A slave has no personal rights and is the property of another person through birth, purchase, or capture.
Slavery goes back to prehistoric times but declined in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire.
During the imperialism of Spain, Portugal, and Britain in the 16th to 18th centuries and in the American South in the 17th to 19th centuries, slavery became a mainstay of an agricultural factory economy, with millions of Africans sold to work on plantations in North and South America. Millions more died in the process, but the profits from this trade were enormous. Chattel slavery involves outright ownership of the slave by a master, but there are forms of partial slavery where an individual is tied to the land, or to another person, by legal obligations, as in serfdom or indentured labour . As a social and economic institution, slavery originated in the times when humans adopted sedentary farming methods of subsistence rather than more mobile forms of hunting and gathering. Slave labour became commonplace in ancient Greece and Rome, when it was used to cultivate large estates and to meet the demand for personal servants in the towns.