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Last summer, writes the architect and human rights investigator Eyal Weizman, the Strip was blanketed with “enormous dust clouds containing particles of the different materials that formed the building[s] and [their] environment—concrete, plaster, paint, glass, metal, sand, soil—some of which are synthetic and toxic.” The dust “covered everybody’s skin, eyes, mouths, nostrils, it was present in food and water, and also covered the entire ground like a new layer of topsoil.” In the decades to come, an epidemic of cancer, lung disease, and brain damage caused by this fallout could come to rival in lethality the war’s bombs and bullets.

There’s other instances of people randomly punching slaves that they didn’t even know because they got in their way or something. This was just normal behavior.

And slaves didn’t rebel en masse because if even one slave committed an act of violent rebellion it was common practice to kill every slave and former slave in the household.

People only took notice for posterity when these mass executions got into the hundreds of people. One of the few recorded for the history books is of over 400 people being killed because one guy stabbed his enslaver.

Chattel slavery is an incredibly cruel and dehumanizing system.

So is every other kind of slavery.

This doesn’t diminish the awfulness of what people were forced to endure under chattel slavery.

I just think it’s useful to remember that cruelty is complicated and diverse and just because a cruel system is different doesn’t make it right by any means.

Roman slavery operated differently from slavery in the antebellum American south which operated differently from slavery in the Ottoman Empire which operated differently from modern prisoner chain gangs.

In the unit about physical work, he points out that work is, at its core, a measurement of labor, and that labor which isn’t done by a paid laborer had another name before the rise of automation: slavery. He has his students quantify the amount of physical work that you might expect out of a human slave, and then sets them to work calculating what that means for their own standard of living. If you wanted to live like you currently do in the ancient world, how many slaves would you need? Calculate your washing machine in slaves. Calculate your dishwasher in slaves. Calculate your refrigerator and your TV and your HVAC in slaves.