Since we're talking mostly about religious views on slavery, for everybody here I have a study of the attitudes of the religions of the world toward slavery throughout their history:
Religions and the abolition of slavery - a comparative approach
Hinduism
The roots of slavery stretch back to the earliest Hindu texts, and belief in reincarnation led to the interpretation of slavery as retribution for evil deeds in an earlier life. Servile status originated chiefly from capture in war, birth to a bondwoman, sale of self and children, debt, or judicial procedures. Caste and slavery overlapped considerably, but were far from being identical. Brahmins tried to have themselves exempted from servitude, and more generally to ensure that no slave should belong to someone from a lower caste. In practice, however, slaves could come from any caste.
Although Hindu opposition to slavery is seemingly not documented, Bhakti movements, spreading from the early centuries CE, stressed personal devotion to one divine being. They welcomed followers from all caste backgrounds, and thus at least criticised slavery by implication.
Faced with the British colonial challenge, a new generation reinvented Hinduism as a reformed world religion, but still emphasised caste over slavery. Ambiguous views of bondage were nicely illustrated by Mahatma Jotirao Phule of Maharashtra (1827-90). In Slavery, a popular and much reprinted book of 1873, he praised the Western abolition of 'Negro slavery,' but wrote only of caste struggles against Brahmins in South Asia.
Buddhism
Buddhism grew out Hinduism, marginalising or rejecting caste, but with an ambiguous attitude to slavery. The canonical texts mentioned servitude without criticising it, and excluded slaves from becoming monks, although practice diverged from this norm. The Buddha forbade his followers from making a living out of dealing in slaves, and showed compassion for their lot. Ashoka (r.269-32 BCE), the archetypal Buddhist ruler, inscribed in stone his injunctions to cease slave trading and treat slaves decently, but without eliminating servitude.
Merciful Buddhist precepts may nevertheless have hastened a transition from slavery to serfdom, similar to that of mediaeval western Europe. Restricted to Sri Lanka and Mainland Southeast Asia by thethirteenth century, Theravada Buddhist kingdoms contained many more serfs than slaves. The main goal of frequent military campaigns was to seize people and settle them as whole communities attached to the soil, sometimes on monastic estates. Unredeemed debtors, who were numerous, blended into this wider serf population. Serfdom, slavery, debt bondage and corvée labour were abolished in stages in the Theravada Buddhist world from the nineteenth century. Western imperialist pressure was significant, together with rising population, commercialisation of the economy, belief in the superiority of free labour, and royal desire to restrict noble powers. However, a Buddhist revival, premised on a return to original texts and the exemplary life of the Buddha, also played a part. The initial Thai abolition decree of 1873 was couched in terms of Buddhist ethics, and the private correspondence of King Chulalongkorn (r.1868-1910) indicates that he was sincere in these beliefs.
Confucianism and the East Asian synthesis
In East Asia, Confucianism generally dominated Mahayana Buddhism and Daoism in social matters. Confucianism initially only sanctioned forced labour for the state, inflicted on captives and criminals. However, private, commercial and hereditary forms of slavery and serfdom soon became rampant. As Neo-Confucian reform movements spread from the twelfth century, some Korean scholars criticised private slavery as un-canonical and inhumane, for slaves are 'still Heaven's people.' Servitude engendered endless lawsuits, brutalised both owner and chattel, and undermined the family, the cornerstone of Confucian ethics. However, other sages argued that patrimonial property should be protected at all costs.
Ming and Qing Chinese rulers cited Neo-Confucian norms to improve the lot of 'mean people,' including slaves. A wave of servile uprisings prompted noted reforms in the 1720s. The authorities prohibited raiding, kidnapping, and trading in people, while tolerating servitude by birth, self-enslavement, and the sale of children in cases of dire necessity. Forced labour for life persisted as a punishment, and officials allocated such people to private individuals, but these 'state slaves' could be neither transferred nor manumitted without official permission. Moreover, the worst offenders were more rarely castrated than in earlier centuries.
Confucianism was weaker in Japan, and Mahayana Buddhism may have played a greater role in the transition from slavery to serfdom, more or less complete by the tenth century. Serfs in turn slowly evolved into a free peasantry in early modern times. Prisoners of war ceased to be legally enslaved from the early seventeenth century, although descendants of former captives might still be traded, and destitute parents continued to sell their children into some kind of bondage. The modernising Meiji regime after 1868, faced with an upsurge in exports of girls to Southeast Asian brothels, passed a law forbidding all buying and selling of females in 1872. A 'Japanese-sponsored cabinet' then imposed complete emancipation on Korea in 1894.
In response to growing Western pressure, Chinese abolition became more secular in tone. The sale of girls, in part for export to Southeast Asia, provoked an international scandal from the mid-nineteenth century. The Qing thus took the ultimate step of abolishing slavery in 1906, to take effect in 1910. The prohibition was repeated by the Republicans after they took power in 1911, and again by the Communists after 1949. Even the latter found it hard to stamp out sales of abducted women and children, however. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was necessary to 'make propaganda to persuade rural people that buying women and children is wrong.'
Judaism
Slavery was as old as the Torah, and posed few problems as long as outsiders were the victims. Deuteronomy, 20:13-14, taught that 'when the Lord your God delivers [the city] into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves.' Leviticus 25:44 further allowed purchases of gentiles: 'Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves.'
Although holding Hebrew slaves grated with the founding story of liberation from bondage in Egypt, exceptions were made and safeguards were ignored. Exodus 21:2-16 allowed the purchase of Hebrew children, but commanded the release of males in the seventh year of their bondage, and forbade kidnapping on pain of death. Deuteronomy 15:1-18 allowed self-enslavement, but called for the release of female as well as male slaves in the seventh year, together with the cancellation of debts. Leviticus, 25:10, further commanded that slaves be freed after seven times seven years, in the year of the jubilee.
The prophetic books criticised slavery. Isaiah, 61:1-2, trumpeted that God 'has sent me ... to proclaim freedom for the captives,' and to 'proclaim the year of the lord's favour [the jubilee].' Ezekiel, 46:17, also referred to freedom in the year of the jubilee. Jeremiah, 4:8-22, identified disobedience in releasing Hebrew slaves in the seventh year as causing the wrath of God to fall upon his people. Joel, 3: 6, fulminated against the sale of Jewish slaves to Greeks, while Amos, 1:6 and 1:9-10, condemned the sale of 'whole communities of captives.'
Sects, flourishing around the beginning of the Common Era, took this a step further. The austere and pacifist Essenes, centred in Palestine, declared enslavement to be against God's will. Through John the Baptist, they may have influenced early Christianity. The Therapeutae, in Egypt, pronounced slavery to be contrary to nature. They probably reflected the ideas of Stoics and other Ancient authors, who opposed Aristotle's views on 'natural slavery.'
Despite this sectarian ferment, rabbinical Judaism clung to slavery after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. At best, rabbis were uncertain whether uncircumcised gentiles broke purity rules by residing in the household, whether efforts should be made to convert slaves, and what impact this might have on their servile status. At the same time, they tightened rules on manumitting Jewish slaves, to keep the community united. The twelfth century Maimonides code recognised both Jewish and non-Jewish slaves, and the Genizah records of tenth to thirteenth century Egypt depict slavery as part of everyday life. Early Modern rabbis debated whether it was right to hold 'Canaanite' gentiles as slaves, but Jews participated in Atlantic slave trading and slave production.
The onset of Judaic repudiation of slavery came in the nineteenth century, when some Jews were affected by Western abolitionist fervour. Moses Mielziner's closely argued German dissertation, written in 1859, circulated widely in abolitionist circles, even if his views were hotly contested. The United States Jewish community split over the issue on broadly North-South lines, like their Christian compatriots. Even after legal emancipation in the United States, a minority of Jewish scholars 'continued to insist on the abstract lawfulness of human bondage as an ordinance of God.' Jews in Islamic lands may have been particularly slow to take up the cause of abolition.
