Originally, slavery had nothing to do with racism either in the ancient world or in colonial North America, but simply existed as an economic arrangement favoring those who enslaved forced labor. In the classical world, victorious armies often enslaved captives of war. Moreover, debtors who could not work off their debts found themselves sold into slavery. However, when a group of people with identifiable racial characteristics had been in slavery for a several generations, their physical characteristics helped them be more easily identified as slaves: