@izzythepush,
I agree with that, although the conditions under which people became slaves differed considerably, also. Truly influential slaves were those who had already had a good education--so, for example, Isthmus (the principle city of which was Corinth) allied itself with Carthage in the final Punic War, so many of the leading families were sold into slavery--this happened in several city states which resisted the Roman hegemony. These people were already literate, so they were highly valued. Subsequently, Octavian--Caesar Augustus--created his enormous bureaucracy using Greek slaves. For those slaves, the best future they could offer their children was literacy and a good education.
Nevertheless, most slaves in the empire lead indifferent lives at best. Many, perhaps most, were literally worked to death in a long, slow process of years of heavy labor in the
latifundia, the huge slave driven argicultural and manufacturing operations owned by the
Patres and run for them by the oder of
Equites ("Knights"). I have noted over the years a tendency in historical fiction to refer to "servants" in Roman homes--bollocks, they used slaves, who were only marginally better off than the workers of the
latifundia in that they probably got enough, or almost enough to eat. With the extensive dole, free-born Romans disdained to work as servants.
The racial aspect of North American and West Indian slavery was a product of two factors. One was the already extensive slave trade in West Africa before European traders arrived. The other was genetic. Sickle cell anemia is endemic in West Africa, and its prevelance increases in the presence of malaria. As a consequence, and because people with sickle cell disease are resistant to the life cycle of the malaria plasmodium, West African negroes became the slaves of choice--by default, just about everyone else died off. Originally, the "Sugar Islands" attempted to use European bond laborers--but they couldn't abide the heavy labor in conjunction with the climate. Theoretically, the West Africans were entered under the same conditions--but they could barely speak Dutch, or French or English, never mind being illitereate. So at the end of seven years, they didn't know, and nobody told them they were techincally free. It was not long before that fiction was dropped altogether.
