Racialized Commodities: Long-distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greece, c. 700-300 BCE

Between c. 700-300 BCE, the ancient Greeks developed a vivid imaginary of the world's peoples. Ranging from the light-skinned, "gray-eyed Thracians" of the distant north to the "dark-skinned Ethiopians" of the far south, as the poet Xenophanes described them around 540 BCE, Greeks envisioned a world populated by human groups with distinct physiognomies. Racialized Commodities traces how Greece's "racial imaginary"--a confluence of thinking about cultural geography, commodity production, and human physiognomy--emerged from cross-cultural trade between Greece and its Mediterranean neighbors during the Archaic and Classical Periods. It adopts the model of a "commodity biography" to investigate how trade led to the entanglement of cultures, bodies, and things in Archaic and Classical Greece. For merchants, the racial imaginary might be used to play up the "exotic" provenance of their goods to consumers. It might also circulate practical information about customs, pricing, navigation, and doing business in foreign ports. Archaic Greek attempts to explain foreign bodies were rarely pejorative, and Racialized Commodities begins with some of their earliest images of African peoples, described by Greeks as Egyptians or Ethiopians, before seeking to explain what changed in the early Classical Period. As the Persian Empire loomed and Greek cities became increasingly dependent on enslaved labor, negative stereotypes of Thracians and Scythians became widespread and coalesced into the charged idea of the barbarous--the "barbarian."

Table of Contents:
Introduction Part I: The world of the Elephantine papyrus Chapter 1: A short history of natron Chapter 2: Egypt in your hand Chapter 3: From ancestor to 'Other' Part II: Letters from the Pontus Chapter 4: Journeys into slavery Chapter 5: Slavery and the balance of trade Chapter 6: Inventing whiteness Postscript Appendices Bibliography

About the Author :
Christopher Stedman Parmenter is Assistant Professor of Classics at The Ohio State University.

Review :
This is a landmark intervention in the study of race in antiquity as well as studies in ancient slavery and Greek culture more broadly. This exciting, innovative, and thought-provoking book breaks new ground by linking the emergence of an ancient Greek idea of 'race' to the dramatic upsurge in long distance trade during the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. This is a persuasive and altogether timely demonstration of how race operated in ancient Greece. For those interested in the history of race linked to perceived skin color, this book will be both a revelation and a resource. Drawing especially on histories of trade, the author charts the way the Greeks came to see and associate black skin with prestige and power and, later, the way a certain image of 'whiteness' formed to sanction chattel slavery, particularly in democratic Athens. There is much to admire in this book. [Parmenter] ranges widely and authoritatively over different classes of evidence-literary, epigraphic, papyrological, archaeological, and visual-and he displays a command of the literature for areas such as Egypt, the Aegean, and the Black Sea which are often studied separately. He appears to be as comfortable analyzing literary texts and archaeological artifacts as he is discussing Critical Race Theory or Soviet historiography. And much illumination is provided by reference to comparative materials and approaches-most notably those derived from study of the transatlantic slave trade but also with regard to Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, the Great Migration and its aftermath in the United States, the eighteenth-century British pottery industry, and medieval Genoese and Venetian slave trading. Racialized Commodities presents an erudite analysis of long-distance trade and inter-regional attitudes from a range of new perspectives.... The success of this project derives from a thorough collection of the pertinent material evidence on which the study rests, presented in a number of detailed appendices. The raw data for the work is handled judiciously and clearly, presenting a deep dive into the practicalities of commercial exchange. This creative piece of scholarship employs a wide range of evidence from shipwrecks to miraculously preserved merchants' letters, to contribute to understanding of social and economic history.