FACTBOX: Slavery - some facts

(Reuters) - Britain marked 200 years on Sunday since its first law abolishing trade in African slaves received royal assent, a major step toward ending the practice that shipped more than 10 million Africans overseas into slavery.

Here are some key facts about the slave trade:

* WHAT IS IT?

-- The condition in which one human being was owned by another. A slave was considered by law as property, or chattel, and deprived of most of the rights ordinarily held by free persons.

* TYPES OF SLAVERY:

-- Two basic types have been identified throughout recorded history: most common was household, patriarchal, or domestic slavery.

-- The other -- productive slavery -- was less common and used slave labor for economic production, such as on plantations. It occurred primarily in classical Greece and Rome, in 9th century Iraq, among the Kwakiutl Indians of the American Northwest and in a few areas of sub-Saharan Africa, and was widespread in the Americas as a result of the Atlantic slave trade.

* THE FIRST SLAVES:

-- Slavery is known to have existed as early as the Shang dynasty (18th-12th century BC) in China. It existed in Chinese society until the 20th century, in a similar way to the rest of the world: slaves were those captured in war, in raids, and the sale of insolvent debtors.