The Ancient World Ran on Slavery — and Nobody Taught You How Deep It Went | Part 1 of 3: The Global History of Slavery

This is the first episode in a three-part File 47 investigation into the global history of slavery — the oldest continuously operating institution in human history, and one whose modern forms currently affect an estimated 50 million people worldwide.We begin at the beginning. Not at 1619. Not at the transatlantic trade. At the clay tablets of ancient Babylon, where the oldest written records of human civilization already include administrative notations for enslaved people — recorded not as an aberration requiring explanation, but as a routine feature of economic life requiring documentation.Slavery did not begin in America. It did not begin in Europe. It did not begin with any single civilization, race, or religion. It is one of the most universal institutions in the documented history of our species — present in Babylon, in Egypt, in Greece, in Rome, among the Slavic peoples of medieval Europe, and on the coastlines of Ireland, England, and Iceland, where North African corsairs raided villages and carried away thousands of men, women, and children to the slave markets of North Africa.In this episode, we examine the ancient record — from Hammurabi's legal code to the silver mines of Athens, from the crucified six thousand on the Appian Way to the etymology of the word slavery itself, which derives from the Slavic peoples so frequently captured and sold in the medieval period that their ethnicity became the word for the condition.We then investigate the Barbary slave trade in depth — the centuries-long campaign by North African corsairs to raid the coastlines of Europe that resulted in the enslavement of between one million and 1.25 million European Christians between 1500 and 1800. The raids on Ireland, England, Iceland. The galley slaves chained to their oars. The market s of Algiers. The ransoming networks. And how it ended.This is not a story about any single culture's guilt. It is a forensic examination of how slavery became so embedded in human civilization that it took five thousand years to begin seriously challenging it — and why the challenge remains incomplete.Part 2 examines the Arab and Indian Ocean trade and the transatlantic system.Part 3 examines modern slavery — the 50 million people living inside it today.A companion article expanding the investigation is available on ⁠Medium⁠ at ⁠medium.com/file-47⁠.Subscribe to File 47: Investigative History for new episodes every week. If this episode left something with you, leave a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts — it's the primary way we reach new listeners.