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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Slavery is one of humanity’s most ancient and persistent inequities. It predates the rise of civilization, played a key role in the growth of Western and Islamic cultures and was an integral part of the emergence and global spread of capitalism. Given its historical significance, it is not surprising that the problem of slavery is still passionately debated today and that modern-day trafficking and forced servitude remain key issues of public concern.
In Enslavement: Past and Present, historical sociologist Orlando Patterson casts a wide net to examine the social, political, and economic complexities of slavery across different eras and societies. Patterson examines slavery at several levels of abstraction, from micro-level relations of domination to the macro-structures of entire societies. Building on the 'bundle of rights' perspective, he reevaluates the definition of slavery, exposing its variegated fabric of iniquities across tribal and advanced pre-modern societies as well as our modern globalized age. Patterson also examines the critical role of women in the history of slavery, the significance of manumission in the formation of Christian doctrine, and the devastating toll of genocide and undaunted revolt of slaves in Jamaican slave society. Concluding with an investigation of contemporary slavery and other forms of servitude, this book urges readers to reckon with the brutal legacies of the past and its alarming modern-day persistence.
Enslavement: Past and Present deepens our understanding of the broad spectrum of evil and human bondage throughout history, an understanding that is essential for contemporary struggles to build a more inclusive society for all.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Introduction
Part I: The Nature and Study of Slavery
1. On the Institution of Slavery and Its Consequences
The distinctive features of slavery
The modes of enslavement
The acquisition of slaves
Treatment of the enslaved
Manumission as an integral element of slavery
Agency and resistance
The enduring consequences of slavery
2. Revisiting Slavery and Property as a “Bundle of Rights”
Property as a bundle of rights (or sticks)
Property and slavery across time and societies
3. Beyond “Slave Society”: The Structural Articulations of Slavery in Pre-Capitalist and Capitalist Social Formations
Approaches to the study of slave societies
An alternative framework for the study of slave societies
Large-scale passive articulation: The case of Korea
Conclusion
4. The Denial of Slavery in Contemporary American Sociology
Introduction
The historical significance of slavery
The silence of the sociological clan
Part II: Slavery in the Premodern and Early Christian Worlds
5. The Origins of Slavery and Slave Society: A Critique of the Nieboer-Domar Hypothesis and Case Study of Ancient Athens
The origins of slavery as institution
The origin of slave society: Athens 800–300 BCE
Appendix
6. The Social and Symbolic Uses of Slavery in Ancient Rome and Early Christianity
Coda
Part III: Slavery in the Modern World
7. Slavery and Slave Revolts: The Maroon Slave Wars of Jamaica, 1655–1739
Introduction
The British conquest and the failure of White settlement, 1655–1700
Early Black marronage and slave revolts, 1655–1700
Black solidarity between enslaved rebels and maroons, 1700–1720
Toward victory: The defeat of the British slaveholder class, 1720–1739
Snatching betrayal from the jaws of victory: Cudjoe and the Treaty of 1739
Explaining slave revolts
Conclusion
Appendix A
Appendix B
8. Slavery and Genocide: The US South, Jamaica, and the Historical Sociology of Evil
The nature of genocide and ethnocide
Slavery and genocide in history
Slavery and protracted genocide in Jamaica, 1655–1838: A counterfactual comparison with US slavery
Coda
Part IV: Slavery Today
9. Human Trafficking, Modern-Day Slavery, and Other Forms of Servitude
Servitude, slavery, trafficking, and smuggling
Forms of servitude
Measuring servitude
Explaining the rise of modern servitude
Conclusion
Credits
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Predicted Probability of Slavery by Population Density, with 95% CI
Figure 5.2
Predicted Probability of Slavery by Cropping Index, with 95% CI
Figure 5.3
Predicted Probability of Slavery by Warfare, 95% CI
Figure 5.4
Subsistence Mode by Type of Slavery
Figure 5.5
Subsistence Mode by Women’s Workshare
Figure 5.6
Estimated Populations, Core Greece and the Greek World, 1000–300 BCE
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
Map of Jamaica Maroon Settlements 1655–1755
Figure 7.2
“Old Cudjoe making peace.” Illustration from The History of the Maroons (1803) b…
Figure 7.3
Photograph of the town of Accompong in the parish of St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, in …
Chapter 8
Figures 8.1 and 8.2
Graphs composed by author from Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1
Ngrams on use of terms “slave labor” and “forced labor,” 1800–2010
Figure 9.2
Ngrams on use of seven related terms re trafficking and slavery, 1900–2010
List of Tables
Chapter 5
Table 5.1
Population density: numeric label and frequency
Table A1
Logistic model predicting slavery by population density
Table A2
Logistic model predicting slavery by the cropping index
Table A3
Logistic model predicting slavery by frequency of warfare
Table A4
Logistic model predicting slavery by warfare if boundaries of populaton expanding
Table A5
Logistic model predicting slavery by the occurrence of seasonal starvation
Table A6
Logistic model predicting slavery by starvation levels, controlling for warfare
Table A7
Logistic model predicting slavery by degree of witchcraft beliefs
Table A8
Logistic model predicting hereditary slavery by degrees of agriculture, fishing,…
Table A9
Logistic model predicting polygyny >20% by agriculture type, female workload, wa…
Chapter 9
Table 9.1
Estimation methods and applications
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Introduction
Begin Reading
Credits
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For Anita, cherished companion, lifesaver, with all my love and gratitude
“Whoever saves a life saves an entire world,” Tractate Sanhedrin 4.5; Quran 5:32
Enslavement
Past and Present
Orlando Patterson
polity
Copyright © Orlando Patterson 2025
The right of Orlando Patterson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6177-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024934471
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply grateful to Professor Loïc Wacquant, distinguished Professor of Sociology at Berkeley, whose encouragement and insightful guidance were instrumental in bringing this collection to fruition. His unwavering support and generosity exemplify a rare camaraderie among scholars, an act I hold in high regard and will always cherish. I further extend my heartfelt appreciation to Professor Chris Muller, who also urged me to publish these essays and whose valuable feedback on the introduction contributed significantly to its refinement.
Earlier renditions of Chapters 2 and 6 found their roots in discussions sparked by contributions to a collection of papers on my book Slavery and Social Death (2018 [1982]), edited by the classical scholars John Bodel, Professor of Classics and History at Brown University, and Walter Scheidel, Professor of History and Classics at Stanford. The scholarly discourse surrounding this work, notably during the Brown University conference in 2012 and the subsequent publication On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death (2017), greatly enriched my understanding of comparative slavery and enhanced my interpretations of the symbolic role of slavery in Christian doctrine.
Chapter 2’s evolution was further shaped by insights gleaned from responses to my keynote lecture at the University of Dayton School of Law’s conference on “Property and Subordination” in 2017, efficiently organized by Professor Eleanor Brown, now of Fordham Law School. I am indebted to Professor Brown and the distinguished legal scholars in attendance for their invaluable perspectives.
Chapter 4 was written for a special issue of Theory and Society, edited by Professors Fiona Greenland of the University of Virginia and George Steinmetz of the University of Michigan. Their astute observations greatly contributed to honing the final draft.
I am grateful for the intellectual stimulation provided by conversations over three days on my work with members of Berkeley’s Matrix Institute for Cross-disciplinary Social Science, brilliantly led by Professor Marion Fourcade. Special thanks to Professor Scott Strauss for his extensive and invaluable feedback on an early version of Chapter 8 delivered at the conference.
The revision of several chapters benefited significantly from discussions at the conference on my work organized by Professors Bruce Kapferer and Michael Rowlands of University College London. Their meticulous planning and insightful observations were invaluable, making this conference one of the highlights of my career. The 2023 Daryll Forde memorial lecture at UCL, delivered as part of the conference proceedings, provided valuable feedback on Chapter 5, thanks to Professor Martin Holbraad’s chairmanship and learned interventions as well as the engaged audience’s probing questions.
Professor David Wengrow’s perceptive questions and observations during our meeting at the Royal Anthropological Institute, which he chaired, prompted new insights that influenced the revisions of several chapters, as did the penetrating comments and novel perspectives brought to the meeting by the anthropologists from the University of Bergen, Professors Knut Rio, Bjørn Bertelsen, and Rolf Scott, whose university generously co-sponsored the conference.
The Harvard Sociology workshop in History, Culture, and Society, which I co-chair with Professors Ya-Wen Lei and Chris Muller, has been a constant source of inspiration and intellectual exchange, shaping many ideas reflected in these chapters.
I remain grateful to the late Professor Sidney Mintz of Johns Hopkins University and the late Professor Arnie Sio of Colgate University for their invaluable feedback on the manuscript of Chapter 7, offered some fifty years ago, but still remembered.
Any errors or shortcomings of style or substance in these chapters are solely my responsibility and should not be attributed to the scholars mentioned above.
Lastly, I thank my wife Anita Patterson, for her patience and support, both emotional and intellectual, during the long nights and months spent on the revision of these chapters.
Initially the enslaver is perceived as the essential truth, an independent self-consciousness existing for itself, though not quite as its [the enslaved’s] own. However, enslavement does eventually entail the enslaved accepting this purely negating truth of the enslaver’s existence for itself; and making it an essential component of itself. This [other-directed] consciousness is not so much a fear for the particular or momentary, but for its utmost being; for it has experienced the fear of death, of absolute subjection. It has been internally dissolved in this, has trembled through and through in itself, and everything fixed has been shaken within it. This pure universalizing movement, the absolute dissolution of all [previous] existence, now simply becomes the essence of self-consciousness, an absolute negativity. (¶42) … This negative medium or formative activity is simultaneously the particularity of pure [sublated] consciousness existing for itself, which now through [enslaved] labor steps outside itself into something permanent; and through this laboring consciousness, the contemplation of independent being [freedom] as its own is attained. (¶43)
G. W. F. Hegel, (1807). Phenomenology of Spirit, selected from Chapter IV, ¶¶42, 43
He can only understand the effect of this combat on my spirit, who has himself incurred something, hazarded something, in repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant. Covey was a tyrant, and a cowardly one withal. After resisting him, I felt as I had never felt before. It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous tomb of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. I was no longer a servile coward, trembling under the frown of a brother worm in the dust, but my long-cowed spirit was roused to an attitude of manly independence. I had reached the point at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, while I remained a slave in form.
Frederick Douglass, (1855). My Bondage and My Freedom, selected from Chapter 17
[Western] Mankind has liberated itself not so much from enslavement as through enslavement.
G. W. F. Hegel (1917–20 [1840]). Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, p. 875
INTRODUCTION
Along with man’s inhumanity to woman, slavery is one of humanity’s most ancient and persistent inequities. It predates the rise of civilization, and its traces can be seen in archaeological findings, pre-literate legends and myths, and observations of surviving hunter-gatherer societies (Biermann and Jankowiak, 2021; Lane and MacDonald, 2011). Slavery played a foundational role in the ancient rise and growth of Western and Islamic civilizations and was significant in other cultures such as those of Africa, pre-Columbian America, Korea, and Southeast Asia. It also had a critical role in the emergence and global spread of capitalism. Given its historical significance, it is not surprising that the problem of Atlantic slavery is still passionately debated in the Anglo-American world today, more than a century and a half after its abolition in America, with modern-day trafficking and servitude being major concerns worldwide.
The ongoing debate surrounding the implications of Atlantic slavery reflects its deep-rooted social, economic, and political consequences. Echoes of the slave trade and plantation slavery continue to resonate in contentious discussions about racial inequality, systemic racism, and reparations. The 1619 Project (Hannah-Jones, 2019) an initiative by the New York Times, has brought attention to this legacy by reframing American history, highlighting the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans. Several major American universities, such as Harvard, Brown, and Georgetown, have recognized the role of slavery in their founding and development, taking steps such as removing statues, names, and objects associated with slavery, as well as providing funds for reparations and commemorations. However, these efforts have ignited controversy, with conservative critics arguing that they present a revisionist view of history, while supporters maintain that they shed light on previously neglected aspects of the American narrative. The debate has even entered mainstream American politics, leading to the censorship of many books on race and slavery in schools and libraries, as well as high school exams on Black history.
In Britain, the debate has been equally intense and increasingly acrimonious. Attempts to reassess the role of the Atlantic slave trade in British imperial and domestic economic history, including its contribution to the rise of prominent elite families such as that of former British Prime Minister David Cameron, have been condemned as attempts to belittle and tarnish British history. Several British universities, notably Glasgow, Bristol, and Oxford, have acknowledged the importance of slavery in their past and have taken steps to make amends, with Glasgow agreeing to pay £20 million as reparations for benefiting from the Atlantic slave trade. However, academic backlash has emerged, particularly at the University of Cambridge, where a researcher studying Cambridge’s connection to Atlantic slavery faced criticism in the national press from anonymous academics who labeled them a “woke activist” with an agenda (according to the Guardian newspaper).
The claim by some scholars and politicians that modern scholarship on slavery, which acknowledges its evils and enduring impact, amounts to the imposition of value judgments on historical events is epistemologically disingenuous and historiographically inaccurate. Some subjects are inherently normative, and slavery is undoubtedly one of them. The historiography of slavery indicates that the study of the subject has always been influenced by values and ideologies. A brief look at the historiographies of ancient and Atlantic slavery makes this abundantly clear.
The study of slavery in Europe is as old as post-classical Western history itself. Discussions on “the moral problem of slavery continued incessantly during the Middle Ages,” according to Malowist (1968: 161). From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, numerous major works focused on the moral aspects of ancient slavery, mainly in the form of Latin dissertations (Vogt, 1973: 1–7).
Starting in the late eighteenth century, there was a surge of studies on slavery that resulted from the abolitionist movement and the interest of Marxian and non-Marxian scholars in both ancient slavery and the iniquities of the contemporary institution. Studies on ancient slavery were related to the abolitionist controversy in two ways: the role of slavery in biblical and early Christian times and its role in ancient Greece and Rome. The first aspect, highly polemical in nature, sought to justify or condemn slavery based on scriptural grounds. Proponents of slavery argued that it was morally acceptable since it was sanctioned by the Old Testament, Pauline theology, and the patristic thinkers of the early Church. Antislavery writers, however, attempted to show that early Christianity, while not ideologically critical of slavery, was historically and structurally opposed to it, and there was a correlation between the institutionalization of Christianity and the decline of slavery. The antislavery thesis led to the development of a more sophisticated historiography on this aspect of ancient slavery (Davis, 1966: Chs. 10–12; Davis, 1975: Ch. 11; Patterson, 1977: 408).
Regarding ancient Greece and Rome, the early nineteenth century saw debates over the then accepted fact that classical European antiquity was based on slavery. Enlightenment scholars condemned the ancients for their reliance on slavery, while others argued that the great civilizational breakthroughs of the Greeks were made possible only by slavery. These debates continued throughout the nineteenth century, with scholars questioning the foundations of ancient Greek civilization and arguing for or against its dependence on slavery (Vogt, 1965). Over time, scholarly opinion shifted, and it is now widely accepted that ancient Greek civilization was indeed based on slavery (Finley, 1960: 53–72).
Parallel to these debates, Marxian scholars, evolutionary historians, and anthropologists also explored the role of slavery in human development. Slavery was seen as a major stage in the emergence of socialism within the cruder materialistic conception of history. Marx himself recognized the limitations of this view and developed the concept of the Asiatic mode of production specifically to address the problem of slave society. Engels, influenced by Morgan, later abandoned this qualification and developed the untenable periodization theory that all societies went through five stages, including slavery. This theory had a detrimental impact on historical scholarship in the Soviet Union and China (Patterson, 1977: 410–13).
In the United States, the study of slavery has always been a morally, ideologically, and emotionally charged subject (Elkins, 1975). From the early twentieth century, US slave studies revolved around two main themes: the economic structure, efficiency, and profitability of slavery, and the socioeconomic stability and cultural integrity of the slaveholding world and its consequences for the enslaved. The dominant school for the first half of the twentieth century, led by Ulrich Phillips (1918), argued that slavery was pre-capitalist, socially stable, morally benign, and culturally progressive for the enslaved. Black American historians, led by W. E. B. DuBois (1935: Chs. 1–4), strongly resisted this racist interpretation but faced institutional marginalization within the segregated historically Black university system (see Smith, 1980). Kenneth Stampp (1989 [1956]), influenced by the civil rights movement, challenged the dominant school, emphasizing the capitalistic and profitable nature of slavery, its social instability, and its moral perversity. Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s cliometric school, drawing on earlier work by economic historians, argued that slavery was capitalist, profitable, socially stable, and culturally progressive for both enslaver and enslaved, generating further debate (Walton, 1975; Haskell, 1975; David and Temin, 1974). Eugene Genovese (1965) partly returned to the Phillips thesis, highlighting the pre-capitalist nature of the system while emphasizing its social stability and cultural integration (see also Genovese, 1976). Herbert Gutman (1976) and John Blassingame (1972) likewise argued for the social stability and moral integrity of the Black segment of the enslaved community, but expressed less enthusiasm for the system as a whole; indeed, they strongly suggested that it was brutal, although the two theses rest uneasily alongside each other.
This positive emphasis on Black culture, community, and agency, as well as the stability of the Black family under slavery, was in part a response to the work of the earlier tradition of liberal scholarship that emphasized the injuries of slavery and Jim Crow for Blacks (see, for example, Frazier, 1951 [1939]; Myrdal, 1944; and Kardiner and Ovesey, 1951). Stanley Elkins’s (1959) controversial study of the psychological response of American slaves was written in that tradition. The infantilized Sambo image of Southern lore, Elkins claimed, was the tragic result of the totally oppressive institution of slavery, similar to the response of many Jewish inmates of the Nazi concentration camps. In the mid-1960s, a policy brief written by a non-historian, Patrick Moynihan (Rainwater and Yancey, 1967), argued that slavery had been destructive of Black institutions, especially their marital and familial relations, which persisted in contemporary economic and social problems of the inner cities. Although this argument was largely a revision of positions held by earlier liberal scholars, noted above, including contemporary Black scholars such as Kenneth Clark (1965), Moynihan was condemned as a racist who was blaming the victim, in complete disregard of the fact that the report was written as a rationale for quite radical intervention by the Johnson Administration on behalf of the Black poor. In a balanced evaluation of this period of historical writing on slavery and its legacies, Peter Kolchin (1983) has noted that, “in destroying the myth that slaves were depersonalized Sambos and in focusing on the enslaved as actors who helped shape their own world,” historians have “tended increasingly toward celebration and even mystification of slave life.” This danger has persisted, one Black American historian claiming that slavery was a mere “predicament” for Black slaves, over which they triumphed (Brown, 2009).
The latest controversy surrounding slavery arises from the New History of Capitalism (NHC) school of thought, which claims that slavery was not only closely related to, but also generative of, modern capitalism, particularly nineteenth-century American industrial capitalism (among its leading proponents: Beckert, 2014; Beckert and Rockman, 2016; Schermerhorn, 2015; Baptist, 2014; Rockman, 2014). This viewpoint has sparked disagreement from conservatives and nearly all economic historians, and also from liberal and even some left-leaning historians, and feminists. Critics argue that the NHC, in addition to repeating as new discoveries long-established findings by economic historians on the capitalistic nature of US slavery (Conrad and Meyer, 1958; Fogel and Engerman, 1974), has tended to “mishandle historical evidence and mis-characterize important events in ways that affect their major interpretations on the nature of slavery, the workings of plantations, the importance of cotton and slavery in the broader economy, and the sources of the Industrial Revolution and world development” (Wright, 2016). The polemical assertion of several of NHC’s least defensible claims in one of the most widely cited articles of The 1619 Project, authored by Matt Desmond, a qualitative sociologist with no formal historical training, has been fodder for critics of both The 1619 Project and, somewhat unfairly, the entire NHC school. No one now doubts that Southern slavery was highly profitable and enriched the slaveholder class, and that its social, cultural, political, and racial consequences for America were transformative and, for many, catastrophic. Whether it contributed significantly to US economic development during the nineteenth century or actually retarded the South as a region are still open questions, with nearly all economic historians critical of the NHC (on which, see Wright, 2022). Some left-leaning scholars, particularly those focusing on the West Indies, have also criticized the NHC for its America-centric approach and its neglect of the Caribbean and sugar in favor of North America and cotton. The NHC’s treatment of the region and its history, especially the fact that the entire debate on slavery and capitalism was initiated some eighty years ago by Eric Williams (2021 [1944]) and C. L. R. James (1963 [1938]; see also Beckles, 1997), the two great heroes of West Indian scholarship, has been viewed as “neglectful and erasing, marginalizing intellectual communities that have long nurtured Caribbean studies” (Hudson, 2018; see also Burnard and Riello, 2020). It is extraordinary that Seth Rockman, a leading member of the NHC, in a long review of earlier explorations of the history of capitalism with “competing accounts of the field’s genealogy” (2014: 442) almost completely neglects the large Caribbean historiography on the subject, with one miserly, almost slighting, reference to Eric Williams and the vast transatlantic literature this work generated. One conservative commentator has gleefully accused the NHC of having a “Whiteness problem,” declaring that the “Caribbean-centric black radical school of historical thought … is now in direct tension with the predominantly White and Ivy League-centric NHC school” (Magness, 2019). Feminists have also criticized the NHC for neglecting the role of gender in the rise of capitalism and nonrecognition of female historians of the subject (O’Sullivan, 2018).
The study of slavery today also encompasses contemporary trafficking and modern forms of servitude. While slavery is now illegal everywhere and is universally condemned, there is debate about its definition, and about the extent and political commitment to its abolition (Patterson and Zhuo, 2018; Allain, 2012). Additionally, debates arise concerning what forms of exploitative relationships should be considered slavery or “slave-like” labor. Feminists have engaged in intense arguments regarding the morality of sex work, with different perspectives on whether it is akin to slavery or a woman’s right to choose (MacKinnon, 2011). The distinction between emotionally abusive relationships and outright marital slavery also remains blurry (Patterson and Zhuo, 2018).
In summary, the study of slavery encompasses a wide range of debates and perspectives. It involves examining economic, social, cultural, and moral aspects of the subject, in both its historical forms and its enduring presence in contemporary societies. The subject has always been morally and intellectually contentious and this continues to shape academic scholarship and public discourse. Understanding the history of slavery is crucial for acknowledging the profound injustices endured by millions of enslaved individuals and the need to take seriously the demand for a consideration of the nature and extent of moral, political, and other forms of reparation. It is a reminder of humanity’s capacity for both cruelty and resilience and serves as a catalyst for ongoing efforts to combat inequality and build a more inclusive society for all.
* * *
The nine chapters in this book traverse the author’s lifelong study of the subject. All but one of them (Chapter 4) have been revised to bring them up to date, or have been completely rewritten. They all reflect the distinctive viewpoint of a comparative and historical sociologist which, at the very least, means a sensitivity to theoretical issues and the importance of defining terms carefully. This is one of the main shortcomings of too much traditional historical scholarship on slavery.
What is slavery? Why slavery? How did slavery originate? What were its different levels of development in society? What was slave society? What were the institutional and cultural mechanisms by which it was maintained? How did it come to an end? What was the role of gender in the rise and maintenance of slavery? What did it mean to be enslaved? Why, how, and when did the enslaved resist? Why did some slave societies experience relatively few large-scale revolts, while others experienced many, forcing slaveholders to yield, or the system to collapse? Why was slavery so closely linked to some religions? Why is slavery and redemption from slavery the central metaphor of Christian doctrine? What was the relation between slavery and freedom? Is slavery to be defined in terms of the absence of freedom, as is traditionally done, or is it more historically accurate, and philosophically less essentialist, to understand freedom as the absence of slavery? Why was slavery the critical institution at all the great turning points of Western civilization, from the rise of ancient Greece and Rome to the rise of capitalism in the Atlantic system and the emergence of America? What were the consequences of slavery for our present times, for the descendants of the enslaved, their enslavers, and the societies in which they continue to coexist?
These are some of the deeper theoretical and substantive issues that any serious engagement with the subject should raise. While several historians have made notable contributions to these theoretical issues, it is striking how they are avoided in typical works on the subject. Indeed, a disdain for theory and definition is even hailed as a hallmark of the new history of slavery and capitalism, one of its leading advocates declaring that it “has opened new vistas on the past by pursuing its questions differently from earlier scholarship,” the first of these being that “the current scholarship has minimal investment in a fixed or theoretical definition of capitalism”(Rockman, 2014: 442).
Part I, “The Nature and Study of Slavery,” explores theoretical, definitional, and disciplinary issues in slave studies. Like all enduring social structures, slavery exists on different levels of abstraction: the micro level of relationships, the meso level of groups and institutions, and the macro level of entire societies, states, and civilizations. Chapter 1 summarizes major findings on slavery as a relation of domination amounting to a state of social death. A significant point of contention addressed here is the prevailing definition of the enslaved as human property, and slavery as ownership of one person by another. I challenged this approach in Slavery and Social Death (Patterson, 2018 [1982]), not for being wrong, but for being limited in its application only to Western and capitalistic systems. A better conception of property that embraces all forms of slavery, I argued, is the relativistic one that views property as a bundle of rights (or “sticks,” as some legal theorists prefer). Chapter 2 develops this approach, drawing on recent legal theory. I show that the bundle-of-rights approach is consistent with the views and practices of slavery in all premodern and modern slave systems and is increasingly adopted by economists and legal theorists in the study of the changing nature of property, especially in our postindustrial digital age.
Chapter 3 examines the problem of slavery at the macro-structural level, often referred to as the problem of slave society, or what Finley (1968) called “genuine slave societies.” I begin with a review of past and present approaches to the problem, including a critique of the Marxian concept of the slave mode of production, the first important attempt to examine what constitutes slave society. I then propose that a better way of understanding this set of societies is to consider what I call “patterns of articulation,” or ways in which societies become dependent on the institution. This approach seeks to answer three basic questions. First, what was the nature of the dependence on slavery? Was it economic, military, administrative, lineage-based, status enhancement, or ritualistic? Second, what was the degree of dependence? This refers to the number and proportion of the enslaved in the population. And third, what was the direction of dependence? Was slavery an active and transformative force, influencing most other institutions, or was it passive and noninvasive? The answers to these three questions together determine the various patterns of articulation of slavery. These patterns are briefly discussed with examples.
The problem of inequality is central to sociology, particularly American sociology, which focuses largely on class, race, and inequality. However, it is puzzling that American sociology has shown the least interest in the problem of slavery, both domestically and internationally, compared to other social and historical disciplines. Economics, for instance, has shown great interest in slavery, with one of its members winning a Nobel Prize partly for work on the subject. Chapter 4 attempts to explain this puzzle, suggesting that it is due in part to a pervasive presentist and parochial bias in the American practice of the discipline and a special reluctance to provide historical explanations for contemporary racial problems, due to the fear of being maligned with the charge of blaming the victim.
Part II, “Slavery in the Premodern and Early Christian Worlds,” presents two studies on slavery in the premodern world. Chapter 5 critiques the theory – independently developed by the Dutch historical anthropologist Herman Nieboer and the MIT economist Evsey Domar – that slavery arises as a result of a high ratio of land to people. The first part of the chapter retests this theory with data from George Murdock’s sample of world societies, using statistical methods that were not available when the paper was first published in 1977. I propose an alternate model that takes into account social, economic, and resource factors, paying special attention to the role of women as wives, reproducers, and producers, and of warfare and male violence in competing for status and power. I suggest that slavery emerges for quite different reasons in different sociohistorical contexts. The second part of Chapter 5 not only offers a historical case study that confirms my critique, but also presents a brief historical sociology of the first-known large-scale slave society in human history: that of ancient Greece, especially Athens between 800 and 300 BCE.
In an important comment on the concept of slavery as a state of social death, the distinguished classicist John Bodel (2017) argued that death, being the ultimate final state, is too static a metaphor to account for the fact that slavery was demographically a temporary status in ancient Rome, given its high rate of manumission and the anticipation of it by most of the enslaved. As a metaphor, he argues, the idea of social death does not comport well with the celebratory triumph over slavery reflected in the monumental inscriptions of freedmen. In Chapter 6, I show that social death, far from being conceived metaphorically as a static condition, was understood dynamically as a prelude to liberation by those who did achieve their freedom. We find the association of manumission with death and rebirth in many cultures, including Han China. However, it was most powerfully expressed in the central metaphor of the religion that was refashioned in the midst of Roman slave society: Christianity. The urban poor, including the enslaved, were significant segments of the early Christian congregations. Freedmen and freedwomen occupied important leadership roles in its organization and the development of its creed. The most important social and emotional experience of these freedmen was their redemption (Latin redemptionem, “a buying back, redemption, releasing, ransoming”) from the social and spiritual death of slavery. Christianity introjected this powerful secular metaphor of redemption, making it the center of its creed. The writings of St. Paul, the religion’s “second founder,” fully expressed the centrality of spiritual death, not simply as a prelude, but as a condition to be transcended by the life-giving, redemptive death of Christ. There could be no clearer demonstration of death as a dynamic symbolic state than the belief that salvation came to the Christian by dying in Christ and living his death. I draw on the symbolic theory of Charles Peirce in interpreting Paul’s complex, dynamic vision of death, and argue that Christianity’s power as a creed inheres in the fact that its central metaphor has equal appeal to both conservative elites and the dispossessed throughout the ages of Western history, depending on how it is interpreted.
Part III, “Slavery in the Modern World,” focuses on Jamaica and the US South, the paradigmatic large-scale plantation systems of the Americas, the problem of slave revolts, and the surprisingly unexplored question of the relation of genocide to slavery.
The question of slave revolts has long concerned historians of slavery in the Americas and antiquity. Was it the case that there were relatively few slave revolts in Graeco-Roman antiquity? If so, why? What were the causes of slave revolts? Why did some parts of the Americas, such as Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and Brazil, have high rates of rebellion, while other areas, such as Barbados and the US South, have relatively low rates? Emphasizing the attitudes of the enslaved is inadequate, as the enslaved everywhere resented their condition and resisted in various ways, with outright collective slave wars being the most extreme form. Chapter 7 focuses on Jamaica and argues that demographic, ethnic, and geographic factors, in addition to the genocidal brutality of the system and absenteeism of the slaveholder class, were key variables in accounting for slave revolts. These were genuine slave wars and should not be confused with maroon communities established by runaways in other parts of the Americas.
Chapter 8 reviews the field of genocide studies and distinguishes between ethnocide, the destruction of a people’s culture, and genocide, the physical elimination of all or part of a people. Slavery in the US South exemplified the historic crime against humanity of ethnocide without physical decline due to the unique pattern of demographic reproduction and growth of its enslaved population. From 1655, when the British captured the island, to 1838, when slavery was abolished, Jamaica experienced one of the highest mortality rates of any slave society in the modern world. The chapter argues that the destruction of the enslaved African population amounted to a form of protracted genocide. Using the demographic history of the United States as a counterfactual case, the genocidal death toll over the course of 133 years of slavery was estimated at nearly 6 million, including those who died prematurely from overwork, and miscarriages due to harsh conditions or the premature death of the mother, and the anti-natal policies of the planters.
Part IV, “Slavery Today,” is a single long chapter examining slavery in our times. The revival of slavery, other forms of forced servitude, and human trafficking in recent times have engendered widespread activism and a substantial body of literature. While there are valid concerns about the conflation of terms, exaggerated empirical claims, and a shortage of evidence-based work, modern-day slavery and other forms of servitude are undeniably real and shockingly widespread, the UN’s International Labour Office estimating some “50 million people in situations of modern slavery on any given day” (ILO et al., 2022). Although contemporary slavery is universally considered illegal and evil, its actual practice, and genuine political commitment to its abolition, vary across different countries. Forms of servitude such as debt bondage, extreme child labor, domestic servitude of immigrant labor, as well as marital slavery, are widespread in countries like Pakistan, India, Thailand, and the Gulf States, despite formally advocating human rights and having laws against slavery (Patterson and Zhuo, 2018; Allain, 2012). Among the world’s advanced nations, the United States is unique in being both a major destination for, and the source of, thousands of modern slaves, in its brothels, restaurants, construction sites, homes, and farms. This chapter clarifies the basic terms in the field of contemporary studies of the subject – servitude, forced labor, modern-day slavery, trafficking, and smuggling – and examines all forms of servitude to evaluate the extent to which they can be classified as slavery proper or other forms of exploitation. It also addresses methodological problems in measuring servitude and provides a brief analysis of the factors contributing to its contemporary revival.
IThe Nature and Study of Slavery
1ON THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Slavery is the most extreme form of the relations of domination. In the totality of the enslaver’s power, their exclusion from the rights, privileges, and duties of the society of the free, and the denial of any recognition of their human worth and dignity, the enslaved and their descendants suffered the condition of social death.
Slavery has existed, at some time, in most parts of the world and at all levels of social development. This chapter examines seven aspects of the institution: its distinguishing features; the means by which persons were enslaved; the means by which owners acquired them; the treatment and condition of the enslaved; manumission; slave resistance; and the enduring consequences of slavery.
1.1: The distinctive features of slavery
The traditional, and still conventional, approach is to define slavery in legal-economic terms, typically as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised” (UN OHCHR, 1926). In this view, the enslaved is, quintessentially, a human chattel. This definition is problematic because it adequately describes mainly Western and modern, capitalistic systems of slavery. The conception of the enslaved as chattel originated in the practices and legal thought of ancient Rome, where it was quite appropriate. However, in many non-Western parts of the world, several categories of persons who were clearly not enslaved, such as unmarried women, concubines, debt bondsmen, indentured servants, sometimes serfs, and occasionally children, were bought and sold. Conversely, in many slaveholding societies certain categories of the enslaved, such as those born in the household, or women who had given birth to sons by their enslavers, were not treated as chattels to be bought and sold. Other societies not directly influenced by Roman legal thought also developed an alternate conception of property that more appropriately described the condition of slavery and other forms of possession. Sir Moses Finley (1964) has shown that, even in Athens of the classical era, a relativistic, bundle-of-rights approach was more appropriate for an understanding of the relation of slavery. This alternate approach to property will be considered in the next chapter.
Slavery is a relation of domination that is distinctive in three respects. First, the power of the enslaver was usually total, if not in law, almost always in practice. Violence was the basis of this power. Even where laws forbade the gratuitous killing of the enslaved, it was rare for enslavers to be prosecuted for murdering them, due to their universally recognized right to punish their slaves, and to severe constraints placed on the enslaved in giving evidence in courts of law against their enslavers, or free persons generally (Fede, 2017; Jacobs, 2024 [1855]: 23–7).
The totality of the enslaver’s claims and powers in them meant that the enslaved could have no claims or powers in other persons or things, except with the enslaver’s permission. A major consequence of this was that the enslaved had no custodial claims on their children; they were genealogical isolates, lacking all recognized rights of ancestry and descent. As the self-liberated formerly enslaved John Swanson Jacobs noted: “He owns nothing – he can claim nothing. His wife is not his – his children are not his” (2024 [1855]: 6). From this flowed the hereditary nature of their condition. They had no more legal rights to or claims on their children and parents than to other persons or things. Another distinctive consequence of the slaveholder’s total power was the fact that they often treated the enslaved as their surrogates, and hence could perform functions for them as if they were legally present, a valuable trait in premodern societies with advanced commodity production and long-distance trading, such as ancient Rome, where laws of agency, though badly needed, were nonexistent or poorly developed. However, even in slave societies where the law of agency was well developed, slaveholders sometimes used the enslaved as their agents in commercial transactions, as not infrequently happened in the antebellum South. The practice contradicted the custom of White supremacy and was sometimes challenged, although the views of the slaveholder usually prevailed on the grounds that the enslaved, having no formal existence outside of the slaveholder, could act on his behalf with his permission (Tippett, 2021).
Slaveholders’ power over their slaves had a distinctly carnal aspect. The enslaver possessed the body of the enslaved. Among cannibal peoples, this entitled them to literally consume the enslaved’s body. In early Christian texts, the enslaved were often referred to as “the bodies” (Glancy, 2006). While the ancient Romans did not eat their slaves, their possession of them was so extreme that they used the term abusus to describe their ownership, meaning that the enslaved’s body was not just used, but used up. This was similar to how patriarchal men felt about women, and it is not accidental that in many societies slavery was closely associated with marriage and sexuality, the rituals of marriage and divorce often being similar to those of enslavement and manumission.
Second, the enslaved were universally considered as outsiders, this being the major difference between them and serfs, servants, and other exploited people. They were natally alienated people, deracinated in the act of their, or their ancestors’, enslavement, who were held not to belong to the societies in which they lived, even if they were born there. They lacked all legal or recognized status as independent members of a community. In kin-based societies, this was expressed in their definition as kinless persons; in more advanced, state-based societies, they lacked all claims to and rights of citizenship. Because they belonged only to their enslaver, they could not belong to the community; because they were bonded only to their enslaver’s household, they could share no recognized bond of loyalty and love with the community at large. To be sure, this does not mean that they had no informal personal and communal relations among themselves. They most certainly did, but all human beings need formal recognition of their deeply held relations, especially with kin, and assurances that they could not be arbitrarily terminated by others, because they belonged to, and were included in, relations beyond their superiors, and this the enslaved did not have. The most ancient words for the enslaved in the Indo-European and several other families of languages translate to mean, “those who do not belong,” or “not among the beloved,” in contrast to non-enslaved members of the community (OED): a “stranger by necessity, the slave is designated in the Indo-European languages, even modern ones, either by a foreign word (Gr. doulos, Lat. servus) or by the name of a foreign people (slave<Slav) … In the ancient civilizations, the status of a slave puts him outside the community … There are no slaves who are citizens” (Benveniste, 1973, Ch. 5). For all their communal interactions among themselves, like the enslaved everywhere, American slaves felt this denial of social recognition acutely. Jacobs recalled that his “mental suffering had become such that it made life a burden to me” and that, upon snatching his freedom, “the first thing I strove to do was to raise myself up above the level of the beast, where slavery had left me, and fit myself for the society of man” (2024 [1855]: 50–1).
Third, the enslaved were everywhere considered to be dishonored persons. They had no honor that a non-slave person need respect. What DuBois wrote of the Black slave was true of the experience of all enslaved persons: “They represented in a very real sense the ultimate degradation of man … the tragedy of the black slave’s position was precisely this; his absolute subjection to the individual will of another” (1935: 9–10). Slaveholders could violate all aspects of their slaves’ lives with impunity, including by raping them. “A slave’s wife or daughter,” wrote the ex-enslaved Jacobs, “may be insulted before his eyes with impunity; he himself may be called on to torture them, and dare not refuse” (2024 [1855]: 6). In most slaveholding societies, injuries against the enslaved by third parties were prosecuted, if at all, as injuries against the person and honor of the enslaver. Where an honor-price, or wergild, existed, as in Anglo-Saxon Britain and other Germanic lands, its payment usually went to the slaveholder rather than to the injured slave. Universally, slavery was considered the most extreme form of degradation, so much so that the enslaved’s very humanity was often in question. In ancient Greece they were called human-footed animals (i.e. animals who walked on two feet), in Rome “vocal instruments”; if they were Greek slaves, they were contemptuously called “Graeculus,” meaning “little Greek,” the ancient version of the American term “boy,” “bound to some one,” no matter their age, or infantilized “Sambos” (Cartledge, 1985). Among the Tuareg, the generic term for a man, ahalis, was never applied to a male slave, who was usually called akli, or boy (Winter, 1984: 12).
The honorlessness of the enslaved served other ends than their debasement. It was a form of human parasitism in that it enhanced the ego and honor of the enslaver (Patterson, 2018 [1982]: Ch. 12). In many tribal and hunter-gathering societies, such as the Tupinamba of Brazil, the glorification of the slaveholder and his kin was often its sole function, since the enslaved were of little economic value and may even have been an economic burden. However, in many advanced societies, the honorlessness of the enslaved, the fact that they were mere surrogates of their enslavers, served both honorific as well as useful economic and political functions. In ancient Rome, the enslaved parasitically projected the honor and dignitas of their enslavers, “a precious marker of respectability” (Harper, 2011). In the American South, male enslavers were obsessed with honor, which defined their identity as men, and, because the enslaved was quintessentially defined as a person without honor, “all issues of honor relate to slavery” (Greenberg, 1997: xiii). This parasitism was extended to the meanest of non-enslaved persons, who reveled in the fact of not being a slave, to the benefit and security of the slaveholder. As DuBois noted of the poor White both during and after slavery, their non-slave status and Whiteness “fed his vanity because it associated him with the masters,” and “while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage” (DuBois, 1935: 700).
For all these reasons, there was a general tendency for enslavers and the non-enslaved to conceive of and treat the enslaved as socially dead persons. The enslaved themselves were acutely conscious of this conception and the socio-legal definition of their condition by the free. And, while in their own eyes, and in relations with fellow slaves, they did not consider themselves socially dead, it was a permanent, dehumanizing affliction imposed on them that they often referred to when describing their degradation and relating why real death was preferable to the unfreedom and degradation of social death. Harriet Jacobs wrote that “I had rather live and die in jail, than drag on, from day to day, through such a living death” (Jacobs, 1861: 63). Her contemporary, Frederick Douglass, repeatedly returned to the description of his enslavement as a kind of death, describing his sense of freedom as “glorious resurrection from the tomb of slavery” (Douglass, 1855: 73). Throughout the Americas, the enslaved celebrated rather than mourned the death of kinsmen and friends, since physical death brought a merciful end to the living, social death of slavery and the hope of return to Africa (Roediger 1991; Patterson 2022 [1967]: 195–202). Among slaveholders and the free, in societies at all levels of development, the social death of the enslaved was often represented symbolically in ritual signs and acts of debasement, death, and mourning: in clothing, hairstyles, naming practices, and other rituals of obeisance and nonbeing (Patterson, 2018 [1982]: 51–62; Thompson, 2003: 241–4; Santos-Granero, 2017).
Although, as we will discuss below, the enslaved everywhere sought ways of relieving, escaping, and even violently resisting this imposed condition, and of exercising agency, the consequences of social death could be devastating, given the power of enslavers and their support from the free as well as those controlling the levers of communal and state power. It threatened the core social motives that psychologists have identified as essential for effective social functioning and wellbeing: belonging – the need to freely affiliate and bond with others in strong, stable relationships and groups with shared common goals and interests that are not arbitrarily severed or disrupted; understanding – the need to make sense of one’s social environment and “predict what is going to happen in case of uncertainties”; control – the feeling of being effective in dealing with one’s environment and in setting and realizing normal, everyday goals; self-enhancement – maintaining self-esteem; and trust – “seeing the world as a benevolent place,” with confidence in the reliability of others (Fiske, 2010). In the absence or persistent disruption of these basic human motives, the most fundamental of which is belonging, the psychological wellbeing and survival of individuals through belonging in groups is threatened. What DuBois wrote of the American slave held true for the enslaved of all times and places: “The hurt … was not only his treatment in slavery; it was the wound dealt to his reputation as human being. Nothing was left; nothing was sacred” (1935: 39).
Few formerly enslaved wrote more searingly than John Jacobs, the brother of Harriet Jacobs, of the tragic struggle they experienced each day reconciling their inherent humanity with the endless onslaught on it by the slaveholder and his society’s socially erasing definition of them as socially dead or, more acutely, “murdered.” “Human nature will be human nature,” he wrote; “crush it as you may, it changes not.” But “slavery is unnatural, and it requires unnatural means to support it. Everything droops that feels its sting. Hope grows dimmer and dimmer until life becomes bitter and burthensome. At last death frees the slave from his chains, but his wrongs are forgotten. He was oppressed, robbed, and murdered” (2024 [1855]: 73).
1.2: The modes of enslavement
Free persons became enslaved in one of eight ways: capture in warfare, kidnapping, through tribute and taxation, indebtedness, punishment for crimes, abandonment and sale of children, self-enslavement, and birth (for detailed discussion of these methods see Patterson, 2018 [1982]: 105–31). Capture in warfare is generally considered to have been the most important means of acquiring slaves, but this was true mainly of simpler, small-scale societies, and of certain volatile periods among politically centralized groups. Among even moderately advanced premodern societies, the logistics of warfare often made captivity a cumbersome and costly means of enslaving free persons.
Kidnapping differed from captivity in warfare mainly in the fact that enslavement was its main or sole objective, and that it was usually a private act rather than the by-product of communal conflict. Other than birth, kidnapping in the forms of piracy and abduction was perhaps the main form of enslavement in the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean during Greek and Roman times; and this was true also of free persons who were enslaved in the trans-Saharan and transatlantic slave trades.
Debt bondage, which was common in ancient Greece up to the end of the seventh century BCE, the ancient Near East, and in Southeast Asia and Latin America down to the twenty-first century (see Chapter 9), could sometimes descend into real slavery, although nearly all societies in which it was practiced distinguished between the two institutions in at least three respects: debt bondage was nonhereditary; bondsmen remained members of their community, however diminished; and they maintained certain basic rights, in relation both to the bondholder and to their spouses and children.
The paying of tribute or taxes by means of slaves from vassal states was not uncommon although it was a major source mainly in the Islamic world and among several of the more advanced states of precolonial Africa. Often persons sent as tribute were already enslaved, although vassal states sometimes had to send free persons as Korea was required to do when it was a client of the Mongols during the thirteenth century. The most famous case of vassal states paying tribute with free persons involved the Christian peoples of the Ottoman empire, mainly in the Balkans, whose children were periodically recruited by means of the devshirme to reproduce the elite slave corps of Janissaries (Agoston, 2017)
Punishment for crimes was a major means of enslavement in small, kin-based societies; China and, to a lesser extent, Korea were the only advanced societies in which it remained the primary way of becoming enslaved. Nonetheless, it persisted as a minor means of enslavement in all slaveholding societies and became important historically in Europe as the antecedent of imprisonment for the punishment of crimes.
The enslavement of foundlings was common in all politically centralized premodern societies, though rarely found in small-scale slaveholding communities. It was the humane alternative to infanticide and was especially important in China, India, European antiquity, and medieval Europe. It has been argued that it ranked second to birth as a source of slaves in ancient Rome from as early as the first century CE until the end of the Western empire.
Self-enslavement, or autodedition as it was known in medieval Europe, was often the consequence of extreme penury or catastrophic loss. It occurred on a significant scale in East Asia. In premodern Korea the extreme burdens of taxes, corvée labor, and military service on the rural poor resulted in a substantial number of people taking the extreme step of commending themselves to slavery, to which we return in Chapter 3
