Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2008
In 1922 Carter Woodson lay a brief but nevertheless sweeping foundation for a history of captivity that reached into the earliest recesses of the classical world. Invoking the classical paragons of democracy, Woodson argued (1922, 15) that slavery
was once the normal condition of the majority of the inhabitants of the world. In many countries slaves outnumbered freemen three to one. Greece and Rome, the most civilized of the ancient nations in which the so-called democracy of that day had its best opportunity, were not exceptions to this rule.