Slavery is the legal classification of humans as property, in which a person can be held as property by a slaveholder. Slavery originated in the first few millenia BCE, when the first civilizations forced prisoners of war and lowborn people to do manual labor in the households of wealthy families. This system would remain in place in Western Europe for thousands of years, but most European nations abolished this type of slavery during the Middle Ages; Russia would not emancipate its serfs until the Emancipation Reform of 1861. In the 1400s, a new type of slavery would take hold in the West - race-based slavery. Africans and Native Americans were enslaved by the Europeans, although the extermination of the Native Americans through disease led to most slaves being African-Americans. Slaves were mostly employed in colonies as unpaid laborers, usually working on plantations to pick cotton or farm sugarcane. The slave trade was outlawed in the late 1700s and early 1800s in most countries, and slavery would be abolished over the course of the 19th century, with slavery causing the start of the American Civil War in 1861. Since then, slavery has been unacceptable, and Mauritania was the last country to abolish slavery, doing so in 1981. Human trafficking, an illegal practice, has since replaced slavery.
