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keeping such a brutal industry running was provided by the ‘good old’ Greek authors, and to
some extent by the Romans. The end of the 18 th century saw the height of the slave industry in
human history. 430
Due to Marxism and other theories of oppression, slavery has come to be seen as the
most primitive kind of systematic oppression. I do not share this view unconditionally 431 , but
it will do for practical purposes in this context. The economic aspect of oppression in the Cape
Colony, especially, took its beginnings in massive land appropriation, genocide and
enslavement: ‘The Cape Colony was one of the most rigid and oppressive slave societies in
history.’ 432 The enslavement of indigenous Khoisan survivors was disguised under a
nomenclature which termed them ‘servants’, whereas the term ‘slave’ was reserved for
imported slaves from Asia, Madagascar and Mozambique. These imported slaves rapidly
became a majority in the Cape Colony’s population. 433
In Graeco-Roman Egypt, this background of economic exploitation was also
important, since slavery continued to exist as a significant part of the economy. Yet, it was no
longer as basic as it had been and remained both in Greece and in Rome. ‘Only’ around ten
per cent of the population in Graeco-Roman Egypt consisted of slaves. The Macedonians took
over the forms of fiscal exploitation that the Persians and, ultimately, the Egyptians
themselves had already established in Egypt, centuries before Alexander’s conquests. 434 They
did sharpen it, however, to an extent thus far unseen. In fact, many Egyptians were part-time
slaves, at least during Roman times, forced to carry out menial work, such as stone quarrying,
for up to three months a year. Furthermore, economic exploitation under the Greeks and
Romans – in interaction with new forms of productive forces, including at times even steam
engines – developed a hitherto unknown form of exploitation. Proto-capitalistic, ‘and possibly
fully capitalistic’, structures, with a population density higher than most industrialized states
today, 435 appeared in Egypt alongside feudal forms and mainly domestic slavery.
An economic parallel to that does not turn up in South Africa until the mid-19 th
century. Until then, South Africa under white rule had overwhelmingly been an agricultural
producer based on slave labor with low population density. Israel, on the other hand, is a
relatively small country with high population density, that is, not unlike Egypt.
Dynastic Egypt (before the Ptolemies) had possibly had the lowest rate of slavery of
all known civilized societies in antiquity. The standard explanation for this is, again, the high
population density in Egypt. Already in the fourth millennium BCE, it is estimated to have
reached 200 people per square mile. A general humanist ethics, however, is likely to have
played a significant role as well. 436
Slave-labor-based economies, it is true, seem only to appear in advanced agricultural
societies where there is a perceived shortage of laborers, but some often forgotten, additional
430 Bernal 1987. See also Chapter II.9.1, below.
431 Cf. Löwstedt 1995: 81-85
432 Iliffe 1995: 124. See also N.N.: South Africa Says Countries Must Confront Slavery Past, March 22, 2001.
433 Lester 1996: 23ff. On the part-time forced labor, see Clauss 2003: 131.
434 It would indeed have been stupid of Greeks and Romans to try to impose their own form of slave society on
Egypt, as Walbank 3 1992 (1981): 116 seems to suggest. See also Iliffe 1995: 26.
435 Alston 2002: 346; Oliver 1991: 52, 56. Alston lists the following preconditions of industrialism present in late
antiquity Egypt: ‘comparably flexible capital, long-distance trade networks, sophisticated retailing networks,
large and hungry urban populations…comparatively cheap, easy and safe communications, and proto-capitalistic
(and possibly fully capitalistic) management strategies’ (ibid.). Incidentally, the myth of slaves building the
pyramids has been dismissed by egyptologists. They were built by Egyptian wage-laborers, many of them
periodic workers. Likewise, there is no archaeological trace, nor any written evidence outside the Bible, of the
first part of Exodus, that the people of Israel were enslaved and imported by the ancient Egyptians. There are,
however, indications that Egyptians used prisoners of war as slaves. As for the second part of Exodus, see Freud:
Moses and Monotheism, 1955 (1939); and, even more essentially, Assmann: Moses the Egyptian, The Memory
of Egypt in Western Monotheism, 1997. See also Chapter II.9.3, below.
436 Karenga: Maat. The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A Study in Classical African Ethics, 1995: 495ff;
Assmann 1995 (1990): 58ff; Tyldesley 1995 (1994): 14f