This chapter explores dynamic aspects of the book editors' challenge to consider the rise and demise of ‘slave systems’ in the ancient Mediterranean and in the emergently modern Atlantic – but it offers a historical approach to recurrent slaving as incremental processes of change in place of the structural premise of abstract and implicitly static ‘slave systems’ that underlies the method of comparison implicitly proposed, and also nearly all the current literature on slavery. Slavers marginal to particular historical contexts in which they lived, earlier and later, found both means and motivation to advance themselves, at the expense of rivals in control of, but limited to, local resources by acquiring outsiders whom they exclusively controlled. This recurrent historical dialectic, uniquely contextualized in both ancient times and the modern Atlantic, as well as elsewhere in the world, identifies similarities and differences in the historical dynamics that explain the resulting parallels and contrasts that conventional comparisons in structural terms describe.

Slaving is fundamentally a historical process, as slaving strategies achieved prominence primarily in times and places where rapid military or economic expansion facilitated access to outsiders. It was also, thus, generally a by-product, a secondary strategy, arising from specifiable tensions within larger and more complex historical processes. Significant slaving and integration of the slaves in turn contributed to still others.

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter I will endeavour to develop a general model of the relationship between slavery and technology in ancient Greece and Rome. This model is informed by comparative evidence from other periods and places and, consequently, may also be applicable to other pre-industrial societies.

In the ancient world, slaves who were skilled artisans or service providers were usually paid for their skills and products. Most people in this sector were paid piece rate, per unit that they made or performed. For example, stonemasons working on the Erechtheion frieze were paid per figure, those fluting the columns, per foot. As a rule of thumb, the more products or services the person sold, the more money she or he made. Slaves could raise the money needed to buy their freedom through saving the residual income from their earnings. Purely on an abstract, theoretical level, we can appreciate that the ancient, independently living slave had good reason to be industrious and to want to increase his or her output in terms of quantity or quality, since every obol earned was an obol closer to freedom. Indeed, the prospect of freedom may have been a more powerful motivator than any felt by a free worker. The prospect of freedom at a price would have provided a powerful motivator for those in the manufacturing sector to improve their productivity and/or the quality of their product.

Historical studies of slavery are, by definition, both global and comparative. Slavery, in fact, is an institution whose practice has covered most of the documented history of the world and has spread across many different countries and regions around the globe. Thus, very few societies have remained historically untouched by it, while, at different times and in different degrees, most have seen a more or less strong presence of slaves employed for a variety of different purposes within them. Throughout history and in many societies, masters have utilized their slaves for tasks as diverse as working on landed estates or even on industrial complexes, or, more commonly, serving in households and other domestic settings, and, more rarely, for specific military or religious purposes.

The chapters gathered in this collection represent the variety of experiences associated with slavery, while they focus particularly on the scholarly study of its influence on the economy and society of those cultures that made extensive use of it. Though the dimensions of the scholarly study of slavery, much as slavery itself, are truly global in their breadth – and the authors of each chapter are aware of this – the declared scope of the present book is to focus on the comparative analysis of two specific regions of the world where slavery flourished at different times: the ancient Mediterranean and the modern Atlantic.

Comparative typology may be useful as a heuristic tool, not as an objective in itself. Indeed, to focus on constants can lead to fixing the features underlined by the observer and thereafter to masking the forces, the agents and the processes at work behind the repetitions or the deviations, processes which evidently participate in the ‘fabrication’ of history. Slavery, properly speaking, will be our subject. Other modes of dependence (e.g. collective dependence in antiquity, serfdom, etc.), as well as debt bondage, will be excluded.

Firstly, I will analyse the processes leading to what I propose to call ‘systemic exits’ from slavery, that is to say types of individual or collective deliverance, which do not call into question the equilibrium of a given slave system, while they may even sometimes reinforce it. Then, I will look at how the slaves, through modes of resistance, participated in the process of deliverance from slavery – a type of process, whose nature (systemic or not) will have to be defined. Finally, I will focus on two phenomena, which both led to the non-systemic deliverance from slavery: on one hand, the case of slave systems that seem to have slowly ‘declined’ before vanishing almost completely; on the other hand, that of systems abolished as a result of specific measures or decisions.

SYSTEMIC EXITS

Although numerous, systemic exits refer to specific individuals and do not call into question the very nature of a slave system.

There is some general agreement among scholars about the conditions under which slavery has existed, particularly in large-scale slave societies as in the ones in the Americas. In the analysis of such slave societies, economic surpluses play a major role, and variants of the Domar–Nieboer argument that related slavery to a high ratio of land to labour have been frequently resorted to. If some scepticism about this argument exists today, certainly it was one often used by many contemporaries in describing the rise and fall of slavery and the new forms of labour control that replaced it. Correspondingly, discussions of the expected ending of slavery were frequently based on arguments positing a declining ratio of land to labour. Expectations of the reported successes (or lack of them) of the transition to free labour were also related to the relative amounts of land and labour. The rise and fall of smaller-scale slave societies was often explained by economic elements, although various social and political factors may have had a major influence in some of these cases. Slavery, in those societies with written documents, was generally dealt with through extensive law codes, often with thorough details and broad coverage. These laws provided the fundamental basis for the control of slave labourers, as well as imposing limits on the masters and non-slaveholding free people.

The subject of my study is the system of helotage within the ancient Greek polis of Sparta. A fundamental feature of Spartan society was that the Spartiate citizens lived as rentier landowners supported economically by a servile population, the helots, who worked their estates. The Spartiates inhabited a cluster of villages within the region of Lakonia, towards the northern end of the Eurotas valley. Their landholdings, in contrast, were much more extensive. At the peak of their power, from c. 600 bc to 370 bc, when Spartan territory covered the entire southern Peloponnese, the Spartiates’ estates farmed by helot cultivators were spread across both its main regions: their ‘home’ region of Lakonia and the neighbouring region of Messenia to the west, occupying overall perhaps some 1,400 km2 out of a total geographical area of 8,500 km2. After Sparta's loss of Messenia in 370 bc, the helots of Lakonia continued to be the predominant labour force on citizen estates in the region until at least the second century bc.

Modern thought has often followed ancient Greek and Roman sources in portraying Sparta as an exceptional society, somewhat different from other Greek poleis, and indeed from most other civilized human societies. In recent years my work has increasingly been concerned with deconstructing that image as it relates to Greek antiquity, exploring the complex manner in which Spartan institutions and practices were frequently both distinctive and yet reflected, and sometimes even exemplified, trends observable elsewhere in the Greek world.

INTRODUCTION

With these words, Alexander von Humboldt began the chapter on slavery in his Political Essay (Essai politique) on the island of Cuba, published in 1826. The chapter represented the most important argument made by a liberal thinker against slavery in the Atlantic world in the first half of the nineteenth century. Understandably, when John Thrasher omitted it from his 1856 translation of the Essai politique into English, Humboldt protested openly and forcefully against the omission.

The origins of systematic comparison between slave systems, however, can be traced back to earlier than the publication of Humboldt's Essai politique and can be linked directly to the Haitian revolution. Already by 21 August 1791, immediately after the outbreak of the rebellion in the Acul region's plantations, in the north of Saint Domingue, terror struck throughout the world of slaveholders in the Americas. A powerful fear travelled through the Atlantic world in a pattern of concentric rings; one could appropriately describe this phenomenon by saying that ‘a spectre wandered through the Americas’. It was, thus, the ‘suspicion of an analogy between the contemporaneous shocks experienced by all the American slave systems’ that was to trigger scientific comparison.

INTRODUCTION

Genuine ‘slave economies’ – in which slave labour permeated all sectors of the economy and played a central role in economic output outside the sphere of family labour – were rare in history. Classical Greece and the Italian heartland of the Roman empire are among the most notable cases. This raises important questions: how did the Greeks and Romans come to join this exclusive club, and how did the circumstances that determined the development and structure of their regimes of slave labour compare to those that shaped other slave-rich systems? This chapter has two goals. The first one is to improve our understanding of the critical determinants of the large-scale use of slave labour in different sectors of historical economies. This calls for a comparative approach that extends beyond classical antiquity. I hope to show that by adjusting and fusing several existing explanatory models, and by considering a previously unappreciated factor, it is possible to make some significant progress toward the creation of a cross-culturally valid matrix of conditions that situates the experience of ancient slave economies within a broader context. In brief, I argue that the success of chattel slavery is a function of the specific configuration of several critical variables: the character of specific economic activities, the incentive system, the normative value system of a society, and the nature of commitments required of the free population.

At the turn of the first millennium the empire of New Rome was the oldest and most dynamic state in the world and comprised the most civilized portions of the Christian world. Its borders, long defended by native frontier troops, were being expanded by the most disciplined and technologically advanced army of its time. The unity of Byzantine society was grounded in the equality of Roman law and a deep sense of a common and ancient Roman identity; cemented by the efficiency of a complex bureaucracy; nourished and strengthened by the institutions and principles of the Christian Church; sublimated by Greek rhetoric; and confirmed by the passage of ten centuries. At the end of the reign of Basileios II (976–1025), the longest in Roman history, its territory included Asia Minor and Armenia, the Balkan peninsula south of the Danube, and the southern regions of both Italy and the Crimea. Serbia, Croatia, Georgia, and some Arab emirates in Syria and Mesopotamia had accepted a dependent status.

The empire was never again to be as powerful in the five centuries that yet remained to it, though its decline was neither steady nor inexorable. Crisis invigorated the sources of Roman strength and catastrophe was usually followed by decades of resurgence. The Komnenoi (1081–1185) largely reversed the decline of the late eleventh century and the Laskarids founded a resilient and even expansionist state at Nikaia that managed to reclaim the capital from the aggressors of 1204.