Book Reviews 319

John Bodel and Walter Scheidel, eds., On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social
Death [The Ancient World: Comparative Histories], Oxford, John Wiley and Sons,
2017, xiv + 314 pp., £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-119-16248-3.

Alice Rio, Slavery after Rome: 500–1100 [Oxford Studies in Medieval European His-
tory], Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, xii + 285 pp., £ 65.00 (hardback),
ISBN 978-0-19-870405-8.

Ilaria Ramelli, Social Justice and the Legitimacy of Slavery: The Role of Philosophical
Asceticism from Ancient Judaism to Late Antiquity [Oxford Early Christian Studies],
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, xvi + 293 pp., £ 70.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-
0-19-87727-4.

The current review article examines three recently published volumes on the
history of slavery. All three of them raise very important questions, and outline
issues that should be at the forefront of future research. Their joint examina-
tion aims to bring together correspondences and common themes, as well as
ways in which the approaches proposed in one volume can deal with issues
raised by another.
The first volume under review, edited by John Bodel and Walter Scheidel,
is dedicated to an assessment of Orlando Patterson’s magisterial Slavery and
Social Death, 35 years after its original publication. This important volume
includes a short introduction, thirteen essays and an extensive response by Pat-
terson. The essays range widely in space and time, covering ancient, medieval
and early modern slavery in Greece and Rome, China, the Ottoman Empire,
South Asia, Brazil, Africa and native American communities. Patterson’s most
famous contribution concerns the argument that the concept of property is
insufficient to define slavery; he has instead proposed the concept of social
death, defined as a composite of violence, natal alienation and dishonor. In
addition, Patterson also offered a number of other conceptualizations of slav-
ery, which have attracted far less attention, such as slavery as human parasitism
or institutionalized liminality.
The essays can be broadly divided in two tendencies. The first one explores
the continuing relevance of Patterson’s arguments through particular case-
studies. Kyle Harper shows how the Greek word eleuthera (free woman) came
ultimately to mean wife, thus illustrating how sexual honor and marriage-
ability was a privilege restricted to free women and denied to slaves. In the
same line, Fernando Santos-Granero explores how rituals of enslavement and
markers of servitude served to objectify slaves’ dishonor in the native commu-

Journal of Global Slavery

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/2405836X-00303007
320 Book Reviews

nities of the Tropics. Equally, Sandra Greene argues that the concept of social
death retains its validity in exploring the experience of enslaved children.
The second tendency takes a critical stance towards Patterson’s work by
exploring the validity of Patterson’s understanding of particular cases, showing
the limits of his approach, criticizing their actual utility, or preferring certain
of Patterson’s approaches instead of others. Two contributions pay particular
attention to Patterson’s other important work, Freedom in the Making of West-
ern Culture. Peter Hunt challenges Patterson’s description of Athenian thetes
and Spartan helots as slaves, seeing thetes as indebted freemen and helots as
serfs. Catherine Cameron criticizes Patterson’s argument that female empathy
with the slave’s lot led to the creation of freedom as a value, by showing that in
small-scale societies elite women invested in slavery as a means of enhancing
their own status.
In terms of wider issues, the issue of property is unsurprisingly a bone of
contention. David Lewis criticizes Patterson’s view that exclusive property only
emerged with Roman law. Using a cross-cultural typology of property rights,
he shows that it can be applied to slave property in both Athens and Baby-
lonia. Lewis argues that Patterson confuses property rights with contractual
rights, and proposes that dishonor is a consequence of slaves being property,
rather than the other way round. Indrani Chatterjee criticizes the concept of
social death, by arguing that the South Asian property regimes allowed for slave
inheritance, thus negating natal alienation. In the same line, Ehud Toledano
argues that the concept of dishonor cannot account for Ottoman elite slaves
and finds more value in the concept of human parasitism. In a very impor-
tant contribution, Junia Furtado shows the extent to which slaves attempted
to use alternative roles and identities in order to shape as many aspects of their
lives as possible by means other than slavery and its attendant dishonor. Slaves
could acquire honor through ritual expertise, participation in recognized com-
munities and their leadership, and the amassing of wealth. Brazil is particularly
significant in this respect, since there a number of such slave initiatives were
explicitly recognized by the state.
Moving to wider issues, it is rather unfortunate that, despite contributions
that range across space and time, the editors have not included a chapter that
focuses on what I would consider as Patterson’s greatest contribution: the lib-
eration of the study of slavery from the exclusive focus on Greco-Roman and
New World slavery, where slavery “really mattered,” and its study as a global
phenomenon. By inviting us to study the consequences of slavery beyond
the five “quintessential slave societies,” Patterson has stimulated a revolution
in understanding, whose effects are still emergent. Nevertheless, Patterson’s
global approach to slavery is inherently problematic, because it is deeply anti-

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historical. His project consists in locating the transhistorical essence of slavery,

as his various definitions testify; but if slavery has an essence, then it can have
no history per se, as Nietzsche famously aphorized. And it is this particular
assumption that is beginning to be challenged, as the global study of slavery
is emancipated from the social scientists’ grip and taken up by historians. As
the chapters in this volume have shown, although there is much of value in the
various concepts proposed by Patterson, the attempt to elevate them into the
transhistorical essence of slavery faces serious problems.
This is what makes the next book under review an immense step forward.
Early medieval slavery is overwhelmingly ignored by slavery scholars: not only
are the sources difficult to comprehend, but early medieval slavery offends
most of the assumptions we make about slavery. Alice Rio’s book is the first
synthesis on the topic for over fifty years and it thus fills an extremely impor-
tant gap. It covers Frankish, Iberian, Italian and English slaveries in the period
500–1100, while also using Irish and Byzantine slaveries for good comparative
purposes. But there is a more significant reason why all slavery specialists need
to read this book; it provides a means of dealing with the problems created
by the essentialist approach to slavery that has been dominant for so long.
Rio stresses the instrumentality of slavery: slavery as property and slavery as
domination were used as instruments in order to achieve certain purposes. In
certain periods and societies the set of purposes and the forms of using the
instruments were fairly circumscribed; but in other periods and societies, like
the early middle ages, there was an immense range of purposes and forms in
which the tool of slavery was employed. Rio uses repeatedly the term experi-
ment in order to describe the agency of those who employed the instrument
of slavery and the varying success and long-term recurrence of those uses and
purposes.
As Rio shows, the instrumentality of slavery means that we cannot deter-
mine a priori the ways it was used, or the extent to which it was applied. Masters
might use the instrument of slavery for relatively limited purposes, while leav-
ing most of the slaves’ lives run on principles other than slavery, or they might
enforce that instrument to cover the full range of slaves’ lives. The apparently
confusing ways in which the vocabulary of slavery is used in early medieval
sources is a reflection of this variability in use and context. In fact, as Rio shows
in her discussion of manumission, the tool of slavery might even be primarily
used to regulate relationships between masters, rather than between masters
and slaves.
Early medieval slavery is usually approached within a metanarrative that
seeks to locate the transition from ancient slavery to medieval serfdom. As Rio
shows, this framework needs to be completely abandoned for the early middle

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ages. Early medieval slavery included an enormous diversity of groups, from

self-dedicatees to religious institutions and military retainers, whose unfree-
dom might be very limited, to “ideal-type slaves” and “ideal-type serfs.” There
was no a priori or legal distinction between these diverse groups; their diver-
sity was the conjunctural outcome of the strategies followed by masters and
slaves in innumerable contexts: the same persons could function as “ideal-
typical slaves,” if employed as household servants or prebendiary cultivators
early in their lives, or as “ideal-typical serfs” later on. People who entered slav-
ery through raiding and trading could have radically different features and
functions from people who entered slavery through self-sale, debt and penal
enslavement.
It was only after 1100 that this enormous diversity changed fundamentally
across Europe. In the South, where Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims con-
fronted each other, slavery came gradually to be restricted to religious outsiders
acquired through the market and employed in household service and the crafts,
while indigenous rural dependents were completely dissociated in status from
slaves and followed trajectories of their own. In the solid Catholic North, with-
out religious outsiders, the enslavement of Christians came gradually to be seen
by the English and Frankish states as a characteristic of barbarian Others, while
the channeling of slavery to arrange issues solely relating to land tenure led to
the emergence of serfdom as a distinctive legal status.
A number of significant conclusions follow from these findings. The first is
the need to abandon serfdom as a catch-all term to describe all conditions of
unfreedom that do not fit ideal-typical slavery; a significant number of the cases
usually classified as serfdom is merely slavery instrumentally used for a limited
range of purposes (as with the case of helots mentioned above). The second
is the need for those who work on other periods and societies to rethink their
assumptions in the light of Rio’s work. We have taken for granted too many
things and have tried to account for them through essentialist transhistorical
models of slavery. Rio shows very well that slavery in time and place is the
result of the conjunctures of processes that might be concurrently moving in
very different directions. If early medieval slavery appears so diverse, this might
be the case because the sources allow us to see diversity more clearly. Roman
historians are starting to realize that late Roman slavery looks more complex
and contradictory not because it was in crisis, but because the late Roman
state started to intervene and legislate on issues that were earlier dealt with
through gentlemen’s agreements and social conventions. Late imperial legisla-
tion makes visible forms of diversity and complexity that were largely invisible
in earlier sources; we need to re-examine earlier forms of ancient slavery in
the light of these findings. But even if early medieval slavery was really much

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more diverse than in other periods (which I think is true), we can no longer
take the recurrent features of slavery in other periods and societies as reflec-
tions of the essence of slavery. We need to study these features as the outcomes
of processes, even if these processes were more convergent than those of the
early middle ages.
Rio shows that there was nothing inherent in Christianity or the state that
affected slavery in particular; in fact it was largely after 1000 when certain
aspects of Christianity or the state (like e.g. the non-enslavement of religious
and communal insiders) started to have widespread impact. This again stresses
the need to examine processes, rather than inherent essences; but it also under-
lines the need to take seriously the impact of the political community and the
wider world on the historical slaving processes. Too many studies have focused
almost exclusively on the relationship between masters and slaves as the defin-
ing feature of slavery; but, as Rio shows, slavery was the outcome of processes
in which various actors, apart from masters and slaves, were involved in histor-
ically changing ways.
The third book in this review is Ilaria Ramelli’s study of ancient views on
slavery. Scholarship on ancient discourses on slavery is polarized between two
arguments. The older one argued that the inherently humanitarian approach of
Stoic and Christian thought led to enlightened views that ameliorated slavery
and ultimately led to its abandonment. Much subsequent scholarship showed
convincingly the fallacies of this argument; but in so doing, it ended up arguing
that there was effectively no change in discourses on slavery over the whole of
antiquity.
Ramelli offers a novel thesis that tries to eschew the pitfalls of both argu-
ments. Her book is effectively an attempt to explain the views of the fourth-
century Church Father Gregory of Nyssa, the only ancient author who offered
a sustained argument against slavery per se. Her explanation is that Gregory’s
views are the ultimate combination of two traditions. The first tradition based
on asceticism castigated luxury and advised against the use of slaves as a form
of exercising self-sufficiency. This argument is uncontroversial; but Ramelli
argues that there exists a second tradition of social justice, that considers
wealth the consequence of denying other people their necessities. Social jus-
tice is against human oppression, and slavery is one among many forms of
oppression. While the first tradition considered the non-use of slaves as good
for the master, the second tradition considers the enslavement of human be-
ings as unjust for the slaves themselves. And the combination of the two tradi-
tions led for the first time to the call for the abolition of slavery.
It is true that in his commentary on the Ecclesiastes Gregory constructs an
argument on the basis of man’s divine creation as an image of god in order

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to argue that the enslavement of human beings is against god and cannot be
justified in any way. But it is remarkable that nowhere in this text does Gre-
gory propose what would be the obvious conclusion for us, namely that slavery
should be abolished. Ramelli bases her argument that Gregory favored aboli-
tionism on another text, a homily on Easter. Gregory presents Easter as a festival
of release from travails, in particular for people like debtors and prisoners. In
this respect, Easter provides an excellent opportunity for the manumission of
slaves. But, Gregory goes on, even for those who remain slaves, Easter should be
an opportunity for masters “to turn those despised into dignified people, those
afflicted into joyful, those deprived of freedom of speech into free.” But while
Gregory explicitly argues for the amelioration of the condition of people who
will remain in slavery, at least during Easter, Ramelli inexplicably takes this as
a general call for the abolition of slavery. And with this, the whole structure of
her argument collapses. For the rest of the book is largely a collection of various
pagan, Jewish and Christian authors and their views on slavery, wealth and jus-
tice. It is undoubtedly a fascinating collection of sources little known to most
historians; but there are so few connections in how individual authors discuss
the three topics, that the whole acquires meaning only if it could be shown that
the parts belonged to a process leading to Gregory’s call for abolition.
There are unfortunately many examples where Ramelli’s interpretations are
strained. When Paul claims “there is no Jew nor Greek, no slave nor free, no
male or female, but all of you are one in Jesus”, the simple interpretation of this
passage is that social, ethnic and gender distinctions are immaterial in the eyes
of God. Ramelli’s argument that this is a proclamation of equality needs to be
proven, rather than asserted. Even if it could be proved, we should wonder what
it would actually entail to proclaim equality in a world where class and gender
distinctions were dominant and nobody ever proposed their abolition in the
texts that we have. Ramelli does not wonder how it was possible for Roman
jurists to proclaim that slavery is against nature, and then go on to discuss the
operation of Roman slavery unperturbed.
Nevertheless, Ramelli’s book is a step in the right direction, both in positing
that there was change in ancient discourses on slavery, as well as in looking for
change not in views on slavery per se, but in changing views over a number
of wider issues in which slavery was imbricated. There was hardly any discus-
sion of slavery per se in antiquity. Slavery was always discussed as part of wider
issues, and we need to reconstruct those contexts of discussion. Unless we do
so, we shall never understand how it was possible for Gregory to condemn the
injustice of slavery without calling for its abolition.
Ancient discourses on slavery take it as a fact of life. To link it to Patterson,
think of death, another fact of life, as an analogy to how ancients talked about

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slavery: perhaps it is bad to those that it happens; perhaps we should strug-

gle to keep it at arms’ length as much as we can; perhaps some people deserve
it for what they have done or who they are; perhaps it is an accident of for-
tune; perhaps it is beside the point, an insignificant detail when other things
are more important; perhaps inflicting it on some people is a legitimate means
for other people to achieve desirable things (victory, glory, power, wealth); per-
haps inflicting it on (certain) people is shameful and unjust. It remains to be
seen whether ancient discussions of slavery ever moved beyond considering it
as a fact of life; if Ramelli’s particular argument that they did so is not partic-
ularly convincing, it does not mean that other efforts to prove this might not
have more luck.

Kostas Vlassopoulos
University of Crete
vlasop@uoc.gr

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