Off the top of my noggin I would say that a slave is a person who has a legal or social status which varies between a dead person's and that of an inanimate object. Like the dead, slaves sometimes have rights, but in many cases they must be defended by the state or third parties, and the only legitimate action they can take to defend themselves is to complain to the authorities (if they exist - slaves were SOL in some societies). A slave can be compelled to go wherever and do whatever the master orders them to (within the bounds of the law). Their connection to their kin is partially or totally severed, with the master assuming some of the responsibilities of the family or clan, such as providing food, housing, and mates. This is a very broad and leaky definition which won't hold up to a Socratic blowtorch, but there you go.
By your definition, " a person who has a legal or social status which varies between a dead person's and that of an inanimate object" there was no slavery except in Russia, Mongols, Japan, the Vikings, I guess technically Brazil. Aztecs and Inca, strictly speaking, and other indians. Otherwise, everyone who wasn't Royalty was a slave - which is not an incorrect stance to take.
Japan while the population had about zero rights, the slave population was primary prisoners (convicts or war captives) and had pretty much negative rights. Your slaves are almost always an "outside" population, and Japan is.
Mongols included all Mongols in a class above anyone else, everyone else was varying levels of dog.
The Vikings had Thralls, who were often war prisoners, though delving into human war booty gets tricky - this problem plagues the Aztecs and Inca as well. Mostly though they were traders who sold to the islamic states for steel. Its hard to unpack thrallery because the vikings didn't write a lot about it and most of the accounts are 3rd party who often had an axe to grind.
Brazil also had extreme stratification, where you had slaves being treated as practically disposable. While there were legal protections for slaves, the slaves were off in the jungle with no access to them, and none of the value that protected slaves in the US south. There was no Portuguese CSI showing up to investigate, and slaves were needing to be replaced at a fairly regular pace so there were no questions to be asked. (The US south also had some the same issues, however unlike Brazil there was economic incentives for not mistreating your slaves.)
"Wait, but in Rome a slave owner could have a slave put to death no questions ask" You say. Except the Partriarch of a family could have any member of his household, including his children and his wife put to death (unless she was connected) also with no questions asked. Slaves had about the same rights as a living person there.
Taking Slavery's All-Stars, the Ottomans, slaves had significant rights. The Ottoman word for the people in south-eastern europe and the caucuses is "Slav" from which we get the word "Slave". The Arab-run Islamic governments quickly decided early on that White Supremacy was real (Ok they just decided that Arabs are the worst race) and rather than trust the running of government to shiftless dunecoons, they instead would collect young boys as slaves, convert them to islam, and then educate them to be Government Workers as they would be loyal to the sultan and not to a family that even if they remembered them, would be hundreds or thousands of miles away.
But unless they were mine workers from africa, slaves had significant rights in both the civil courts and under religious law (in
theory). So your definition immediately excludes the #1 slave trading and slave owning culture.
Slavery is like obscenity "I know it when I see it", but also like obscenity the definition is very fluid. And also like obscenity, no matter what the definition you give, there is going to be an example out there that doesn't fit the letter of your definition but you're going to look at it and say "They are clearly slaves".
" A slave can be compelled to go wherever and do whatever the master orders them to (within the bounds of the law). Their connection to their kin is partially or totally severed, with the master assuming some of the responsibilities of the family or clan."
So are you saying US Marines are slaves?
(I'm dropping off the point about mates because my nigga....seriously that doesn't even hold water in the US south unless you're reading schlickfic)
I am out of my depth here because my knowledge of antiquity is limited, but other quite ancient societies in the Mediterranean and Near East practiced various forms of slavery and, as far as I know, there isn't any correlation between their longevity and the well-being of their slaves. It seems to me that the numerous civil wars, initiated by ambitious generals and officers, did more damage to the state than indolent farmers, and that resultant social instability retarded technological development. I would also point out that slavery did not self-destruct either during or after the empire, but survived in its descendants until the 1880s.
You've got a misunderstanding. Because Mesopotamia slavery, while under harsher conditions, the difference between a slave and a free person was often just a question of "is this the area you grew up in?" (and even then....)
When going into this next part, I like to start by bringing up Nate Turner account his first contact with white sharecroppers. Nate Turner, for the unaware, was a slave in virginia who lead a revolt. He was pretty clearly schizophrenic or psychotic and believed he needed to kill every white person he could to trigger a race war that would result in the end of slavery and all the blacks going back to Africa. After killing several white farmers, Nate and his band encountered a new breed of white: Sharecroppers. He saw that the white share croppers lived worse than the slaves did, and so his race war band left them alone and went on to slaughter a few more wealthy white families.
Now, not to go all existential, but there is always compelled labor. No man is truly free, etc. Even if you live alone on in the jungle, if you want to live you're going to have to do some hard work. Every society needs an underclass to do the dirty jobs - one either forms naturally or it is created. So what we need to focus on is the delta between slave free, that is "How much worse off a slave from the average shlub?" or another way "if a slave were to be freed, what changes?"
For example in Rome, a free slave was citizen and could vote, but usually not much changed. In most cases, slaves usually continued to work for their same masters, doing pretty much what they were doing before. Now I should also specify that the slaves we hear tales about are urban slaves and not the ones being worked to death on the frontier farms.
So going back to Mesopotamia, while societies there had slaves, the slaves didn't live that much different than free people. That is, Massa-hotep wasn't really all that concerned about you escaping because you didn't have anywhere better to go. You likely wouldn't get far. Slaves were allowed to own property. They were allowed to run businesses and side-hustles. The children of slaves were not slaves. Slaves were also a minority of the population; every society needs an underclass. You also couldn't be killed - but again, if you turn up dead with a 'Property of Massa-hotep' dagger in your heart and clutching a blood-spattered a cuneiform tablet scribed with "LO I SAY AS I SCRIBE THIS WITH MY STYLUS I AM BEING MURDERED BY MY OWNER", there is no Bronze-Age CSI and the official cause of death will be "Angered the Harvest Goddess & was smote".
And all those mideast cultures were toppled, by stronger outside forces, all of them with less reliance on slavery, until the Arabs and Ottomans bucked the trend for a while; but again, Arab/Ottoman slavery and Byzantine slavery were different beasts. Slaves generally preferred the Prophet botherers due to the protections slaves had under Islamic law from mistreatment ... until the general level of human condition raised, and there started to be a gulf between Slaves and Freed again.
A society that depends on slavery doesn't innovate and is eventually toppled.
Bringing this back around to the point of this autistic slap fight and my digression about Nate Turner, in the US South in the 1860s there was little gap between "Slave" and "Free" at the very bottom rungs of society. In some ways it was worse to not be a slave, because Massa fed his slaves (at the cheapest per-unit cost, which is why Soul Food focuses on pork includes things like collard greens and a collagen slurry made from boiling down pig anus) but in general, quality of life was improving and developments in industrialization were starting to make slavery an economic loser. The gulf between "slave" and "free" was rising, and would eventually be untenable as once freedom became universally preferable to slavery and it was known among the slaves, you wouldn't be able to keep your enslaved population contained and able to work. Even if the civil war never happened, the 13th amendment was "no state shall be forced to end slavery", probably within 50 years slavery in the US would have effectively ended and collapsed.
You are right about inventory being freed up along the Berber coast, but you missed my other, more important point, which was that the Civil War in the United States wouldn't have any direct impact on the slave trade in the Ottoman Empire because slaves were not being exported to the Americas in any real numbers by the middle of the 1800s thanks to British interdiction.
Ah I gotcha. I'm not saying that the American Civil War would have caused an uptick in Ottoman slave importing, but the restriction of the Atlantic slave trade during the lead up to would have. Mainly just a shit post how every wokie loses their mind about 300,000 slaves in the US while hand waving the 8 million going to Brazil and completely ignoring the Ottomans.
And if we're going full geopolitics, given the economic interests involved, you've got Britain, and also partly France, in a very uncomfortable position - being that Britain was militantly anti-slavery (because that's our colonies' free labor that you're exporting!) and France was also anti-slavery for pretty much the same reasons, but with both having very solid reasons for backing the confederacy.
Which I guess actually if you want to continue the Civil Forever war, but don't want to have to deal with the issue of slavery (hell, I can see non-woke 'we don't want games to descend into agrument about racial politics' reasons for that) there's your way out Britain demands the CSA outlaw slavery in exchange for continued support.
