Slavery as a legal, government‑backed system ended surprisingly recently in world history, and it has existed in some form for thousands of years.

Quick Scoop: “How long ago was slavery?”

It depends what you mean:

  • Slavery as a human practice :
    Organized slavery appears in some of the earliest civilizations (Mesopotamia, ancient Greece, Rome, etc.), so people have been enslaving other people for over 4,000 years.
  • Transatlantic slave trade (Europe, Africa, the Americas):
    • Portuguese traders were transporting enslaved Africans by sea to Europe by the 1440s (about 580 years ago).
* Spaniards brought enslaved Africans to what is now the United States by **1526** (about 500 years ago).
  • End of slavery in major Western powers (legal abolition, not overnight freedom in reality):
    • Britain (Empire) : Slave trade banned in 1807 , slavery in most British colonies abolished in 1833/1834 (about 190 years ago).
* **France** : Abolished slavery in its colonies in **1848** (about 178 years ago).

* **United States** : Slavery ended nationwide with the **13th Amendment in 1865** (about 161 years ago as of 2026).
  • Global picture :
    • Many countries ended legal slavery in the 19th century.
* Some forms of legal slavery or very close equivalents continued in parts of the world **well into the 20th century** , and **modern forms of slavery (forced labor, trafficking)** still exist today, even though they are illegal.

So if someone in the U.S. asks “how long ago was slavery?”, a historically grounded answer is:

Legal slavery in the United States ended about 160 years ago , but the broader system of slavery is thousands of years old and its effects and modern forms are still with us.

Why this feels “not that long ago”

  • People who were born into U.S. slavery in the 1860s could have lived into the early 20th century, overlapping with the grandparents or great‑grandparents of people alive today.
  • After formal abolition, systems like sharecropping, Black Codes, and Jim Crow laws kept many formerly enslaved people and their descendants in conditions of severe exploitation and racial terror.
  • Globally, many abolition dates fall between the 1800s and early 1900s , which is just a few human lifetimes ago.

An easy way to picture it: if you stack four or five generations of a family photograph wall, slavery and its immediate aftermath sit just a couple of frames back, not in some distant, mythical past.

Today’s reality

Even though nearly all countries have outlawed slavery on paper, organizations that monitor human rights point out that millions of people are still trapped in forced labor, debt bondage, and human trafficking , which are widely described as “modern slavery.”

That’s why, when people ask “how long ago was slavery?”, many historians and activists answer:

  • The legal era of slavery ended roughly 150–200 years ago in many countries.
  • The legacy and modern equivalents of slavery are ongoing problems right now.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.