Enslavement in the context of "Voluntary slavery"

Human rights are universally recognized moral principles or norms that establish standards of human behavior and are often protected by both national and international laws. These rights are considered inherent and inalienable, meaning they belong to every individual simply by virtue of being human, regardless of characteristics like nationality, ethnicity, religion, or socio-economic status. They encompass a broad range of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, such as the right to life, freedom of expression, protection against enslavement, and right to education.

While ideas related to human rights predate modernity, the modern concept of human rights gained significant prominence after World War II, particularly in response to the atrocities of the Holocaust, leading to the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. This document outlined a comprehensive framework of rights that countries are encouraged to protect, setting a global standard for human dignity, freedom, and justice. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) has since inspired numerous international treaties and national laws aimed at promoting and protecting human rights worldwide.

Slavery in the Spanish American viceroyalties included the enslavement, forced labor and peonage of indigenous peoples, Africans, and Asians from the late 15th to late 19th century, and its aftereffects in the 20th and 21st centuries. The economic and social institution of slavery existed throughout the Spanish Empire, including Spain itself. Initially, indigenous people were subjected to the encomienda system until the 1543 New Laws that prohibited it. This was replaced with the repartimiento system. Africans were also transported to the Americas for their labor under the race-based system of chattel slavery. Later, Southeast Asian people were brought to the Americas under forms of indenture and peonage to provide cheap labor to replace enslaved Africans.

People had been enslaved in what is now Spain since the times of the Roman Empire. Conquistadors were awarded with indigenous forced labor and tribute for participating in the conquest of Americas, known as encomiendas. Following the collapse of indigenous populations in the Americas, the Spanish restricted the forced labor of Native Americans with the Laws of Burgos of 1512 and the New Laws of 1542. Instead, the Spanish increasingly utilized enslaved people from West and Central Africa for labor on commercial plantations, as well as urban slavery in households, religious institutions, textile workshops (obrajes), and other venues. As the Crown barred Spaniards from directly participating in the Atlantic slave trade, the right to export slaves (the Asiento de Negros) was a major foreign policy objective of other European powers, sparking numerous European wars such as the War of Spanish Succession and the War of Jenkins' Ear. Spanish colonies ultimately received around 22% of all the Africans delivered to American shores. Towards the end of the Atlantic slave trade, Asian migrant workers (chinos and coolies) in colonial Mexico and Cuba were subjected to peonage and harsh labor under exploitative contracts of indenture.

The German Nazi Party adopted and developed several racial hierarchical categorizations as an important part of its racist ideology (Nazism) in order to justify enslavement, extermination, ethnic persecution and other atrocities against ethnicities which it deemed genetically or culturally inferior. The Aryan race is a pseudoscientific concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people who descend from the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a racial grouping and it was accepted by Nazi thinkers. The Nazis considered the putative "Aryan race" a superior "master race" with Germanic peoples as representative of the Nordic race being the best branch, and they considered Jews, mixed-race people, Slavs, Romani, black people, and certain other ethnicities racially inferior subhumans, whose members were only suitable for slave labor and extermination. In these ethnicities, Jews were considered the most inferior. However, the Nazis considered Germanic peoples such as Germans to be significantly mixed between different races, with the East Baltic race being considered inferior by the Nazis, and that their citizens needed to be completely Nordicized after the war. The Nazis also considered some non-Germanic groups such as Sorbs, Northern Italians, and Greeks to be of Germanic and Nordic origin. Some non-Aryan ethnic groups such as the Japanese were considered to be partly superior, while some Indo-Europeans such as Slavs, Romani, and Indo-Aryans were considered inferior.

These beliefs stemmed from a mixture of historical race concepts, 19th-century and early 20th century anthropology, 19th-century and early 20th-century biology, racial biology, white supremacism, notions of Aryan racial superiority, Nordicism, social Darwinism, German nationalism, and antisemitism with the selection of the most extreme parts. They also originated from German military alliance needs. The term Aryan generally originated during the discourses about the use of the term Volk (the people constitute a lineage group whose members share a territory, a language, and a culture). Unlike the German armed forces (Wehrmacht) only used for military conflicts, the Schutzstaffel (SS) was a paramilitary organization directly controlled by the Nazis with absolute compliance with Nazi racial ideology and policies.