Gefangen und geknechtet: Sklaverei in prähistorischer Zeit?, 2022

2019

Paper written for the course "Rome and the Universal", University of Bologna. Short analysis of archaeological evidences of the slave trade in the Roman world and in the Early Medieval trade of the Vikings.

Themes in Contemporary Archaeology, 2021

Written sources from the early Middle Ages frequently report enslavement and slave trade in northern Europe. The evidence, abundant and unequivocal, indicates the great importance of this form of unfreedom for social structures and the economy, and sheds light on the forms of violence and oppression associated with it. But written sources, by nature fragmentary, illuminate only some aspects of the phenomenon of slavery and leave many questions unanswered. It is therefore tempting to supplement them with archaeological finds. This raises, however, a number of methodological problems, given that enslavement, slave trade, and slave holding leave few, if any, unambiguous material traces. They can be easily missed when looked at it in isolation; but when combined with the results reached by historians, natural scientists, or linguists, archaeological evidence can provide important insights into this “dark side” of the early medieval economy. To address this methodological challenge, comparative and interdisciplinary approaches offer the most secure way forward.

Springer eBooks, 2023

L.A.B. Independent Publishing , 2024

The variations of slavery and the considerable lack of sources relating to ancient societies, should lead us to critically re-examine the words that we choose according to the context in which slavery is unfolding. It would be hard for us to identify social dislocation from the ‘dry business’ dealings reported on ancient court documents or royal inscriptions. Harder still would it be for us to flat-out restrict the impact that cultural survival had on enslaved individuals and their ideas of belonging. Should we endeavor to find a definition of slavery? The contextualization of slavery according to the society examined seems being more crucial for purposes of comparative analysis than attempting to find a clear-cut, ‘fits-all’ definition.

In slave societies, slaves form a fundamental, if not the fundamental, unit of labor. In slave societies such as the American South and ancient Rome, slaves engaged in a wide range of economic activity, from serving as labor on massive agricultural plantations, to serving as workers in manufacturing, to personal body-slaves. As such, the study and examination of slavery and institutions of slavery has focused on slavery as primarily an economic institution, and the keeping of slaves as economic activity. In this paper, I propose a different analysis. Rather than examining slavery as an institution brought about and propagated by economic factors, I will argue that slavery in the ancient Roman world was primarily a social and cultural institution. I will argue that while slavery had its economic advantages, it likewise had economic disadvantages when compared to an alternate system of labor, namely wage-laborers. It is my contention that in the Roman Empire, slavery existed as a social institution, one that was driven by factors of culture, society, and politics, rather than economics. To this end, I will examine the existence of the alternatives to slavery in the ancient world and compare these systems against systems of slavery present in the Roman Republic and Empire, and the American South. Economic analysis and comparison of slave society in the American South and ancient Rome will be primarily based on statistical and archaeological evidence and models derived from both time periods.

Slaveries of the First Millennium: New Perspective on Slavery , 2021

In a world where princesses found themselves enslaved, kidnapped boys became army generals, and biblical Joseph was a role model, this book narrates the formation of the Middle Ages from the point of view of slavery, and outlines a new approach to enhance our understanding of modern forms of enslavement. Offering an analysis of recent scholarship and an array of sources, never before studied together, from distinct societies and cultures of the first millennium, it challenges the traditional dichotomy between ancient and medieval slaveries. Revealing the dynamic, versatile, and adaptable character of slavery it presents an innovative definition of slavery as a historical process. If we wish to fight for the eradication of modern slavery we first need to understand its significance as a form of exploitation, adaptable to changing circumstances. The purpose of this book is to challenge perspectives that look at slavery as a discrete phenomenon and instead to examine the historical development of the first millennium through the eyes of slavery. Perceiving slavery not just as a social phenomenon but as a system that enabled the development of historical societies and emerging economies reveals the role it plays as a historical process.

The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries, ed. S. Hodkinson, K. Vlassopoulos & M. Kleiwegt, 2018

This short chapter provides the outline of ideas that are further developed in my book Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c. 800-146 BC (Oxford 2018). It challenges prevailing assumptions (based on the work of M.I. Finley) that a vast qualitative and quantitative gulf separated the slaveholding practices of the Greeks from those of their eastern neighbours.

The Cambridge World History of Slavery, 2021

SLAVERY IN THE MEDIEVAL MILLENNIUM * craig perry, david eltis, stanley l. engerman, and david richardson The three preceding volumes of The Cambridge World History of Slavery (henceforth CWHS) already in print have had a major shaping influence on this final collection of essays and have served to underscore the importance of the present volume. Nonspecialists and the general public alike are acutely aware of the existence, indeed centrality, of slavery as an institution in the postcontact Americas and in ancient Greek and Roman societies. But general knowledge of the history of slavery between the fall of Rome and the rise of the transatlantic plantation complexes might be charitably described as lacking precision. Most readers would recognize that extreme social inequality developed in the larger and more complex polities in this millennium-long era and that some form of coerced labor emerged in just about every society. If pressed for an example, many would be more likely to mention not slavery, but serfdom, a practice closely associated with, though not confined to, medieval Europe. Yet the global perspective underpinning the essays below suggests that slavery continued to flourish in all parts of the world for which records and material objects have survived. In short, both the dismemberment of the Roman Empire and Columbian contact had large effects on who was enslaved but quite possibly not on the incidence of the institution across the globe. What also follows, given what is known of historical global population distributions, is that most enslaved persons in recorded history have not been African and male, much less of Slavic (from which the word "slave" is derived) origins, but rather could come from any number of regions and were most likely female. 1 The impression that the practice of slavery passed through a onethousand-year hiatus is firmly rooted in the Western-language scholarship * We thank this volume's contributors for their valuable feedback on this chapter. Thanks are also due to Roxani Margariti and Devin Stewart and to the members of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University who participated in a workshop on the chapter. Any mistakes are our own.