Natural slavery (or Aristotelian slavery) is the argument set forth in Aristotle's Politics that some people are slaves by nature, while others are slaves solely by law or convention. [1]
In his work, the Politics , Aristotle describes a natural slave as "anyone who, while being human, is by nature not his own but of someone else" and further states "he is of someone else when, while being human, he is a piece of property; and a piece of property is a tool for action separate from its owner." [2] From this, Aristotle defines natural slavery in two phases. The first is the natural slave's existence and characteristics. The second is the natural slave in society and in interaction with their master. According to Aristotle, natural slaves' main features include being pieces of property, tools for actions, and belonging to others. [3]
In book I of the Politics, Aristotle addresses the questions of whether slavery can be natural or whether all slavery is contrary to nature and whether it is better for some people to be slaves. He concludes that
those who are as different [from other men] as the soul from the body or man from beast—and they are in this state if their work is the use of the body, and if this is the best that can come from them—are slaves by nature. For them it is better to be ruled in accordance with this sort of rule, if such is the case for the other things mentioned. [4]
It is not advantageous for one to be held in slavery who is not a natural slave, Aristotle contends, claiming that such a condition is sustained solely by force and results in enmity. [5]
Aristotle's work has come under controversy and criticism in recent years.[ when? ] According to Darrell Dobbs, there is a "general consensus that the formulation of Aristotle's account of slavery is riddled with inconsistency and incoherence." [6] Other scholars have argued that the state of natural slavery is ultimately alterable, since Aristotle's conception of nature is as well. [7]
Stoic thought disagreed with the Aristotelian concept of natural slavery, as it was expressed in Seneca's Letter 47 and elsewhere.
During the 16th century, as the Americas began to be colonized, the debate over the enslavement of the native peoples grew. Many colonizers supported enslavement and went to great lengths to morally justify it. Bartolomé de las Casas was in favor of peacefully converting native peoples without enslaving them. Las Casas protested the treatment of natives by Spaniards, and in 1520 was granted an audience with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (Charles I of Spain). [8] He asked instead for their peaceful conversion. [9]
In April 1550, Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda met in Spain for a debate on the rationalization of native American enslavement and its morality based on Aristotle's idea of natural slavery. Sepúlveda defended the position of the New World colonists, claiming that the Amerindians were "natural slaves." [10] Las Casas countered that Aristotle's definition of the "barbarian" and the natural slave did not apply to the Indians, who were fully capable of reason and should be brought to Christianity without force or coercion. [10] [11] Sepúlveda reasoned that the enslavement of natives was a result of war: the "superior" was dominating the "inferior", and the Spaniards had every right to do so. [12]
Bartolomé de las Casas, OP was a Spanish clergyman, writer, and activist best known for his work as an historian and social reformer. He arrived in Hispaniola as a layman, then became a Dominican friar. He was appointed as the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians". His extensive writings, the most famous being A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and Historia de Las Indias, chronicle the first decades of colonization of the Caribbean islands. He described and railed against the atrocities committed by the conquistadores against the Indigenous peoples.
The encomienda was a Spanish labour system that rewarded conquerors with the labour of conquered non-Christian peoples. In theory, the conquerors provided the labourers with benefits, including military protection and education. In practice, the conquered were subject to conditions that closely resembled instances of forced labour and slavery. The encomienda was first established in Spain following the Christian Reconquista, and it was applied on a much larger scale during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Spanish East Indies. Conquered peoples were considered vassals of the Spanish monarch. The Crown awarded an encomienda as a grant to a particular individual. In the conquest era of the early sixteenth century, the grants were considered a monopoly on the labour of particular groups of indigenous peoples, held in perpetuity by the grant holder, called the encomendero; starting from the New Laws of 1542, the encomienda ended upon the death of the encomendero, and was replaced by the repartimiento.
The School of Salamanca is an intellectual movement of 16th-century and 17th-century Iberian Scholastic theologians rooted in the intellectual and pedagogical work of Francisco de Vitoria. From the beginning of the 16th century the traditional Catholic conception of man and of his relation to God and to the world had been assaulted by the rise of humanism, by the Protestant Reformation and by the new geographical discoveries and their consequences. These new problems were addressed by the School of Salamanca.
Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda was a Spanish humanist, philosopher, and theologian of the Spanish Renaissance. He is mainly known for his participation in a famous debate with Bartolomé de las Casas in Valladolid, Spain, in 1550–1551. The debate centered on the legitimacy of the conquest and colonization of America by the Spanish Empire and on the treatment of the Native Americans. The main philosophical referents of Ginés de Sepúlveda were Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Roman law and Christian theology. These influences allowed him to argue for the cultural superiority and domination of the Spanish over the Native Americans during the period of the conquest.
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies is an account written by the Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas in 1542 about the mistreatment of and atrocities committed against the indigenous peoples of the Americas in colonial times and sent to then Prince Philip II of Spain.
Slavery in the Spanish American viceroyalties included indigenous peoples, enslaved people from Africa, and enslaved people from Asia. The economic and social institution of slavery existed throughout the Spanish Empire including Spain itself. Enslaved Africans were brought over to the continent for their labour, indigenous people were enslaved until the 1543 laws that prohibited it.
Sublimis Deus is a Papal bull promulgated by Pope Paul III on June 2, 1537, which forbids the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and all other indigenous people who could be discovered later or previously known. It states that the Indians are fully rational human beings who have rights to freedom and property, even if they are heathen.
The Valladolid debate was the first moral debate in European history to discuss the rights and treatment of Indigenous people by European colonizers. Held in the Colegio de San Gregorio, in the Spanish city of Valladolid, it was a moral and theological debate about the conquest of the Americas, its justification for the conversion to Catholicism, and more specifically about the relations between the European settlers and the natives of the New World. It consisted of a number of opposing views about the way natives were to be integrated into Spanish society, their conversion to Catholicism, and their rights.
De Thesauris in Peru is a treatise by Spanish Dominican priest and reformer Bartolomé de las Casas, who was the first resident Bishop of Chiapas. In it, one of his last works before his death, he vigorously defended the rights of the native peoples of Peru against the slavery imposed by the early Spanish Conquest. The work also questioned Spain's right to take the gold and silver acquired from the ransom paid to free Atahualpa, the Inca sovereign emperor, as well as valuables looted from the burial sites of the indigenous population.
Frey Nicolás de Ovando was a Spanish soldier from a noble family and a Knight of the Order of Alcántara, a military order of Spain. He was Governor of the Indies (Hispaniola) from 1502 until 1509, sent by the Spanish crown to investigate the administration of Francisco de Bobadilla and re-establish order. Ovando "pacified" the island by force, subduing native Americans and rebellious Spaniards, with disorderly colonists being sent back to Spain in chains. He implemented the encomienda system with the native Taíno population.
The Catholic Church during the Age of Discovery inaugurated a major effort to spread Christianity in the New World and to convert the indigenous peoples of the Americas and other indigenous peoples. The evangelical effort was a major part of, and a justification for, the military conquests of European powers such as Portugal, Spain, and France. Christian missions to the indigenous peoples ran hand-in-hand with the colonial efforts of Catholic nations. In the Americas and other colonies in Asia, and Africa, most missions were run by religious orders such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Jesuits. In Mexico, the early systematic evangelization by mendicants came to be known as the "Spiritual Conquest of Mexico".
Lascassas is an unincorporated community in Rutherford County, Tennessee, near the city of Murfreesboro. Its geographic coordinates are 35°55'49"N, 86°17'28"W. The ZIP Code for Lascassas is 37085.
Francisco Tenamaztle, also Tenamaxtlan, Tenamaxtli or Tenamaxtle, was a leader of the Caxcan Indigenous peoples in Mexico during the Mixtón War of 1540–1542. He was later put on trial in Spain. With the support of Bartolomé de las Casas he defended the justice of his cause by appealing to King Carlos I.
The Catholic Church and slavery have a long and complicated history. Slavery was practiced and accepted by many cultures and religions around the world throughout history, including in ancient Rome. Passages in the Old Testament sanctioned forms of temporal slavery for Israelites as a means to repay a debt. Slaves, captured in war or purchased, and their children were enslaved for life. After Christianity was legalized under the Roman empire, sentiment grew that many kinds of slavery were incompatible with Christian justice. Views ranged from rejecting all forms of slavery to accepting slavery subject to certain restrictions. The Christian West almost entirely enforced that a free Christian could not be enslaved, for example as a captive in war. However, this was not consistently applied throughout history. The Middle Ages witnessed the emergence of orders of monks such as the Mercedarians who focused on ransoming Christian slaves. By the end of the Medieval period, enslavement of Christians had been largely abolished throughout Europe, although enslavement of non-Christians remained permissible and was revived in Spain and Portugal. Slavery remained a subject of debate within the Church for centuries, with several Popes issuing bulls on the issue, such as Sublimis Deus.
Lewis Hanke was an American historian of colonial Latin America best known for his writings on the Spanish conquest of Latin America. Hanke presented a revisionist narrative of colonial history that focused on the role of Bartolomé de las Casas, who famously advocated for the rights of Native Americans, and searched for just resolutions to the tensions between the conquistadores and the natives during the colonial period of Spanish rule. Hanke's writings documented Las Casas' work as a political activist, historian, political theorist, and anthropologist. His scholarship also uncovered evidence to support Hanke's claim that Las Casas did not act as the sole voice of conscience during the colonial era, but actually constituted the head of what was a larger reform movement by a number of Spanish colonists to prevent "the destruction of the Indies.”
During and after the European colonization of the Americas, European settlers practiced widespread enslavement of Indigenous peoples. In the 15th century, the Spanish introduced chattel slavery through warfare and the cooption of existing systems. A number of other European powers followed suit, and from the 15th through the 19th centuries, between two and five million Indigenous people were enslaved, which had a devastating impact on many Indigenous societies, contributing to the overwhelming population decline of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
Protector of the Indians was an administrative office of the Spanish colonies that deemed themselves responsible for attending to the well-being of the native populations by providing detailed witness accounts of mistreatment in an attempt to relay their struggles and a voice speaking on their behalf in courts, reporting back to the King of Spain. The establishment of the administration of the Protector of the Indians is due in part to Bartolomé de las Casas – the first Protector of the American Indians, and Fray Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, the great Cardinal Regent of Spain. Throughout this era, the King of Spain gained information regarding the treatment of native peoples through Bartolomé de las Casas and Fray Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros. Bartolomé de las Casas was one of the first Europeans to set foot into the new hemisphere. He later dedicated his life to ending the harsh treatment of Indigenous Americans. The institution of the Protectors of the Indians rested on the idea that rulers should appoint officials to defend, both within and outside of the courts of justice, individuals who were less favored.
Slavery in Latin America was an economic and social institution that existed in Latin America before the colonial era until its legal abolition in the newly independent states during the 19th century. However, it continued illegally in some regions into the 20th century. Slavery in Latin America began in the pre-colonial period when indigenous civilizations, including the Maya and Aztec, enslaved captives taken in war. After the conquest of Latin America by the Spanish and Portuguese, of the nearly 12 million slaves that were shipped across the Atlantic, over 4 million enslaved Africans were brought to Latin America. Roughly 3.5 million of those slaves were brought to Brazil.
Slavery was a widely accepted practice in ancient Greece, as it was in contemporaneous societies. The principal use of slaves was in agriculture, but they were also used in stone quarries or mines, as domestic servants, or even as a public utility, as with the demosioi of Athens.
Seneca the Younger's Letter 47 of his Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, sometimes known as On Master and Slave or On Slavery, is an essayistic look at dehumanization in the context of slavery in ancient Rome. It was a criticism of aspects of Roman slavery, without outright opposition to it, and had a favorable later reception by Enlightenment philosophers and subsequently the 19th century abolitionist movement. Conversely, the text has also been seen as a proslavery apologia, as well as in the light of the Stoic philosophical idea that "all men are slaves".