Slavery was a universal custom in the Middle East from the very earliest civilizations, which explains its ready acceptance in the major religions to arise in that region. The same was true of other parts of the world. In India, slavery was certainly common by the beginning of the Common Era and probably at the time of the Buddha, in the sixth century BC (Singh, 2009). There is reason to suppose that slavery was widespread in the earliest Chinese culture, the Shang dynasty, which flourished for about 700 years from the seventeenth century BC onward (Cotterell, 1980). In both India and China,
...more
