Once more on Hume and slavery: ancient vs modern and Humean lies

In his attempts to make light of, ignore, explain away, or whatever, race-based modern (in his time) slavery, David Hume, in The Populousness of Ancient Nations, also hints at an old trope:

"But classical slavery was WORSE!"

That's not a direct quote, but it is the old trope to a T.

I touched on this in my original main post on Hume and racism and his infamous Note, but this needs to be looked at further, because it t'aint necessarily true. In fact, a closer look at this essay of Hume's shows both that claim and one other are basically lies.

First, was slavery of classical antiquity sometimes more brutal than that of 1700s Virginia and the Carolinas, or even than on the Caribbean plantations like the one (maybe more we don't know about?) whose sale Hume brokered. 

Yes, indeed.

Were punishments worse?

Yes.

Modern slaves weren't crucified after revolts, though they were usually put to death. 

But? Per Hobbes, life in general was nasty, brutish and short, moreso in 100 CE than in 1770. (On the other hand, the amount of crimes for which one could be executed in Humean Britain was no day at the beach. And, in the U.S., post-slavery Jim Crow lynchings were arguably as barbaric as crucifixion.

The greater amount of slave revolts might be support for Greco-Roman slavery being more brutal. Or, it might be support for the fact that ancient plantations having at least as many slaves as the Caribbean and more than the mainland British colonies, but like them on a mainland, not small Caribbean islands, made escape somewhat more tempting. Or, it might be support for the idea that guns let modern slaveowners have even greater control over their charges.

The reality is that, in many ways, ancient slavery was not as bad.

First, Rome, especially, made manumission fairly easy. Oppose that to the U.S. colonies and states, where state laws from the late 1700s up to the Civil War continued to further and further restrict owners' right to manumit their slaves.

Second, social mobility for freedmen was MUCH greater in ancient Rome than the modern European colonial lands. There's a couple of reasons for that. One, slavery being even more common meant less stigma attached. Slavery not being race-based in antiquity meant there was even less stigma attached.

Third, many slaves being literate, and in general, there being no government laws against them being educated, meant that, not only were they not burdened by stigmas, they were more in control of their own destinies once freed. (Now, this was not the case for all slaves, of course, but for many, it was.)

AND?

I have little doubt that David Hume the professional historian as well as student of ancient philosophy knew these things himself, and was being disingenuous if I'm polite and a liar if I'm not.

That said, Hume is disingenuous from the start about Europe of his day "abolishing slavery." Scottish miners, colliers in specific, were subjected to the functional equivalent of slavery in Hume's day. (It wasn't a legally heritable slave status,  In addition, many upper-crust Scots owned a black house slave or two at his time.