What is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective, ed. Noel Lenski and Catherine M. Cameron

Le résumé fourni par la source

Slavery—as a practice, institution, relationship of domination and subordination or system of property accumulation—can be found across time and around the globe. Yet, as the contributors to this edited volume demonstrate, slavery scholars (to varying degrees) tend to use a binary first proposed by ancient historian Moses Finley in 1968 to understand enslavement comparatively; that is, the demarcation between ‘Slave Societies’ and ‘Societies with Slaves’. In Slave Societies, according to Finley, enslaved people constituted at least 20 per cent of the population, played a chief role in economic production, and exercised significant cultural influence. Only five (Western) societies met his criteria: ancient Greece and Rome, modern Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States South. These five examples proved distinct from Societies with Slaves because, as Finley argued, slavery did not shape other cultures to the same degree that it did in the five ‘genuine’ Slave Societies. Thus, the contributors in...

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