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The Vikings were more than just bloodthirsty raiders

The Norse (or Northmen) were farmers, traders, craftsmen, and musicians, as well as, feared warriors.

For almost 400 years the Norse spread across most of Europe and were the first Europeans to set foot on North American soil

The Vikings were Indo-European people from Scandinavia

another branch of Vikings migrated south into Russia to trade with Constantinople.

Vikings and the Slavs also raided the Roman territory

The history of slavery in India is complicated by the presence of factors which relate to the definition, ideological and religious perceptions, difficulties in obtaining and interpreting written sources, and perceptions of political impact of interpretations of written sources.[1] If current scholarly interpretations of various literary sources are accepted, then slavery as forced appropriation of labour, skill or sexual gratification appears to have existed in various forms from the pre-500 BCE period, though never as a legitimate and generally acceptable widespread practice. Historical consensus points to an intensification of slavery under India's Islamic period.[2][3][4][5][6] For instance, K. S. Lal discussed in his work "Muslim Slave System in Medieval India" the import of African slaves to India by Muslims through the Middle East, a trade never undertaken by India's indigenous religions due to limited contact with Africa. Often, claims about slavery in India, and the sources they are based on, need to be analyzed with special attention to context. Some modern scholars appear to treat most claims of slavery by Persian or Arabic chroniclers as propaganda or exaggeration for military and political glorification, whereas similar arguments are not applied to the textual claims of the epics, the Smriti, or other pre-Islamic Indian texts (Levi admits the possibility of exaggeration on the part of Muslim chroniclers but accepts Basham's claims based on Mahabharata without such doubts.[1]) Susan Bayly of Cambridge University noted in her work "Caste, Society and Politics" that India was never a monolithic caste society [7] with noted shifting and fluidity of the caste structures in some parts of India, and its non-existence in others. Irfan Habib notes in his study of the agrarian system of Mughal India, that in many parts of the country, caste barriers were fluid, and the working classes formed a type of vast labour pool, from which specializations were formed as and when needed without consideration of caste.

  Slavery, or involuntary subjection to another or others, existed in every ancient civilization, such as Sumer, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, parts of the Roman Empire, and so on. People were enslaved for various reasons, including slave raiding, sale of insolvent debtors and capture in war; slaves commonly were recognized as property, assets that could be bought and sold. In the Chinese empire (c. 211 BCE - 1912 CE), slavery existed throughout all dynasties, although numerous aspects of slavery did not remain the same. The word "slave" itself changed many times, nubi () in the Han period, yinke () in Jin, booi aha () under Manchu rule, and so on. The function and position of slaves in Chinese economy shifted several times as well.             This paper will briefly describe the initiation of slavery before Imperial China, and proceed to analyze several aspects about slavery in each dynasty of the Chinese Empire; I will discuss the changing definition of a slave, how slaves became slaves, abolition of slavery and ways to gain freedom, and the degree of dependence or power slaves held in society. The paper is organized in chronological order, but details of slavery in several dynasties existing before Ming and Qing can be scarce due to the lack of attention slaves received prior to Manchu rule.