How did Islam and Christianity affect labor systems?

Answer 1

Answer 1

Christians are pro human rights, and were opposed to the use of slavery in the US and protested the US government for a long time to end slavery. It was the citizens of the US that got the government to write labor laws. Christians today are opposed to human trafficking.

Answer 2

Until the early 1800s, Christianity and Islam both permitted and justified slavery. Regardless of whether people would have supported slavery without Christianity or Islam (since slavery was acceptable in most places in East Asia where neither Christianity or Islam were very effective in proselytizing), these two religions provided their strong support to the extant enterprise.

The Catholic church made clear, for example, the racial status of Blacks as brutes and the permissibility of their enslavement. Blacks were distinguished from Indigenous Americans as early as 1543 with a papal bull in terms of their ability to receive Christ and therefore the permissibility of their salvation. Since Blacks could not be saved except with extensive contact with a "civilizing force", enslaving Africans was a "positive" because it promoted morality among the Black peoples. Protestant Christianity was little better exclusively demonizing Blacks as Hamitic peoples. In the Bible, some of the descendants of Ham (one of Noah's three sons) are cursed that they shall serve the children of the other sons. Ham is typically considered the "Father of Africa" and Japeth is typically considered the father of Europe. Protestants, including US Vice President John C. Calhoun cited this argument to show that Christianity is in support of the enslavement of Blacks. Of course, currently, almost all Christian sects have moved on to a post-slavery mindset and it is true that most Abolitionists were Christians, but Christianity's past with slavery is quite strong.

Islam, while rewarding the man who freed his slaves, made no secret of permitting slavery. Many of the cities in the Islamic Empires had a bustling slave trade and there was strong financial incentive to enslave Africans, Slavs, Turks, and numerous other ethnic groups that lived just outside of the Islamic Empire. Muslim authorities explained that it was more permissible to enslave non-Muslims because creating inequality between Muslims was problematic for Mohammed's message of equality between all Muslims. However, there was little enforcement of this doctrine. Many Turks, for example, converted to Islam during their enslavement, but their slavery did not end or change in quality after their conversions. The Turks, in fact, were generally known as the Mamluks (which means "owned") and were slave soldiers for the Abbassid and Buyid Caliphates. Slave labor was used to grow cotton in Lower Egypt long before it was used to grow cotton in the new world. Islamic enslavement also served as general template for the Spaniards when they went to the new world. Spain's prior Islamic occupation had given Spaniards with a good sense of how a slave market should be run, how the industry could be funded, and what ways slavery could be justified. It should be no surprise then that the Spanish slave-system was quickly adopted by the other European Powers due to the effectiveness of the model, having been honed by Muslims for centuries. Slavery still exists in several Muslim-majority countries (even though it is officially illegal), most prominently in Mali, Mauritania, and Sudan. Some Muslim-majority countries only banned slavery recently, like Saudi Arabia in 1969. Most Muslims and Muslim religious leaders today object to slavery in all of its forms.