The 21st century liberal line is
that 'slavery is wrong', as if in our time
we speak for all history,
and in our time we can account
for what history was meant to be.
But history tells a different story,
and the older the times we look back on
the less reliable it gets, and harder it is
to explain the times are to account for,
and yet we should examine them closely
to find the humane and compelling in these accounts.
We can't know who wrote those account about powerful men,
any more than we can know what the men were like as children
or the women their mothers were, and what parenting was like.
The lives of women and children were seen
as too weak and inconsequential
for accounts of them to be thought to matter.
In this historical vacuum lived the domestic slaves,
where they were like women and children,
where they were all became the property of male masters
and patriarchs who owned everything that was owned,
from cattle, sheep, to family, servants, and language.
For slaves domestic slavery to a household
was a way of escaping homelessness, poverty,
and worse; it was better than the alternative.
Where histories record a loss of choice,
we must recognise history as the outcome
of the Hobson's choice past for the present day.
With the enlightenment came industrial slavery
and an industrial scale slave trade, in which
the rich countries named the poor countries
ransacked them for resources, and abducted
their population to process what ransacked
and dumped the slaves, their names lost from history,
in moves which were the opposite of domestic slavery.
Where domestic slavery housed those it contracted,
in their lack of means, industries of every type
made millions not just homeless but stateless,
existing well beyond their means of reversing it.