Overview

Between c. 700-300 BCE, the ancient Greeks developed a vivid imaginary of the world's peoples. Ranging from the light-skinned, ""gray-eyed Thracians"" of the distant north to the ""dark-skinned Ethiopians"" of the far south, as the poet Xenophanes described them around 540 BCE, Greeks envisioned a world populated by human groups with distinct physiognomies. Racialized Commodities traces how Greece's ""racial imaginary""--a confluence of thinking about cultural geography, commodity production, and human physiognomy--emerged from cross-cultural trade between Greece and its Mediterranean neighbors during the Archaic and Classical Periods. It adopts the model of a ""commodity biography"" to investigate how trade led to the entanglement of cultures, bodies, and things in Archaic and Classical Greece. For merchants, the racial imaginary might be used to play up the ""exotic"" provenance of their goods to consumers. It might also circulate practical information about customs, pricing, navigation, and doing business in foreign ports. Archaic Greek attempts to explain foreign bodies were rarely pejorative, and Racialized Commodities begins with some of their earliest images of African peoples, described by Greeks as Egyptians or Ethiopians, before seeking to explain what changed in the early Classical Period. As the Persian Empire loomed and Greek cities became increasingly dependent on enslaved labor, negative stereotypes of Thracians and Scythians became widespread and coalesced into the charged idea of the barbarous--the ""barbarian.""

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9780197757116

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Reviews

This is a landmark intervention in the study of race in antiquity as well as studies in ancient slavery and Greek culture more broadly. This exciting, innovative, and thought-provoking book breaks new ground by linking the emergence of an ancient Greek idea of 'race' to the dramatic upsurge in long distance trade during the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. This is a persuasive and altogether timely demonstration of how race operated in ancient Greece. * Joseph Skinner, Newcastle University * For those interested in the history of race linked to perceived skin color, this book will be both a revelation and a resource. Drawing especially on histories of trade, the author charts the way the Greeks came to see and associate black skin with prestige and power and, later, the way a certain image of 'whiteness' formed to sanction chattel slavery, particularly in democratic Athens. * Susan Lape, University of Southern California *

Author Information

Christopher Stedman Parmenter is Assistant Professor of Classics at The Ohio State University.

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