Is Slavery Good Or Bad Essay

Slavery itself was an evil greater in scope and magnitude than most people imagine and as a result, its place in history is radically different from the way it is usually portrayed. Mention slavery and immediately the image that arises is that of Africans and their descendants enslaved by Europeans and their descendants in the Southern United States - or at most, Africans enslaved by Europeans in the Western Hemisphere. No other historic horror is so narrowly construed. No one thinks of war, famine, or decimating epidemics in such localized terms. These are afflictions that have been suffered by the entire human race, all over the planet - and so was slavery. Had slavery been limited to one race in on country during three centuries, its tragedies would not have been one-tenth the magnitude that they were in fact.
Why this provincial view of a worldwide evil? Often it is those who are most critical of a "Eurocentric" view of the world who are most Eurocentric when it comes to the evils and failings of the human race. Why would anyone wish to arbitrarily understate an evil that plagued mankind for thousands of …show more content…
The Europeans who were enslaved in North Africa were despised and abused because they were Christians in a Muslim region of the world, [10] where they were called "Christian dogs." Race became the most visible difference between slaves and slaveowners in the Western Hemisphere. As distinguished historian DanielJ. Boorstin put it: "Now for the first time in Western history, the status of slave coincided with a difference of race." To make racism the driving force behind slavery is to make a historically recent factor the cause of an insitution which originated thousands of years earlier. This enshrinement of racism as an over-arching casual factor accords far more with current instrumental agendas than with