The literary and documentary sources of the late Roman world evince relatively little interest in the internal workings of rural communities, and reveal mechanisms of self-regulation only rarely. But we must assume a diversity in social structures and patterns of interaction that matches the physical diversity of settlements sketched above. For analytical purposes, we may envisage two poles, and assume that in most cases a community will fall somewhere along the spectrum between the two. At one extreme may be placed the more or less egalitarian community of agriculturalists, characterized by relatively poorly developed structures of self-government, and collectively subject to a wealthy patron or landlord. At the other is the highly stratified village community, dominated by an exclusive oligarchy of wealthier peasants, who consciously excluded their less wealthy or powerful neighbors from the business of governing the community, and the status and recognition that this entailed. We should imagine also that the natural state of rural communities both large and small was a delicate equilibrium between the competing and largely contradictory needs of the individuals, households, and families that made up those communities on the one hand, and the cohesion of the group as an effective mechanism for the mitigation and management of subsistence and social risk, on the other. It will be the purpose of this chapter to explore the strategies available to communities in seeking to maintain this equilibrium.

To this end, I briefly sketch the evidence for social differentiation and self-governance within rural communities in the late Roman world. Next, I examine the decision-making processes of individuals and households in those communities, the constraints within which those decisions were made, and the collection of mutually contradictory demands that had to be balanced and evaluated in the process. Then I outline the ways in which inequality and internal tension might be negotiated, paying particular attention to regular mechanisms for the periodic alleviation of jealousy and conflict. Finally, I explore some strategies that these communities might employ for resolving disagreements or disputes that have escalated to a point where they require a specific response or solution. Throughout, I focus principally upon structures that may be considered intrinsic to the community, leaving discussion of their interactions with outsiders for a later chapter. As we shall see, while such a strategy is in a certain sense artificial, it has the benefit of emphasizing the primacy of the community’s cohesion and the subsistence survival of its members over the demands, perceptions, and desires of the powerful figures whose perspective has long dominated the study of rural communities in the period.

Alongside the collection of negotiations and interactions that made up the internal dynamics of their communities, the peasants of the late Roman world were enmeshed in a collection of complementary relationships with the powerful figures who lived on the margins of their world. These relations of power, authority, and dependence have long been regarded as the principal determinants of the socio-economic contours of the late Roman countryside. Certainly, such accounts as survive of interactions between peasants and the powerful in the period tend to stress the unthinking deference of the former and the unquestioned dominance of the latter. However, these narratives have, on the whole, been constructed by the powerful and for the powerful. When placed within the context of the strategies for the management and mitigation of subsistence and social risk that were outlined in the preceding chapters, interactions between peasants and aristocratic landowners and soldiers, bishops and holy figures take on a subtly different valence.

In this chapter, I sketch the array of powerful figures who interacted with rural communities and their inhabitants in the period. I begin from two propositions which appear at first blush to be contradictory, but which should in fact be regarded as complementary. On the one hand, relations of power are fundamental to an understanding of the structure and functioning of rural communities in the late Roman world. Patrons and would-be patrons operated within a competitive environment, expressing their claims to power and, by extension, authority using a variety of subtly different vocabularies, both familiar and unfamiliar to the peasants who served as their interlocutors. Their capacity to exercise their power effectively rested upon their ability to obtain or elicit an acknowledgment from subordinates that that power was legitimate, and therefore carried authority. This reliance upon the peasantry as a source of legitimacy granted the latter, both singly and collectively, a certain amount of agency in both initiating and structuring their interactions with the powerful.

RUNAWAYS

In the Americas, as in precolonial Africa, slavery's reproduction was structurally linked to the reproduction of power. Things could not be any other way. Slavery was not a self-reproducing system; it presupposed unequal power relations. Long before their connection in production, slaves and masters were united through a private, culturally legitimated power relationship. In other words, before he or she became property, the slave was the captive of another man. For this reason, escapes and quilombos, though typical strategies of resistance to slavery, were not only direct attacks on property: They were extreme political acts whose very existence as possibilities restricted the master's reach, guaranteeing slaves a small yet crucial space from which they could make demands. We must not forget that slavery prevailed for four centuries in the Americas – fully four times as long as universal emancipation. In many ways, the slave past is still greater than the free present. For this reason, though escapes and the establishment of communities of runaways constituted classical forms of resistance to slavery, their study may, in fact, teach us much about slavery's great relative stability.

We begin our analysis with the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), a region highly integrated into the international market for tropical products. In 1789 there were 65,000 slaves in the region and 15,000 in the city of Rio de Janeiro alone. Thirty years later, these numbers had increased to 150,000 and 40,000 respectively. The trade in African slaves explains this growth.

Before contact with Europeans, most North American indigenous communities were familiar with captives taken in intergroup fighting as a potential source of additional community members. Such captives were the proximate or ultimate source of most of those in statuses of servitude, including slavery, in the majority of Native American communities in early historic times.

Statuses of servitude, especially slavery, within Native American communities have not attracted a great deal of scholarly scrutiny, partly because the positive pole of the idea of the “noble savage” continues to color both the popular and scholarly image of Native Americans sufficiently to often cause surprise and even resistance to the suggestion that not all precontact and early contact indigenous communities were egalitarian. That various forms of bondage, including slavery, did occur in some indigenous communities is also frequently dismissed, or their importance in some aboriginal communities minimized.

Careful scrutiny of the earliest available sources on indigenous North American societies, however, reveals that statuses of servitude were of considerable significance in some, although certainly not all, such societies. Two major questions are pursued here. First, as best we can tell, what happened to captives prior to European impact on indigenous societies? How were the fates of captives likely altered as a result of significant European influence?

I emphasize similarities and broad, widespread patterns, but considerable variation existed within this framework of similarities that cannot be considered here. Because of major variations across the continent, a regional approach is adopted.