Slave Systems, Ancient and Modern (review)

The editors' summary of the issues and chapters in this book adopts an interdisciplinary approach and discusses a wide variety of authors, but it omits one important discipline, economics. A few of the chapters, particularly those by Stanley Engerman and Walter Scheidel, compensate for this omission to some extent, but the book as a whole reveals a common limitation of interdisciplinary history.

The scholars in this volume are well-known historians of both the ancient and modern worlds, but the book seems to emphasize apparent differences between ancient and modern slavery. For all of the detailed distinctions made between various ancient societies and various modern tribes and countries, slavery in any particular era seems remarkably homogeneous compared to its change over time. It is a pity that the books by Steinfeld were not known to these authors.¹ He widens the concept of slavery to analyze various forms of bound labor. Only Stephen Hodkinson breaks down the dichotomous view of the other essays and discusses Spartan helots in the context of "diverse examples of servile exploitation (290)."

Orlando Patterson, a student of modern slavery whose earlier work is cited in most of these essays, opens the volume with a statistical analysis of slavery in primitive, largely nonliterate societies. He represents the difference between them as an equilibrium position dictated by the sex ratio and other aspects of the societies. Joseph C. Miller, another modern historian, discusses slavery as a dynamic process, assuming that slave systems were not in equilibrium but rather waxing and waning as historical conditions changed. Appearing in separate essays, this fundamental question of how to regard slave systems is not confronted directly.

Scheidel uses economic models from Fenoaltea and Temin, who started the discussion with simple models that illuminated one or another aspect of slavery, to analyze ancient slavery, but he argues for a more nuanced view than either of these authors.² Scheidel's synthetic approach tries to combine a variety of insights into a single schema. Tracey Rihil offers a detailed look at Roman baking, discussing the interaction of slavery and technical change: "I believe that mass urban supplies of grain [in Rome] encouraged mechanization of its processing and the mass production of bread. . . . Slavery was perhaps the main agent of technology transfer and innovation in any society in which physical mobility amongst the free was unusual" (141, 147). Michael Zeuske follows with a description of early modern Atlantic slavery largely through the eyes of a nineteenth-century observer.

Two essays examine the ideology of slave holding. The volume's editors contribute a chapter analyzing mostly ancient manuals for slave owners, and Rafael de Bevar Marquese and Fábio Duarte Joly look mostly at modern writing. The common theme is that because slaves were expensive property, they needed to be maintained and fed well. Two essays examine exits from slavery, Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau focusing on individuals and Engerman on the emancipation of groups. It appears that slaves everywhere had to pay for their freedom, whether individually by purchase or collectively by paying taxes to reimburse their former owners for the loss of slave property. Hodkinson's analysis of Spartan helots, which closes the volume, returns to the intent of the volume by recognizing the variety of instances throughout history in which workers have been at a severe disadvantage in bargaining with their masters and employers.

This volume will interest students of slavery in both the ancient and modern world, although the chapters offer less insight about the differences between ancient and modern slavery than might be hoped. The chapters by Hodkinson and Scheidel are the standouts.