Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia by William D. Phillips, Jr. (review)

Phillips has produced an excellent survey of slavery as practiced in Iberia (with an emphasis on Spain) for nearly a millennium. Ranging from the Roman period to the nineteenth century, Phillips offers a thematic, rather than an argument-driven, overview of the contours of the institution within Spain and Portugal. His synthesis of existing scholarship, including a helpful bibliography, will be of great use to (Anglophone) scholars less familiar with published work in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and French.

The book opens with a concise but rich historiographical introduction followed by six chapters—“The History of Slavery in Iberia,” “To Become a Slave,” “To Traffic in Slaves,” “To Live as a Slave,” “To Work as a Slave,” and “To Become Free”—and concludes with a brief epilogue entitled “The Wider Extensions of Iberian Slavery.” As Phillips acknowledges in the introduction, “The history of slavery in Spain is complex and lacks a clear narrative line” (9). The looping chronology of the work, a product of its thematic organization, sometimes makes it repetitive and hard to follow. Readers might not always be able to keep track of what happened when and why. Although Phillips’ stated focus is the variability of life under slavery, his tendency is to highlight the institution of slavery rather than the changing experiences of slaves. Although Philips includes profiles of enslaved individuals when he is able to do so, the particular cultural, intellectual, and material concerns of slaves are not part of the story.

Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia will be required reading for scholars of Iberia and for those interested in European slavery, but it will be most useful when considered in conversation with emerging scholarship about slavery throughout the Americas. Masterful work of synthesis though it is, the book might have engaged more with new scholarship that examines slavery throughout the Iberian and Atlantic worlds. Phillips offers no substantive consideration of how American slavery and resistance might have influenced the Iberian version of the institution—intellectually, culturally, or demographically. He alludes to this scholarly discussion only fleetingly in the text and offers only a brief overview of slavery in the Americas in the epilogue. The thoughts and actions of the enslaved do not figure largely in his account of the rise and fall of the institution. In a telling omission, his short closing discussion of the emancipation era fails to mention the Haitian Revolution. Similarly, the tone of master narrator that Phillips employs sometimes prevents him from capturing the contested nature of slave regimes. For example, his references to slavery in Iberia dying “a natural death” and “slavery’s peculiar development in the Americas” distance the reader from the contingent, lived realities of enslaved people (145, 160).