The biggest problem I see with the TikTok piece is the claim that the United States quickly and efficiently eliminated slavery and was one of the first nations to do so.

In fact, the United States was a holdout compared to similarly developed industrializing nations like Great Britain.

If you'll forgive my putting on my amateur ancient history lover hat, Roman slavery is interesting in how it has so many similarities to U.S. slavery but critical differences too.

It's absolutely true that the Romans did not enslave "races." Race wasn't a concept Romans understood, and they didn't care who a slave was in the first place. The Roman empire, both before and after Augustus, whom we think of as the first emperor, was a vast commercial enterprise, led by mega-wealthy families equivalent to today's billionaires.

It was also almost 100% a slave economy.

Rome expanded its territories to enrich the families who ran Rome, and acquiring slaves was one of the primary reasons for expansion. The household slaves you mentioned were not that primary purpose, and represented only a small percentage of the total universe of Roman slaves.

Most slaves worked fields growing grain, olives, and the other staples. Many others worked copper, iron, and gold mines, goldmines especially being one of Rome's primary sources of wealth.

Mining slaves were almost always worked to death. Mine owners needed a constant resupply of slaves in order to keep their operations running. It was in their interest to see Rome continue to expand its territories to bring in more people enslaved during the course of wars.

Agricultural slaves fared a little better than mining slaves but not much better. The conditions were not quite as brutal as the mines, and they didn't tend to die as fast. But they were far from the privileged household slaves in big cities like Rome itself.

The entire Italian peninsula was filled with vast farms operated by mega land owners, and worked by armies of slaves whose lives were fairly short and brutal.

The island of Sicily was practically nothing but a giant farm operation, with slaves outnumbering the local population.

The wealthy businessmen who ran these farms usually freed their slaves when they became too old to work productively, but this was not good news for the slaves, who generally had no way to support themselves, and who either ended up as beggars on city streets somewhere or simply lay down and died. . Periodically, reforming politicians would try to pass laws to stop the freeing of slaves, and this was almost always to address the problem destitute agricultural freedmen caused to society.

Mostly though, Romans worried about the vast number of slaves outside cities, who if they ever got organized could represent a serious threat. They weren't just imagining things, as the Spartacus rebellion shows. Spartacus was a slave gladiator (most but not all gladiators were slaves) who escaped and organized armies of mining and agricultural slaves to fight for their freedom.

That rebellion ended with bodies hanging on crosses all up and down the Italian peninsula on just about every Roman road — as an example of what would happen to slaves who tried to rebel.

Household slaves lived far better lives, and if you believe some of the sources, even sometimes very good lives. Although, nobody really asked the slaves. Pretty much everything that has come down to us is writing by wealthy slave owners, many of whom claimed their slaves were happy.

Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. Poor people sometimes did enter household slavery voluntarily in order to advance their station in life. Since it was customary to eventually free some household slaves, especially valuable ones like physicians and teachers who had served well, people who did not hold Roman citizenship could use slavery as a step up for their family.

But this came with a huge gamble. The slave owner held absolute power of life and death over his slaves. Slave owners could beat their household slaves and kill them with no legal consequence, and they did that sometimes. It was socially frowned upon, sometimes intensely depending upon what era of Roman history we're talking about, but we know it happened a lot because it got written about a lot.

What wasn't socially frowned upon was the right of slave owners to have sex with their household slaves, an almost universal practice. Slaves had no right to bodily autonomy, and were often bought expressly for sexual purposes, especially adolescent boys and girls.

Several of Rome's wealthiest families owned interests in large chains of brothels staffed entirely or almost entirely by slaves.

The one thing the Romans never seemed to get a handle on like the US did was breeding slaves. Wealthy Romans were constantly pushing for more wars so more slaves could pour into Rome, but they never seem to hit on the idea of producing their own slaves. I'm not sure why. Maybe because on the individual level, war was cheaper for large-scale slave owners than breeding operations. Why spend money on expensive facilities and on removing slave women even temporarily from the workforce when the Roman state can go out, conquer a territory, and bring 100,000 new slaves back to Rome?

One of the reasons the Roman economy began to contract (at least in the West) in the third and fourth centuries is that Rome had run out of easy territories to conquer and easy slave pickings in those territories.

By then, a feudal system had begun to emerge that turned agricultural workers, even Roman citizens, into landbound serfs, but that's another story.