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4.6: Enslaved People

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    135171
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    For there were indeed slaves in Qin and Han society. Some were owned by the government, others privately. Some criminals and their families became government slaves; sometimes the families were pardoned after a dozen years or more. An executed criminal’s family and even their descendants might be permanently enslaved, their faces tattooed. Other government slaves were war captives, or had been offered as tribute. Aged government slaves were sometimes freed, sometimes cared for, but sometimes sold or resold to private owners. The government confiscated the slaves of criminals along with other property. Government slaves worked mainly in dangerous places like mines and iron foundries. Gong Yu – the farmer turned high official – in 44 BC decried the fact that 100,000 convicts were at work in such government enterprises.8

    Privately-owned slaves were those who had been sold or had sold themselves when families were starving, or who were kidnapped and sold illegally. The famine and destruction that attend war often brought enslavement for children; in 205 BC, Liu Bang permitted people to sell their children (or move to Sichuan) for food, and three years later he declared all such people free again. Children might also be pawned, and if not redeemed within three years would become slaves; or they could be put up as collateral for a loan and be lost that way. A child born to two slave parents was enslaved from birth, but it is not clear whether just one enslaved parent made the child a slave. Private slaves could be freed or buy themselves out of slavery, but stealing them was a crime. Some merchants specialized in training youngsters as singers and dancers and selling them, and some sources report young slaves dressed up in silk and displayed for sale in pens. In one case “several tens” of these were sent for sale together. Freed slaves were commoners, with no permanent taint. Han slaves included Koreans, Iranians, Turks, Tibetans, Uighurs; and Han subjects were sold as slaves in foreign countries.9

    Han commoners fell into slavery in part because of state monopolies on iron and salt (why would salt be a good government monopoly?), and because they were required to pay the “poll tax” – a per capita fixed tax – in cash. Farmers could not easily raise cash. Since the main crops in any place come ripe at the same time, if sold on the market then they are worth little. The monopolies and cash poll tax, squeezing smallholders, were introduced at the same time as a tax on wealth (not income) that taxed goods at twice the rate of land. Wealthy families were looking to convert other kinds of wealth into land. They quickly bought up the fields of their desperate poorer neighbors, and even their children. Those families now had to work for others. High taxes compromised the Han fiscal base and its political claim to be supporting smallholders.

    And why did Emperor Wu want all that tax money? To fight the Xiongnu.


    This page titled 4.6: Enslaved People is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Sarah Schneewind (eScholarship) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.

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