Please consider supporting us by clicking on the like and subscribe buttons. Your support will be greatly appreciated. I will begin by considering two examples of pre-modern bondage. The first from Neo-Babylonia in the 6th century.
He owned considerable property, including a house, cattle, sheep, grain, dates, and other produce he used in trade. While some later North American slaves also owned, traded, and even inherited property, They had no legal rights of ownership. Madanu also leased fields and paid rent in the form of dates. He acted as an agent for his masters and carried out assignments of a business kind, managing his master's property, paying taxes, and even lending out food and money. In total contrast to modern New World slavery, Madanu became involved in a successful lawsuit with a free man and succeeded in getting an insolvent debtor arrested.
Yet if Madanu's wealth made him the envy of many free Babylonians, he himself was sold at least five times. For example, he, his wife, and his six children were sold in the year 508, in the fourteenth year of the reign of Gaius I, to Marduk Nasir-a-Pli, and then again, in 506, by Marduk Nasir-a-Pli's wife, Amat-Bau, for twenty-four minas of silver. Amat-Bau's husband, had transferred ownership of the slave family to her as compensation for her dowry which he had squandered while this sale in five or six was later cancelled because the buyer refused for some reason to pay the silver madan bel usur could be sold at the whim of an owner and even killed with relative impunity at worst his killer would be required to pay his price to his owner as if he were livestock it seems likely that madan bel usur was even branded with his owners'names, like many other Babylonian slaves.
Even so, there are no records of anti-slavery protest or even of slave rebellions in the ancient Near East. Crossing the Atlantic to pre-conquest Brazil, we find that the Tupanamba, like many primitive slave-holding peoples, had no economic need for slave labor. Food was abundant as a result of the hunting done by males and the gathering, as well as slash-and-burn planting and harvesting done by women. Nevertheless, the men, who had much time on their hands when not hunting, seemed to be perpetually at war with their neighbors, and the wars gave much cultural and symbolic importance to the large numbers of enslaved captives, who were eventually killed in ritualistic vengeance and then eaten.
Orlando Patterson, a preeminent expert on global slavery, underscores the difference of such practices from the norm in primitive warfare throughout the world. In general, hunting and gathering peoples immediately killed male captives, who were considered too dangerous to keep, and either killed or temporarily enslaved female captives, who were then absorbed and assimilated into the conquering society, especially as the need grew for women's agricultural labor. The Tupanamba gave the appearance of treating their slaves surprisingly well, though everyone knew they would eventually be murdered in an elaborate ritual. The captives were given food, clothing, and sometimes even temporary Tupinamba wives for the male slaves, an indication of the status of women among these particular Indians. As the foreign slaves lived and worked with their captors, they were constantly required to humble themselves and show respect to their conquerors.
Thus the function of slavery, as in many societies, was to make the Tupinamba feel honored, superior, or almost godlike as they defined themselves as non-slaves. It was only in ancient Greece and Rome that non-slave began to mean free, in our individualistic sense. In Africa, and most other pre-modern societies, the opposite of being a slave has traditionally been defined as being a member of a specific tribe, chiefdom, or clan, with close ties to both ancestors and descendants. Before the final stage of murder and cannibalism, the Tupinamba humiliated their slaves, denouncing and reviling their tribes of origin.
The Tupinamba also engaged in cat-and-mouse games, allowing a frantic slave to escape before being recaptured. It is crucial to realize that such slaves were being treated essentially as animals, a fact symbolized by their ritualistic slaughter and the final cannibal feast. This behavior dramatizes the point that wholly apart from later economic functions, slaves from the very beginning were perceived as dehumanized humans, humans deprived of precisely those traits and faculties that are prerequisites for human dignity, respect, and honor. By a depraved but all too human logic, this freedom to degrade, dishonor, enslave, and even kill and eat, gave the Tupanamba not only solidarity but a sense of superiority and transcendence.
of rising above the constraints and material conditions of life that modern americans have not been so far removed from the tupinamba in a moral or even ritualistic sense can be seen in the enthusiasm for lynching former slaves and their descendants a century ago american lynch mobs did not eat the blacks whom rebecca felton called ravening human beasts who should be lynched by the thousand every week Felton, a prominent Southern feminist and journalist, was the first woman to become a U.S. senator. We are told, however, that Southern whites eagerly gathered as souvenirs the lynched victims'fingers, toes, bones, ears, and teeth. In Paris, Texas, for example, some 10,000 whites came in 1893 to participate in the lynching of He Smith, an insane former slave accused of raping and killing a three-year-old white girl, in the mad wantonness of guerrilla ferocity. High on a platform so the men, women, and children could see the torture of Smith, the father and brother of the dead girl applied white-hot irons to Smith's bare feet and tongue before burning out his eyes. One observer recalled a cry that echoed over the prairie like the wail of a wild animal.
There was even a primitive gramophone to make a recording of Smith's ghastly cries. After the platform had been soaked with oil and set ablaze, cremating what was left of Smith, people raked the ashes to acquire nigger buttons, bones, and teeth to keep as relics. As with the Tupinamba, we find a ritual sacrifice, consecrated by fire, designed to purge society of the ultimate domestic enemy. We now face a momentous question. Can Madanu Bel-Asur and other privileged slaves, including elite military slaves like the Egyptian Mamluks and the chief eunuch agents of Chinese and Byzantine emperors, whom Patterson labels the ultimate slaves, be lumped together with the captives of the Tupanamba, to say nothing of the millions of African-American slaves from colonial Brazil to the pre-Civil War South?
Can we exclude from such a broad category of slavery? the so-called free Negroes like He Smith in the 1890s, or Chinese contract laborers, who, in the late 19th century, were transported across the Pacific to Peru and Ecuador, where they typically died within a year or two from the lethal effects of mining and shoveling seabird manure for the world's fertilizer markets. I do not want to get deeply involved in the controversies over definition, but a book of this kind should give some attention both to the concept of slavery, and to various examples and social embodiments of bondage, in part because most people assume they know what slavery is, and never give much thought to what our Thirteenth Amendment means when it affirms that neither slavery this is the first and only time the word is used in the Constitution nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the united states or any place subject to their jurisdiction the except clause allowed states in the post-reconstruction south to send blacks to prison or prison farms on trifling or trumped-up charges and to lease slave-like convict labor to large private farms and mines traditional definitions of slavery have stressed that the slave's person is the chattel property of another man or woman and thus subject to sale and other forms of transfer that the slave's will is subject to the owner's authority that the slave's labour or services are obtained through coercion meaning that the owner's authority is always backed up by the whip or other instruments for inflicting pain and that the master-slave relationship is beyond the limits of family relations, thus differentiating it from the slave-like subordination of women and children in a patriarchal family. As we will see a bit later, slavery may well have been modeled on the domestication of animals, especially livestock and beasts of burden, i.e. chattel, from the medieval Latin capitale and Latin capitalis, which was the root for both cattle and capital.
The domestication of livestock began around 8,000 BCE, and as the laws governing chattel property evolved in the Mideastern Fertile Crescent and then in other food-producing societies, it was almost universally agreed that a slave could be bought, sold, bequested, inherited, traded, leased, mortgaged, presented as a gift, pledged for a debt, included in a dowry, freed, or seized in a bankruptcy. These legal points generally applied even to privileged slaves in ancient Mideastern civilizations, and for the Western world were much later codified in Roman law. Orlando Patterson has surprisingly argued that defining humans as property is of secondary importance and is not an essential constituent of slavery. He defines slavery as the permanent, violent, and personal domination of needily alienated and generally dishonored persons. One must read his now classic book, Slavery and Social Death, to fully understand this tightly packed sentence.
In brief, his first point stresses that slavery is always an extreme form of personal domination. So even a privileged slave like Madanu lived under the direct power of his owner, a power that often extended to life and death, though we should note that a father could legally kill or sell a rebellious son in some patriarchal societies. Patterson's second point holds that the slave, whether a foreign captive or a degraded and dehumanized member of the master's ethnic group, is always an excommunicated person, lacking an independent social existence. This condition of social death was clearly recognized in Greco-Roman antiquity and even in medieval Jewish rabbinic sources.
By stressing the slave's natal alienation, Patterson means that the captive and his or her descendants are torn away and uprooted from an original family, clan, ancestors, and even legal descendants, since his or her children become the property of the mother's owner. At least in theory and in law, the slave has no legitimate independent being, no place in the cosmos except as an instrument of her or his master's will. While this Aristotelian view of the slave's condition would not apply to traditionally dependent, but free wives and children, it could and did symbolize an ideal of religious allegiance and total dependency. For example, in the Hebrew Bible, Moses is pictured as God's slave, often translated as servant, and early Christians were exhorted in the New Testament to become the slaves or servants of Jesus, and even to free themselves of all family ties.
The Hebrew evid, the Greek dolus, the Latin servus, and the Arabic abd were all used to signify total dependence on God along with meaning slave, a word, as we shall see in chapter 3, derived from the medieval Latin sclavus, meaning slav. Patterson's third constituent is the slave's perpetual condition of dishonor. All slaves, he argues, are like the captives of the Tupinamba in the sense that they provided a master class with a resource for parasitic and psychological exploitation.
even when slaves were purchased primarily for economic reasons their degradation gave their masters a sense of honor prestige and superior identity one can see this mechanism in embryonic form in sibling rivalry when one brother or sister achieves a sense of pride and superiority from the humiliation of a usually younger sibling more profound forces were at work in the master-slave relationship as the german philosopher hegel demonstrated in his classic account of slavery emerging from a struggle of my self-consciousness to gain recognition from your self-consciousness, your sense of being the center of the universe. Hegel's paradigm of slavery is far too complex to analyze here, but it is worth noting that there are deep philosophic and psychological aspects to the dishonoring, humiliating, or dehumanizing of slaves, a process that nourished what we now call racism, epitomized in extreme form, In the Texas Mob's response to the lynching of He Smith, I would modify Patterson's view of slavery in two ways. First, I would restore the crucial element of chattel property, which is closely related to Patterson's natal alienation and generalized dishonor. The key to this relationship, as I have suggested, lies in the animalization or bestialization of slaves. This is not to say that masters literally saw slaves as only animals, or as an entirely different species, except in extreme cases or in response to the scientific racism that emerged in the mid-19th century.
To give an example of one such extreme case, when in 1856 the northern traveler Frederick Law Olmsted exclaimed to a white overseer that it must be disagreeable to punish slaves the way he did, the overseer replied, Why, sir, I wouldn't mind killing a nigger more than I would a dog. For the most part, though, viewing slaves as human animals meant focusing on and exaggerating the so-called animal traits that all humans share and fear, while denying the redeeming rational and spiritual qualities that give humans a sense of pride, of being made in the image of God. of being only a little lower than angels.
According to the philosopher Nietzsche, man didn't even want to be an animal. It may be helpful at this point to distinguish the idea or concept of slavery from various historical varieties of servitude and bondage. From the first written records in ancient Samaria, the concept of slavery has been a way of classifying and categorizing the most debased social class. In the ancient Near East, as in Asia, africa and the americas various forms of slavery arose long before they were systematized by laws and legal codes such as the hamurabi code of the late sixteen hundreds b c e the first documents revealing the existence of slavery come from sumer as early as two thousand b c e but some six thousand years earlier mesopotamia led the world in the revolutionary shift from a hunting and gathering society to an agricultural one with urban centers. Although men and domesticated dogs had already been hunting together for two millennia, it was only with the Neolithic revolution, some 10,000 years ago, that sheep, cattle, pigs, horses, goats, and other social animals were domesticated, consequently undergoing an evolutionary process called neoteny, or progressive juvenileization.
In other words, the domesticated animals became more submissive than their wild counterparts, less fearful of strangers and less aggressive. Far from being fortuitous, these changes in biology and behavior were closely geared to human needs and farming. To control such beasts, humans not only branded them but devised collars, chains, prods and whips, and also castrated and subjected certain animals to specific breeding patterns.
Though one cannot move beyond speculation, the continual comparison of slaves to domestic animals suggests that as formal wars developed between more densely populated societies, similar techniques of control were imposed on captives. No doubt for a time most male captives were considered too dangerous to enslave and were thus killed, while women were often raped and taken as concubines. Then, with an increasing need for agricultural labor and public works, Victors devised better methods of branding, marking off, and controlling male prisoners, whose foreign speech would sometimes have made them seem more like animals than men.
We can see why Aristotle said that the ox was the poor man's slave. And Xenophon, like many other writers on incentives for slaves, compared the teaching of slaves, unlike that of free workers, with the training of wild animals. Despite widespread attempts to equate human captives with domestic animals and even to market them and price them the same way, as the Portuguese, for example, dealt with African captives taken to Lisbon in the mid-15th century, slaves were fortunately never held long enough in a distinctive group to undergo genetic neoteny. And, as Jared Diamond makes clear, many mammals, such as zebras, successfully resisted domestication. yet a kind of neoteny was clearly the goal of many slaveholders even if they lacked a scientific understanding of how domestication changed the nature and behaviour of animals aristotle's ideal of the natural slave was very close to what a human being would be like if subjected to a genetic change similar to that of domesticated plants and animals the same point can be seen in the later stereotype of the slave sambo in actuality however The animal species Homo sapiens exhibits remarkably little genetic variation, compared, for example, to gorillas, and also shares an amazing capacity for self-transcendence and rational analysis, for viewing ourselves from a vantage point outside the self and for imagining what it would be like to be someone else.
We also have the capacity to analyze our own genome and the nature of the cosmos surrounding it. And since humans can imagine abstract states of perfection, they very early imagined a perfect form of subordination. Thus Plato compared the slave to the human body, and the master to the body's rational soul. Slaves supposedly incarnated the irrationality and chaos of the material universe, as distinct from the master-like force of creation and shaping the world. The natural slave, according to Aristotle, could have no will or interests of his own.
He or she was merely a tool or instrument, the extension of the owner's physical nature. In an important passage that deserves to be quoted in full, Aristotle made explicit the parallel between the slave and the domesticated beast. Tame animals are naturally better than wild animals, yet for all tame animals, there is an advantage in being under human control, as this secures their survival.
By analogy, the same must necessarily apply to mankind as a whole therefore all men who differ from one another by as much as the soul differs from the body or man from a wild beast and that is the state of those who work by using their bodies and for whom that is the best they can do these people are slaves by nature and it is better for them to be subject to this kind of control as it is better for the other creatures i have mentioned assistance regarding the necessities of life is provided by both groups by slaves and by domestic animals. Nature must therefore have intended to make the bodies of free men and of slaves different also, slaves'bodies strong for the services they have to do, those of free men upright, and not much use for that kind of work, but instead useful for community life. While even Aristotle admitted that sometimes slaves can have the bodies of free men, and that free men could have only the souls and not the bodies of free men, he could nevertheless conclude in an argument that would have a measurable influence in western culture that it is clear that there are certain people who are free and certain who are slaves by nature and that it is both to their advantage and just for them to be slaves while slaves in antiquity could usually be recognized by clothing branding collars and other symbols the millennia-long search for ways to identify natural slaves would eventually be solved by the physical characteristics of sub-Saharan Africans. After quoting Cato, Varro, and Colliamella, all famous Roman writers, on the similar treatment of slaves and animals, the ancient historian Smith Bradley notes that Aristotle also stated that the slave was as appropriate a target of hunting as the wild animal, and concludes that the ease of association between slave and animal was a staple aspect of ancient mentality.
and one that stretched back to a very early period. The common Greek term for slave, andropodon, man-footed creature, was built on the foundation of a common term for cattle, namely tetrapodon, four-footed creature. Yet a few ancient writers, especially cynics and Stoics, saw a fundamental contradiction in trying to reduce even foreign human beings to a pet-like or animal status.
They saw that a master's identity depended on having a slave who recognized him as master and owner, and that this in turn required an independent consciousness. Contrary to Aristotle, the master-slave roles could be reversed, a phenomenon that actually occurred in ancient Rome as well as in such regions as the 19th century Congo. When pirates captured the early cynic Diogenes of Sinope and took him to a slave market, he supposedly pointed to a spectator wearing purple robes and said, Sell me to this man.
He needs a master. The only surviving all-out attack in antiquity on the enslavement of human beings by Gregory of Nyssa in the late fourth century makes much of the animal parallel. Complaining that slaveholders set themselves up as masters of creatures who had been made in the image of God, Gregory wrote, you have forgotten the limits of your authority, and that your rule is confined to control over things without reason.
Surely human beings have not been produced from your cattle. Surely cows have not conceived human stock. Irrational beasts are the only slaves of mankind.
Despite language like that of abolitionists, 14 centuries later, however, Gregory's repudiation of slavery, as Peter Garnsey has shown, was part of a more general attack on the love of money, usury, drunkenness, love of pleasure. and he never called for actions that would weaken or eliminate what he clearly saw as inhuman bondage, that is, the treatment of humans as non-human beasts of burden. This paradox of trying to reduce a human being to saleable chattel is what I have termed the basic problem of slavery, arising from the irreducible human dignity of the slave. Although a slave is supposed to be treated like a dog, horse, or ox, as reflected in all the laws that define the slave as a chattel or thing, the same laws have had to recognize that slaves run away, rebel, murder, rape, steal, divulge revolts, and help protect the state from external danger. Virtually every slave-holding state has had to arm slaves, no matter how reluctantly, in times of crisis.
No masters or lawmakers, whether in ancient Rome, medieval Tuscany, or 17th century Brazil, could forget that the most obsequious servant might also be what Renaissance Italians termed a domestic enemy, bent on theft, poisoning, or arson. Throughout history it has been said that slaves, if occasionally as loyal and faithful as good dogs, were, for the most part, lazy, irresponsible, cunning, rebellious, untrustworthy, and sexually promiscuous. This central contradiction was underscored in Roman law, especially the 5th century Code of Justinian, which ruled that slavery was the single institution contrary to the law of nature, but sanctioned by the law of nations, or international law.
We have seen how American courts deal with this contradiction in the Amistad case. Hence, bondage came in the Western world to symbolize the brutal world as it is, to represent the compromises man must make, with the sinful world of Adam's fall, with reality. As one might expect, there was much divergence between the legalistic or philosophical concept of slavery and the actual systems of servitude and forced labor that arose in various societies around the world.
Still, the concept has guided judges and legislators, who at times have tried to shape bondage according to biblical or classical models. It is of inestimable importance that the classical and biblical traditions linked slavery with original sin, punishment, Noah's curse of Canaan, often confused with ham, and the irremediable realities of human life, including, in the post-Edenic world, the grim or even tortuous need of most humans to toil, as the Bible puts it, by the sweat of your brow, in order to get enough bread to eat and live. By the same token, the later abolition of slavery became tied with personal and collective freedom with the redemption from sin with the romanticizing of many forms of labor and with the ultimate salvation of human kind these associations and symbols lie at the core of our western cultural heritage and are echoed in some other cultural traditions as well this point is dramatically illustrated by the exodus theme in the bible which as we will later see encouraged and inspired many slaves. Although bondage was sanctioned and taken for granted in the Old Testament, the central message and dynamic of the Hebrew Bible involves an escape from slavery and a 40-year struggle to find the meaning of freedom.
This was why, in 1777, Benjamin Franklin proposed to the Continental Congress a depiction of Moses leading Israel's liberation from slavery for the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States. The historian Michael Walzer has documented the many ways in which the biblical Exodus story has been used to justify movements of liberation. One can imagine a spectrum of states of freedom and dependency or powerlessness, with various types of serfdom and peonage, shading off into actual slavery.
Within the category of slavery itself, we can also imagine a spectrum of slave systems beginning with those that accord slaves a variety of protections and rights. Orlando Patterson has analyzed 66 slave-holding systems, ranging from the Bella Coola of British Columbia to the Tareg and Ashanti of Africa, and the ultimate slave or chief eunuch agents of emperors from Turkey to China. Patterson has been far more concerned with the dynamics of power and the relation of masters and slaves to the rest of society than with questions of harshness or leniency. Accordingly, his comparisons reveal much complexity. It is clear that some forms of contract and prison labor have been harsher and more lethal than most examples of slavery.
The same point can be made concerning the coerced labor in totalitarian states, such as Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, and Mao's China. If the laboring prisoners in the Nazi death camps and in Russia's gulag were not legally defined as owned chattel property, they were thereby completely made expendable and could be starved or frozen to death or simply shot without any recognized loss. In terms of material standard of living, the slaves in the 19th century American South were clearly far better off than most slaves and forced labor in history.
Yet they were victims of one of the most oppressive slave systems ever known in terms of the rate of manumission, racial discrimination, and psychological oppression, or what Patterson terms, generalized dishonor. As Patterson shows, some slave systems with high rates of manumission and the purchase of freedom were among the most brutal and oppressive regimes in other ways some societies enacted impressive sounding laws intended to protect slaves but then we discover that these laws were hardly ever enforced similarly while laws in the u s south deprived slaves of legal marriage nineteenth-century planters and ministers did much to encourage slave marriages and families in part for self-interested reasons patterson's work thus far has focused largely on pre-modern slavery and on psychological and social functions that transcended economic motives. Yet it is crucial to remember that the central quality of a given kind of slavery was usually defined by the nature of the work required, whether this meant cutting sugar cane, or working in a sweltering boiler room of a sugar mill in the tropical West Indies, where the climate contributed to high mortality, or serving as a sex object in a Persian harem. or wearing fine linens and driving white people in a coach in virginia or performing as an acrobat dancer soldier doctor or bureaucrat in rome it is also important to remember that in most societies even the most privileged slave the wealthy farm agent in babylon the greek poet or teacher in rome the black driver musician blacksmith or boat captain in mississippi could be quickly sold or stripped and whipped or raped or sometimes even killed at the whim of an owner. All slave systems shared this radical uncertainty and unpredictability.
The slave, even the Mamluk army officer or powerful eunuch issuing orders in the emperor's name, was deprived of any supportive family or clan, any continuity with a genuine history. Whatever privileges she or he may have gained could be taken away in a flash, leaving the slave as naked as an animal at an auction. This absence of a past and a future, of a place in history and society from which to grow in small increments, made each slave totally vulnerable. This may be the very essence of dehumanization. Since New World slavery was affected by significant but often neglected continuities and influences that extended back to the ancient Near East, the Bible, and Greece and Rome, It is important to take a number of snapshots of the nature of bondage in those times and regions.
Slavery did appear in a number of primitive hunting and gathering societies, such as the Tupinamba, but it acquired a more central role when people learned to exploit the muscle power of animals, developed extensive agriculture, and built urban civilizations with complex social stratification. In ancient China, for example, where many criminals as well as foreign captives were enslaved, bondsmen were viewed as subhuman and were tattooed for identification, and captive Turks and Indonesians were often referred to as blacks. As in parts of the ancient Near East, mutilation and death awaited any slave who had sex with a free person. From Samaria and Babylonia on to Egypt, The economies of ancient societies were not truly based on slave labor as in later Athens and Rome.
In Mesopotamia, a wide range of statuses, with varying degrees of dependency, stretched between slaves and godly rulers. Nor was there any status resembling the later Greek and Roman concept of individual freedom. Indeed, in the eyes of later Greeks, all Persians or other Asian subjects of authoritarian kings were essentially slaves.
a term easily extended to the subjects of any authoritarian rule. Similarly, in 18th century England, it often seemed that most other Europeans were enslaved to authoritarian kings, in contrast to the free English, and by the 1770s most white North Americans claimed that the English were determined to enslave them. The first and primary source of slaves in many societies was foreign prisoners of war and victims of piracy and kidnapping. Orlando Patterson has described the social death of such captives as intrusive, since they were brought into a society where they were seen as strange, alien objects of contempt and dishonor. The Greek word for barbarians, barbaroi, whom the Greeks much preferred as slaves, referred to foreigners like Scythians and Thracians, who spoke a different language and who were thus ignorant of the political institutions and cultural characteristics of the city.
Thus, like an ox or an ass, a barbarian was unable to communicate with her or his captors. Gerda Lerner has argued persuasively that the archetypal slave was a woman. and that the status of slaves as inferior dependents was closely modelled on the status of women in patriarchal societies certainly we see in both homeric and biblical literature that the males defeated in wars were usually slaughtered while foreign women were enslaved and used for household service as well as for sex and heavy labour in mesopotamia by the second millennium b c e i e two thousand to one thousand Civilizations had become sufficiently developed to absorb large numbers of male prisoners, especially as temple slaves, or slaves of a state who were not individually owned. Such men lived together in workhouses near temples, and performed heavy work digging canals for irrigation and transport. In Sumer, public slaves were referred to as iginudu, meaning, not raising their eyes.
which apparently they were forbidden to do as a symbol of their degradation and social death, and probably to prevent their eyes from looking at non-slave women. Some slaves were branded with the same mark as livestock. In Babylon, their hair was cut short in front, to reveal the brand on their forehead.
In the Neo-Babylonian period, slaves often had their owner's name branded on the back of their hand. Although the Hebrew Bible tells us to give shelter to a fugitive slave, this compassion was doubtless. Passion was doubtless meant only for a Hebrew slave of a non-Hebrew owner.
The Hammurabi Code of the 18th century BCE prescribed death for anyone who sheltered a fugitive or helped a slave escape. When recaptured, a fugitive was to be branded with an additional identifying mark on his face for all to see. In theory at least, ancient Hebrews limited the servitude of their own people, who would have mostly been debt slaves, to six years. And when a slave was set free, the master must not let him go empty-handed. Furnish him out of the flock, threshing floor, and vat, with which the Lord your God has blessed you.
Bear in mind that you were slaves in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you. Other Hebrew slaves were to be emancipated at the Jubilee every fifty years. This meant confining perpetual chattel slavery to the Israelites'enemies, especially the Canaanites. a white Semitic people and a label many Jews later applied to all Gentile slaves. As later Christians searched the Old Testament for pro-slavery sanctions, they also found, in Leviticus, Such male and female slaves as you may have, it is from the nations, heathen, in King James Bible, round about you, that you may acquire male and female slaves.
You may also buy them from among the children of aliens, strangers in King James Bible, resident with you. or from their families that are among you whom they begot in your land these shall become your property you may keep them as a possession for your children after you for them to inherit as property for all time such you may treat as slaves but as for your israelite brothers no one shall rule ruthlessly over the other this portentous if very human distinction between people like us and the outsiders Not only validated perpetual slavery, but even seemed to imply that non-Hebrew slaves could be ruled ruthlessly or with rigor. Yet Leviticus and Exodus also proclaim versions of the golden rule, love your fellow or neighbor as yourself, and you shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt. Both Jews and Christians have long struggled to reconcile these oppressive and compassionate passages and precepts.
Some later captains of slave ships claimed that their treatment of Africans conformed to the golden rule. Though Egyptians in the New Kingdom, circa 1575 to 1075 BCE, used many war-captive slaves for heavy labor on temples, obelisks, and other public works, It appears that most slaves in Mesopotamia were not captured in war or slaving raids. Both the Hammurabi Code and Hebrew Bible prescribe death as the penalty for kidnapping minors. Orlando Patterson uses extrusive to refer to internal or domestic sources of slaves. He speaks of the forcible expulsion of people within an in-group from the status and privileges enjoyed by non-slaves.
One clear example would be the early modern Russian slaves and later serfs, who were degraded and dehumanized by masters of the same ethnicity. Yet the Old Testament describes a ritual for Hebrew slaves who chose to remain with a master instead of being freed and perhaps starving, or having to leave a wife and children at the end of six years of service. Such a slave would be brought to a doorpost, where his master shall bore his ear through with an awl, and he shall serve him forever.
Presumably the board hole would hold an earring or clay tag of some kind with the master's logo. One major source of extrusive slaves throughout the ancient world was the thousands of unwanted babies who were abandoned and exposed to the elements. This was the main form of birth control throughout antiquity.
There were no foundling centers or hospitals as in medieval Europe. Hence numerous documents speak of infants being placed in the mouth of a dog or crow. or in a pit, which could mean a symbolic descent to animal status as infants were deprived of human protection. Most of these children, abandoned at wells or on the street, died of hunger and cold, and their corpses might well have been fed upon by dogs and crows. Of those who were rescued, some were adopted as free children, but most were raised as slaves.
Some parents even sold their own small children into slavery. Desperate poverty and indebtedness were other common sources of extrusive slaves, especially in the second millennium in the eastern Mediterranean, and much later among various African and Asian peoples. Yet debt slaves were increasingly elevated above chattel slaves in the ancient Near East. They were also apparently of declining importance, from the 7th to the 4th century BCE.
According to Plutarch, Solon, the great greek lawgiver and reformer of the late sixth century totally abolished debt bondage because all the common people were in debt to the rich in babylonia egypt and the ancient world in general the number of slaves never approached fifty per cent of the population most agricultural work was done by tenant farmers free workers dominated most of the craft industries though in the neo babylonian period Slaves appeared as artisans, agents, tenant farmers, merchants, and even bankers. Apart from the public temple slaves, private household slaves became an important symbol of wealth and power, as in later Greece and Rome. The richest families might own over 100 slaves and use them in a variety of ways. For thousands of years, slavery was simply taken for granted in ancient Babylonia and Egypt, as in India, China, and the Americas. Manumissions were exceedingly rare, in contrast to later Rome.
If someone killed a slave, he was not guilty of murder, but simply required to pay the slave's market price to the master, as if he had killed a horse or cow. In the Neo-Babylonian kingdom from 626 through the 4th century BCE, it was still not a crime to kill a slave, in contrast to 5th century BCE Athens, and the 19th century CE American South. Victor Hansen has recently pointed to an agricultural revolution that began in ancient Greece around 750 BCE, in which small numbers of slaves were associated with family farms producing a mix of crops.
Aided by as few as one or two slaves, small-scale farmers succeeded in producing sufficient food to maintain a democratic polis, or city-state. Thus, slavery became economically important as soon as farmers began producing a surplus of grain, olives, fruit, and wine that could be sold or exchanged. As in the much later North American colonies, freedom and slavery advanced together. Indeed, Greece was probably the first genuine slave society, that is, a collection of states totally dependent on slave labor, as distinct from the many societies that simply possessed slaves.
If the ancient Greeks hold the distinction of having created democracy, they also came to see slave labor as absolutely central to their entire economy and way of life. Along with a growing emphasis on individual and political liberty, Greek free citizens came to disdain all types of manual labor. Within the city-state, at least, the free male Greek citizen needed time and leisure to participate in civic society, and make use of his rational thought and creative powers.
The condition of the free man, said Aristotle, is that he does not live under the constraint of another. As a noted British classicist puts it, the Greeks could imagine no alternative to slave labor. The life of the citizens in the polis, the only form of civilized organization they knew or could imagine, would have been impossible without that leisure they prized so highly. Leisure to haunt the gymnasium, the roofed porches where men congregated for conversation and dispute, the theater, the assembly, the courts, and all the varied time-consuming duties and pleasures of the free male citizen.
Of course, there were many pronouncements from Athens and other cities against enslaving any Greek peoples, even when defeated in war. Yet Greeks continued to war against and enslave fellow Greeks, and often looked upon such a sparing of life as an act of mercy. Greeks also accepted the right to enslave infant foundlings who had been abandoned by a parent.
As the demand for slaves grew, merchants increasingly purchased slaves as part of long-distance seaborne commerce. In other words, The trade in such commodities as ceramics and olive oil opened up distant markets for human labor. From the 6th century BCE onward, merchants followed armies in the field and bought up prisoners of war, who were then transported with other goods to such commercial centers as Athens, Corinth, Aegina, and Caius.
It is estimated that in such cities, slaves made up at least one-third of the population. and were even more widely dispersed among slave owners than in the later U.S. South.
As in the later Roman world, this linkage of slavery with long-distance commerce by sea served to separate the urban centers of culture and learning from the violent origins of enslavement. A respected urban master might have little mental picture of the bloody battlefields or terrifying raids of a pirate ship that had furnished him with servants. Moreover, from the 6th century on, The gulf continued to widen between slaves and free citizens, in contrast to the much earlier Homeric slaves who ate, drank, and worked side by side with their non-wealthy masters.
It should be added, however, that there were many manumitted slaves in Greek society, some of them citizens, and that Athens freed most male slaves of military age in 406 BCE so they could serve in the Peloponnesian War. While Greek slaves worked as nurses, prostitutes, urban artisans, and domestic servants, we should not forget the less visible and far more miserable slaves in the mines. Diodorus Secundus described the miners in Ptolemaic Egypt. No leniency or respite of any kind is given to any man who is sick, or maimed, or aged, or in the case of a woman for her weakness, but all without exception are compelled by blows to persevere in their labors, until through ill-treatment, they die in the midst of their tortures.
Consequently, the poor unfortunates believe, because their punishment is so excessively severe, that the future will always be more terrible than the present, and they therefore look forward to death as more to be desired than life. In modern times, the eminent classicist Lerner Knox climbed into the mineshaft at Lorien in Attica, the main source of revenue and coinage for Athens, where the supposedly virtuous statesman Nicias owned one thousand of the slaves who extracted silver. Knox found that the shafts down which one descended by ladders one hundred and thirty meters into the earth measured two meters by one point three meters. At the bottom, miners were forced to crawl into dark galleries or tunnels, one meter high, and from zero point six to zero point nine meters wide.
Knox badly scratched his knees and hands, frayed his shirt and trousers, and then got stuck in a dark bend. as he tried to crawl out backward yet thousands of slave miners worked in such a hellish environment with crude oil lamps ten hours on and ten hours off similar conditions were perpetuated and extended by the romans for example in the notorious silver mines in spain And it was Rome that bequeathed to Christian Europe the juridical and philosophical foundations for modern slavery. As the legal scholar Alan Watson has written, it is not going too far to suggest that southern U.S. slave law, when it did not adopt Roman rules, preferred others because of the power of racism. Watson adds that non-racist slavery is very different, but may be no less horrifying in many respects, than racist slavery. Perhaps the most crucial point of influence is the principal distinction in the law of persons.
All men are either free or slaves. There is no third, intermediate category in Roman law. Through many centuries of time, learned lawyers, judges, and professors passed on a kind of culture of law, concerning the uses of power and the regulation of slavery, based on the mid-sixth century CE institutes of Justinian.
which was revived at the end of the 11th century and especially influential in spain france and portugal despite the striking differences in the english common law tradition educated american southerners as watson observes were very familiar with roman law and well-informed travelers in the american south exclaimed over the similarities between roman slave law and the laws of southern states this is not to deny some significant differences often stemming from the racial character of American slavery, including restrictions on manumissions, and rules governing the peculium, or property entrusted to slaves but still legally owned by a master. And even the harshest southern lawmakers in the United States did not copy Roman laws allowing naked slaves to be put in an arena to fight hungry lions, or ruling that if a slave raped a free virgin, molten lead was to be poured down his throat. Still, as matters developed, many antebellum southern leaders, writers, and journalists were very familiar with classical Roman texts.
From the late 18th century, well into the first half of the 19th, Americans fixated on classical models, from architecture to prose, producing, for instance, a Latin and therefore eternal biography of George Watson, on to republican theories of government and a senate, as in ancient Rome. Thus, eminent slaveholders, having absorbed some classics in southern academies and colleges, could think of themselves as modern Cato's or Colliamella's. In addition to such leaps over time, which were also stimulated by the growing popular familiarity with the Bible, one of the themes of this book, there was a genuine continuity of slave trading and slave holding from ancient Greece to Rome, and from the late Roman Empire to the Byzantine and Arab worlds.
from the medieval shipment of slaves from the balkans the black sea and caucasia to muslim and christian mediterranean markets and from there to the beginnings in the 15th century of an african slave trade to portugal and spain and then to the atlantic islands and new world as we shall see in subsequent chapters this crucial continuity in no way diminishes the importance of changing contexts ethnicities and economic needs and markets It is probably a mistake, however, to picture the entire Roman Empire as a massive collection of slave societies. My colleague, Ramsey McMullen, has argued that if we could travel during the late Roman Empire in a great circle from Gaul to Britain, Germany, Dalmatia and the Balkans, Palestine, Egypt, Northern Africa and Spain, we would see most of the agricultural work being performed by free peasants. Slaves, of course, would appear everywhere.
but mostly as urban and household servants, weaving, fetching water, cleaning stables and latrines, cutting wood, assisting women in childbirth and nursing, dressing and transporting wealthy owners. At the same time, Smith Bradley, the leading expert on the subject, stresses that slavery was an integral part of the social order throughout the Roman world. An estimated million house slaves obeyed the orders of the richest 5% of Italy's population. Some of the wealthiest families possessed and paraded many hundreds of slave servants.
Indeed, a man with no more than two or three slaves was an object of pity. The great exception, whereas slaves were concentrated in large-scale agriculture, serving as a prototype for New World plantations, were the Latifundia of southern Italy and Sicily. As Roman armies conquered region after region in the two centuries before the Common Era, an immense flow of captives, many of them transported by merchant slave traders, were channeled to the farmlands of Italy and Sicily to produce grain, wine, wool, and olive oil. Large landlords repeatedly evicted the small farmers of these regions, who migrated as a jobless proletariat to Rome and other cities. The inflow of war captives was supplemented by a growing number of slaves by birth.
Except for the highly productive Latifundia, along with some factories producing fine pottery, swords, shields, and other products, most Roman slaves were to be found in towns and cities. Even so, estimates range from two to three million slaves in Italy at the time of Augustus, alongside a free population of four to five million. Taking account of the uncertainty of such statistics, the proportion of slaves in the Roman population was very close to that at the heyday of American slavery, some 30%.
Contrary to much scholarly opinion, McMullen thinks that the number of slaves may not have changed much from the time of Augustus, at the beginning of the Common Era, to the reign of Alan, in 410. The Roman adoption of Christianity in the fourth century had little effect on slave law. though it doubtless made manumission much easier and more widely approved. While the Romans, as Watson observes, showed little interest in an ideal law, Justinian's Institutes proclaimed, following the mid-second century jurist Florentinus, that slavery is an institution of the law of nations, eos gentium, by which, contrary to nature, a person is subjected to the domination of another. This was the only instance in which a rule of international law was said to be contrary to the law of nature. But Augustus and other church fathers had already provided an answer by drawing a profound and influential connection between slavery and original sin.
While Augustus urged masters to treat slaves as their brothers in Christ, he interpreted society's need for slaves as part of a universal human depravity, as the way the world is and must be accepted, as distinguished from the city of God. This dualistic view of slavery as a product of sin represented a significant departure from the Romans, who not only accepted inhuman bondage, in the sense that slaves were not fully human, but simply took it for granted. In the Roman world of reality, it was not problematic to burn alive a slave criminal, or to join huge audiences in watching the ritual death of slave gladiators. The law provided that if a slave murdered his master, all the slaves in the household must be questioned under torture and then executed.
The jurist, Ulpian, explained the rationale. Since otherwise no home can be safe unless slaves, at the risk of their own lives, are compelled to guard their masters as much from members of the household as from outsiders. When in 61 CE a slave murdered the senatorial prefect of Rome, Padonius Secundus, in his own home, the Roman Senate plunged into a heated debate whether to carry out this law and execute all 400 slaves, including women and children, in the victim's household.
Such an action would deprive the master's heirs of a great fortune. Yet, as Gaius Gaius told the Senate, whom will the number of his slaves protect when four hundred did not protect Padonius Secundus? In the end, the issue of security prevailed.
All four hundred were crucified, though the emperor Nero had to call out troops against a crowd wielding firebrands and stones, wanting to stop the executions. Afterward, other rich slaveholders could presumably sleep more soundly. Relations between Roman slaves and their owners, both male and female, were the subject of much study and even advice manuals, written almost in the spirit of scientific management. Colliamella's Dei Rerustica, well known to some 19th century American masters, it had even been cited by Milton, emphasized the need for positive incentives and inducements that would encourage slaves to compete and become more productive.
Colliamella wrote that he even loved to jest with his slaves and engage in friendly conversations. He even stressed that it was wise to consult with some slaves on the best ways to tackle new work. It is also worth noting that beginning in the 2nd century CE, many masters stopped the practice of branding ordinary slaves and substituted metal collars bearing the name of the owner. On the other hand, Smith Bradley points out that Roman slavery was always based on physical and psychological terror. and it was never a disgrace to burn alive a slave accused of some crime.
Bradley most vividly illustrates the Roman slave's status of animality in an analysis of Apuleius'mid-second-century CE novel, The Golden Ass, or Metamorphoses. In this story, a prosperous, well-born, and well-educated young man, Lucius, becomes suddenly transformed into a four-footed ass or donkey. a paradigmatic illustration of the animalization of the slave in real life. Since Lucius retains his rational human identity but is unable to speak or complain as he is flogged, set to the drudgery of turning a mill, and even sexually exploited, he symbolizes the plight of the dehumanized human, yearning for ways to resist, but also learning that once slaves were set on the level of beasts, all need to cater to their human sensibilities was removed. Ironically, the author Apuleius was himself a slave owner, and his account of one man's temporary bestialization was meant as a comedy, not a call for abolitionist action.
Relations between slaves and their owners became the subject of much literary satire, fable, and comedy, which provides insight into the fears, tensions, and desires of the Roman slaveholding society. Those slaves were sometimes portrayed as grateful, loyal and obsequious, it was difficult to forget the Roman proverb, All slaves are enemies. Especially revealing is The Life of Aesop, a fictional slave biography from Roman Egypt in the first century CE. Since slaves had long and commonly been likened to animals, it is significant that the slave Aesop, supposedly living in the sixth century BCE, constructed famous animal fables, like later African American slaves.
that served as an indirect way of communicating the slaves'view of their master's world. One of the main themes of Aesop's biography, like the biblical story of the slave Joseph and Potiphar's wife, involves sexual relations between male slaves and the wife of the master, who is portrayed as a sex-crazed slut on a lascivious lookout for a young, handsome, athletic, good-looking blonde slave. As Smith Hopkins puts it, the baths Cleanliness, heat, and lust were a heady mixture, and the close association between powerful female mistresses and their male slave attendants in public and in private stimulated the anxieties of husbands, and later of Christian moralizers. Aesop himself, who begins by severely rebuking his new mistress for her immorality, ends up by seducing her, in revenge for his master's ingratitude. Apart from lurid sexual details centering on Aesop's frightening potency, Hopkins makes two important points.
First, humor camouflages unceasing guerrilla warfare between master and slave, especially the slaves who help to bathe, dress, and feed their masters, and who thus know every point of weakness and vulnerability. Second, a comedy like The Life of Aesop provides a way of dealing with the humanity of a slave, even if at the end he is put to death. By inverting normality with a picture of the wise, shrewd slave protagonist, the story finally moves on to restore normality by putting the slave in his place. Disorder implies order. Thus, the Roman festival of Saturnalia, by allowing slaves to act like masters for one day, reinforced the basic structures of authority.
Colonial and early National Americans would experiment with similar rituals. But racial distinctions made rituals more complex and threatening. Nothing in the Roman world was really like the racial slavery that came to pervade the Western Hemisphere.
Romans imported slaves from countless countries and all directions, including blonde, blue-eyed slaves from Northern Europe, highly educated and professional slaves from Greece and Northern Africa, and even a few black slaves from south of the Sahara. In addition, especially in the period of relative peace, after the empire had been firmly established, increasing numbers of slaves were obtained from breeding, piracy, and the exposure of infants. The public did associate some ethnic stereotypes with slavery. Because slaves in certain regions included a disproportionate number of red-haired Thracians, actors playing the part of slaves sometimes wore red wigs as an identifying symbol.
Indeed, Spartacus, the famous leader of the third major slave revolt in southern Italy and Sicily, was a Thracian. Trained as a swordsman at a school for gladiators, Spartacus led from 73 to 71 BCE a slave army that grew to some 70,000. The Romans finally crushed the rebellion and crucified Spartacus and some 6,000 other survivors. Thus, along with the precedent and sanction for slave plantation agriculture, The Roman era also passed on a heroic precedent for slave resistance, even if the lesson, confirmed scores of times in the New World, was that slave revolts are suicidal. In 1770, a classic work, partially written and edited by the radical French historian and writer, the Abbé Reynal, condemned New World slavery and called for a black Spartacus, who would be a vehicle for nature asserting her rights against the blind avarice of Europeans and American colonists.
In the 1790s, Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the rebellious blacks in the Haitian Revolution, was hailed as the long-awaited black Spartacus, especially by the French general, Etienne Laveau, who called him the Black Spartacus, the Negro predicted by Reynal, who would avenge the outrages done to his race.