doubt that slavery is what Academic Monkey meant by dealing in people….

Probably not. But it does seem to be one of the most prominent examples in “historical societies.” That, and family relationships — which of course have their own sort of violence and their own fettering “bonds.” I am not being fair here, of course, but I do think it’s important to remember and to stress that, if we are supposed to be viewing this historically, those non-monetary ways of “dealing” with each other could offer their own kinds of shittiness and inhumanity — to say the very least. But to the extent that that’s true, I wonder how much the problem really is a problem either with monetary or non-monetary relationships — and how much it is a problem with the social or interpersonal context within which those relationships occur.