One day, I mentioned to a friend how much I paid my domestic worker. Her reaction was immediate: “Oh, that’s a lot. Why pay that much?” I asked her one question in return: if your employer offered you a raise of that exact amount, would you turn it down? She thought about it, then said no. So I asked her: why find that amount excessive for someone else, when you yourself, with your comfortable life, wouldn’t turn it down as a supplement to what you already earn? There is something deeper in this conversation than the question of salary. There is, in embryo, everything we refuse to see about ourselves.
We live in an era where the discourse on slavery, racism, and exploitation is omnipresent. And this discourse has its legitimacy — the transatlantic history is real, its wounds are documented, its consequences still visible in the economic and social structures of the contemporary world. But there is a blind spot in this discourse that we do not want to illuminate. A truth we dodge with remarkable skill.
Domination has never been a question of skin color. It has always been a question of power. And as soon as a human being held an advantage over another — economic, military, institutional — without a mechanism to constrain him, he has, in the majority of documented cases in human history, exploited that advantage. Without geographic exception. Without cultural exception. Without racial exception.
To understand where we are today, we must travel. Not far — in time. And return with what history has to tell us.
First Stop: Rome. The Most Advanced Civilization of the Ancient World.
When we think of Rome, we think of its aqueducts, its law, its Senate, its philosophers. We think of a civilization that laid the foundations of modern Europe. What we forget — or prefer to forget — is that this same civilization ran on the backs of millions of human beings reduced to slavery. And that among them, there was not a single Black African. There were Gauls, Germans, Britons, Greeks, Thracians, Asians. Human beings of all colors, all origins, treated like cattle.
The numbers are staggering. In the first century AD, slaves represented between 25 and 40% of the population of the city of Rome — between 300,000 and 350,000 people in a city of 900,000 inhabitants. In some regions of Italy, one in three inhabitants was a slave. Across the entire empire, it is estimated that one in five people was in bondage. The Roman economy did not function despite slavery. It functioned because of it.
Roman law was explicit in its brutality. Servus non persona est — the slave is not a person. It was written into the civil code. A slave could legally be subjected to corporal punishment, torture, sexual exploitation, summary execution. Their fate depended entirely on the character of their owner. Some masters treated their slaves almost like family members. Others worked them to death in the mines, where life expectancy was measured in months.
The philosopher Seneca described in a letter what he observed at Roman banquets: a slave cleaning up his master’s vomit, another picking up scraps under the table from drunken guests. No one in the room found this shocking.
The gladiators deserve particular attention, because they embody a particularly revealing form of exploitation. Most were prisoners of war or condemned men, sold to lanistae — owners of combat schools — who trained them and then rented or sold them for the games. They fought before tens of thousands of spectators whose entertainment consisted of watching human beings injure or kill each other. Their lives had value only in proportion to their ability to entertain. Spartacus, the Thracian gladiator whose revolt in 73 BC gathered up to 120,000 slaves, was white. His oppressors were too. Race had nothing to do with it.
As for female slaves, their condition added institutionalized sexual servitude to economic bondage. They had no legal recourse against abuse by their master or members of his household. None. Roman law did not recognize the rape of a slave as a crime — it was, at most, damage to her master’s property if the aggressor was a third party.
Here is the question I pose: if someone described these facts without saying where they took place or when, what word would we use? And why does that word change when we specify it was in Rome, between white people?
Second Stop: A Word and Its Secret History.
There is a fact that most people do not know, and that deserves careful attention. The word we use today in almost every European language to designate a slave — slave in English, esclave in French, esclavo in Spanish, schiavo in Italian, Sklave in German, saqaliba in medieval Arabic — comes from the name of a white people of Eastern Europe: the Slavs.
This is not a trivial linguistic coincidence. It is testimony to a massive historical reality. From the 8th century onward, the Slavic peoples — Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats, and others — were so massively captured and sold as slaves that their name eventually became synonymous with the word “slave” across all of Europe and the Arab world. The word spread through dozens of languages like a collective linguistic scar.
Between the 6th and 11th centuries, millions of Slavs were captured by the Vikings, sold to Arab merchants, transported to the slave markets of Baghdad, Constantinople, Córdoba. The Crimean Tatars, between 1500 and 1700, captured between one and two million Russians and Poles to sell as slaves. Crimea, for centuries, was one of the largest slave markets in the world — and the slaves were white.
And then there were the Barbary pirates — the corsairs of the North African coast, based primarily in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, they ravaged the coasts of Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, England, Ireland. They attacked entire villages, carried off families, fishermen, women, children. One night in 1631, an Irish village called Baltimore awoke to find its entire population taken aboard ships bound for the slave markets of North Africa. The village did not repopulate for years.
The historian Robert Davis, of Ohio State University, calculated that between 1530 and 1780, between one million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured and sold as slaves on the coasts of North Africa. Between 1500 and 1650, there were probably more white Christian slaves in North Africa than there were Black African slaves in the Americas.
“One of the things that both the public and many scholars have tended to take as given is that slavery was always racial in nature. But that is not true.”
— Robert Davis, historian, Ohio State University
This fact is not cited here to relativize or minimize the transatlantic slave trade. It is cited because it constitutes irrefutable historical proof: slavery never needed skin color to justify itself. It only ever needed a power imbalance and the absence of an institution to constrain it.
Third Stop: Feudal Europe. Where White People Reduced Other White People to Serfdom.
After the fall of Rome, direct slavery did not disappear — it transformed. It took the name of serfdom, and was the condition of the vast majority of European peasants for nearly a millennium. It would be tempting to say that serfdom was less brutal than slavery. The reality was more nuanced — and often just as dark.
A serf was bound to his lord’s land. He could not leave it without permission. He could not marry without his master’s consent. He had to work for free on the lord’s lands several days a week — sometimes up to half his time — in addition to cultivating his own plot to survive. His children were born serfs. His grandchildren were born serfs. He had not chosen this, and he could not escape it by his own will. In Russia, serfdom had evolved into a form indistinguishable from pure slavery: serfs could be bought, sold, gambled in card games, given as gifts. It was not until 1861 — four years before the abolition of slavery in the United States — that Tsar Alexander II freed the 40 million Russian serfs.
In France, serfdom did not officially disappear until 1789, during the Revolution. In Prussia, in 1811. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at the end of the 18th century. This system lasted, depending on the region, between eight hundred and a thousand years. Throughout this time, white human beings had the right to treat other white human beings as a hereditary productive resource. And the masters did not hold back.
The Catholic Church itself owned slaves and serfs. Saint Martin of Tours owned 20,000 serfs. The popes administered estates whose labor force was servile. Religion — all religions — has never constituted a natural obstacle to domination. It has often justified it.
Here is what this history tells us: European feudalism was not an anomaly of history. It was the human norm in the absence of the rule of law. As soon as someone had land and weapons, and no one could constrain them, they reduced their weaker neighbors to servitude. Not out of particular malice. Out of economic logic, in a world without institutional protection for the weak.
Fourth Stop: What’s in a Word.
There is a detail I particularly love in this story, because it alone illustrates the entire thesis of this article. The word “robot” — the term we use today to designate automated machines — comes from the Czech robota, which meant “forced labor, servitude.” It was invented by the writer Karel Čapek in 1920 for his play about mechanical workers with no rights or will of their own. He chose this word precisely because his Slavic compatriots knew, in their flesh and in their memory, what it meant to be treated as a machine in service of another.
Slave. Robot. Two words in the modern global vocabulary that carry within them, engraved in their etymology, the memory of domination imposed on white human beings by other human beings. We use these words every day without thinking about it. It is perhaps the most eloquent symbol of our inability to see history in its entirety.
The Return to the Present: What We Do Today.
We have traveled far. It is time to come back. And to ask the question this journey was designed to make inevitable.
Let us return to the opening scene. My domestic worker. My friend’s indignation at a salary she herself would not refuse. This banal moment contains in embryo the exact same psychological mechanism that has always underpinned domination: the certainty of being able to decide what is enough for someone else. The conviction — never explicitly stated, but operative — that certain people, because of their social origin, their level of education, their economic vulnerability, deserve less. Or rather: that they do not have the legitimacy to demand as much.
This is not an opinion. This is what the data shows.
Human Rights Watch has documented for decades the working conditions of domestic workers around the world. In South Africa, a study conducted in 2020 by the Izwi Domestic Workers Alliance and the Hlanganisa Institute reveals that domestic workers regularly describe employers who refuse them raises knowing full well they cannot afford to leave. Employers who prevent them from going out on weekends. Employers who house them in undignified conditions. Employers — and this is the detail that should stop us — who belong, in the majority of documented cases, to the same Black community as the workers they exploit.
“Domestic workers reported that their employers perceived them as vulnerable because they were poor and believed they could manipulate them. Many reported that their employers knew the workers desperately needed their wages. Many felt powerless in the face of abuse.”
— Izwi/Hlanganisa Report, South Africa, 2020
Human Rights Watch also documents the conditions of African domestic workers in Morocco, where girls as young as ten are sent to work in urban homes for a pittance, and where employers beat them, lock them in, deny them access to healthcare. It is not colonizers doing this. It is Moroccans doing this to other Moroccans. Africans doing this to other Africans.
“If something happened — if I broke something or did something wrong — they would beat me with a shoe or a belt on any part of my body. I could not leave the house — they locked the door when they went out... My family saw me twice in the year I worked.”
— Testimony of a child domestic worker in Morocco, Human Rights Watch, 2005
In Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, the DRC, Angola — everywhere economic conditions create a class of people without alternatives, some of their compatriots seize that advantage. Not all. Not even the majority. But enough for the pattern to be documented, repeated, recognizable. Workers denied leave to see their sick parents. Domestic employees paid months after the due date, or not paid at all, with the implicit threat of dismissal as the only response to their complaints. Entire families who treat their employee as property rather than as a person.
This is not racism in the ordinary sense of the term. It is something more fundamental and more universal. It is the human tendency to consider those who are economically beneath us as a different category — a category for which the ordinary rules of dignity do not quite apply in the same way.
The only difference between a Roman master and an African employer who refuses a raise to his domestic worker is the law. Where the law protects the weak, domination is constrained. Where it does not, it thrives — in everyone, without exception of race or culture.
What We Refuse to See.
There is in contemporary African society a generalized victimization discourse that points to external responsibilities — colonization, the West, multinational corporations. This discourse has its share of truth. But it is used, consciously or not, as a screen. It protects us from the most uncomfortable question: what do we, ourselves, do with the power we have?
Our countries lack schools? Roads? Hospitals? Clean water? Electricity? Yes. And meanwhile, African political leaders embezzle billions that end up in accounts in Geneva or Paris. It is not the West doing this to our populations. It is our elites doing this to their own citizens. The mechanism is exactly the same as the one we describe when we talk about colonization: someone has power, someone does not, and the absence of the rule of law allows one to exploit the other without constraint.
And our leaders know it. That is why — as we have developed elsewhere — they do not build solid educational systems. A people that does not think, that does not understand how the state works, that does not know that public money belongs to them — that people is easy to govern. Ignorance has always been the first tool of domination. It was no different in ancient Rome, where slaves were forbidden to learn to read. It was no different in the slaveholding American South, where literacy for slaves was punishable by death. And it is no different in our countries today, where schools are chronically underfunded while the children of elites study in Paris, London, Brussels.
What History Actually Tells Us.
If we accept all of the above — Rome, the Slavs, medieval serfdom, African domestic workers today — only one conclusion is possible: slavery and domination are not Western inventions, nor racial pathologies. They are universal human tendencies that only solid institutions have managed to constrain.
Where there existed a rule of law that protected the weak against the powerful, domination retreated. Where that rule of law was absent or corrupted, it thrived. This is not a coincidence. It is a law governing how human societies function, verified by history on every continent, in every culture, in every era.
The transatlantic slave trade was a particular horror, not because it was unique in its principle, but because it was industrial in its scale, recent in its history, and left structural traces in the societies where it was practiced. Its particularity deserves recognition. But recognizing it does not require ignoring everything else. On the contrary: understanding that domination is universal should make us even more demanding of ourselves. Because it means we are all capable of it. And therefore all responsible for it.
The Question We Do Not Want to Ask.
Let us return to my friend. To that banal scene on a Friday morning. She is not mean. She is not racist. She has never wanted to harm anyone. But in that sentence — “why pay that much?” — she revealed something she did not want to see: the unconscious conviction that an amount she would accept without hesitation as a simple raise — on top of what she already earns in a comfortable life — would be excessive for someone else. And that this asymmetry was normal.
This mechanism is universal. It ran through the psychology of the Roman master who found it normal for his slave to sleep on the kitchen floor. It ran through that of the feudal lord who found it normal for his serfs to work for free on his lands three days a week. It runs today through the psychology of the African employer who finds it normal not to pay his domestic worker’s leave, or to confiscate her phone so she doesn’t “waste time.”
This mechanism is us. All of us. In certain circumstances, with certain people, when institutional protections weaken or do not exist. Admitting it is not a capitulation. It is the beginning of an honesty that alone can produce something different.
Because if domination is human and universal, then we all have — every one of us — the power and the responsibility to fight it. Not just over there, in the past, in others. Here, now, in ourselves.
Let us start by paying our domestic workers fairly. And by asking ourselves, honestly, why we had not done so before.
In Brief
Central thesis: Domination is not racial. It is human. And history proves it in every era, on every continent.
Ancient Rome: 25 to 40% of Rome’s population was enslaved. White Gauls, Germans, Britons — sold, tortured, sexually exploited. Roman law: “the slave is not a person.”
The etymology of “slave”: “Slave” comes from “Slav” — the white Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe, so massively enslaved that their name became synonymous with the word in every European and Arabic language.
The Barbary pirates: Between 1530 and 1780: between 1 and 1.25 million white Europeans sold as slaves in North Africa.
Medieval serfdom: 800 years of hereditary servitude in Europe. Abolished in Russia in 1861 — four years before the abolition of slavery in the United States.
The word “robot”: Comes from the Czech robota — “forced labor.” Coined in 1920 in memory of the servitude of the Slavic peoples.
Today in Africa: Documented reports from Human Rights Watch and academic studies: African domestic workers beaten, unpaid, locked in, denied leave — by their African compatriots.
