Did they, though? The categorizations go way WAY farther back than the 18th century. Probably to the dawn of civilization to be honest. The Greeks talked about their slaves in very familiar terms to how the English did in colonial era.
Replies
Sorry to say this, but you make the impression of not really knowing what you're talking about - so probably worth reading up a little before returning to the subject ?
aug 19, 2025, 12:08 am • 1 0 • view
What? No they didn’t. Slavery in Ancient Greece and Rome wasn’t racialized and slaves weren’t considered subhumans. They were largely captives of war or people who couldn’t pay their debts, and their descendants.
aug 18, 2025, 11:01 pm • 5 0 • view
Modern racial classifications are called that because they’re modern.
aug 18, 2025, 11:02 pm • 2 0 • view
The Romans thought Greek slaves were particularly valuable as tutors because of their intellectual culture!
aug 18, 2025, 11:03 pm • 1 0 • view
Right. Chattel slavery was an entirely new invention as were the racial categories and the way natural sciences were directed toward the job. Linnaeus tried to define the races using the newly developed taxonomic standards he had just created
aug 18, 2025, 11:09 pm • 0 0 • view
Chattel slavery is what the Greeks and Romans practiced too
aug 18, 2025, 11:44 pm • 0 0 • view
People as property without rights. But it was considered something that could be done to anyone under the right circumstances, not an inherent biological state of subservience.
aug 18, 2025, 11:45 pm • 0 0 • view
Iirc the distinguishing feature was not property without rights but that chattel slavery was hereditary. I don’t believe that was part of ancient forms
aug 18, 2025, 11:52 pm • 0 0 • view
Not true. Even Aristotle wrote that slaves were subhuman.
aug 18, 2025, 11:49 pm • 0 0 • view
The fact that he sees a problem here at all (how can one be a master and another a slave if they’re both responsive to reason and capable of fine action?) is your clue that he almost certainly doesn’t think of slaves as subhuman in the way modern slavers and racists sometimes did.
aug 19, 2025, 12:03 am • 1 0 • view
Charles Carroll’s “The Negro a Beast” is probably a useful contrast case
aug 19, 2025, 12:06 am • 1 0 • view
aug 19, 2025, 12:10 am • 1 0 • view
Popular 19th-century slaver ideology (and attendant racism) was by some distance more backward than Aristotle.
aug 19, 2025, 12:12 am • 1 0 • view
“Slave” was a social status rather than an inherent nature. If your ship got attacked by pirates you had a real good chance of being sold into slavery unless you were worth a random.
aug 19, 2025, 12:16 am • 0 0 • view
*ransom
aug 19, 2025, 12:17 am • 0 0 • view
You’re engaging in a very frustrating white supremacism strategy to minimize colonialism and slavery. Hopefully that’s unintentional
aug 18, 2025, 11:54 pm • 2 0 • view
Aristotle was European. I’m arguing he (and almost everyone else born before about about 1900) was by modern definition racist and accepted subhuman categorization of the “other” as not immoral. And I’m saying that makes the word close to meaningless when applied historically.
aug 19, 2025, 12:00 am • 0 0 • view
aug 19, 2025, 2:03 am • 0 0 • view
Aristotle has to actually argue that some kinds of slavery are just because there is influential and plausible opinion known to him at the time that *no* slavery is just. He has contemporaries who think that enslaving even foreigners is just wrong.
aug 19, 2025, 2:07 am • 1 0 • view
aug 19, 2025, 2:07 am • 1 0 • view
Yes there are always the enlightened few, it’s true. But I’d guess Aristotle’s opinion was by far the mainstream in Greek opinion.
aug 19, 2025, 2:44 am • 0 0 • view
OF COURSE slaves themselves were dehumanized to greater or lesser degree, but the notion that that entire racial populations were in a natural state of slavery did not exist. These were cosmopolitan societies - especially Rome.
aug 19, 2025, 12:09 am • 1 0 • view
It’s like you yourself can’t escape the modern notion that slavery requires an idea of racial inferiority.
aug 19, 2025, 12:09 am • 1 0 • view
They didn’t have anything even resembling the modern idea of race, which was invented specifically to relegate entire populations to an inescapable and inherent inferior status to justify the most depraved exploitation.
aug 19, 2025, 12:12 am • 1 0 • view
Pretty much everything you said was wrong. Congrats
aug 19, 2025, 12:02 am • 0 0 • view
This is incorrect. This book gives a thorough historical overview of the changes in Western conceptions of race from Ancient Greece to the modern day:
aug 19, 2025, 12:18 am • 0 0 • view
They don’t go back to the dawn of civilization at all, they were largely a product of the enlightenment.
aug 18, 2025, 10:55 pm • 2 0 • view
The Greeks slaves were largely other Greeks tho
aug 19, 2025, 1:19 am • 0 0 • view