As an institution of global proportions, slavery's fortunes rose and fell over the course of half a millennium. This book examines the intercontinental interaction of violence, economics, and civil society in accounting for the ebb and flow of slavery and antislavery. For thousands of years before the mid-fifteenth century, varieties of slavery existed throughout the world. It thrived in its economically and culturally developed regions. The institution was considered indispensable for the continued functioning of the highest forms of political or religious existence. It set limits on how a social order could be imagined.

Beyond the organization of society, enslavement was often conceived as the model for the hierarchical structure of the physical universe and the divine order. From this perspective, in a duly arranged cosmos, the institution was ultimately beneficial to both the enslaved and their masters. Whatever moral scruples or rationalizations might be attached to one or another of its dimensions, slavery seemed to be part of the natural order. It was as deeply embedded in human relations as warfare and destitution.

By the sixteenth century, however, some northwestern Europeans began to recognize an anomaly in their own evolution. Jurists in the kingdoms of England and France noted that slavery had disappeared from their realms. They claimed that no native-born residents were subject to that status. Although slavery might be recognized elsewhere as one of the normal facts of social relations, their own laws had ceased to sanction it.