At its most basic analytical level, slavery must be understood as a labor system. Regardless of society, culture, or historical period, slave owners utilized slaves as workers to accomplish a wide variety of economic tasks. Slaves, however, were not simply laborers but were also valuable assets, since they were legally or customarily regarded as chattel to be bought and sold in the same way as land, animals, tools, and other forms of property. Thus, slaves filled two fundamental economic functions for their owners: as laborers for the production of goods and services, and as investments in property that could be bought, sold, rented, or used as collateral to secure credit from lenders.

Unlike systems such as wage labor, slaves rarely earned monetary or other compensation and had few choices as to occupation or owner/employer, since ultimately the entire slave labor system was based upon coercion and often a great deal of brutality. Accordingly, the geographical mobility of slavery considered in the previous chapter, as well as the occupations and economic sectors in which slaves labored, were determined solely by the slave owners, whose motivations were almost always governed by the general economic principal of perceived profit maximization.

It is certain that the quest for a perverse form of social prestige may have also been a motive for owning slaves in the cultural context of some slave societies, or societies with slaves that “assigned” status to slave owners.