Slave Systems
Ancient and Modern

This book compares features of slavery in ancient Greece and Rome and in the modern Atlantic world.

Enrico Dal Lago (Edited by), Constantina Katsari (Edited by)

9781009113847, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 October 2021

389 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.596 kg

"This is a well researched book in which many of the arguments shaped by the respective scholars could very well become manuscript titles on their own in the future."
World History Bulletin, Patrick Albano, Pierpont Community and Technical College

A ground-breaking edited collection charting the rise and fall of forms of unfree labour in the ancient Mediterranean and in the modern Atlantic, employing the methodology of comparative history. The eleven chapters in the book deal with conceptual issues and different approaches to historical comparison, and include specific case-studies ranging from the ancient forms of slavery of classical Greece and of the Roman empire to the modern examples of slavery that characterised the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. The results demonstrate both how much the modern world has inherited from the ancient in regard to ideology and practice of slavery; and also how many of the issues and problems related to the latter seem to have been fundamentally similar across time and space.

Part I. Slavery, Slave Systems, World History and Comparative History: 1. The study of ancient and modern slave systems: setting an agenda for comparison Enrico Dal Lago and Constantina Katsari
2. Slavery, gender, and work in the pre-modern world and early Greece: a cross-cultural analysis Orlando Patterson
3. Slavery as historical process: examples from the ancient Mediterranean and the modern Atlantic Joseph C. Miller
Part II. Economics and Technology of Ancient and Modern Slave Systems: 4. The comparative economics of slavery in the Greco-Roman world Walter Scheidel
5. Slavery and technology in pre-industrial contexts Tracey Rihll
6. Comparing or interlinking? Economic comparisons of early nineteenth-century slave systems in the Americas in historical perspective Michael Zeuske
Part III. Ideologies and Practices of Management in Ancient and Modern Slavery: 7. Ideal models of slave management in the Roman world and the Antebellum American South Enrico Dal Lago and Constantina Katsari
8. Panis, disciplina, et opus servo: the Jesuit ideology in Portuguese America and Greco-Roman ideas of slavery Rafael de Bivar Marquese and Fabio Duarte Joly
Part IV. Exiting Slave Systems: 9. Processes of exiting the slave systems: a typology Olivier Pétrè-Grenouilleau
10. Emancipation schemes: different ways of ending slavery Stanley Engerman
Part V. Slavery and Unfree Labor, Ancient and Modern: 11. Spartiates, helots, and the direction of the agrarian economy: toward an understanding of helotage in comparative perspective Stephen Hodkinson.

Subject Areas: Slavery & abolition of slavery [HBTS], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], History of the Americas [HBJK]