Slave Systems: Ancient and Modern

A ground-breaking edited collection charting the rise and fall of forms of unfree labour in the ancient Mediterranean and in the modern Atlantic, employing the methodology of comparative history. The eleven chapters in the book deal with conceptual issues and different approaches to historical comparison, and include specific case-studies ranging from the ancient forms of slavery of classical Greece and of the Roman empire to the modern examples of slavery that characterised the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. The results demonstrate both how much the modern world has inherited from the ancient in regard to ideology and practice of slavery; and also how many of the issues and problems related to the latter seem to have been fundamentally similar across time and space.

Table of Contents:
Part I. Slavery, Slave Systems, World History and Comparative History: 1. The study of ancient and modern slave systems: setting an agenda for comparison Enrico Dal Lago and Constantina Katsari; 2. Slavery, gender, and work in the pre-modern world and early Greece: a cross-cultural analysis Orlando Patterson; 3. Slavery as historical process: examples from the ancient Mediterranean and the modern Atlantic Joseph C. Miller; Part II. Economics and Technology of Ancient and Modern Slave Systems: 4. The comparative economics of slavery in the Greco-Roman world Walter Scheidel; 5. Slavery and technology in pre-industrial contexts Tracey Rihll; 6. Comparing or interlinking? Economic comparisons of early nineteenth-century slave systems in the Americas in historical perspective Michael Zeuske; Part III. Ideologies and Practices of Management in Ancient and Modern Slavery: 7. Ideal models of slave management in the Roman world and the Antebellum American South Enrico Dal Lago and Constantina Katsari; 8. 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; Part IV. Exiting Slave Systems: 9. Processes of exiting the slave systems: a typology Olivier Pétrè-Grenouilleau; 10. Emancipation schemes: different ways of ending slavery Stanley Engerman; Part V. Slavery and Unfree Labor, Ancient and Modern: 11. Spartiates, helots, and the direction of the agrarian economy: toward an understanding of helotage in comparative perspective Stephen Hodkinson.

About the Author :
Enrico Dal Lago is Lecturer in American History at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His books include The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno (2001), Slavery and Emancipation (2002) and Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815-1861 (2005). CONSTANTINA KATSARI is Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Leicester. She is co-editor of Patterns in the Economy of Roman Asia Minor (2005) and is completing a monograph on the Roman monetary economy. Her articles on Roman economy and ideology have appeared in edited collections and internationally acknowledged periodicals.

Review :
"This is a well researched book in which many of the arguments shaped by the respective scholars could very well become manuscript titles on their own in the future." World History Bulletin, Patrick Albano, Pierpont Community and Technical College