Yet the story of slavery’s disappearance from Europe after the collapse of Rome tells a different tale—one where economics smothers morality, and where the so-called “progress of conscience” is little more than a rearrangement of incentives.
Slavery, that ancient and brutal institution, faded from Europe not at the height of its intellectual brilliance but precisely during what later historians would label the Dark Ages. The disappearance of slavery was not accompanied by a burst of light, but by a dimming of power. “History rarely abolishes an institution out of compassion,” as one philosopher observed, “but often out of exhaustion.” Rome’s machinery had collapsed; the system that fed on slaves was too weak to sustain itself.
And yet, modern European memory prefers a gentler explanation: Christianity. It is comforting to believe that spiritual awakenings liberate bodies. But the record tells us something more ambivalent. Medieval theologians debated the soul’s salvation far more than the slave’s emancipation. Later centuries would reveal the irony with painful clarity: Christian conquistadors and Protestant merchants built slavery on a planetary scale. The cross and the whip often sailed on the same ship.
The more plausible engine of change was feudalism. Europe did not morally transcend slavery—it replaced it. The feudal lord had no use for chattel slaves when serfs could be bound to the soil through custom, obligation, and necessity. The manor replaced the plantation; the chain became invisible. Feudalism did not awaken Europe’s conscience; it merely taught Europe another technique of domination. As a result, the continent survived, but did not flourish. It lived, as it were, in a long twilight.
This is the uncomfortable hypothesis: Europe’s great ages of power correlate disturbingly well with its access to coerced labour. When Europe abandons slavery, Europe withers; when Europe embraces it, Europe ascends.
The fifteenth century proved the point. Europe’s re-emergence into global power was not powered by piety, nor by a spontaneous improvement in diligence, but by the mass enslavement of Africans. Between 12 and 18 million people were transported across the Atlantic—an atrocity industrial in scale, theological in justification, and civilizational in effect.
The plantations of the New World—built on the backs of Africans—did not merely produce crops; they produced Europe’s re-entry into world history. Before Africans arrived, European settlers in the Americas were, quite literally, dying out. Their life expectancy hovered near twenty-five years; starvation and disease threatened the colonial project. In a tragic twist of history, Africans saved the European presence in the Americas; without African labour, the “West” might never have become Western.
And yet Europe congratulated itself with another myth: the “Western work ethic.” Max Weber, that eloquent theorist of capitalism, attributed Europe’s ascent to the Protestant ethic—discipline, frugality, and industriousness. But the plantations tell a different story: If the Europeans possessed such a superior work ethic, why did their prosperity require millions of enslaved labourers? A civilization that relies on coerced bodies should hesitate before praising its own industrious spirit.
The paradox deepens in the twentieth century. As Europe and the United States industrialised into great powers, they steadily shifted their agriculture to Latin America and Africa, and their manufacturing to East Asia. The global economy rearranged itself along a new axis: the so-called engines of Western productivity were powered by the labour of non-Western hands. If Weber had travelled through Asia, he might have rewritten his thesis altogether—perhaps not “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” but “The Discipline of Asia and the Exhaustion of Europe.”
History, when stripped of its comforting narratives, forces us to confront a sobering truth: Civilizations do not rise because they work harder or pray better. They rise because they discover, justify, or outsource labour.
Europe tells this story with a peculiar combination of moral pride and historical amnesia. But beneath the surface lies an older, harsher logic: whenever Europe loses control over cheap labour—whether in antiquity or in modern times—it enters a winter of decline. And whenever it regains such control, it reclaims a summer of strength.
Whether this is a cycle or a curse depends on what humanity chooses to remember—and what it chooses to forget.
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