Slavery as Stockholm Syndrome

slavery

 "is an institution according to the law of nations whereby one person falls under the property rights of another, contrary to nature."

This definition of slavery is, surprisingly, from first century Roman law, recognizing the unnatural quality of slavery in the eyes of the Roman Empire, one of history's great slavers. It is placed by David Graeber in his book "Debt" in opposition to the opinion of Olaudah Equiano, an African sold into slavery as a child, who bought his freedom, became a success­ful merchant, a best-selling author, an Arctic explorer, and eventually, one of the leading voices of English Abolitionism. His life story played a significant part in the movement that led to the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807 (as they freed up their ships for the opium trade.) Yet for most of his early life, Equiano was not opposed to the institu­tion of slavery. The conundrum appeared to be that slavery essentially deprives the slave of honor. "To be able to recover his honor, a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and standards of the society that surrounds him, and this means that, in practice at least, he cannot absolutely reject the institutions that de­prived him of his honor in the first place."