Introduction: Historicizing and Spatializing Global Slavery

Abstract

The introduction to this volume explains the condition of slavery (including its definition and its place at the far end of a broad spectrum of coercion and unfreedom); illuminates conceptual and methodological choices; and discusses the layout and main intentions of the handbook. In particular it discusses how scholars approach the study of slavery, as well as some common themes in global slavery scholarship. It also underscores the intention of this volume to both historicize and spatialize slavery—i.e., to historicize it by moving beyond linear stories that trace slavery from Graeco-Roman antiquity and end with transatlantic slavery and abolition; and to spatialize it by recentering the geography of slavery, illuminating regional contexts of slavery around the world.

Introduction

Slavery has been a common—if often fluid and complex—condition in most world societies throughout history. Only very few societies became so economically, politically, and culturally dependent upon slavery as to ultimately develop into what Moses Finley famously dubbed “slave societies”—a category he reserved for ancient Greece and Rome, and the plantation regions of the Americas from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. It has been precisely the latter societies, however, that have long dominated static popular images and the historical literature on slavery.¹ That has begun to change. The study of global slavery has grown strongly in the last few decades, as scholars working in several disciplines have actively cultivated broader perspectives on enslavement. Not only has interest in slavery among scholars working on the Atlantic world reached a high point, but scholars have also intensified their study of slavery in ancient, medieval, North and sub-Saharan African, Near Eastern, and Asian and Pacific societies. Practices of modern slavery and human trafficking from South Asia to Europe and the Americas are also receiving more academic attention than ever before, and are now being integrated into historical paradigms of slavery. More importantly, scholars are increasingly looking across borders—temporal, spatial, and disciplinary—to better understand slavery and slaving throughout world history. The recent surge in slavery studies has led to a greater appreciation of slavery as both a global and a globalizing phenomenon in human history.²

First, scholars increasingly underscore slavery as a global practice that has existed in innumerable world societies. Historians and anthropologists working on communities as far apart in time and space as ancient Babylonia, medieval Venice, Chosŏn Korea, the nineteenth-century American South, and twentieth-century West Africa have devoted considerable ink to illuminating local and regional case studies of slavery in extremely diverse settings. To be sure, practices of slavery differed widely across time and space, and categorization in some settings has proved difficult—scholars indeed continue to disagree on what constituted “slavery” in some localized settings. Most studies of slavery, however, converge on situations throughout world history in which human beings were (or are) treated as property that could be bought, sold, or transferred; held captive for indefinite periods of time; subordinated to others in extremely dependent and exploitive power relationships; denied basic choices (including potentially rights over their bodies, lives, and labor); and compelled to labor, provide services, or serve various personal, cultural or societal functions against their will.³

Second, scholars now more fully appreciate the globalizing effects that slavery has had on world societies. From antiquity to the present day, slavery has by definition connected societies through forced migrations, warfare, trade routes, and economic expansion. Slaving blazed both maritime and land routes around the globe. Slave-trading routes crisscrossed Africa; helped integrate the Mediterranean world; connected China to the Indonesian archipelago; and fused the Atlantic world. Global and transnational approaches to history focus heavily upon the global movement of people, goods, and ideas, with a particular emphasis on processes of integration and divergence in the human experience. Slavery in various settings straddled all of these focal points, as it integrated various societies through economic and power-based relationships, and simultaneously divided societies by class, race, ethnicity, and cultural group.

Both of these developments—the remarkable expansion of slavery scholarship in various settings throughout world history and the greater appreciation of slavery’s role in connecting societies—have led to new understandings, definitions, and approaches to the study of slavery. The inevitable cross-pollination of slavery studies from such diverse and global perspectives has greatly influenced the ways in which historians and anthropologists talk and think about slavery around the world. Long dominated by scholarship on the early modern Atlantic and classical Graeco-Roman case studies—which created the very framework for slavery studies, from its terminology to its theoretical approaches—slavery scholarship has in recent years been enriched with new insights into how slavery was understood in various settings, including how it functioned, how it was meant to function, how and why people moved in and out of conditions of slavery, how experiences of slavery were characterized, and how practices of slavery affected regional and interregional power relationships. Understandings of slavery have moved beyond static snapshots and abstract definitions. There is now more focus on situating practices of slavery along a broad continuum of coercion and extreme dependencies; understanding the constantly developing and changing nature of slavery practices across time and space; and appreciating what conditions of slavery meant for real people, both the enslaved and slaveholders.

Put simply, the recent surge in slavery studies has helped scholars to historicize and spatialize slavery in world history. Historicizing slavery has entailed moving beyond linear stories that trace slavery from the Graeco-Roman context directly to Atlantic slavery and abolition, and embracing a broader appreciation of how widespread and interlinked diverse practices of slavery were and continue to be around the world, as well as how systems of slavery have arisen and fallen in localized settings. Spatializing slavery has entailed recentering the geography of slavery, appreciating for example just how exceptional and atypical Atlantic slavery was and what made it so, and illuminating regional contexts of slavery around the world.

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery throughout History aims to introduce students and scholars to the study of slavery across time and space. Its intention is to historicize and spatialize slavery, providing both emerging and established researchers with a comprehensive understanding of the current state of the field, as well as serve as a unique reference work for developing further lines of inquiry. Providing chapter-length analyses of the most prominent and widely researched systems of slavery around the world—from antiquity to the contemporary era—it integrates various strands of slavery studies and encourages readers to uncover connections, similarities, and differences between various manifestations of slavery throughout history.

Global Perspectives of Slavery

How do scholars understand slavery, and how do they approach the study of slavery in light of recent developments in the field? It can be difficult to find cohesion in the various strands of global slavery research. Different case studies have necessitated different approaches to establish what exactly constituted (or constitutes) slavery or slavery-like practices in various settings. They have necessitated different approaches to the centrality of labor to conditions of slavery. They have necessitated different approaches to slavery’s relationship to “freedom” or other conditions of non-slavery. As scholarship moves to global views of slavery as a human condition, the danger arises that academic understandings of slavery will ultimately encompass virtually all forms of oppression and thereby seem so nebulous as to become meaningless. Kostas Vlassopoulos recently underscored this in an article on the consequences of global approaches to slavery: “If slavery has an essence, but its historical manifestations differ substantially across time and space, how can we study slavery as a global phenomenon?”⁴ What indeed can be said about slavery from new global perspectives, and what parameters can be said to constitute the framework from which most scholars of slavery operate?

Upon closer inspection most approaches to the study of slavery around the world differ by degrees rather than fundamentally. There are exceptions, to be sure, but most new global slavery research does reveal common understandings and approaches that provide a basic framework from which to analyze slavery across time and space. Three interrelated themes stand out in particular, all of which are characterized by calls to both broaden our understanding of slavery in light of its diversity in world history and clarify its position in relation to conditions of freedom and unfreedom.

First, as stated above, new global slavery scholarship has gone to great lengths to situate slavery at the most extreme end of a broad spectrum—or continuum—of unfree and dependent conditions in various settings. This has led to a further clarification of what distinguishes slavery around the world from serfdom, debt bondage, various forms of indentured servitude, imprisonment, peonage, forced labor, and related asymmetrical dependencies. Scholars of slavery in various settings agree that the condition of slavery, in virtually every world society in which slavery existed, transferred to the slaveholder unlimited and potentially permanent power over the enslaved person, including powers related to life, reproductive capabilities, entitlements, and all other attributes. This differed from all other dependent conditions. It is important to note that, from a global perspective, slavery has not always constituted a clearly defined category or institution, the way it ultimately did in the slave societies of the Atlantic or Graeco-Roman worlds, for example. Indeed, as Vlassopoulos recently argued—partly in an attempt to move beyond more static models such as Finley’s “slave societies” versus “societies with slaves” conceptualization—approaching slavery from a global perspective entails understanding it as a collection of “practices and processes” in various contexts. This view is reinforced by Joseph Miller’s call for understanding slavery and slaving as “historical strategies,” or rather temporally and spatially changing processes, instead of static institutions.⁵ The practices and processes that constituted slavery were everywhere, however, to quote Vlassopoulos, rooted in “two conceptual tools: the tool of property in human beings, and the tool of domination in which one human being can exercise theoretically unlimited power over another.”⁶ Unlike all other forms of dependency, enslaved people were denied by their enslavers most—indeed virtually all—rights and privileges associated with personhood, which were instead conferred upon the slaveholder, a situation which Orlando Patterson—one of the first to produce a global comparative study of slavery—famously referred to as “social death.”⁷ The utility of Patterson’s conceptualization has been highly contested by some scholars of global slavery, partly because in practice enslaved people around the world most certainly functioned as persons, demonstrated agency, and were sometimes even relatively well integrated into local communities. The practice of domination and the attempts at dehumanization never resulted in the enslaved person internalizing their dehumanized status or condition, and everywhere both the theory and practice of slavery were riddled with holes and inconsistencies. Frederick Cooper, a historian of African slavery, for example, has criticized the model for ignoring slave agency and focusing too much on slaveholders’ ideas on how they thought slavery should work, rather than how the system actually played out in specific settings.⁸ And indeed, enslaved people could find themselves with certain rights and privileges associated with personhood in certain contexts—when contractually or legally promised manumission at a future date, for example (such as with coartación in Spanish America, or gradual abolition laws in the northern United States).

In essence, however, “social death” does not refer to a loss of personhood or social interaction in any absolute sense, but rather a loss of the rights and privileges associated with personhood during the condition of slavery, and in this sense there are more similarities than differences across time and space. Enslaved people were political and social outsiders—the most extremely marginalized people in any given society, completely subordinated to the will of their masters.⁹ The condition of slavery almost everywhere entailed no legitimate claim to the fruits of one’s own labor; one’s own offspring, family, or community; one’s own body or the reproductive capabilities of one’s own body; one’s own life. All such power rested with the slaveholder (or higher cultural or political authorities that governed the slaveholder), who could either grant or withhold such “privileges.” Crucially, the enslaved person was denied the rights and privileges associated with personhood for an indefinite—potentially permanent and even intergenerational—period of time. No action by the enslaved person guaranteed a release from the condition of slavery—no repayment of debt, no expiration of term—except as agreed upon by the slaveholder or, in some cases, the state or other institutions of authority (as with legal abolition in the modern period, or cultural dictates regarding manumission in Islamic law, for example). Entry into the state of slavery was also almost always coerced, usually through violence (especially capture in wars) or birth—and in the latter case the condition was maintained through violence or the threat of violence. Few people in world history volunteered themselves for enslavement, although there are rare examples of people enslaving themselves to a more powerful person—usually people in desperate and impoverished circumstances who opted for bondage for purposes of physical sustenance or protection. In short, most scholars approach slavery as a collection of practices and processes that fell at the most extreme along the spectrum of unfree and dependent conditions, one that distinguished itself in its reduction of human beings to a state of property, subjected to the theoretically unlimited power of other human beings.

Second, and very much related to the first theme, global slavery scholarship has underscored the need to understand practices of slavery from perspectives that move beyond paradigms of “labor” and that embrace broader views of the various purposes and functions of slavery in diverse settings. Long identified as the most extreme solution to labor shortages in societies where productive resources were available and power relationships made coercion of laborers possible—a theory that goes back to H.J. Nieboer’s important thesis on this subject in the early twentieth century, and the adaptation of that thesis by Evsey Domar in 1970—slavery has often been equated with forced labor, especially forced labor in profit-seeking economic activities.¹⁰ Global labor historians, who by definition deal with questions related to work and labor, continue to approach slavery first and foremost as a form of highly controlled or coerced labor, one that was at least comparable to (and on the same spectrum as) peonage, debt bondage, indentured servitude, and exploited wage earners in modern industrial and post-industrial societies. Marcel van der Linden has indeed called for more comparative studies of all forms of coerced labor (including slavery) by “dissecting” them into three “moments”: entry into coerced labor, extraction of labor, and exit from coerced labor conditions.¹¹ This approach comes out of a need to escape a longstanding binary between slave and free labor. Labor historians correctly argue that non-slave labor was not necessarily free labor, and that the work experiences of enslaved laborers often resembled those of other marginalized laborers and oppressed working classes. Global perspectives of slavery, however, remind us to take a closer look at the nature and centrality of slave labor in societies in which it existed. First, it is important to remember that slavery was not—or at least, not only—a form of labor. Its rootedness in the conceptual tools of property in human beings and total power over another, as stated above, set it analytically apart from all other labor systems. To be sure, the extraction of labor and the acquisition of resources usually lay at the root of enslavement in most world societies, and work was a central aspect of virtually all enslaved people’s lives. But the condition of slavery went beyond work and labor. It applied to non-productive people, including the very young, very old, injured, and handicapped. It could not be redeemed through any amount of work or self-purchase, except as agreed upon by the slaveholder or higher authorities. It accrued not only material wealth and resources to the slaveholder but also (and sometimes only) immaterial benefits such as prestige, privileges, and power.¹² Even in societies in which slavery unequivocally served to produce commodities for capitalist markets and thereby enrich the master class, such as in the Atlantic world, slavery entailed more than simply a labor system. And second, slavery studies remind us to broaden our definition of what slave “work” entailed, as labor historians have indeed long argued. Global perspectives of slavery underscore the fact that enslaved people performed a wide variety of functions that went beyond productive economic activities and included everything from wet-nursing and childbearing to soldiering to performing rituals to civil service in the upper echelons of government. In short, global perspectives of slavery necessitate an understanding of its specific purposes in various settings and an acknowledgment of its similarities but also fundamental differences with various coerced labor systems.

A third theme that has arisen in light of new global slavery scholarship has been the call for a reassessment of the relationship between slavery and freedom, considering not simply what we mean by such categories but also what they meant to the enslaved. Two trends are notable in this regard. The first is a tendency in the scholarship to underscore that non-slavery in various world societies did (and does) not necessarily constitute freedom in the sense of a person exercising the power to act and make decisions without constraints. Much like global labor historians’ efforts to escape the traditional binary between slave labor and free labor, scholars of slavery around the world have undertaken similar efforts to escape binary thinking about slavery and freedom. Instead, as stated above, they place slavery at the extreme end of a broad spectrum of dependent conditions, and they underscore the fluidity between various conditions of unfreedom. The conceptual language of freedom was indeed largely absent in many contexts of slavery, and even where it did exist, it did not always constitute the opposite of slavery.¹³ In many societies in which slavery existed, various dependent and coerced conditions could morph into slavery—debt bondsmen in the Indian Ocean world could eventually become enslaved, for example, as could ransom captives taken by corsairs in wars in the early modern Mediterranean. People could move in and out of conditions along the spectrum of dependency. Manumitted African Americans in the nineteenth-century American South—whose condition and legal status fell far short of the legal condition of “freedom” enjoyed by most white southerners, and whose forced poverty and marginalization often resulted in new dependent relationships—could be reenslaved as a punishment for crime or vagrancy. Such cases demonstrate that slavery was not always entered into from a state of “freedom” and that exiting slavery did not always result in a condition of “freedom,” unless that term refers exclusively to non-slavery. A second trend in the scholarship has been an effort to qualify the above by considering how enslaved people understood non-slavery, and how they strove to attain it. In other words, enslaved people everywhere understood their condition and understood the differences between their condition and other conditions and statuses in their respective societies. For most, exiting the slave status was an act of personal liberation, even if doing so did not result in considerable improvements in their daily lives. Exiting slavery may not have necessarily resulted in radical changes in people’s working conditions, for example, nor afforded them many rights or privileges, nor even led to a detachment from their former owners. Everywhere, however, the boundary between slavery and non-slavery was perceived as enormously important. Relative to slavery, most conditions of non-slavery appeared “free” to most enslaved people, even when they constituted conditions of what scholars would categorize as unfree or dependent.

Scholars of slavery around the world continue to debate and disagree on various aspects of slavery in different contexts, and consensus is unlikely given the enormous variety of its historical manifestations across time and space. Global slavery scholarship does in a very general sense converge with respect to certain themes, however. It understands slavery as a temporally and spatially changing collection of practices and processes, situated at the most extreme end of a broad spectrum of unfree and dependent conditions, whose rootedness in theories of property in human beings and the exercise of unlimited power over another person’s body and life set it analytically apart from all other forms of unfreedom. It acknowledges that slavery cannot be strictly equated with coerced labor, and seeks to understand the similarities and differences between slavery and other forms of coerced labor in various contexts. It seeks to reassess the relationship between slavery and notions of freedom, acknowledging that people did not always enter into conditions of slavery from a state of “freedom,” nor exit slavery into a state of freedom, and exploring human experiences of living and moving within and across statuses and social hierarchies. All of these themes provide an analytically rich way forward in the years to come.

This Handbook

The Palgrave Handbook is designed to encourage global perspectives and simultaneously provide a coherent understanding of slavery as a practice in a wide variety of settings throughout world history in a single volume. A number of editorial decisions have been made in order to enhance coherence and readability.

First, the volume is divided into 5 chronological “parts” that highlight the development of slavery over time. Part I contains chapters on specific case studies of slavery in Ancient Societies (to 500 C.E.), examining the earliest written sources on systems of slavery in the Mediterranean and Near East. Part II continues with case studies of slavery and slave-trading in various Medieval Societies (500–1500 C.E.), from the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean and even South America. Part III deals with Early Modern Societies (1500–1800 C.E.), a period of unprecedented global interactions and long-distance slave-trading throughout the world. Part IV delves into practices of slavery in the Modern Societies (1800–1900 C.E.), characterized as an age of revolutions and emancipation but also significant expansion of slavery in some parts of the world. Part V explores Contemporary Societies (1900–present), an era defined by the expansion of human rights and ultimately the universal illegality of slavery. Each part is prefaced by a very short introduction by the volume editors.

This chronological division is intended to provide the volume with a coherent structure, highlight developments over time, and encourage comparisons of slavery practices across space within specific time periods. It should be noted, however, that in practice world history is not easily divided into neat periods with clear beginnings or ends. The years given in parentheses in each section title are rough indications, not hard boundaries. For this reason, the editors decided to title each section with both a name and a rough indication of the years in a given period. Chronological periodizations also do not always apply neatly to all world societies. If the Medieval Period (ca. 500–1500 C.E.) is largely defined as the period following the breakdown of empires and disruption of long-distance trading in the Mediterranean and Near East, for example, it is known as a period of expansion and consolidation of empires in parts of the Americas. Moreover, the danger exists that the chosen periodization for this volume may be interpreted as adopting Eurocentric understandings of world history. The volume editors are aware of these shortcomings. In the end, the decision was made to follow the scholarship in the field of global slavery and of world history in general, in which the same 5-pronged periodization is widely used as a frame of reference. Indeed, most scholars of slavery, including scholars whose case studies fall well outside of European influence, identify with these periods and situate their case studies in relation to other practices of slavery around the world in the same period.

Second, the volume is subdivided into 32 thematic chapters by both established and emerging scholars that illuminate specific case studies of practices of slavery in different parts of the world, providing readers with the broadest geographic scope possible. Each chapter constitutes a brief introduction to slavery in a particular region and context; annotation is necessarily light, and each chapter ends with a Further Reading section for those who wish to learn more about a specific case study. A condition as common in world history as slavery does not allow for a complete or definitive geographic representation in a single volume, of course, and many potential case studies were necessarily left out. The volume editors made a selection based on a number of factors. First, each chronological part contains chapters that zoom in on case studies from around the world insofar as they are reflected in the scholarship. The latter constitutes a major challenge for any handbook on global slavery—practices of slavery in some regions or time periods are simply not yet well studied or remain unstudied due to a lack of sources. The editors did go to great lengths to offer as broad a selection as possible, from both the Global North and the Global South. Second, the volume contains chapters on the most prominent and studied cases of slavery but also a smattering of chapters on case studies that may be less familiar to students and scholars who are new to the field, such as for example slavery in the early modern German Reich, asymmetrical dependencies in the Inca empire, and state-sponsored slavery systems adopted by totalitarian states in the twentieth century. The intention is to expose readers to the latest scholarship in the main areas and time periods on which global slavery studies focus, but also identify some relatively new directions that are currently being explored and integrated into the field. Third, the editors deliberately limited the number of chapters that deal with Atlantic slavery to four; these explore the rise of slavery in the Americas; plantation slavery in the British Caribbean; slavery in Latin America (especially Cuba and Brazil) during the “second slavery”; and slavery in the antebellum US South. The voluminous and exciting scholarship on Atlantic slavery easily surpasses that for all other case studies, and this volume could have contained many more chapters on various parts of the Americas, but the editors ultimately limited the space reserved for the Atlantic in order to help readers place Atlantic slavery—which was in many respects atypical and exceptional—within a wider global context and to allow more space for other case studies.

In order to enhance coherence and comparability, each contributor was asked to explore or shed light on three themes in their respective chapters, insofar as they are relevant and applicable to their respective case studies. The three themes are inspired by historian Marcel van der Linden’s three-pronged approach to “dissecting coerced labor”—which for this volume has been modified to account for slavery not being strictly equitable to forced labor, namely:

• a. Entry into slavery (how people became enslaved, including from other conditions of dependency and coercion);

• b. Experiences of the enslaved during slavery (how people lived and worked as “slaves,” and the nature of exploitation, coercion, and violence in their lives); and

• c. Exits from slavery (methods by which people ceased to be “slaves,” including cases in which their new status or condition was one of dependency or coercion).¹⁴

The authors were free to interpret and incorporate these three themes in ways that made sense for their respective cases. Some cases did not lend themselves to one of the themes, for example. The second theme—experiences of the enslaved—also gave contributors considerable leeway to briefly discuss the most important or pressing challenges or aspects of enslaved people’s lives. Many chose to focus on issues related to work, while others included other aspects of enslaved people’s social lives. Authors were also free to determine their own internal chapter structure, so that not all of the chapters are necessarily structured according to the three themes in turn.

A third editorial decision that was made in order to enhance coherence and provide more general reflections on slavery as a global phenomenon was to include a thematic injection at the end of each of the five chronological parts. The injection is a short essay (roughly half the length of a chapter) that discusses an overarching theme or cross-cutting question that highlights the connections between slavery practices in different settings, or how scholars approach the study of slavery in different settings. Catherine Cameron’s injection essay to Part I, for example, examines how archaeologists identify “invisible” or marginalized people in world history, and how archaeological methods are helping historians understand the lives of the enslaved. The injection essay to Part II, by Ruth Karras, explores the theme of sexual exploitation of enslaved people from a gender history perspective. Part III concludes with an injection essay by Klaus Weber about the interconnected global commodity chains involved in the development and sustenance of early modern slave systems. William Mulligan’s injection essay for Part IV examines the development of global abolitionist networks and movements in the nineteenth century. Finally, Part V concludes with an injection essay by Joel Quirk about modern anti-slavery and human rights movements, and the ways in which these movements affect how scholars think about slavery as a historical phenomenon. The injection essays encourage readers to zoom out and consider a theme that helps bring place the specific case studies in each part in a wider context.

The structure and approach of this handbook make it a unique addition to the literature on global slavery in the English language.¹⁵ Indeed, this handbook complements other recent handbooks and anthologies of global slavery and provides certain features that others do not. Perhaps most well-known is the excellent four-volume Cambridge World History of Slavery (4 vols., Cambridge University Press). Like the Palgrave Handbook, the Cambridge history is divided chronologically and offers short essay overviews of slavery in various contexts throughout world history. Unlike the Palgrave handbook, however, it is divided into four separate (and lengthy) books, all of which can be purchased or read separately. This allows readers to delve into a wealth of case studies on specific time periods and regions, but does not encourage or facilitate a clear understanding of the development of slavery over time, from antiquity to the present. The Routledge History of Slavery (2012), edited by Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard, offers a more concise and accessible overview of global slavery. Unlike the Palgrave volume, however, it is relatively short and heavily dominated by essays on Atlantic slavery. The recently published volume Writing the History of Slavery (2022), edited by David Stefan Doddington and Enrico Dal Lago, provides readers with an excellent historiographical and methodological overview of global slavery scholarship, but is intended to introduce readers to historical approaches to slavery rather than provide an overview of case studies on slavery in specific settings. The Palgrave Handbook complements these other handbooks by providing a concise volume that introduces readers to practices of slavery in a wide variety of settings, as well as a handful of thematic and theoretical essays.¹⁶

To understand slavery—why and how it developed, and how it functioned in various societies—is to understand an important and widespread practice in world civilizations. The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery throughout World History encourages students and scholars to zoom out and understand the similarities, differences, and connections between practices of slavery around the world. As such it hopes to inspire a new generation of slavery studies and help set the research agenda for years to come.

Notes

• 1. Moses I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (Princeton: Marcus Weiner, 1988).

• 2. The recent surge in global perspectives of slavery can be seen not only in a wealth of new publications and handbooks, but also in other academic projects, such as large international conferences; the launch of the Journal of Global Slavery to complement the longstanding journal Slavery & Abolition; the opening of the Brown University Center for Slavery and Social Justice in the US; and the opening of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany; among others.

• 3. Damian Alan Pargas, “Slavery as a Global and Globalizing Phenomenon: An Editorial Note,” Journal of Global Slavery 1, no. 1 (2016): 1–4; David Stefan Doddington and Enrico Dal Lago, eds., Writing the History of Slavery (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), chs. 1–2.

• 4. Kostas Vlassopoulos, “Does Slavery Have a History? The Consequences of a Global Approach,” Journal of Global Slavery 1, no. 1 (2016): 6.

• 5. Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

• 6. Vlassopoulos, “Does Slavery Have a History?” 12–13.

• 7. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

• 8. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 17.

• 9. For classic works on slaves as marginalized outsiders that have greatly influenced current global slavery scholarship, see for example: Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers, “African ‘Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality,” in idem, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975); Claude Meillassoux, ed., L’esclavage en Afrique précoloniale (Paris: François Maspero, 1975).

• 10. H.J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnographical Researches (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1900); Evsey D. Domar, “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis,” Journal of Economic History 30 (Mar. 1970): 18–32. Orlando Patterson delivered one of the most scathing critiques of the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis, arguing that rather than viewing slavery as an economic system, it should be seen in terms of power relationships. See Orlando Patterson, “The Structural Origins of Slavery: A Critique of the Nieboer-Domar Hypothesis from a Comparative Perspective,” in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292 (1977): 12–34; Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 1.

• 11. Marcel van der Linden, “Dissecting Coerced Labor,” in Marcel van der Linden and Magaly Rodríguez García, eds., On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 291–322.

• 12. Vlassopoulos reminds scholars that in many cases “prestige creation” was the main—sometimes the only—slaving strategy. See Vlassopoulos, “Does Slavery Have a History?” 14–15.

• 13. See for example Vlassopoulos, “Does Slavery Have a History?” 10; as well as Anthony Reid’s discussion of this concept for Asian slavery systems: Anthony Reid, “Merdeka: The Concept of Freedom in Indonesia,” in David Kelly and Anthony Reid, eds., Asian Freedoms: The Idea of Freedom in East and Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 141–60.

• 14. van der Linden, “Dissecting Coerced Labor.”

• 15. The most recent and ambitious handbook to date is the French-language Les mondes des esclavages: Une histroire comparée (Paris: Le Seuil, 2021), edited by Paul Ismard, Benedetta Rossi and Cecile Vidal. This excellent volume is twice the size of the Palgrave volume and contains 50 chapters on various case studies. For a similar (more succinct) handbook of global slavery in German, see Michael Zeuske, Handbuch Geschichte der Sklaverei: eine Globalgeschichte von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013).

• 16. Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery 1: The Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery 3: AD 1420–AD 1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); David Eltis, et al., eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery 4: AD 1804-AD 2016 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Craig Perry, et al., eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery 2: AD 500-AD 1420 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard, eds., The Routledge History of Slavery (New York: Routledge, 2012); David Doddington and Enrico Dal Lago, eds., Writing the History of Slavery (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). For a global view of modern slavery, see Kevin Bales, Understanding Global Slavery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).