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Premodern Slavery

Ancient: Babylon Ancient: Greece Ancient: Rome Hebrew Slavery African slavery Egypt/Arab/ Islam China/India Brazil: Tupinamba. Modes of Acquisition Eligibility Sources of slaves Status in society Roles in Society Social Function Experience Religion. Premodern Slavery.

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Premodern Slavery

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  1. Ancient: Babylon Ancient: Greece Ancient: Rome Hebrew Slavery African slavery Egypt/Arab/ Islam China/India Brazil: Tupinamba Modes of Acquisition Eligibility Sources of slaves Status in society Roles in Society Social Function Experience Religion Premodern Slavery

  2. Hammurabi’s Code (18th C. BCE) • 14. If any one steal the minor son of another, he shall be put to death. • 15. If any one take a male or female slave of the court, or a male or female slave of a freed man, outside the city gates, he shall be put to death. • 16. If any one receive into his house a runaway male or female slave of the court, or of a freedman, and does not bring it out at the public proclamation of the major domus, the master of the house shall be put to death. • 17. If any one find runaway male or female slaves in the open country and bring them to their masters, the master of the slaves shall pay him two shekels of silver. • 18. If the slave will not give the name of the master, the finder shall bring him to the palace; a further investigation must follow, and the slave shall be returned to his master. • 19. If he hold the slaves in his house, and they are caught there, he shall be put to death. • 20. If the slave that he caught run away from him, then shall he swear to the owners of the slave, and he is free of all blame. • 117. If any one fail to meet a claim for debt, and sell himself, his wife, his son, and daughter for money or give them away to forced labor: they shall work for three years in the house of the man who bought them, or the proprietor, and in the fourth year they shall be set free. • 118. If he give a male or female slave away for forced labor, and the merchant sublease them, or sell them for money, no objection can be raised. • 119. If any one fail to meet a claim for debt, and he sell the maid servant who has borne him children, for money, the money which the merchant has paid shall be repaid to him by the owner of the slave and she shall be freed.

  3. Concepts • Captive • Chattel • Commodity • Bestialization/Domestication • Dehumanization • Coercion/Punishment • Dishonor

  4. Summary Premodern Slavery • Justifications: captives in a just war, judicial (penal or debt), social (voluntary self-sale, poverty) • Slaves can sometimes exercise administrative/social power/status (Babylon, Rome, Egypt) • Many forms of limited duration (set terms, manumission was frequent, though not necessarily full freedom) • Commodification: some, e.g. Saharan trade, but not large scale market (warfare was sporadic) • Enslavement: typically an “other,” tribe, ethnicity, religion, nationality, but often indistinguishable, i.e. need for branding and/or other identifiers, sometimes internal, e.g. Greek adoption of abandoned infants. • Assimilation: African kinship assimilation, subsequent generations in Mediterranean cultures. • Slave labor: domestic, craft production, civil works, managerial, agricultural (not intensive production for trade, e.g. Roman; slaves not obtained en mass for production)

  5. Aristotle: natural subordination Patterson: social death, cut off from history Davis: dehumanization and coercion Descriptors of Slavery

  6. Origins of Racism • Chicken or Egg ? • Subhuman (Genetics) • Blackness/Labor • Childlike (limited intelligence, knowledge) • Animalistic (instinctive and lascivious, not rational) • Bible: Noah’s Curse (sin) • Blackness (evil) • Darkness, Danger, Evil, the Devil, Chaos, Witches • Uncivilized (pagan, literacy, technology, custom)

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