ABSTRACT
The abolition of slavery and serfdom is one of the most remarkable transformations in all of world history. Before the nineteenth century, some proportion of the population was either enslaved or enserfed across the vast majority of human societies. Slave masters had rights to sell, beat, and coerce their slaves. Landowners had a more limited set of powers over serfs but could direct their labour much of the time and could even in some places sell them to other landowners. The fact that slavery and serfdom largely disappeared at the same time, and across a wide range of polities, suggests that there were common sources of change. Though the abolition of slavery and serfdom was a revolutionary transformation in human relations, we should not imagine that the situation of freed slaves or serfs improved dramatically overnight. The abolition of slavery provides clear evidence that ideas matter. We cannot emphasize too much that abolition occurred while slavery was still profitable.
