BMCR 2008.12.33, Enrico Dal Lago, Slave Systems: Ancient and Modern

Enrico Dal Lago, Constantina Katsari (ed.), Slave Systems: Ancient and
Modern.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008.  Pp. xiv, 375.
ISBN 978-0-521-88183-8.  $99.00.

Reviewed by Benjamin Garstad, Grant MacEwan College
([email protected])
Word count:  2565 words
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Table of Contents
(
http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521881838)


The intention of this volume, which originated with a 2004 conference
by the same name at the National University of Ireland, Galway, is
clearly stated in the pre/cis: to chart "the rise and fall of forms of
unfree labour in the ancient Mediterranean and the modern Atlantic,
employing the methodology of comparative history." The editors make a
very businesslike start to the collection of essays in the introductory
chapter, in which they trace the recent scholarship on the broader
problem of slavery, identified as a truly global topic, and attempt
something of a synthesis of the subsequent contributions, each of which
is summarized in turn. They embark on a careful definition of the term
'slave system', but essentially depend upon Moses Finley's 'slave
society', that is, a community in whose economy and society slavery has
a central place which affords effective political control to the
slaveholding elite; a 'slave system' is consequently a number of
interconnected 'slave societies' which form a single market area. We
may thank Dal Lago and Katsari for attempting no theoretical novelties
here, but their neglect of more important methodological problems is
not as understandable. Despite the title of their first chapter, "The
study of ancient and modern slave systems: setting an agenda for
comparison," a straightforward and systematic discussion of the
comparative method remains frustratingly elusive. The basis for
comparison taken from Marc Bloch, "a certain similarity between the
facts observed and certain differences between their contexts," or the
distinction between a 'rigorous' comparison which draws explicit
parallels and a 'soft' comparison which makes implicit assumptions of
comparability and suggests avenues for further study is insufficient to
tackle the problems of the comparative method. In avoiding these
problems, the editors allow much latitude of approach to their
contributors, but might suggest to their readers that comparative
history is an uncomplicated method which does not require hesitation
and qualification.

The utility of comparison may be a foregone conclusion in the editors'
introduction, but Orlando Patterson's "Slavery, gender, and work in the
pre-modern world and early Greece: a cross-cultural analysis" offers
something of a defense of this method and demonstrates its practical
application. He begins with a discussion of some of the broad
theoretical questions, definitions, and methodological issues involved
before focusing on the relation between female contribution to
subsistence and the presence of slavery in a society. Patterson queried
Murdock and White's cross-cultural sample of apparently independent and
representative pre-modern societies in regard to the relative presence
of such features as female participation in subsistence, modes of food
production and agricultural types, polygyny, warfare, and, of course,
slavery. I must confess I found myself somewhat out of my depth,
particularly in the tabulation of the findings of this statistical
work, despite Patterson's generous explanations. His conclusions are
not simple but suggest that in societies which practice extensive (hoe
digging) rather than intensive (plow digging) agriculture and depend
upon female labour, the value of women as producers (not merely
reproducers) is therefore greater and the practice of polygyny more
widespread, and warfare augments the menial workforce with slaves. It
is in just such societies that women have a number of opportunities to
escape slavery and men have very few, and the long-term effect is to
increase the number of male slaves involved in subsistence. Patterson
considers his conclusions particularly relevant to the study of Dark
Age Greece, which he diagnoses as comparable in its small-scale, tribal
communities and agro-pastoral production to the societies of Murdock
and White's sample. In terms of warfare, slavery, and the distribution
of male and female labour, the comparison is probably apt, but it does
not seem to take into account the essentially 'intensive' nature of
Greek agriculture or the predominance of monogamy. As Patterson notes,
we know little about Dark Age Greece, and while this makes it
particularly tempting to fill in the gaps of our information through
comparison, it also makes it hard to test the claims of the comparative
method. And the most radical claim which Patterson's comparison
produces is that the thetes, as a despised group without land, kin, or
trade represented slaves or the descendants of slaves, and so the
Athenian citizens redeemed from slavery by Solon's reforms already had
servile status before they were sold. The key here is Patterson's
identification of 'natal alienation' as one of the defining features of
slavery, but surely it is possible to be born into and retain an alien
status without being a slave. My philological instinct, moreover, is
that two different words, thetes and doulos, reflect different
realities.

Joseph C. Miller's "Slaving as historical process: examples from the
ancient Mediterranean and the modern Atlantic" attempts to examine the
problem of slave systems from the angle of the dynamic historical
process of slaving, rather than the static 'institution of slavery.'
Without offering a definition, Miller's discussion implies that
'slaving' should refer not only to the initial acquisition of slaves,
but also to their introduction -- integration would be antithetical to
his argument -- into domestic service and systems of production, as
well as to the perpetuation of their servile status. As a factor in
historical processes, Miller maintains that slaving allows marginal,
often mercantile, interests to challenge the economic dominance of
established, landed elites through the introduction of an outside
commodity to the economy. His suggestion is intriguing as far as it
goes, but the examples of his title do not really appear to
substantiate his thesis. Rather, he presents "illustrative elements of
an integrated history of the strategy [of slaving]," which, as far as
it touches the Mediterranean, amounts to a survey of the development of
political power, religion, economies, and slaving up to AD 1500. This
survey is composed of sweeping generalizations hardly applicable to any
specific society and simplistic caricatures which must irritate any
serious student of the ancient world. Can the relation between
military/political and religious elites in ancient Mesopotamia really
be explained by saying that the latter supervised cults deifying the
former? Was Egypt, in fact, a less exploitive state in any realm apart
from the politically correct imagination? Can it be said without nuance
or qualification that the Roman generals of the late Republic were
opposed to the landed aristocracy? Miller is on firmer ground when he
turns to the development of the Atlantic slave trade and America's
'peculiar institution.' His survey makes the limitations Miller places
on the comparative method in his conclusion somewhat ironic: reasoning
by analogy is only valid when "the similar historical contexts of the
instances compared" is established.

Walter Scheidel calls upon a number of theories and models in order to
explain both how slave labour was distributed in slaveholding economies
and why chattel slavery was more or less prevalent in different times
and places in the ancient Mediterranean in "The comparative economics
of slavery in the Greco-Roman world." In the first place his models are
borrowed from the study of modern slavery. The tasks of slaves can be
divided into the effort-intensive, which require close supervision and
'pain incentives', and the care-intensive, which require 'reward
incentives' but little supervision. A reward for good service in terms
of manumission is most likely and desirable in an 'open' slave system,
in which former slaves can readily enter the slaveholding society, as
opposed to 'closed' systems, in which some cultural factor such as race
prevents former slaves from rising above their dependant or
disadvantaged station. Scheidel suggests that these factors of
incentives and social openness may be combined in a comparative model.
He also notes that the unavailability or high cost of free labour could
also be an inducement to slave acquisition. In the New World a
combination of abundant natural resources and a scarcity of manpower
certainly led to a dependence on slaves. But what of the ancient
Mediterranean? Sheidel proposes that the increasing political,
judicial, and especially military commitments of citizens in expanding
city-states with growing capital resources and escalating demands on
free labour explain the recourse to large-scale slavery in
fifth-century Athens and late Republican Rome.

Tracey Rihll's "Slavery and technology in pre-industrial contexts" is a
furiously fast-paced and frenetic survey of technological innovation in
the Greco-Roman world, and it only sporadically touches on the relation
of technology to slavery. The comparative approach espoused at the
beginning is also in rather infrequent evidence. She draws three main
conclusions. The fact that some slaves received some pay for their
output and the prospect of buying one's freedom with these earnings
meant that slavery and technical progress were not antithetical.
Nevertheless, she claims technical advances in antiquity were numerous
but unimportant. And "slavery was perhaps the main agent of technology
transfer" across linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries
(although Rihll admits she cannot prove this last point).

Michael Zeuske presents a dense and involved examination of the history
and practicability of comparisons between the various slave systems
from Virginia to Brazil in his "Comparing or interlinking? Economic
comparisons of early nineteenth-century slave systems in the Americas
in historical perspective." His focus is set within quite specific
chronological and geographical parameters, and the ancient world is
mentioned only in terms of the cultural world of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. There seems to be little potential for the
application of Zeuske's work to the study of ancient slavery,
particularly as he repeatedly insists on the introduction of the slaves
as participants and their perspective in any comparative study.
Nevertheless, the rigorous qualifications and conditions that Zeuske
imposes on comparisons within what might be seen as a single 'slave
culture' offer useful cautions to anyone who would attempt comparisons
across great spans of time and space.

The editors' own contribution, "Ideal models of slave management in the
Roman world and the ante-bellum American South," a collaboration like
the volume as a whole, is a comparison of the manuals of advice offered
to Roman estate holders and Southern planters. Dal Lago and Katsari say
they will pursue a method of 'rigorous comparison' and take the
contexts of the respective comparanda into account, but there is not
much in their essay beyond a survey of the contents of agronomical
handbooks. They discover a number of intriguing parallels in everything
from specific instructions on housing slaves and the appropriate use of
the lash to the ideological tenets of benevolence, paternalism, and
reciprocity, but they treat these parallels as independent responses to
similar situations, and explicitly refuse to pursue the possibility
that Southern slaveholders were directly influenced by Roman writers.
This is unwarranted, given that the planter aristocracy of the South
was well versed in the Classics and lived in a culture which sought to
find models for conduct and civilization in antiquity. It is
particularly baffling in light of the next chapter.

In "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 examine the writings of two Italian Jesuits at work
in Brazil in the early eighteenth century, Jorge Benci (Giorgio Benci)
and Andre Joao Antonil (the pseudonym of Joao Antonio Andreoni or, in
Italian, Giovanni Antonio Andreoni). These men, as the authors
indicate, wrote at a time of crisis: crisis in the markets for
Brazilian sugar and African slaves, and crisis in the status of the
Jesuits in Portugal's colonies. As a riposte to certain criticisms of
Jesuit abuses, Benci and Antonil prepared their treatises as an attempt
to synthesize Greek economics, Roman agronomics, and Biblical
patriarchy in order to set up an ideal of the Christian household in
which the master bore the full weight of his obligations. Their ideal
had little time to establish itself before it was successfully
challenged by a more individualistic and capitalistic model which
emphasized production and profit rather than responsibility.

Olivier Petre-Grenouilleau's "Processes of exiting the slave systems: a
typology" (an essay which might have benefited from much more extensive
editorial attention) attempts an unrestricted survey and classification
of the routes by which people left the state of slavery.
Petre-Grenouilleau identifies three basic types of 'exit.' Among the
first are all those means of conferring freedom which serve to
perpetuate the slave system. Manumission at the will of the master
(here the word 'enfranchisement' is rather confusingly used in the
sense of the French 'affranchissement') is presented as most common,
but also as a different kind of dependence, rather than real freedom.
Petre-Grenouilleau also includes in this type slave revolts, because
they bolster the slave system by obviating the need for change and
siphoning off the least tractable slaves. The second type is an
"evolution of global society, entailing a slow 'decline' of the slave
system." Petre-Grenouilleau realizes that talk of historical decline is
quite outmoded, and insists that the apparent decline of slave systems
is more often a transformation or less obvious continuation of such
systems. He concludes that abolition combined with the evolution of
global society, his third type, is the only means of not simply
offering freedom to slaves, but ending a slave system.

If some of the papers in this collection insist upon a rigorous and
detailed comparison of different slave systems, Stanley Engerman's
"Emancipation schemes: different ways of ending slavery" demonstrates a
very different approach in which the topic serves to attract a diffuse
number of facts and figures, dates and events, but limited analysis and
insight. There is, moreover, a disconcerting and superfluous
importation of modern value judgments into an historical discussion,
which is otherwise absent from the collection as a whole. Widespread
emancipation was by no means frequent in antiquity, and so it is
perhaps fair that the Romans receive barely a mention alongside the
mediaeval Scandinavians.

Stephen Hodkinson's "Spartiates, helots and the direction of the
agrarian economy: toward an understanding of helotage in comparative
perspective" is a significant contribution to the study of unfree
labour in ancient Greece and a model of the comparative method. Relying
principally on parallels from pre-colonial Africa, the plantation
South, and the Russian serf system, he augments the meager literary and
archaeological evidence to paint a more detailed picture of the social
relations of agricultural production in the Spartan state. The helots,
he concludes, paid their dues in kind as sharecroppers, which probably
meant less supervisory intervention by the Spartiates. In terms of
fixed tenure on the land, they may have been resettled by their masters
according to the opportunities and deterioration of production. The
roles of Spartiates and helots in determining the configuration of the
economic system are queried, and while the Spartiates undoubtedly
effected some changes after the conquest, they probably, for the most
part, took over control of the preexisting Messenian peasant economy.
Within Spartan territory there were differences in the helot system.
Close to Sparta itself the Spartiates could exercise more frequent and
direct supervision over the helots, and it is noticed that here the
helots lived in several small, dispersed settlements. In Messenia,
further from the site of their civic responsibilities, the Spartiates
probably depended on mnoionomoi, helot overseers, and there is a
corresponding concentration of the population in a small number of
larger villages. There is evidence that this greater degree of
independence and concentration of the population led to a sense of
communal identity and the growth of community institutions, as well as
to an economic and social stratification of the helot populace, with
the wealthier and more influential helots collaborating with the
Spartiate landowners.