Every civilisation was built on slavery. Perhaps shocking but all the great achievements of mankind owe their existence to the imprisonment and enslavement of people.
Traditionally we try to justify human progress through technology. Fire, farming, tools are all argued to have increased efficiency and so bought humans time to spend on civilisation like arts and thinking.
But as we see today all that we do with this time is make more thing and become richer. To buy us time we need slaves to do the work for us. This way we remain rich, but have time for civilisation.
The last great slave owning civilisations were the Nazis in the 1930s and a generation before that the Americans. Without slaves neither civilisation would have happened.
The reason that slavery has diminished was the discovery steam in the 1700s which means that instead of using humans to turn food into work, we could turn coal into work. It just so happened that Britain was the world's greatest coal producing country right through the 1700,1800 and most of the 1900s. It is no surprise that during this time Britain was the world's largest empire.
Empire and civilisation require energy and work. You wither have slaves or machines or both.
So we don't need any romantic ideas of "freedom" and "justice" and need only have a very straightforward logic developing across history.
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