ABSTRACT
James Steuart attempts to explain how slavery influences the demographic growth and the employment of individuals in a society. Steuart completely neglects the ethical and juridical aspect of the issue of slavery, as his comparison between the conditions of slaves and wage workers shows. Slavery was seen as a weakness in the economic and social model and, at the same time, as an obstacle to human progress. Steuart’s attitude towards the phenomenon of slavery, however, seems to lead him in the opposite direction, since he considers it a ‘constitutive’ element of the modern economy and tries to make it compatible with society’s new ways of organizing production. Ragip Ege’s work represents an interesting exception because it deals with the topic of slavery independently from the issue of population. In the specific case of slavery, the legislator should feel the duty to remove laws that justified the inequalities amongst men as regards climatic or environmental factors.
