Slave example sentences
Related (12): enslaved, slavery, bondage, servitude, captive, thrall, serf, indentured, oppression, freedom, liberation, emancipation
"Slave" Example Sentences
Common Phrases
- slave labor
- slave trade
- slave to
- slave away
- slave driver
- slave quarters
- slave narrative
- slave owner
- enslaved people
- slave market
- wage slave
- slave revolt
Examples by Level
A1
- He was a slave in ancient Rome.
- The slave worked in the field every day.
- They freed the slave from the chains.
A2
- My grandfather's family owned a slave plantation before the war.
- She felt like a slave to her job — working weekends, no days off.
- The slave trade destroyed millions of African families.
B1
- He'd become a slave to his phone, checking it every few minutes without thinking.
- Learning about the slave narratives in history class changed how I understood America.
- You can't build a free society on the backs of a slave population — the contradiction eventually breaks everything.
B2
- The irony wasn't lost on her: the nation's founders wrote about liberty while maintaining a slave system that contradicted every word.
- What struck me most about the slave autobiographies wasn't the suffering — it was the intellectual clarity of people denied every opportunity.
- He'd spent his twenties as a slave to ambition, only to realize at forty that he'd sacrificed the things that actually mattered.
C1
- The psychological architecture of slavery — how it dehumanized both the enslaved and the slave owner — remains one of history's most devastating examinations of power.
- To read the slave narratives is to encounter voices of extraordinary eloquence speaking from circumstances designed to render them silent.
- Modern consumer culture often positions us as willing slaves to convenience, a bondage so comfortable we rarely question its cost.
C2
- There's a particular cruelty in how the slave trade was rationalized through pseudo-scientific racism — the perpetrators needed to believe their own mythology to live with themselves.
- The slave narratives possess a rhetorical power that transcends their historical moment; they speak to any condition of systematic dehumanization.
- What we call freedom, he'd come to understand, was often just a more sophisticated form of slavery — the chains simply invisible to those who wore them.
Examples by Scenario
🏠 Everyday Life
- I feel like a slave to my alarm clock — it goes off at 6 AM whether I slept or not.
- My neighbor mentioned his ancestor was a slave, and it completely reframed how I think about his family's history.
- The dog acts like a slave to the food bowl, abandoning everything the moment it hits the floor.
💼 Workplace
- She joked that she'd become a slave to spreadsheets since the new manager arrived.
- Our company did a diversity training that included a documentary about the slave trade — it was heavy but necessary.
- He's been a slave to email for so long he doesn't even notice when he's checking it anymore.
📊 Business
- The fashion industry's supply chain was exposed as relying on near-slave labor conditions in overseas factories.
- Our marketing campaign about ethical sourcing directly addresses the slave labor problem in cocoa production.
- Investors are increasingly demanding transparency about whether companies profit from slave or near-slave working conditions.
🛒 Buying / Shopping
- I spent an hour researching whether this chocolate brand uses slave labor before I bought it.
- The price seemed too good to be true — I wondered if it was made with slave labor somewhere in the supply chain.
- These jeans cost twelve dollars, which made me immediately suspicious about slave or exploitative labor practices.
✈️ Travel
- The museum tour in Charleston focused heavily on the slave trade that built the city's wealth.
- We visited a historic plantation and the guide was honest about the slave quarters and the people who lived there.
- Traveling through the American South meant confronting the slave history embedded in almost every old building.
📚 Education
- The history curriculum finally includes primary sources from slave narratives, not just textbook summaries.
- My daughter's teacher assigned a project on the slave trade, and she came home asking difficult questions.
- The university added a required course on slavery and its legacy — it's one of the most important classes on campus.
❤️ Relationships
- We broke up partly because I felt like a slave to his needs — always adjusting, never being asked what I wanted.
- He told me his great-great-grandmother was a slave, and sharing that vulnerability changed how I understood him.
- She said she didn't want to become a slave to motherhood the way her own mother had, and I respected that honesty.
📰 News / Politics
- The senator's remarks comparing taxes to slavery drew immediate backlash from historians and civil rights groups.
- A new documentary about the slave trade in the Indian Ocean is getting international attention for reframing global history.
- Reparations advocates argue that the wealth gap today is a direct result of slave labor and systemic theft.
💻 Technology
- The app uses AI to analyze historical documents, including slave auction records, to help researchers trace family histories.
- Some critics argue that social media algorithms make us slaves to engagement metrics and dopamine hits.
- The database digitized thousands of slave narratives, making them searchable and accessible to students worldwide.
📝 Formal Writing
- The institution's endowment was substantially built through investments in slave-trading enterprises during the eighteenth century.
- Historical records indicate that the slave population in the colony increased by approximately forty percent between 1750 and 1760.
- Contemporary scholarship demonstrates that the economic benefits derived from slave labor persisted through subsequent generations via inherited wealth and property.