Slavery and race

In certain examinations of slavery it is argued that a distinction needs to be made between slavery and racism. Thus it is sometimes proposed that ancient civilizations may have taken slavery for granted, because, as Benjamin Isaac has observed, “there was no assumption that a person had a natural or moral right to freedom” and, further, that “the subjection of one people by another was not in itself morally condemned.” Hence “the urge to build a systematic and consistent theory proving that one set of human beings was inferior to another was less strong than in modern times.” ¹