The definitions of slavery are as numerous as the societies in which slavery was to be found, and for good reason. The rights which owners had over their slaves and the duties by which they were bound constituted a bundle whose composition varied from society to society, although the slave’s rights were always heavily circumscribed. Nevertheless, certain elements can probably be considered part of all these bundles. First, the slaves were initially outsiders, brought by force to serve their new master, or they were in some way expelled from full membership of their society, for instance, because of debt or as the result of a criminal trial. They might of course be the descendants of such individuals, depending on the degree to which a given society was prepared to assimilate slaves and their offspring to full membership. Second, at least in the first generation, slaves were marketable commodities, at any rate where commercialization was present in any recognizable form. In other words, they were a species of property and it was this which distinguished slaves from other forms of forced labour. Third, slaves had specific, generally inferior, occupations within the total division of labour. Finally, slaves were held in their status only by force or the threat of it, and in many ways the ending of the necessity for this marked a slave’s full assimilation into the society.
Within this broad framework, the variations were enormous. This is to be expected from an institution which, in its various forms, existed all over the world—Australia is the only large and inhabited land mass where slavery never occurred—and from the beginnings of recorded human history until the twentieth century. Indeed, vestiges still survive, particularly in parts of the Islamic world and in various prostitution rackets. Nevertheless, the various slave systems may perhaps be distinguished according to two criteria, namely the degree of openness and the extent to which the system of production was organized around it.
As regards the former question, particularly in societies whose social systems were organized around kinship groups, slavery could be a valued means of expanding the size of that group and the number of dependants an important individual had beyond the limits set by the natural processes of reproduction. Since slaves were by definition outsiders, and thus people without kin of their own, they and their descendants could be incorporated into their owners’ group, albeit often in an inferior position. Where there was no premium on the number of kin an individual might have, or where the rules for the division of property made it advantageous to cut down the number of co-sharers, then slaves and their descendants could rarely gain admission to the higher ranks of society. In such circumstances, slaves would be freed only as a result of a formal act of manumission. These might occur with greater or lesser frequency, but in all such cases the exslave began his or her life of freedom in a lowly status, often still formally dependent on his or her former owner.
With regard to the second criterion, while slavery as such has existed in an enormous number of societies, the number in which it has been crucial to the organization of production has been relatively few. Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and, in modern times, the southern USA, the Caribbean and parts of Brazil are the best known of these, although there were a number of other parts of the world, such as seventh-century Iraq, eighteenth-century colonial South Africa, Zanzibar in the nineteenth century, and parts of the western and central Sudan in the same period, for which a convincing case could be made. The emergence of economies based on slave labour depended on at least three conditions: first, private property rights, above all land, had to be established, and concentrated to the extent that extra-familial labour was required; second, internal labour had to be insufficiently available, often as the result of the emancipation of earlier labourers, whether they were bonded peasants as in Ancient Greece or indentured servants as in colonial America—in other words, large-scale slavery was a consequence of large-scale freedom. Third, since slaves generally had to be bought, commercial market production had to be sufficiently developed. Although the demand for slaves on a grand scale may well have been logically prior to their supply, the continued existence of a slave society required the regular importation of new slaves, almost invariably through an organized slave trade, as—with the exception of the USA—slave populations were unable to reproduce themselves naturally.
In those cases where slavery was an integral part of the organization of labour, it tended to be rather towards the closed pole of the assimilation continuum, even though the distinction between slave and free was nowhere as harsh as in the USA. For this reason, it was only in these societies (and not always even there) that a genuine slave culture was able to develop, as something distinct from that of the owners. Therefore, it was only in such societies that slaves were able to organize sufficiently for a large-scale rebellion to be possible, although individual acts of resistance were to be found wherever slavery existed. Very often, the major revolts were none the less the work of newly imported slaves, as the efficacy of repression tended to persuade second generation slaves of the futility of a rising, and led them to adopt an ambivalent attitude, which combined outward acquiescence with the effort to create a way of life for themselves that was as free and as comfortable as the circumstances permitted. In this way they tended to confirm the paternalist ideology of their masters, although this would then be rudely shattered by the general refusal of ex-slaves to remain in their former owners’ service when, after the abolition of the institution, there was no longer legal compulsion for them to do so.
Robert Ross
University of Leiden
Further reading
Miller, J.C. (1985) Slavery: A World-wide Bibliography, White Plains, KS. (Continued in annual instalments in Slavery and Abolition.)
Patterson, O. (1982) Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Cambridge, MA.
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