Slaves were property and at the mercy of their owners. They did eventually gain some very limited rights under the Principate.
Not sure there was any special Roman “reasoning” behind slavery; the institution went way back. You could be sold into slavery, unwisely choose to resist Caesar, born a slave, etc
Note that death rates in Rome were very bad. Typically slaves lived ~ 2 years.
I don’t know how much of this was due to the malaria, and how much to working in the hypocausts, but it wasn’t a kind, gentle slavery.
Emphasis mine.
That’s a rather odd claim to make in a thread where people are making explicit comparisons between the American South and other types of slavery. As someone who teaches university-level American history, including the history of slavery, I can tell you that we often make comparisons between slavery in the American colonies and the United States South, on the one hand, and other slave societies like Brazil, the Caribbean, and ancient Rome on the other.
No-one in this thread, as far as I can tell, has claimed that Roman slavery was “not that bad.” In fact, Pantastic explicitly rejected that argument. More generally, the scholarly and academic comparisons between slavery in colonial British America and the United States, and slavery in classical antiquity, rest less on the day-to-day conditions of individual slaves than on broader questions of how the system of enslavement worked, slavery’s connection to the productive economic systems of the societies in which it existed, the links between enslavement and evolving ideas of human taxonomy, ideas about what slavery meant to the people involved, and other big-picture questions of how to understand slavery as a contingent and historically-specific institution. I’ve never said to my students, and neither (to my knowledge) have any of my many friends who teach American history at universities all over the world, that Roman slavery was “not that bad.”
I don’t claim to be an expert on Roman slavery. I certainly have read nowhere near as many books and articles about Roman slavery as I have about slavery in the British American colonies, and in the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War. I do, however, in my reading on Roman slavery, try to rely on works written by experts in the field. One of my go-to books if I want to check something about slavery is Rome is Slavery and Society at Rome, by Keith Bradley (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Bradley is a pre-eminent scholar on the history of Roman slavery, and this book is a relatively short one (about 180 pages) designed to bring the key findings of his earlier, much larger and more complex works to a wider audience.
Bradley frequently makes the point that Roman slavery and modern slavery are comparable in a variety of important ways, but he also observes many of the same distinctions that are common in this field of discussion. He notes, for example, that “unlike New World slavery, Roman slavery had no association with skin colour” (p. 121). He makes the argument, common to many comparative discussion of slavery, that the institution worked differently in pre-capitalist and pre-modern societies than it did in modern capitalist or proto-capitalist societies, arguing that, while Roman slaveowners “were well aware of the concept of profit-making…it does not follow that [Roman] landowners sought the greatest possible levels of profit from their possessions in the capitalistic manner of New World slaveowners” (pp. 14-15).
If all we’re doing is looking at the experiences of an individual slave at any particular point in time, these distinctions might not be that important, but in terms of understanding slavery historically they are crucial. The vagaries of an individual slaveowner might be a much greater factor than the long-run economic system or racial ideology in determining the life experience of a particular enslaved person, but the big structural issues matter too. The fact that we might find an American slave who was worked lightly and treated well, or a Roman slave who was worked unceasingly and treated brutally, doesn’t eliminate the broad and important differences that characterize the systems themselves, and that tend to produce certain long-run outcomes.
Another prominent scholar of antiquity, Walter Scheidel of Stanford, sums up some of the key differences in his chapter of the The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which Scheidel also edited. He notes the strong similarities between the slave societies of classical antiquity, arguing that “Roman slavery effectively was Greek slavery” in its central systems and conditions, adding:
Many of the central arguments about the important characteristics that emerged in the system of trans-Atlantic slavery can be found in one of the seminal works on the subject, Robin Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (Verso, 1997). He makes, for example, a similar point to Bradley about the role of profit and capital:
Again, these distinctions might not mean much to any particular slave, but they are historically important.
ZosterSandstorm, you said earlier in the thread:
which is, of course, completely correct. But that, also, is at the heart of some of the key efforts to distinguish New World slavery from slavery in Rome. It’s not simply that New World enslavers “had” a post-1500 conception of race; it’s that slavery itself played a crucial role in helping to create, embed, and sustain long-run conceptions of race and racial inequality. This problem became particularly acute in an Enlightenment world where people were starting to articulate ideas about natural rights and the natural equality of man. If you’re going to enslave people in a world like that, you need some sort of rationalization about why it doesn’t contradict your foundational beliefs about human relations, and arguments about the “natural” inferiority or dependency of particular races are especially convenient in such circumstances.
I think, also, that this is part of what makes American slavery seem unique. It was not the first place to have slavery. It was not the only place where slaves were treated brutally. But it was the first place to maintain and even expand the institution of chattel slavery while proclaiming Enlightenment principles of rights and equality. Fundamentally, the United States serves as the poster-boy for continuing to do something that its foundational ideology acknowledges is wrong. Writers like Thomas Jefferson at least acknowledged the contradiction, but by the mid nineteenth century, Southern slave owners had basically decided to ignore it, or, in some cases, to explicitly reject America’s founding principles in order to defend slavery. James Henry Hammond, in his famous Letter to an English Abolitionist, said, “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that all men are born equal.”
If American slavery was “uniquely” bad in any particular way, I think it is precisely that it most clearly defied the nation’s own bedrock principles, articulated ad nauseum during the Revolutionary era and afterwards. Hell, the revolutionaries had the gall to describe themselves as “enslaved” by British tyranny, and Massachusetts slaves called on the state legislature, in a series of petitions during the 1770s, to live up to its rhetoric regarding natural rights and the promise of liberty. It was, however, not the legislature but the courts that ended slavery in Massachusetts.
And finally, I think all of this explains why, in modern debates, some people seem to place such strong emphasis on the evils of American slavery, to the exclusion of other systems. It’s partly due to this issue of hypocrisy, but it’s also because most of these debates take place in the United States, and the people who live here are understandably more concerned about their own country’s behavior than the behavior of other countries. This is particularly the case because there are consequences of slavery that persisted (and persist) well after the institution itself ended. It’s hard to make an argument that the history of Roman slavery has any noticeable effect on the lives of modern Italians; trying to argue that American slavery has no effect on post-slavery American society would be to deny the last century and a half of American history.
I love this post- well reasoned, well written and well cited.
Seconding DocCathode; and adding applause in particular for the last two sentences of mhendo’s post.
Thank you, mhendo. Great post.
I mostly agree with your post, though there are a few things I think we should look at.
The idea that Romans did not view slavery as race-based is absolutely true. However, Romans did implicitly view slavery in an ethno-cultural context. A learned Greek might be a slave, but a valued and useful one. On the other hand, a Celt or Carthaginian might be put to the fields or someone from Hispania worked to death in the mines. In short, Romans did deal heavily in national stereotypes - so heavily that several have stuck around to the present. However, it was much easier for slaves to “become Roman” assuming they lived long enough than for Africa-American slaves to become, well, fully “American” in the eyes of the majority of free citizens in either case. Please note that I am emphasizing they did actually become Americans and this was a major point of argument by one of my personal heroes, John Adams. Many, though not necessarily most, Americans, imagined or in some cases deliberately created * a hard line between racial groups, and this created a social gap that was not necessarily organic to the American experiment.
*We can actually identify some of the people involved in this. It was not inevitable
A quirk of the United States was that slavery, despite being allowed, had no natural induction point. No one was “created” a slave in the American system - the status and the idea was imported directly from abroad. This meant that many slave-owners eventually closed ranks because they had no alternative cheap labor source - it was easier to lock down slavery over time, especially after 1830 or so. Nonetheless their were some bright spots in the American firmament regarding slavery. For example, in Virginia between 1800 and 1820 something like 10% of the slave population went free. In Georgia following the Revolutionary War, so many thousands upon thousands of petitions flooded the legislature urging them to ban slavery that the legislators sagely nodded and… formed a gag rule so they never had to hear them again. Had these trends continued it probably would have accelerated, which is one reason that the Founding Fathers didn’t get rid of it right away. In their eyes it was a dying institution anyway. We can point to several other cases as well; the pro-slavery side felt they had to destroy any criticism of the institution and vigorously tried to control public discourse. This worked - until it didn’t. However, I bring that up because it was very different from the Roman view of slavery, which was that it was so naturally a part of society that it was both necessary and inevitable. No Roman that we have record of criticized slavery in general until the arrival of Christianity.
I’m not quite sure what to make of this argument, especially your point that racial ideology “was not necessarily organic to the American experiment,” and that it was “not inevitable.”
If your point is simply that it was possible, if things had gone differently, for the United States to have developed a different system, without slavery and without the racial supremacist ideology that went along with it, my response is basically to shrug and say, “Sure, I guess it was possible for that to happen, but it didn’t.”
This line of argument is quite common among people who are desperate to rescue a relentlessly positive vision of American history, in which every problematic thing that happened in the history of the United States is somehow an unfortunate aberration that doesn’t reflect the real history of the nation, which is understood to be pure and unadulterated liberty. Sorry, but our understanding of history needs to grapple with what actually occurred; counterfactual questions of what might have happened under different circumstances might be fun to play around with, but they’re not the main focus of the historian.
What? How is this at all relevant to anything? By this definition, basically every single thing that the colonists or the new revolutionary Americans of the late 18th century did “had no natural induction point” and “was imported directly from abroad.” The Enlightenment ideology of natural rights to life, liberty, and property? Imported from abroad. Republican ideas about the consent of the governed and the need for a virtuous citizenry? Imported from abroad.
You seem to be somehow suggesting that, because slavery came from somewhere else, the people who practiced it and perpetuated it and supported it were somehow the helpless victims of history, forced in some sort of Marxian determinism to live in a world that was not of their own creation, and therefore not to blame for their sins.This is pure sophistry, and it’s another example of the sort of relentless cheerleading that I mentioned above, by which anything bad that happens in America must be someone else’s fault, and not a “real” part of the history of the United States.
American history is a massive field, and no-one can know everything, so I could be wrong, but I think you might be mixing up your historical stories here. I have never come across a story of these alleged thousands of petitions to the Georgia legislature, nor any reference to a Georgia gag rule. The gag rule, as understood by historians of slavery, was something put in place in Congress (the House; the Senate rejected it) in the 1830s to prevent the discussion of anti-slavery petitions. I’m not sure what you’re referring to with the Georgia legislature here.
First of all, Georgia’s free white population after the Revolutionary war was just over 50,000, of which under 14,000 were free white males aged 16 or over (i.e., the type of person who sent petitions in those days). I sincerely doubt that this tiny population sent “thousands upon thousands of petitions” about anything to their legislature in the late 18th century.
Second, Georgia was, especially in proportion to its population, one of the loudest post-Revolutionary states in support of protecting the institution of slavery, and pushing back against anti-slavery sentiment. Historian Richard Newman, in his 1996 article “Prelude to the Gag Rule: Southern Reaction to Antislavery Petitions in the First Federal Congress” (Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 16, no. 4) notes the state’s persistent and dogged determination to prevent any discussion of anti-slavery issues in Congress, and also observes that, by the 1790s, “every state in the Union, with the predictable exceptions of Georgia and South Carolina, had abolition societies that sought to attack slavery politically” (p., 580). My emphasis.
“Had a whole bunch of really important things not happened, or happened differently, then other things probably would have also happened differently, and so we can say that the bad things that happened are not really the fault of the people who did them, because they thought things were going to happen differently.”
Look, I’m not someone who wants to tear down every statue of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington. I understand that these people were products of their time, and as a historian I believe that it is in our best interests to study them and try to grasp them in all of their complexity, in all of their inconsistency, in all of their brilliance, in all of their faulty humanity and inhumanity. But let’s not pretend that they were nothing more than twigs on the stream of history, buffeted this way and that by forces that they couldn’t understand and didn’t control, their impulses for true liberty and equality thwarted only by an unfortunate series of tragic circumstances for which no-one is really to blame, and which therefore is not really a true part of the American story.
Actually, a considerable portion of the Southern defenses of slavery made precisely that type of argument. James Henry Hammond, who I quoted in my previous post, argued that “American Slavery is not only not a sin, but especially commanded by God through Moses, and approved by Christ through his apostles.” Biblical arguments for slavery were ubiquitous, as were arguments that it was, in one way or another, a natural development and a positive good for “superior” whites to exercise a firm but (of course) benevolent control over what they saw as inferior and dependent people. For George Fitzhugh, slavery actually saved blacks, because they were so inferior that, if free, “they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition” by whites. Whatever we might say about the rise of a small, and growing, abolitionist movement in the North after the 1820s, the fact is that just about every white Southerner was taught, and believed, that the institution of slavery was morally and Biblically correct, economically essential, and racially justifiable.
From Britannica:
Roman law introduced the idea in the Lex Cornelia de Sicariis et Veneficis (the dictator Sulla’s enactment on murders and poisoners of 81 bce) that a slave was a person and thus that killing a slave could be a crime. That provision found its way into the Code of Justinian
see also Selections of Roman Slave Laws which contains laws from the second centur AD; for example -
(53) But nowadays neither Roman citizens nor any other people who are subject to the sovereignty of the Roman People have the right to treat their slaves with excessive and unreasonable brutality. For a Constitution of the Divine Emperor Antoninus orders anyone who kills his own slave without due reason to be brought to justice in exactly the same way as one who kills another’s slave. Excessively harsh treatment on the part of owners is also limited by a Constitution of the same Emperor; for when certain provincial governors asked him for a ruling regarding slaves who had taken refuge at the temples of gods or statues of emperors, he declared that owners were to be forced to sell their slaves if the cruelty of their behaviour appeared to be unbearable. In both cases he ruled justly, for we ought not to misuse our rights - that is the ground for interdicting those who waste their own property from administering it.
From “Freedom and Slavery in Roman Law”:
Slaves freed by Latins were Latin freedmen. There is a Junian Latins notable class of Latin freedmen called Junian Latin, Latini Juniani. Such were:
(I) Freedmen who had been emancipated informally, inter amicos, per
epistolam. Such informal emancipations were originally
unenforcible at law. Finally the prxtor decided in equity
that the master should not be allowed to revoke. i. e., claim his strict-law rights. This gave the anomaly of a man who could not be claimed as slave and yet was not free. The Junian statute established for such a special liberty. It applied also to a freedman emancipated by one who had
not a civil law title but a pretorian title. It applied to one emancipated under thirty years, to one abandoned because old and sick, to a slave who gave evidence in a case of ravishing.
Their children were born free, and they could acquire property for themselves. But the Junians were distinguished from others in this way: they died slaves in the eyes of the law. So they could have no universal successor either testamentary or intestate. Their goods were then taken up
by their previous master-not as successor but under the title of peculluhnz These masters were then liable for the Junian’s debts only up to the extent of the peculun.
My quick Google/perusal of the subject brings up several points - foremost, that the law was evolving, and for a society that lasted over half a millenia of course the rules changed significantly. As time went on slaves became less mere chattels like furniture and more like human beings.
I find it odd there’s a reference to “ravishing” and slaves who could therefore leave their master.
Also, remember mostly the deadly work til you die jobs like the proverbial salt mines were often for those enslaved due to crimes. The same argument applies to most Roman slaves as applies to plantations in the American south - slaves cost money, and as long as they were not treated so harshly that they died, they were a low-cost resource. The master only needed to feed them. The link I give refers to a (female) slave being sold for 420 denari so presumably a healthy slave was not in the category of “disposable”. The laws refer to killing a slave as a crime, although it fails to mention the typical punishment.
Slavery in any form is reprehensible. But remember that while xenophobia and chauvinism were common in every time and place, the peculiarity of dehumanizing Africans was new to the New World to justify slavery. Recall even as late as 1600, Shakespeare has two instances where a black suitor for Portia or husband to Desdemona is simply normal.
Would a non-learned Greek be accorded the same respect? No? Then it’s not ethno-cultural, it’s just classist.
Side note - Biblical arguments were also a key feature of Apartheid. They went a bit further, not only the whole Curse of Ham crap but also a revisionist view of White Afrikaners as the new “chosen people”.
ETA: Dang, I’m only now seeing the parallels between Mormonism and the whole Boer Great Trek stuff.
Not really. Othello was a ‘Moor’, that is to say a North African, not a sub-Saharan Black African. So was Portia’s suitor, the Prince of Morocco.
Shakespeare probably thought of them as being something like Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud, the Moorish ambassador of the Sultan of Morocco to Queen Elizabeth I, who had his portrait painted in England in 1600.
Yes, really.
Elizabethans didn’t make the same fine distinctions between groups that you do. Moors were black to them.
I mean, normal to a point. Portia makes two comments on the Prince of Morocco’s “complexion”:
If he have the condition of a saint and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me than wive me.
A gentle riddance.—Draw the curtains, go.—
Let all of his complexion choose me so.
Portia - beautiful, wise, desirable Portia - doesn’t like black people. This too is normal.
The word ‘black’ didn’t mean the same to Elizabethans as it does to us, as you point out.
It meant dark-complexioned, or even light-complexioned with black hair. It had nothing to do with race.
For example, a little later in the 1650s, King Charles II was described (in a Parliamentarian ‘wanted’ poster after the Battle of Worcester) as a ‘tall black man’. But by race he was 100% European.
A ‘tall black man’:
However, that doesn’t mean that Elizabethans didn’t make a distinction between Europeans / North Africans with a dark complexion or olive skin and sub-Saharan Blacks. They did. They called them Negros.
From the OED:
1555 ‘They are not accustomed to eate such meates as doo the Ethiopians or Negros.’ [Note the distinction between Ethiopians and Negros.]
1580 ‘In all Ginea the blacke people called Negros…’
1613 ‘There is amongst them an Iland of Negro’s inhabited with blacke people.’
In other words, ‘black’ referred to dark skin, ‘Negro’ referred to race.
I think you’re overreaching.
Well post-Elizabethan, and really talking about his hair colour - ref: “Tall, dark and handsome” - and therefore irrelevant.
I didn’t say they didn’t make a distinction between North Africans and Sub-Saharan Africans. I’m sure they did.
From that you seem to be assuming that they didn’t make a distinction between NAs and Europeans, or that they would group those 3 sets of humans into two sets, one {E+NA}, and one {SSA}. That is clearly not the case. They would group it the other way around {E} and {NA+SA}, with both the latter being “black” as a group.
That’s not a distinction, that’s an indication of two names for the same group. It would be like if I said “The Boers or Afrikaners”
Sure. But it referred to the skin of whole races. So yes, the Elizabethans would have several groups the considered “black people”, not just SSAs. This continued 'till fairly recently - look at Little Black Sambo.
I was not saying the Elizabethans consider Othello SSA. I was saying they considered him a member of that larger Other, the Black Race. PoC, to use the modern expression.
I think it’s really, really critical to note that this interpretation didn’t die at Appomattox. It was perpetuated for generations to come, in order to support the Jim Crow system. Historians, especially Southern historians, were significant drivers of an interpretation that made slave-owners seem benevolent and misunderstood patriarchs. Slavery, I was told–I was taught–wasn’t so bad because “Africans sold their own people”, “slavery was the norm in most of history”, “Africans were still better off than the ones left in Africa”, “slavery wasn’t profitable and slaveowners lost money but kept the institution because of tradition and a sense of obligation towards the slaves” and a million other strained justifications. These dropped out of favor in the Academy after WW2, but they lingered far, far longer in the popular conception of the era, in the mouths of coaches teaching US history, in the worn stories of old fucks talking about history, swapping the same stories back and forth, in the spiels of Docents on battlefields and historical building tours.
:: Shakespeare scholar hat on ::
People in early modern England used the word “Moor” to describe both North Africans and subsaharan Africans, sometimes making a distinction between “tawny Moors” and “black Moors.” We’re not told which one Othello is, but it’s certainly plausible, and even likely, that Shakespeare imagined him as a black Moor. We have a contemporary illustration of a scene from one of his other plays, Titus Andronicus, depicting another Moorish character, Aaron, as a Black man. Both Othello himself and other characters refer to him as “black.” (And yes, sometimes early modern English people used the word “black” to mean dark-haired or dark-complexioned, but sometimes they also used it in the racial sense – Samuel Pepys, for example, uses it to describe both native-born English people and people of African origin, and you just have to figure out which one he means on any given occasion from the context.)
At any rate, it is clear that Othello is meant to look visibly different from the other characters, that both he and the European characters register this difference, and while some of these characters, such as the Duke of Venice and Desdemona herself, think he’s a suitable partner for Desdemona anyway, others do not. Desdemona’s father objects strenuously to the match, and he doesn’t give any other reason for his objections besides his belief that Othello must have somehow bewitched Desdemona, or else it would be impossible “for nature so preposterously to err” – she couldn’t possibly have turned down all the pretty Venetian boys and “run … to the sooty bosom / Of such a thing as thou” if there weren’t magic involved! So there’s almost certainly meant to be a noticeable racial difference, and it isn’t a non-issue, although it’s also implied that Desdemona and the Duke are the ones who are on the right side here, and that this could have been a perfectly happy if unconventional marriage if Iago hadn’t started meddling.
Race (as we understand the term) is not the only possible inference.
Othello was almost certainly a Muslim who converted to Christianity, and was from a different culture. Foreign culture and dicey religion are ample grounds for Brabantio’s objections to his ‘otherness’.
[Moderating]
While there’s still plenty of good discussion going on here, I think we’ve moved well beyond the factual. Moving to Great Debates.