellie points out the originality of Russian slavery by comparing Russian, Spanish and even Arab situations[vii]. He writes: Spaniards could not enslave Spaniards, and Arabs could not enslave Arabs. [...]

[...] Where does slavery fit within the range of dependent relationships that have existed in history, and more particularly in the early modern era, and how did it differ from the others? Chattel slavery has not always been the alternate of free labor, as it appears nowadays. Indeed, a large range of different forms of dependency has been available among centuries, and especially during the early modern period. People were not simply slaves or free men, and different intermediary statuses existed in many societies: from the so-called contract labor, also known as indenture labor, to convict labor and even serfdom. [...]