Interface translated. The historical record entries, place names and scholarly sources below remain in English.
Slavery Across History — a global record, executed by all peoples
Every mark is a documented system of slavery or forced labour. Explore it four ways — a map over time, an at-a-glance grid, a timeline of durations, and a matrix of who enslaved whom. Throughout, colour = the origin/ancestry of the enslaved.
The truth this depicts: slavery was not one race owning another. It was a near-universal institution — Africans, Europeans, Arabs, Central, South, Southeast & East Asians, and Indigenous Americans each appear as both enslaver and enslaved — and it is not over: roughly 50 million people are enslaved today.
Where & when. Each dot sits where a system operated, sized by number enslaved, coloured by the origin of the enslaved. A pale dot in North Africa (Europeans taken by Barbary corsairs) and an African-coloured dot in the Americas coexist: position shows the enslaver, colour shows the enslaved.
2025 ADToday
Hover a dot for the short version; click for the full record with sources. The timeline is cumulative. During play, the forced-transport trades (Atlantic, Arab, Barbary, Crimean, coolie…) stream from origin → captor, then settle; the locally-enslaved systems (serfdom, helotage, nobi…) draw people in from the surrounding area — war captives, debt, raids — so no dot appears from nowhere. Routes are illustrative, not exact.
Origin of the enslaved (colour)
Dot size ∝ log of the estimated number enslaved.
Scale by origin, to3100 BCE
Illustrative total shown:0. Mixes flows & stocks — a sense of magnitude, not an exact sum.
The at-a-glance snapshot. Rows = origin of the enslaved; columns = era. A cell is shaded when documented systems enslaving that people were active in that era — darker = more systems. Read the filled-everywhere pattern: nearly every people was enslaved in nearly every era, and the "Today" column is fully lit — it is not over. Shade = number of documented systems (not people); darkness partly reflects how thoroughly an era was recorded. Click a cell for its systems.
Click a grid cell to list the documented systems it represents.
The barcode of bondage. One bar per system, spanning the years it operated (the time axis is compressed for antiquity, expanded for modern times). Lanes group by who enslaved; bar colour = who was enslaved. Bar length is duration, never quantity — nothing here is summed. Bars running into the bold 2025 edge are still with us today.
Who enslaved whom — the proof. Rows = the people who enslaved; columns = the people enslaved. Each cell counts documented systems. The diagonal is in-group slavery; the filled rows and columns show nearly every group appears as both enslaver and enslaved. Count of documented systems, not people. Click a cell for its systems.
Click a matrix cell to list the systems where one group enslaved another.
The whole story, playing. One clock drives both: a playhead sweeps the timeline below while, on the map above, each system's dot appears and — for the forced-transport trades — the enslaved stream from origin to captor along glowing routes that flow while the trade is active, then settle. Bars light up as the playhead reaches them. Two kinds of movement are shown distinctly: long-distance forced transport (a flowing arc across the map) vs. local captivation (people converging inward, no route) — war captives, debt, raids. Nobody appears from nowhere. Ideal for a screen-recording.
3100 BCEBronze Age
Ambient sound plays during play (muteable). Full-screen for a clean screen-recording.
What this does not claim — the honest objections, answered
It does not equate the systems. Showing many systems side by side is not a claim that they were morally or numerically equal. The trans-Atlantic trade is shown at full scale (~12.5M) and is the largest single flow here.
It does not minimise any system, and it is not "whataboutism." The point is a documented empirical pattern — slavery appears on every inhabited continent and in every era, including now — not a deflection from any one history.
It is not a precise ledger. Ancient figures are order-of-magnitude ranges with confidence flags; low-confidence rows are never used as anchors. Where scholars dispute a number, the range and caveat say so.
Read first — methodology & honest caveats
Estimates, not counts. No censuses survive for antiquity; every figure is a low–high range with a confidence flag and named sources (SlaveVoyages/Emory, ILO & Walk Free 2021, and historians incl. Eltis, Lovejoy, Austen, Davis, Scheidel, Warren, Tinker).
Flow vs. stock — never summed. Some rows are a cumulative flow (people trafficked over centuries); others a stock (held at one moment). They are different and never added. The grid and who-enslaved-whom views count documented systems (an honestly-addable unit), never people; the map's tally is an illustrative sense of scale only.
"Colour" is a deliberate simplification — a broad region-of-origin of the enslaved, never a claim about individuals. Many systems were in-group (Greeks enslaved Greeks; the large "Mixed/Multiple" bucket exists because origins are often plural).
Different institutions, one banner: chattel slavery, serfdom (Russian ~23M, an outlier — bondage to land), debt-bondage, corvée, the post-abolition "coolie" indenture trade, forced marriage, and modern trafficking. The trans-Atlantic trade is shown at full scale (~12.5M) — the point is made by breadth, never by minimising any system.