Talk:History of western civilization

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|This is quite an undertaking. One could write thousands of pages on this topic. Good luck summarizing it! --Xyzzyplugh 16:01, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! (Wiki988 05:47, 11 March 2006 (UTC))

Someone appears to have dreamed some of this stuff up:

This slavery [in the Americas] was unique in world history for several reasons. Firstly, because slavery had not traditionally been part of Western Civilization, Europeans never became slaves

No, much of central Europe and Britain was overtaken and enslaved by the Roman Empire for centuries.

So, since only black Africans were enslaved, a racial component entered into Western slavery which had not existed in any other society to the extent it did in the West.

No, enslaved peoples in Europe were not predominately black. The Irish enslaved Romans they captured, for example, one of them being St. Patrick.

Another important difference between slavery in the West and slavery elsewhere was the treatment of slaves. Unlike in other cultures, slaves in the West were used almost exclusively as field workers, and were practically never given an opportunity to become educated or gain their freedom.

No, not true in any respect at all. Black slaves often earned their freedom in the Americas, they were given indoor jobs as freqently as the Romans, for one, gave their European slaves.

Western slavery was more brutal than any other form of slavery in history.

If we are still talking about slavery in the Americas this is not even remotely true. More brutal than the Greeks, who often mutilated their slaves, chopping feet off to keep them from running away? More brutal than the Romans, who turned slaves into gladiators and otherwise amused themselves by torturing and killing them? So many cultures leave no written records that it's impossible to know what their practices were. But in one period the kings of Numibia buried hundreds of slaves alive in honor of dead kings, and many were killed for the same purpose in other cultures.

Slaves were treated as sub-human and endured harsh treatment from their masters.

Again, hardly unique to the Americas

This article appears to be a charicature of historical revisionism. This section in particular should be mostly deleted or completely re-written.

RFabian 20:05, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

I actually wrote pretty much the entire section you are refering to. Most of the information I recieved for it came from a textbook called The Earth and Its Peoples. I have read over the section again and I do plan on revising it and deleting any erroneous information. I would also like to apologize for the innacuracies in the section, and as I said I will correct them as quickly as possible. --Wiki988 04:15, 14 November 2006 (UTC)