On human bondage : after slavery and social death

327 Pages·2017·2.37 MB·English

by  Bodel

On Human Bondage
The Ancient World: Comparative Histories
Series Editor: Kurt Raaflaub
Published
War and Peace in the Ancient World
Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub
Household and Family Religion in Antiquity
Edited by John Bodel and Saul Olyan
Epic and History
Edited by David Konstan and Kurt A. Raaflaub
Geography and Ethnography: Perceptions of the World in Pre‐Modern Societies
Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Richard J. A. Talbert
The Roman Empire in Context: Historical and Comparative Perspectives
Edited by Johann P. Arnason and Kurt A. Raaflaub
Highways, Byways, and Road Systems in the Pre‐Modern World
Edited by Susan E. Alcock, John Bodel, and Richard J. A. Talbert
The Gift in Antiquity
Edited by Michael L. Satlow
The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy
Edited by Johann P. Arnason, Kurt A. Raaflaub, and Peter Wagner
Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World
Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub
Peace in the Ancient World: Concepts and Theories
Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub
The Adventure of the Human Intellect: Self, Society and the Divine
in Ancient World Cultures
Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub
On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death
Edited by John Bodel and Walter Scheidel
On Human Bondage
After Slavery and Social Death
Edited by
John Bodel and Walter Scheidel
This edition first published 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Bodel, John P., 1957– editor. | Scheidel, Walter, 1966– editor. |
Brown University, host institution.
Title: On human bondage : after slavery and social death / edited by John Bodel and Walter Scheidel.
Description: Chichester, West Sussex ; Malden, MA : John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2016. |
Papers from a conference, “Being Nobody?”, held at Brown University. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016022486| ISBN 9781119162483 (cloth) |
ISBN 9781119162520 (epub) | ISBN 9781119162506 (Adobe PDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Slavery–History–Congresses. | Slaves–Social conditions–Congresses. |
Patterson, Orlando, 1940– Slavery and social death–Congresses.
Classification: LCC HT861 .O64 2016 | DDC 306.3/6209–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022486
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Sadeugra/Gettyimages
Set in 10/13pt Galliard by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Figures and Tables vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Preface xii
Introduction 1
John Bodel and Walter Scheidel
1 Slavery and Personhood in the Neo‐Assyrian Empire 15
Heather D. Baker
2 Orlando Patterson, Property, and Ancient Slavery:
The Definitional Problem Revisited 31
David M. Lewis
3 Slaves or Serfs?: Patterson on the Thetes and Helots
of Ancient Greece 55
Peter Hunt
4 Death and Social Death in Ancient Rome 81
John Bodel
5 Freedom, Slavery, and Female Sexual Honor in Antiquity 109
Kyle Harper
6 Becoming Almost Somebody: Manumission and its Complications
in the Early Han Empire 122
Anthony Barbieri‐Low
7 Ottoman Elite Enslavement and “Social Death” 136
Ehud R. Toledano
8 The Locked Box in Slavery and Social Death 151
Indrani Chatterjee
9 Honor and Dishonor in the Slavery of Colonial Brazil 167
Junia Ferreira Furtado
vi Contents
10 (Child) Slavery in Africa as Social Death?: Reponses Past and Present 193
Sandra E. Greene
11 Slavery and Freedom in Small‐Scale Societies 210
Catherine M. Cameron
12 Rituals of Enslavement and Markers of Servitude: Orlando Patterson
in the American Tropics 226
Fernando Santos‐Granero
13 Slavery from Rome to Medieval Europe and Beyond: Words,
Things, and Genomes 249
Michael McCormick
14 Revisiting Slavery, Property, and Social Death 265
Orlando Patterson
Index 297
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
4.1 Funerary stele of M. Publilius Satyr from Capua representing
two togate figures and the sale of a slave at auction. 86
4.2 Tombstone of an infant boy, Sextus Rufius Achilleus, from Rome. 88
4.3 Schema of van Gennep’s rites of passage with Patterson’s stages
of slavery compared with the corresponding stages of dying. 90
12.1 Kalinago high‐ranking woman, 1600s. 233
12.2 Conibo warrior with captive woman, mid‐1800s. 236
12.3 Chamacoco slave woman, early 1800s. 239
13.1 The frequency of the words “slavery” and “emancipation”
in English‐language books published between 1800 and 2000
ce, included in Google Books Ngram Viewer:
http://books.google.com/ngrams. Smoothing of three years. 255
13.2 T he frequency of the words “slavery” and “emancipation”
in English‐language books published between 1800 and
1900 ce, included in Google Books Ngram Viewer:
http://books.google.com/ngrams. No smoothing. 255
Tables
10.1 Enslaved African children purchased by the North German
Missionary Society, including age and origin, 1863. 204
13.1 Twenty words that co‐occur most frequently with mancipium
in 4754 texts printed in Migne 1844–1864. 253
Notes on Contributors
Heather D. Baker has been Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History
at the University of Toronto since September 2014, having previously held research
positions at the Universities of Helsinki and Vienna. Her work focuses on
Mesopotamia in the first millennium BCE, with specific interests in Babylonian
urbanism, house and household, the Neo‐Assyrian royal palace, and the integra-
tion of textual and archaeological evidence.
Anthony Barbieri‐Low, Professor of Early Chinese History at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, specializes in the social, legal, economic, and material‐
culture history of early imperial China. His first book, Artisans in Early Imperial
China (2007), was awarded numerous international book prizes. His recently pub-
lished book, Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China (2015), offers a study
and translation of recently excavated legal manuscripts from early China.
John Bodel is W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics and Professor of
History at Brown University. He studies ancient Roman history and Latin litera-
ture and has special interests in epigraphy, slavery in antiquity, Roman religion,
funerals and burial customs, writing systems, and the ancient novel. His books
include two other co‐edited volumes in this series: Household and Family Religion
in Antiquity (with S. Olyan, 2008) and Highways, Byways, and Road Systems in the
Pre‐Modern World (with S. E. Alcock and R. J. Talbert, 2012). Since 1995 he has
directed the U.S. Epigraphy Project, which gathers and shares information about
ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions in the United States (http://usepigraphy.
brown.edu).
Catherine M. Cameron is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Colorado, Boulder. She is an archaeologist whose work focuses on
the northern part of the American Southwest during the Chaco and post‐Chaco
eras (900–1300 ce). Her Southwestern work has been published as a monograph
(Chaco and After in the Northern San Juan, University of Arizona Press, 2009) as
well as in articles and book chapters. She also studies captives in prehistory, espe-
cially their role in cultural transmission, and has published Captives: How Stolen
People Changed the World (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), an edited volume,
Notes oN coNtributors ix
articles, and book chapters on this topic. She has been a co‐editor of the Journal of
Archaeological Method and Theory since 2000.
Indrani Chatterjee is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.
Her doctoral dissertation (University of London) was published as Gender, Slavery
and the Law in Colonial India (1999). She is the editor of Unfamiliar Relations:
History and Family in South Asia (2004) and co‐editor (with Richard M. Eaton) of
Slavery and South Asian History (2006). She is also the author of many articles,
chapters in edited volumes, and, most recently, of a monograph titled Forgotten
Friends: Monks, Marriages and Memories of Northeast India (2013).
Junia Ferreira Furtado is Full Professor of Modern History at the Department of
History, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) and 1A Researcher with
the CNPq and Programa Pesquisador Mineiro/FAPEMIG.
Sandra E. Greene, the Stephen ’59 and Madeline ’60 Professor of African History
at Cornell University, has published four single authored books and co-edited four
volumes, including Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast
(1996), Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter (2002), West African Narratives of
Slavery (2011), African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, Vols 1 and 2 (2013 and
2016), and The Bitter Legacy: African Slavery Past and Present (2013). In addition
to writing and teaching courses on African and African Diaspora history, she has
served in a number of administrative positions including Chair of the History
Department at Cornell, President of the African Studies Association (USA), and
Editorial Board member of the American Historical Review. She is a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Kyle Harper is Senior Vice President and Provost and Professor of Classics and
Letters at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Slavery in the Late
Roman World, ad 275–425 (2011) and From Shame to Sin: The Christian
Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013). He is currently work-
ing on a study of the environmental history of the high and later Roman Empire.
Peter Hunt is a Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of
Colorado, Boulder. His first book, Slaves, Warfare and Ideology in the Greek
Historians (Cambridge, 1998), explores the disjunction between the actual extent
of slave and Helot participation in Greek warfare and the relative neglect of their
role in the contemporary historians (Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon). His
second book, War, Peace, and Alliance in Demosthenes’ Athens (Cambridge, 2010),
focuses on deliberative oratory as evidence for a more sympathetic and complex
view of Athenian thinking and feelings about foreign relations. He is currently
finishing a synthetic work, Greek and Roman Slavery: Comparisons and Case
Studies, and beginning research on a larger project on the Athenian “frontier” in
Thrace.
x Notes oN coNtributors
David M. Lewis has held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University
of Edinburgh, and took up up the role of Assistant Professor in Greek History at
the University of Nottingham in 2016. His forthcoming book Greek Slave Systems
and their Eastern Neighbours: A Comparative Study will be published by Oxford
University Press.
Michael McCormick studies the fall of the Roman Empire and the origins of
Europe. He is the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History at Harvard
University, where he chairs the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past
(http://sohp.fas.harvard.edu). His books include the prize‐winning Origins of the
European Economy (2002) and Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land (2011); he
recently led the first multi‐proxy scientific and historical reconstruction of climate
under the Roman Empire (Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43 (2012): 169–
220). He edits the free, student‐created online Digital Atlas of Roman and
Medieval Civilizations (http://darmc.harvard.edu), and is active archaeologically
in France and Spain.
Orlando Patterson is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.
His academic interests include the comparative study of freedom and slavery, and
the socio‐cultural roots of poverty and underdevelopment in the Caribbean and
US. His books include, The Sociology of Slavery: Jamaica, 1655–1938 (1967);
Slavery and Social Death (1982); Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991),
for which he won the American National Book Award for non‐fiction; and Rituals
of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (1998). Patterson was,
for eight years, Special Adviser for Social Policy and Development to Prime Minister
Michael Manley of Jamaica. He has been a member of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences since 1991.
Fernando Santos‐Granero is a Senior Staff Scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical
Research Institute in Panama. Having graduated from the London School of
Economics, he has done extensive fieldwork among the Yanesha of Central Peru,
as well as historical research of Upper Amazon indigenous societies and regional
economies. He is the author of The Power of Love: The Moral Use of Knowledge
amongst the Amuesha of Central Peru (1991) and Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation,
and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life (2009), and co‐author with Frederica
Barclay of the books Selva Central: History, Economy, and Land Use in Peruvian
Amazonia (1998) and Tamed Frontiers: Economy, Society, and Civil Rights in
Upper Amazonia (2000).
Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics
and History, and a Kennedy‐Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford
University. He has published widely on ancient social and economic history, pre-
modern demography, and the comparative history of labor and state formation.