Overview

The practice of slavery has been common across a variety of cultures around the globe and throughout history. Despite the multiplicity of slavery's manifestations, many scholars have used a simple binary to categorize slave-holding groups as either 'genuine slave societies' or 'societies with slaves'. This dichotomy, as originally proposed by ancient historian Moses Finley, assumes that there were just five 'genuine slave societies' in all of human history: ancient Greece and Rome, and the colonial Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South. This book interrogates this bedrock of comparative slave studies and tests its worth. Assembling contributions from top specialists, it demonstrates that the catalogue of five must be expanded and that the model may need to be replaced with a more flexible system that emphasizes the notion of intensification. The issue is approached as a question, allowing for debate between the seventeen contributors about how best to conceptualize the comparative study of human bondage.

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9781107144897

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For ancient historians this book contains some important remarks on Greek and Roman slavery and a thought-provoking methodological framework in which to study them. For those with a broader interest in comparative slavery, it is invaluable. --Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Author Information

Noel Lenski is Professor of Roman History at Yale University, Connecticut. A recipient of fellowships from the Humboldt and Guggenheim Foundations, he has published extensively on Roman imperial history, including Failure of Empire: Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century AD (2014) and Constantine and the Citites: Imperial Authority and Civic Politics (2016). Catherine Cameron is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is an Archaeologist of the America Southwest and has conducted a world-wide, cross-cultural study of captive-taking in prehistory. Cameron is the author of Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World (2016), co-editor (with Paul Kelton and Alan Swedlund) of Beyond Germs: Native Depopulations in North America (2016), and editor of Invisible Citizens: Captives and Their Consequences (2009).

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