At the heart of James Q. Whitman’s From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands lies the notion of ownership in Western property law. Whitman’s boldly argued central thesis is that it is possible to chart a long and gradual transformation from an ancient “property imagination” centered on mastery over humans (and more specifically, enslaved humans) to a modern one centered on lordship over land (pp. 9–10). Modern Western property law, Whitman argues, bears traces of a much older legal framework speaking to an idiom of power that has taken centuries to counter: the master/slave relationship. We owe to Ancient Rome, he argues, the modern legal understanding of the “absolute” ownership of things (dominium), and we can only fully understand how and why slavery finally lost its legitimacy in Western law by tracing the transformation that is his subject.

This wide-ranging tour de force resists simple classification. It sits at the intersection of a Venn diagram comprising three methodological sets: the comparative global slavery of Orlando Patterson; the longue durée system of the Annales school, and more recent work advocating, if not always achieving, a diachronic approach to ancient and modern slavery.Footnote ¹ Perhaps best defined as a (very) selective diachronic analysis of the Western ownership of people and land, this book will attract a wide readership among legal historians, ancient historians, classicists, anthropologists, and historians of enslavement and land ownership in all periods. It will, however, be of special interest to those with an interest in “comparative” approaches to enslavement.

This is a big book in every way: a 440-page interpretative historiography of ownership from the Upper Palaeolithic to the early modern period, as revealed through a forensic critical analysis of centuries of scholarship on Roman, medieval, and early modern property law. Readers will also encounter arguments drawing inspiration from anthropology, comparative slavery, comparative religion, and Christian theology. But despite this chronological and topical breadth, Whitman’s central focus is firmly on Roman law, both in Antiquity and as inherited and interpreted thereafter in Western Europe. Six of his nine chapters focus primarily on Rome, while the two chapters that cover prehistory and the early modern era are painted with a brush that is at once broader and more selective than is the case elsewhere. Scholars of Roman law and Roman slavery will find much to dissect, admire, and argue with in this book. Scholars of early modern slavery, particularly those with an interest in the Transatlantic slave trade may, however, be surprised to find so little explicit analysis of racialized chattel slavery even in the book’s final, early modern, chapter.

The book is divided chronologically into two parts, framed by an introduction and conclusion. Part 1 (Chapters 1–5), “Masters of Men and Beasts,” considers ownership from prehistory to the Classical Roman era, and Part 2 (Chapters 5–9), “From Masters to Lords,” works from later Antiquity to the early modern period, via a critical reassessment of the hypothesis that, with the fall of Rome, an empire-wide slave economy quickly gave way to a feudal one.

Chapter 1 considers ownership in the deep past, looking back as far as evolutionary biology and the first hunter-gatherers. Whitman might have engaged more closely here with archaeological evidence for ways in which the first farming communities forged enduring relationships with, and claims to, the land through the construction of monuments housing ancestral remains. Prehistorians would argue that these people were “investing land with an emotional significance” in a way that Whitman argues, in his conclusion, was not seen before the eighteenth century (p. 286). But the focus of Chapter 1 is primarily on far more recent, non-Western cultures defined by the anthropologist Jack Goody as “chieftainships over people” (Technology, Traditions and the State in Africa [1972]). Whitman is specifically interested in the “use rights” to land and its resources that chiefs allotted to others: hunting and fishing rights, for example, but also rights granting access to other people—the human “prey” of the chapter’s title. Such “rights in persons” were a common feature of chiefdom societies, but particular attention is paid here to pre-colonial Africa in addressing why African “chieftains over people” would offer up 12.5 million captives to foreign slave traders between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The other side of this coin, of course—though this is not a topic, here or elsewhere, that the book chooses to focus on—is that Europe’s Atlantic colonies wanted the labor these captives would be forced to provide, and would continue to want that for a very long time.

Chapters 2–5 are firmly focused on Roman slave law, providing an exceptionally nuanced analysis of changes over time and their significance and demonstrating that reading Roman law through unexpected lenses, such as comparative anthropology, can yield important new insights. Chapter 2 navigates key early Republican terminology—familia (family), pecunia (private property), and occupatio (taking possession)—and provides a fascinating discussion of hand symbolism and terminology in early Roman property law and ritual. Chapter 3 moves on to the late Republican and early Imperial period and charts what Whitman argues to be an epochal change: the emergence around the beginning of the second century BCE of the language of the dominus (master) and his dominium (“that which belongs to the master”), signaling a new concept of “absolute” ownership, but framed in the language and praxis of rights to persons. Chapter 4 considers the jurists and slave law of Classical (Imperial) Rome. This is a richly detailed and cleverly argued chapter, but in demanding that we must “judge the Roman jurists by something other than the standards of modern human rights,” it comes close, at times, to the apologist terminology that so many Romanists have fought so hard to eradicate since the 1950s (p. 181). Yet, there is also much to admire in Chapter 4. One of the most fascinating themes developed here (and first introduced in Chapter 2) explores the relationship, in Roman thought, between the slave who has been “domesticated” or “tamed” through capture in war and the tamed beast. Those familiar with the work of Keith Bradley on the animalization of the Roman enslaved will find additional inspiration here.Footnote ² Chapter 5 draws on and amplifies the materials presented in Chapters 2–4 to position Classical Rome as an “Empire of the Chieftainship over People”: an empire, in other words, in which the property imagination remained centered on absolute dominion over people rather than lordship over land. Yet, by the early imperial period, huge numbers of captives enslaved in warfare and territorial annexation had entered Roman markets, and enormous latifundia (private agricultural estates), making use of mass slave labor, had emerged in both the Italian landscape and the colonia established around the Mediterranean and beyond. Whitman is fully aware of these processes, of course, but accepts the argument (where many would not) that Rome conquered peoples rather than land, and ruled essentially at a distance, through local elites. He has little to say on latifundia, and increased discussion of this “triumph of a form of private ownership” would have been a welcome addition to Chapter 5 (p. 83). How did this and other forms of private land ownership operate—legally and in everyday reality—within an idiom of power still centered on absolute dominion over persons?

Part 2 opens with a short introduction (Chapter 6) centered on two cases familiar to American law students (Pierson v. Post [1805] and Johnson v M’Intosh [1823]), both reliant on the Roman law of occupatio. Chapter 7 offers a critical analysis of a single theme: the “great hypothesis” that the collapse of the Roman Empire ushered in a widespread transition from a slave economy to a feudal one. Drawing on the work of modern scholars, including Elizabeth Brown and Susan Reynolds, Whitman argues that, while a partial passage from slavery to serfdom did indeed take place, it did so for the most part long after the early Medieval period and should not be conceptualized as an economic response to the collapse of the Roman Empire.Footnote ³ Much of this chapter is devoted to proving that this long-lived hypothesis was the outcome of “a centuries-long history of debate and conflict culminating in the resurrection of the Roman dominus in the French Civil Code of 1804.” This is one of many compellingly delineated longue durée arguments destined to delight some readers but leave others unconvinced (p. 261)—in part, perhaps, because as Whitman is rightly at pains to point out, the passage from slavery to serfdom was not a single process but a reiterated one (p. 286). Moreover, as the author also acknowledges in returning to 284 BCE (Late Antiquity) in Chapter 8, Marx and Weber were not entirely wrong: the first of those iterations can be traced back to the Late Roman period, which brought a new legal and cultural focus on land and territoriality, in terms of both ownership and rulership. The Empire, Whitman argues, was reconceived on the model of classical property law, and its head as a dominus, but a major restatement of property rights appeared under Diocletian (d. 312 CE) in the form of the now fragmentary ex hoc iure. Drawing inspiration from the work of Chris Wickham, in particular, Whitman highlights the tendency of late Roman elites to abandon the cities for the countryside and makes some innovative observations on the rural focus of early Christianity, and the role of the new religion in undermining the dominus model of ownership.Footnote ⁴

The changes (or “departures”) highlighted in Chapter 8 are positioned by Whitman as the first, slow steps towards a destination finally reached in the late eighteenth century, as slavery lost its legitimacy in a legal framework that reoriented itself firmly towards land and territoriality, and the ancient Roman concept of occupatio reoriented itself away from the “occupation of prey” to the “occupation of real estate and regions” (p. 335).

Chapter 9 takes the reader along this road, but is notably selective concerning its principal stopping points, the most important of which, for Whitman’s thesis, is sixteenth-century Iberia. Here, he argues, it is possible to trace a passage from slavery to feudalism (one of many such reiterations, as noted above) triggered by the Spanish crown’s decision to view the newly conquered Taino of Hispaniola as vassals rather than slaves. For Whitman, the implementation of the quasi-feudal encomienda system in 1502 and the 1512 Requerimiento, read out to the peoples of the New World, signaled an important moment in the legal decline of slavery. The Taino were offered a grim choice, but a choice nonetheless: to be obedient vassals or to be slaves. However, Whitman thereafter elects to focus his attention on early modern scholarly engagements with occupatio, charting a “gathering transformation in the culture of the law” which, as the title of the concluding chapter puts it, transformed “man the killer to man the tiller,” and in the nineteenth century saw private slavery banished from Western law (pp. 331, 385, 391).

The section of this road that Whitman does not travel after early sixteenth-century Iberia is the sea route, one ploughed for some 300 years by British and European slave ships. Having conferred vassal status on the people of the Indies in the early sixteenth century (as charted in Chapter 9), the Spanish did not simply abandon slaveholding. On the contrary, they immediately took steps to secure a regular supply of slaves from territories beyond their own: Africans. I would have liked to see a more explicit discussion of where Whitman considers natally alienated people of color—who were of course landless, in all senses of that word, and were certainly considered the property of the men who set them to work on their privately owned agricultural plantations—sit in his linear history of Western understandings of ownership. A deeper discussion of the evolution of the colonial law codes through which the enslaved were not only controlled but also deemed unfree could have been an important addition.

This is a fascinating book, and from the first page to the last, a thought-provoking one. Whitman imposes an evolutionary linearity on the history of ownership, and in many respects does so successfully, particularly with reference to the Roman period. And yet, in exploring the mindsets and practices of colonizing societies reliant on mass slavery, he discloses—but does not always choose to develop analysis of—the patterns and cycles that so interested Orlando Patterson in the 1980s and are today the focus of a new generation of scholarship on comparative slavery.