Patterson Slavery 1977

Slavery
Author(s): Orlando Patterson

Source: Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 3 (1977), pp. 407-449
Published by: Annual Reviews
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Ann. Rev. Sociol. 1977. 3:407-49
Copyright (3 1977 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved
SLAVERY *10546
Orlando Patterson
Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
THE STUDY OF SLAVERY
The study of slavery dates back to the very beginnings of the modern world and the
rebirth of scholarship in the Renaissance. Indeed, it may even be said to have started
earlier, for as Iza Biezutnska Malowist has pointed out: "La discussion autour du
probleme de l'esclavage continuait incessamment durant le moyen-age et surtout au
debut de l'age modern 'a l'epoque de grandes conquetes espagnoles et portugaises
aux Ameriques et en Afrique." ("The discussion about the problem of slavery
continued incessantly during the Middle Ages and especially at the beginning of the
modern period of the grand Spanish and Portugese conquests of the Americas and
in Africa.") (Malowist 1968:161) Joseph Vogt found 96 major works written be-
tween the middle of the sixteenth century and the late eighteenth century, most of
them Latin dissertations, on the problem of ancient slavery and its moral aspects
(Vogt 1973:1-7).
The modern study of slavery as a social institution had two major sources: the
abolitionist movement, beginning in the last third of the eighteenth century, and the
Marxist theory of history. Both sources were to move in two substantively similar
directions, one concerned with the problems of ancient slavery, the other with the
problems of modern slavery. We therefore have four basic streams of slave studies
by the end of the nineteenth century (at which time a fifth, the sociological, to be
discussed later, commenced). These four streams are: (a) non-Marxian studies of
ancient slavery; (b) Marxian studies of ancient slavery; (c) non-Marxian studies of
modern slavery; and (d) Marxian studies of medieval and modern slavery, or more
specifically, the application of the Marxian method to regional studies.
Although seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works were often, in the manner
of the times, called "histories," they were mainly firsthand reports and travel notes
dressed up with a dash of historical sketches. As Goveia, speaking of the sixteenth-
century Caribbean, observes, popular works such as those of Fernando Colon, Peter
Martyr, Bartolome de la Casas, and A. de Herrera y Tordesillas became valuable
sources for later historians and "as authorities, their qualifications are by no means
negligible" (Goveia 1956:11). The seventeenth and early eighteenth century saw the
emergence of genuine histories that, significantly, coincided with the challenge to
407
408 PATTERSON
Spanish hegemony in the New World. "The foreign invasion, reflected first in the
interest of an international group of writers, now finds expression as well in the
marked diversification of their subject matter" (Goveia 1956:18).
Almost all these works discuss slavery in one form or another, but invariably
within the context of wider issues. The abolitionist controversy changed all this.
Rising above the numerous tracts, narratives, and other polemical forms written by
"gentlemen long resident" in the area, and others with less impeccable qualifications
were major works of scholarship and participative social commentaries on the
nature, origins, and consequences of slavery in the different regions of the New
World. Each area produced its own batch of superior works that continue to be read
today not only in their own right, but as contemporary secondary sources by modern
scholars (for assessments of which, see Goveia 1956: Chap. 3-4; Saignes 1969,
McPherson et al 1971: Pt. 1-3).
Non-Marxian Studies of Ancient Slavery

The renewed interest in ancient slavery was undoubtedly awakened by the debates
that were being waged about its modern forms. Studies on ancient slavery were
directed at the abolitionist controversy in two ways. One centered on the role of
slavery in Biblical and early Christian times, the other on its role in ancient Greece
and Rome. The first, which was highly polemical, sought to justify or condemn
slavery on scriptural grounds. Basically, it was argued by the pro-slavery camp (on
which, see for example Fletcher 1852; typical of the anti-slavery works were Lee
1855, Copley 1852, Blake 1861; for a general analysis of the religious anti-slavery
literature, see Davis 1966: Chap. 10-12; Davis 1975: Chap. 11) that since slavery
could be shown to be an institution that was sanctioned by the Old Testament, and
by Pauline theology and the patristic thinkers of the primitive church, it was a
morally acceptable practice for the modern world. Anti-slavery writers, on the other
hand, tried to show that primitive Christianity was, if not ideologically opposed to
slavery, historically and structurally opposed to it, that indeed, there was a marked
correlation between the institutionalization of Christianity and the decline of slav-
ery. Because the anti-slavery thesis was the more subtle and intellectually demand-
ing, it led to the development of a genuine historiography on this aspect of ancient
slavery [on which, see Allard (1876, 1884) for the classic culmination of this tradi-
tion; for one of the best works of this kind in English during the nineteenth century,
see Babington 1846; see, more recently, Imbert (1949)].
The world, however, was becoming an increasingly secular place. It was therefore
the second thrust of the debate over ancient slavery that began to carry more weight,
and received the attention of the best classical minds of the nineteenth century.
Here, however, the underlying polemical issues were far more complex. The basic
issue in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not, surprisingly,
whether or not ancient Greece and Rome were based on slavery. On the contrary,
there was considerable unanimity on this point. The debate centered instead on the
implication of this universally presumed dependence of the ancient world on slavery.
Interestingly, the first major scholarly foray in the debate took an extremely
critical view of ancient Greece. Reitemeier's influential work on the subject, pub-
SLAVERY 409
lished in 1789 (cited in Vogt 1965:97) was firmly rooted in the Enlightenment
tradition of freedom and equality and, as such, was harshly critical of ancient Greece
-not only on moral, but on cultural grounds-for its total reliance on slavery. As
Vogt has pointed out, however, so great was the reverence for ancient Greece among
the German neo-humanists that Reitemeier's critical stance was, even for those
enlightened times, rare (Vogt 1965:97). More typical, Vogt tells us, was the view of
von Humboldt, who, in an essay published in 1793, praised Greek education and
character and argued, approvingly, that the great civilizational breakthroughs of the
Greeks were made possible only by slavery. The implications for the modern world
were obvious, and the theme was soon picked up by numerous lesser scholars. The
thesis, however, was soon under attack, the earliest of the more capable critics being
the British classicist Blair (1833). However, it was a French scholar, Wallon, who,
in a prize-winning work (Wallon 1847) brought the skills and erudition of a major
classical scholar to the subject. It is a revealing commentary on the work he pro-
duced that over a century after it was published, Finley, currently the leading
classical student of slavery, could still write that, in spite of inaccuracies, the work
as a general reference "remains useful" (Finley 1960b.229).
In the late nineteenth century, as the polemical issues surrounding the study of
slavery waned, the debate among non-Marxian classicists took a new turn. From
a concern with the moral and cultural consequences of slavery, interest shifted to
the degree to which ancient society was actually dependent on slavery. To be sure,
the more sophisticated of the earlier scholars, especially Wallon, had already found
it necessary to defend the assumption that ancient society was based on slavery, but
they did so within an intellectual climate that was still willing to accept such a view
without much argument. It was this assumption that was now being attacked.
Meyer, in a brilliant work first published in 1898 (Meyer 1910:169-212), brought
the whole view into serious question. By 1909, when Zimmern wrote his interpretive
piece "Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labor?" (Zimmern 1909:1-19, 159-
76), there was little doubt within the community of classical scholars about the
answer, so radically had the climate of scholarly opinion shifted.
Little has changed in the terms of the debate since Meyer's time, except, of course,
the amount of data available and the methodological techniques. It is significant that
half a century after Zimmern's article, Finley was writing a paper with the same title
in a tone that was still controversial (Finley 1959, 1960b:53-72). The Meyer thesis
has been supported during the twentieth century by scholars such as Sargent (1924),
Jones (1952, 1955, 1956), Westermann (1955), and Starr (1958). On the opposing
side have been an equally distinguished array of scholars, both classicists and
historically oriented sociologists, including Weber (1924, 1970), Frank (1927), Heit-
land (1921), and currently, Finley (1959, 1960, 1964). At the moment, Finley and
his supporters seem to have carried the day. (See, also, among nonclassicists, Yeo
1952, Degler 1949.)
It is much too early, however, to pass any final judgment on the issue. Indeed,
it is doubtful whether the debate will or can ever be settled. In this regard, it should
be noted that the formidable school of German non-Marxian classicists headed by
Vogt have tended to steer clear of either position, Vogt's view being that the matter
410 PATTERSON
deserves far more research (Vogt 1965:109). This is undoubtedly true, but Vogt's
unobjectionable observation nonetheless evades what may well be the key issue,
namely, that the debate hinges not primarily on an empirical but on a theoretical
problem. As Degler (1959a), Finley (1959), Wu Ta-Kun (1956), and Tung Shu-yeh
(1956) have pointed out, the crucial question comes down to this: what exactly is
meant by the expression "based on?" That is, before we can answer any question
of the kind, "Was a particular society XI based on a specific institution Ye?" we
must first have a theory that makes meaningful the expression "X is based on E2"
It took classical scholarship over half a century to recognize this basic issue. What-
ever the limitations of Marxian classical scholarship-and there are many-Marx-
ists were at least aware of this theoretical problem from the very start.
Marxian Studies of Ancient Slavery

Marx and Engels never wrote a systematic theory of slave society, but there are
numerous detailed discussions of the subject throughout their works, in particular
the following ones: (Marx, 1971; Engels, 1962; see the well-indexed references to
slavery in Marx & Engels 1970:Vol. 1-3; see also Backhaus 1974). Slavery played
a major role in the cruder materialistic conception of history as one of the five crucial
stages in the emergence of socialism. Marx himself clearly saw the limitations of this
view; at most, it referred only to Western societies, and it is specifically with the
problem of slave society in mind that he developed the idea of the Asiatic mode of
production. Engels, under the unfortunate influence of Morgan, was to abandon this
important qualification and is largely responsible for the rigid, untenable periodiza-
tion theory, which holds that all societies must go through the five stages, including
slavery. Untenable as this position is in- the light of world history, Marx and Engels
must be credited for initiating the all-important discussion of just what is meant by
the term slave society. We return to this matter in a later section, since the modern
Marxian view is still the best theoretical statement on the subject.
Marxian theory seems to have had only minor impact during the nineteenth
century, the first two major works with a clear Marxist perspective appearing in
1874 (See Bucher 1874) and 1897 (See Cicotti 1910). While obviously not Marxian
in the sense of being derived from Marx, it should be noted that Cairnes's enor-
mously influential work on American slavery, published in 1862, was essentially a
materialistic conception of that slave society (Cairnes 1969). Cairnes's work is little
regarded today because ironically, like Marx and Engels, his data has been shown
to be wrong. We think, however, that Cairnes's purely theoretical views on the
subject are still extremely valuable, and indeed, it is this aspect of the work that was
most influential. The truth of the matter is that Cairnes had the right theory of slave
society, if by slave society one means, as classical Marxists do, a pure-type slave
system. His error was to assume that the US South was a pure-type slave society,
which as we now know, it clearly was not, although it was one in which slavery was
predominant. Cairnes's materialistic theory is more applicable to the pure-type slave
societies of the Caribbean; indeed, it was developed originally with these societies
in mind. The fact that he was misled by the available data on the US South into
thinking that it was a pure-type slave society is a reflection on his empirical skills,
SLAVERY 411
but not necessarily his theoretical insights. The work, at any rate, has clearly
influenced not only non-Marxian, but Marxian scholarship.
After the Russian revolution there was a disastrous development in Marxian
studies of ancient slavery. Stalin took a deadly interest in the subject and even
considered himself something of a specialist on it (Stalin 1938); the party line
reverted to the rigid schematization of the later Engels. There was one major
exception during the height of the Stalinist period, and that was Chayanov, who,
as part of his superb series of studies on the theory of peasant society, took the
Marxist theory of slave society to new heights of sophistication (Chayanov 1966).
He was, however, liquidated for his theoretical heresies. The work, fortunately, is
available in English and deserves far more attention than it presently receives. After
Stalin's death, Russian classicists abandoned the sterile schematism of the earlier
period and in 1960 the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR
announced plans for a large number of monographs on almost every aspect of the
subject in all the major regions of antiquity. A considerable number of studies have
since been published. Unfortunately, very few of them have been translated and as
such, they have remained inaccessible to most Western scholars. Reviews of this
literature, however (see Vittinghoff 1960, 1964; Kostevalov 1956; Graham 1967)
suggest that, although still not devoid of ideological bias, many of these works are
of a high order of scholarship. One member of this school did her early work in the
United States on slavery among the Indians of the northwest Pacific coast, and if
her work is anything to judge by (Averkieva 1941), it is clear that the outrageous
simplicities of the later Engels have long been abandoned as far as theorizing on
primitive slavery is concerned. The works of Lencman (1966) on Mycenaean and
Homeric Greece, and of Blavatskaja, Golubcova & Pavlovskaja (1972) on Hellenis-
tic slavery have been translated into German. They are both first-rate, though in no
way definitive, general works on these periods.
Outside of the Soviet Union, Marxian scholarship on ancient slavery has been no
less prolific. Walbank's influential work owes as much to Marx as it does to Weber.
(Walbank 1946) In most respects, Finley's work must be placed firmly in the
Marxian tradition. Indeed, he must be ranked along with Welskopf and Vittinghoff
as one of the leading Marxist theoreticians in this area, although there is an unfortu-
nate tendency for less impartial Marxist scholars to misunderstand his work (for a
good example of such misunderstanding, see the exchange between Finley and Oliva
in the following: Finley 1961; Oliva 1960, 1962). Important works in the Marxist
tradition have also been produced by Italian, French, and other continential, as well
as Oriental scholars. [For a useful compilation of representative Marxist writings
on ancient slavery, see the special issue of Recherches (1957).]
In recent years, a considerable amount of attention has been devoted to non-
European areas of antiquity. Dange's work on India was written very much in the
now wholly discredited Stalinist tradition (Dange 1949). Of far more value is Chana-
na's work (1960), based largely on an exhaustive analysis of the Pali texts. The work
also provides a useful review of the previous literature on slavery in both ancient
and modern India (1960: Chap. 1). Recent Soviet scholarship has made major contri-
butions to our understanding of slavery in ancient Mesopotamia. Happily, there is
412 PATTERSON
now available in English a representative collection of papers by the leading Soviet

scholars in this field (See Diakonoff 1969).
Over the past thirty years or so, Chinese Marxists have been locked in a some-
times cantankerous, often polemical, and always fascinating debate over the nature
and timing of slave society in China. Patterson, assisted by two Chinese-speaking
research assistants, has reviewed this literature. In the space available, we can only
hint at some of the more vigorously disputed issues. The debate in many respects
directly parallels that of its Soviet counterpart between the revolution and 1960,
except that it is far freer, and of a much higher quality of scholarship, in spite of
the polemics. Most Chinese Marxists hold the view that there was a period of
large-scale slave society in China; indeed, the periodization theory still seems to be
the official dogma. Chinese scholars differ sharply, however, over the timing of the
period of large-scale slavery, and over the use of the available evidence. The domi-
nant school, led by the enormously influential Kuo Mo-jo, holds that slavery
emerged during Yin and matured during the Chou period (see Kuo Mo-jo 1956a,b,c,
1957; Yang K'uan 1956; Li Ya-nung 1954). Several scholars strongly contest this
timing, most notably Jung Meng-yiian (1956), and Hsii Chung-shu (1956). They
take issue, in particular, with Kuo Mo-jo's use of the evidence of the tombs, espe-
cially those indicative of human sacrifice, as the basis for generalizing about the
degree and timing of slavery. Kuo Mo-jo's school argues that the absence or decline
of human sacrifice is indicative of the growing significance of slavery, since it implies
greater material need for human labor; the critics argue the opposing view, that
considerable evidence of human sacrifice is indicative of widespread slavery since
slavery is associated with a contempt for human life. A few also make the quite
sensible argument that the evidence may well be of little value as far as slavery is
concerned.
There are, within the Marxist camp, almost as many revisionists as there are
among the bourgeois historians on the subject in the United States. Thus, there are
those who argue that Yin was the period of large-scale slavery, while Chou was
feudalist (Yang K'uan 1956). Others place the period of slavery from Yin to the end
of Western Han (Chou Ku-cheng 1956, Tung Shu-yeh 1956), and still others claim
that the period of the Warring states was the late stage of slave society (Yeh Yii-hua
1956, Huang Tzu-t'ung 1956). Finally, there are those who argue that there was no
period of slavery at all! (Wu Ta-kun 1956, Wang Yii-che 1956, Yang Hsiang-kuei
1956). That the last view is openly advocated clearly indicates that the debate within
China, although dominated by Marxist rhetoric, is nonetheless an open one, quite
unlike the situation that existed in Russia prior to 1960.
Most scholars outside of China hold to the view that there was never any highly
developed system of slavery-no large-scale or pure-type slave system-although
few deny that there were periods in which the institution was of more than marginal
significance. (see Wilbur 1943, Pulleyblank 1958, Wang Yi-tung 1953) The same is
true of most Marxists outside the Soviet Union (see, for example, the statement of
the Czech sinologist Pakora 1963; also Welskopf 1957a,b). An important exception
is the Japanese Marxist historian Noboru (1962: 5-19, 100-13, 147-93), whose work
nonetheless has some of the best discussions of the legal aspects of slavery in China.
SLAVERY 413
Marx, it should be recalled, did not think that China went through a period of
slave society, and argued that the Asiatic mode of production was a system of "latent
slavery," or general slavery, which, as a result of the fact that everyone was poten-
tially a slave to the despot, never required specific slavery of the type developed in
classical Europe (on which, see Erdmann 1961 for a sympathetic treatment; for a
more critical assessment, see Wittfogel 1953). As in Stalinist Russia, this view has
not found official favor in China. Unlike post-revolutionary Russia, however, a
significant minority of Chinese scholars openly advocate this thesis (see, for exam-
ple, Wang, Ya-nan 1956, Hsii Chung-shu 1956).
Non-Marxian Studies on Modern Slavery

As one would expect, the great majority of works on slavery fall into the category
of non-Marxian works on modern slavery. In the United States there has literally
been an explosion of interest on the subject over the past 15 years or so. The first
reaction of serious scholars to the diatribes on slavery that surrounded the abolition-
ist controversy was a retreat into extreme particularism, although, to be sure, this
movement was also part of the general reaction against the groundless speculations
of nineteenth-century positivism as well as the "Teutonic" school of historians
(on which, see van Woodward 1968: Chap. 1). The Johns Hopkins school of slave
studies, however, simply went too far. It generated a great deal of facts, some of
them still useful, but in such a theoretical vacuum that Elkins's view that from the
point of American historiography there was simply no "conversation," no dialogue,
possible on the basis of these works, is not unfair (Elkins 1959:8). Phillips, the
conservative Southern historian, and his school were to dominate American slave
studies for most of the first half of the twentieth century (Phillips 1918, 1929). To
some extent he still does, for Stampp's work, which has survived the recent cliomet-
ric assault as the standard work on the subject, in no way changed the terms of the
debate over slavery. It merely replaced the conservative thesis of Phillips with a
liberal one (Stampp 1956).
US slave studies since the turn of the century may be summarized as a set of
variations around two themes: (a) the problem of the economic contribution and
profitability of slavery and (b) the problem of the socioeconomic stability and
cultural integrity of the world the slaveholders made. Phillips and his school felt that
the system was precapitalist, socially stable, structually well-integrated, morally
benign, and, for the slaves, culturally progressive. Stampp and his liberal supporters
argue that the system was capitalistic and profitable, but socially unstable, morally
perverse, and, for the slaves, a cultural nightmare. Fogel & Engerman (1974),
building on the works of Gray and Conrad & Meyer (1958), argue that the system
was capitalist and profitable, and, for precisely these reasons, socially stable and
culturally progressive for both masters and slaves. Genovese has simply returned
to the Phillips thesis, though dusting off its racist overtones, in arguing that the
system was precapitalist, but socially stable, for the slaves culturally progressive-
forming, indeed, the foundations of modern black ethnic culture-and wonderfully
integrated by means of its paternalistic ethos (Genovese 1965, 1971, 1974). Gutman
(1976) and Blasingame (1972) likewise argue for the social stability and moral
414 PATTERSON
integrity of the Black segment of the slave community, but express less enthusiasm
for the system as a whole; indeed, they strongly suggest that it was brutal, although
the two theses rest uneasily alongside each other.
Surprisingly, almost no contemporary historian argues for the fourth possible
variation, namely that the system was inefficient, precapitalist, and both socially and
culturally destructive. This, interestingly, was the view of the nineteenth-century
political economist Cairnes. With the triumph of the Phillips school, however, this
position was carried forth mainly by Black historians, especially Frazier (1939).
Modern Black historians, however, in their search for continuity and stability, have
tended to reject the "pathological" and "catastrophic" interpretations of Frazier,
especially after the controversy surrounding its revival by Moynihan (Rainwater &
Yancey 1967; see also, Patterson 1971).
Apart from five other special areas, the above summarizes the main themes of
American slave studies. As can be seen, there has really been little that is new or
theoretically exciting about this historiography. And yet, within recent years there
has been astonishing commotion surrounding these studies, attended by inflated talk
about major breakthroughs. How do we explain this discrepancy? For one thing,
it should be noted that the study of slavery is still an emotionally charged issue in
the United States (on which, see Elkins 1975). A good deal of the attention these
works have received has been due to their political uses or abuses by readers, mainly
nonacademic. Second, while there have been advances in the study of American
slavery, these advances have been largely restricted to methodological problems. It
is still debatable whether the cliometricians have revolutionized the techniques of
studying slavery. What remains incontestible is that they have added little to our
understanding of the major theoretical issues surrounding the institution of slavery,
not only because of their use of what Gutman calls "an archaic historical model"
(1975:165-76), but more important, because of a general lack of concern for such
theoretical issues. The debate has been essentially one about facts (though politically
explosive ones) and techniques (on which, see David & Temin 1974; Haskell 1974,
1975; Wright 1974; Fogel & Engerman 1976, 1977; Furet & Fogel 1974; David et
al 1976; Elkins 1975). Not once has any of the critics or defenders of the cliometri-
cians stopped to ask themselves just what are the implications of their work beyond
the purely parochial issues that fascinate journalists and academicians alike. Indeed,
it is doubtful whether cliometric studies have even contributed very much to the
understanding of the dynamics of US slavery, for the dimension of time is woefully
absent from their works. The works of Blasingame (1972), Genovese (1974) (on
which we have more to say shortly), and Gutman (1976) have returned, in a more
sophisticated way, to the neglected area of slave life and culture, but the return is
hardly revolutionary, since they are merely elaborations of the pioneer work done
by the group of scholars centered on the Association for the Study of Negro Life
and History, (on which, see in particular Woodson 1931, Wesley 1927, Franklin
1947). Apart from Gutman (1976) and the very capable yet unfairly neglected work
of Wood (1974), the temporal element is equally absent from their works (on the
problem of historicity, see Ianni 1974); and in all of them there is little concern with
any of the crucial institutional and theoretical issues posed by slavery. Gutman has
SLAVERY 415
been honest enough to admit that his work is not strictly a history of slavery and
that he has no special concern with the study of the institution. His work is, rather,
a study in American rural history. Much the same can be said for most of the recent
works on slavery.
There are, however, some important exceptions. First, there is the issue of the
relationship between slavery, racism, and the origins of slavery. This might easily
have been treated in a purely parochial way, but fortunately, beginning with the
pathbreaking work of Handlin & Handlin (1950) and continuing through the capa-
ble hands of Degler (1959) and Jordan (1962, 1968) and more recently, Frederickson
(1971), the fascinating institutional and comparative aspects of the problem of the
legal and attitudinal origins of slavery have been sensitively explored. For the issue
of the ethnic and racial differences between masters and slaves, as well as the attitude
of masters toward slaves, is one that is crucial in understanding slavery as an
institution. We owe much to these scholars for their clarification of the problem,
although a great deal is still to be done before the matter can be considered settled
(cf for the ancient world Schlaifer 1960, Snowden 1970, Diller 1937, Frank 1916,
Gordon 1960, Davis 1966: Chap. 3).
The psychology of slavery is another important issue of comparative and theoreti-
cal interest. American slave studies owe a great deal to Elkins for his introduction
of the issue (Elkins 1959). Unfortunately, however, much as we may admire the
work's conception, it must be agreed that this is one of those cases where the right
question was given a largely wrong answer. To some extent Elkins was trapped into
error by the very parochialism he deplored in his colleagues. In his eagerness to
isolate what was peculiar to the American slave personality, he, on the one hand,
failed to see that the "Sambo" personality syndrome he identified was partially true
of all slaves in all times, and, on the other hand, adopted the all-too-American liberal
tendency to see the American Black experience as somehow worse than that of other
areas. In doing so, he embraced the erroneous thesis and pseudo-comparative ideal-
ism of Frank Tannenbaum (for the major criticisms, see Lane 1971).
The fact that Elkins fell prey to the spurious Tannenbaum thesis betrays a
surprising ignorance on his part of the comparative data on slavery outside of the
Western Hemisphere, not to mention his biased interpretation of the data on the
Americas. Had he taken the trouble to glance at the literature on slavery in classical
antiquity, he would have found a rich body of secondary works on the treatment
of slave personality among ancient authors that has a direct (though negative)
bearing on his thesis. "Sambo," he would have found, existed, at least in the mind
of the master class, wherever slavery and indeed, all other forms of class oppression,
existed (see, for example, Ehrenberg 1962: Chap. 7; Spranger 1960). (Note: While
there are obvious difficulties in generalizing from literary evidence, such data are no
less reliable than those used by Elkins, and a good case can be made for the view
that in the study of stereotype they are more useful.)
It is typical of the theoretical shallowness and political oversensitivity of Ameri-
can slave studies that the debate over the psychology of slavery became entangled
with another, largely unrelated issue, the problem of slave revolts. To assume that
the Elkins thesis-whether right or wrong-has any bearing on the problem of slave
416 PATTERSON
revolts, as all of Elkins's critics except Genovese does, is to assume along with Elkins
a theory of revolt (essentially, that modal personality patterns are the prime explana-
tory factors), which few students of rebellion take seriously, including those who
attribute causal significance to psychological variables (on which, see Tilly 1970,
Skocpol 1976). Genovese goes halfway in recognizing this common erroneous as-
sumption of Elkins and his critics (Genovese 1968: Chap. 5) in noting that many
slave societies with a tradition of revolt could easily be shown to have had a "Sambo
personality" (whatever this means); but having done so, Genovese immediately
reveals his own lack of understanding of the structural factors that explain revolts
by appealing to the conservative political mysticism of Arendt as a possible lead in
accounting for such resistance (Genovese 1968:94). Apart from the work of Kilson
(1964), there is no satisfactory explanation of slave rebellion (or its absence) in the
United States, although there are numerous monographs, some of them competently
written, on specific revolts (for a useful review of the literature and bibliography,
see McPherson et al 1972:60-64).
This takes us to the third area of American slave studies outside of the mainstream
discussed above: the comparison of American and Latin American slave systems.
It is often claimed, even by his critics, that Tannenbaum made a major contribution
to American slave studies by introducing the comparative method to such studies,
thereby lifting it out of its traditional parochialism (Tannenbaum 1946). We can
offer no such compliment. The work, it is now clear, had a disastrous effect on
American scholarship (see, for example, Klein 1967), for it simply generated a long,
confused, and unproductive detour in what eventually turned out to be an academic
red herring. (For reviews of the debate, see Davis 1966:22343, 1968; Genovese
1968: Chap. 2) It was not even an original red herring, for, as we show shortly, he
simply borrowed the idea from Latin American romantic nationalist historians.
Genovese (1968: Chap. 7) has tried with great ingenuity, but, we think, little success
to rescue some part of this effort. The assessment of the relative severity of slave
systems is, we think, a minor issue. The more substantial question of whether one
system offered greater opportunities for mobility among the slave population than
another is a meaningful question, but it was phrased very badly by Tannenbaum:
his comparison of the whole of Latin America and the English-speaking slave
systems was methodologically untenable in view of the far greater within-group
structural variance than between-group variance in the regions compared; and his
reliance on cultural variables to explain cultural differences (assuming for the mo-
ment that there were such differences) was riddled with one of the most fatal flaws
of such idealistic explanations: tautology. Subsequent critical studies have now
thoroughly discredited the whole unfortunate episode (see Knight 1970, Degler
1970, 1971, Pescatello 1975, Rout 1976, Stein 1957, Boxer 1962).
A fourth area outside of the mainstream that has received much attention among
the Americans is the study of the slave trade, beginning with the pathbreaking work
of DuBois (DuBois 1896). By its very nature, this is not a subject that can be treated
parochially. Curtin's (1969) comprehensive work on the subject is a useful review
and assessment of the state of the literature. It is a point of departure, not a
conclusion, as some readers seem to think. The work has generated many useful
SLAVERY 417
original contributions on the subject in recent years (see, in particular, Anstey 1975,
LeVeen 1975, Inikori 1975, and other unpublished papers presented to the MSSB
conference on the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Colby College,
August 20-22, 1975), although one unfortunate aspect of recent studies has been
an undue emphasis on the problem of profitability. We hope there will be a return
to other aspects of the problem, especially those facets of the tribal provenance of
the slaves, and of sociocultural survivals and discontinuities, issues on which Her-
skovits's early work is still valuable. (Herskovits 1941; more recently, Mintz & Price
1976).
Finally, there is a substantial body of works concerned with the abolition contro-
versy and its role in the abolition of slavery (see McPherson et al 1971:78-108). Most
of these works are quite pedestrian, concerning themselves mainly with the move-
ment of ideas, or worse, simply assuming that the movement in ideas directly
influenced the abolition of the institution. The works of D. Davis are without doubt
the major contributions to this area. The first work (Davis 1966) posed some
potentially interesting questions, but the sequel is something of an anticlimax (Davis
1975). The basic problem of Davis's works, as far as the historiography of slavery
is concerned, is that they are not strictly books about slavery at all, but about the
idea of slavery and the intellectual history surrounding the institution. As he writes
in the second major volume: " . . . it is an analysis of the historical contexts and
consequences of a change in moral perception within the white enslaving culture and
also of some of the ways in which black responses ... impinged on and altered white
perception of the problem of slavery" (Davis 1975:11). This is all very interesting
in itself, but in spite of severe criticism on the matter after the first work (see, in
particular, Finley 1969), Davis in the sequel adamantly refused to take up the issue
of relating ideas to reality.
Slave studies in other parts of the New World (overwhelmingly non-Marxian)
reflect the special problems of these areas as well as the social biases of the historians
involved. In Latin America, romantic nationalism dominated modern slave studies
for a long time, typified by the works of Freyre (Freyre 1956, 1963). Freyre's
assimilationist thesis was, of course, the local counterpart and precursor of the
Tannenbaum argument. Later scholars have rejected the "myth of the friendly
master," exploring instead more meaningful problems. Apart from general works
delineating the true nature of Latin American slavery either on a society-wide basis
or with respect to specific localities within wider national boundaries, a considerable
number of works have appeared dealing with specific issues that the Latin American
data nicely illuminate, issues such as the problem of manumission and the relation-
ship between slavery and race relations (Degler 1971, Mbrner 1970). Latin Ameri-
can scholars have also paid special attention to the problem of the social and cultural
patterns of the slaves and the matter of cultural survival (see, in particular, Bastide
1972; for an assessment of this literature, see Bastide 1974). Considerable attention
has also been devoted to the problems of the slave trade and abolition. General
studies of slavery are now available for almost every Latin American society (for
recent reviews of the literature, see Mbrner 1969, Bowser 1972, Graham 1970). Not
surprisingly, comprehensive studies examining the institution of slavery in Latin
418 PATTERSON
America have now begun to appear, drawing upon the rich and growing mono-
graphic literature (see, in particular, Mellafe 1973, Rout 1976: Pt. 1; and for 2 useful
collections of papers, see Pescatello 1975, Engerman & Genovese 1975).
One conclusion that has emerged clearly from both the monographic and general
literature is that the institution varied considerably both in cultural and structural
terms throughout Latin America in spite of the outward cultural uniformity of the
slave-holding group. At one end of the spectrum the institution was essentially of
the household type and of little or no significance economically (e.g. Hispanic
Jamaica, Puerto Rico); at the other end it was primarily of the chattel variety and
played a dominant role (e.g. Brazil). Few scholars have as yet isolated the crucial
variables accounting for these differences.
The earliest phase of twentieth-century historical scholarship on the Caribbean
was dominated by what Fannon once called "seller histories," a concern with the
constitutional and political aspects of these societies and their relationship to the
metropolitan center. In general, slavery was treated simply as one aspect of these
wider concerns and, with the major exception of Gardner's work (Gardner 1873),
the life of the slaves was largely neglected. The development of a local historiogra-
phy and, just as important, the entry of certain American ethno-historians into the
field, most notably Herskovits, Leyburn (1941), and Mintz, not only changed the
focus of historical writing in the area, but also its method. The study of slavery was
the major beneficiary of this development. Not only have many sound general works
on particular islands or groups of islands appeared (see, for example, Goveia 1965,
Dunn 1972, Debien 1974), there is a growing and often contentious literature on
selected aspects of slave society, among the more important contributions being the
study of demographic problems of the slave family (Higman 1973, 1975, 1976); the
problem of the nature and survival of African culture among the slaves (Patterson,
1968, Braithwaite 1971); rebellions and maronnage (Price 1973); as well as the
problems of emancipation and the slave trade (for a recent review of the literature
and the major research problems of the future, see Engerman 1976a,b). The study
of slavery in the Caribbean differs from its American counterpart in three crucial
respects: one is the fact that it is not plagued with political irrelevances; this is not
to say that Caribbean intellectuals do not take a profound interest in the subject.
The second is the greater role of sociology and anthropology in Caribbean slave
studies compared with such works in the United States. To these one should add
a third difference, the international nature of Caribbean slave studies. Specialists on
the area come from all over Europe and the Americas, in addition to native scholars.
It is rare to find a student of American slavery who is not an American. These
differences account for the far greater sophistication of Caribbean slave studies, in
spite of the infinitely greater financial resources of the Americanists. Thus, students
of Caribbean slavery pioneered the interdisciplinary approach to the problem. There
are still few works in American slave studies that compare favorably with, say,
Mintz's superb interdisciplinary studies on marketing and his comparative analyses
of different Caribbean societies (Mintz 1969, 1974; Mintz & Hall 1960). The recent
spate of studies on the social structure of the American slave community came over
a decade after the works of Smith (1953, 1954), Goveia (1965), and Patterson (1967),
SLAVERY 419
and American scholars have begun to examine in depth the issues raised by Williams
(to be considered under another head) fully thirty years after Williams's masterpiece
was published.
Not surprisingly, the Caribbean continues to attract some of the best interdiscipli-
nary minds from the mainland. Following in the tradition of Pitman (1917), Ragatz
(1928), Mintz (1974), and Herskovits (1966), there are now the works of Sheridan
(1974); Sio, an elegant and painstaking historical sociologist whose long-awaited
work on the free coloreds should be a major contribution to the literature, (see Sio
1976 for a preliminary statement) of Craton, the British-Canadian scholar (1974,
Craton & Walvin 1970), and of the Australian Higman (1976). Just as exciting is
the apparent decision of Engerman to shift a major part of the focus of his research
to the Caribbean area: Engerman should benefit from the more theoretically alert
and interdisciplinary climate, while students of the area should find his formidable
technical skills at least challenging. The study of slavery in the Dutch and Danish
Caribbean has been the major lacuna in this area, but recent work by De Groot
(1976), Lamur (1976), van den Boogaart & Emmer (1976); Hall (1976), Green-
Pederson (1975), and Emmer (1975) are rapidly closing the gap. [For an assessment
of the archival sources and major secondary works on Dutch Caribbean slavery, see
van Opstall (1976).] These developments suggest an exciting future for Caribbean
slave studies.
The study of slavery in medieval and early modern Europe was for a long time
one of the most neglected areas of European historiography. A spate of recent works
are attempting to correct this situation. Verlinden's major work (1955) still domi-
nates this field, but a number of other significant works have added to our knowledge
of the subject (see, for example, Origo 1955, Pike 1966, King 1972: Chap. 6). There
are three major issues here: first, the problem of the decline of slavery and the rise
of serfdom. This has received the most thorough treatment of the three basic issues
(see Bloch 1960, Finley 1969, Rostovtzeff 1926, Andreev 1967). Second, there is the
extent and distribution of slavery in Europe during this period. Third, there is the
degree to which slavery in medieval and early modern Europe forged an historical
link between ancient and modern slavery. In purely descriptive terms, the prevailing
view that slavery survived to its greatest degree in the Latin rim of Europe seems
premature and questionable. Premature because the field still remains largely unex-
plored, and questionable because available works on Britain suggest that as a social
and economic institution, slavery might well have been most developed in the
western states of the British Heptarchy. Indeed, Duby argues that during the tenth
century, slavery was practiced "probably nowhere more actively than on the less
advanced fringes close to pagan lands, such as England and Germania" (Duby
1968:37). The Domesday Book data clearly suggests that during the eleventh cen-
tury, at least 9% of the total counted population were slaves, and that in significant
parts of western England, as much as 20% of the population were members of this
unfree category (Loyn 1962:86-89, 351-52; Postan 1954; Bronlow 1892). Legal and
other evidence, as yet unexplored, also suggests that the institution was by no means
negligible among the island Celts. Piggott is certainly wrong in claiming that the
institution did not exist among them (1973:227). We know for a fact that there was
420 PATTERSON
a thriving slave trade among the Welsh (Bromberg 1942, Charles 1934) and that the
"caeth" or slave class played an important role in their domestic economy (Lloyd
1939:292-93). The literary and legal sources on medieval Ireland are more abundant
but less direct and often very tantalizing. The significance of the fact that the female
slave was a unit of currency will be immediately apparent to anyone acquainted with
the comparative data on slavery in tribal societies (see, for example, Hulstaert
1938:144-47). The cumulative weight of the evidence strongly suggests that the Irish
had a highly developed system of female slavery, very similar in nature and function
to the kind of institution that exists among modern-day primitive tribes such as the
Cubeo (Goldman 1963) and the Trumai Indians of South America (Murphy 1955).
The existence of female slavery of a high order is clearly implied in certain of the
statements in the Cain Adomnain, to cite but one telling example; otherwise, certain
passages simply make no sense, at least not in sociological terms (Ryan 1936:21-76).
It should be noted, however, that for many areas of Germanic Europe (on which,
see Wergeland 1916), we can hope for nothing more than tantalizing glimpses of
the institution, given the poor data available. It is doubtful, for example, whether
there is a great deal more to be learned about slavery in Iceland than what can be
gleaned from the Eddic poems, sagas, and laws, although one strongly suspects that
the institution was more developed there than these sources suggest (Williams
1927). It seems highly probable that the enormous labor shortages created in Nor-
way as a result of the settlement of Iceland were met by massive importation of
slaves (Gjerset 1924).
Third, there is the problem of establishing the degree to which slavery in the
Americas was largely a continuation of a tradition surviving through the middle
ages. Verlinden is strongly of the opinion that there was such continuity (Verlinden
1949, 1964), a thesis that Davis somewhat uncritically accepts (1966: Chap. 2). As
Bishko has pointed out, however, Verlinden's work, while "indispensable," is
"clearly not definitive" (Bishko 1957:91-92). Although Verlinden demonstrates
conclusively that slavery was on the rise in Iberia after 1300, his account of slavery
in this region during the crucial late medieval period, which is of the greatest interest
to Ibero-Americanists, is based largely on secondary sources, "which gives these
chapters a disappointingly familiar and superficial character, and leaves unanswered
many questions in the two areas ofmost direct influence upon the Indies" (Bishko:93,
emphasis added). There is, furthermore, a purely methodological problem of which
both Verlinden and Davis seem unaware: that the simple existence of slavery in
Iberia during the period when the institution was being introduced in the Americas
does not, of itself, prove that there was continuity. The problem of cultural transmis-
sion is an extremely thorny issue in comparative anthropology and history. One
cannot-as most historians are prone to do-simply assume that a migratory group
will carry the aboriginal model of its institutions with it to the new setting. This is
something to be demonstrated, not assumed. A cultural correspondence does not
necessarily imply a continuity: it was the failure to recognize this simple fallacy that
led to the collapse of the entire school of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
diffusionists. We lack the space to explain here the theoretical reasons that make
the diffusionist assumption of Verlinden and Davis unacceptable, but we can hint
SLAVERY 421
at one or two of the factors involved: first, a migratory group is not necessarily a
representative sample of its parent population: indeed, often it is not (see Eisenstadt
1954). This immediately implies that there is no reason to assume a priori that the
Iberians who became masters in the Americas were acquainted, at least in any depth,
with the institution in the parent society. Second, even if it can be shown that there
was such acquaintance with the institution in the parent society, it still cannot be
assumed that the parent institution was replicated in the new setting, for the behav-
ior of a migrant group is more a function of the exigencies of its new setting than
of its aboriginal culture. To give a telling and well-known example: an Englishman
or Dutchman may espouse genuinely liberal views and uphold liberal laws in his
parent society with respect to the immigrant Black population there, yet become a
fanatical white supremacist shortly after migrating to South Africa. To conclude,
then, the problem of the continuity of slavery between the Old and the New World
is by no means a closed issue, but is still one very much open to debate and a
considerable amount of new scholarship.
"Throughout the whole of Islamic history", writes Brunschvig, "down to the
nineteenth century, slavery has always been an institution tenacious of life and
deeply rooted in custom" (1960: Vol. 1). Although there have been a considerable
number of studies on the Ancient Near East (Mendelsohn 1942, 1949; Siegel 1947;
Urbach 1964; Andre 1892; Diakonoff 1969; Bakir 1952; Gelb 1973; Klengel 1963),
and a fair body of scholarship on the post-Islamic period of this region, much still
remains to be done. There is no first-rate general study of the institution throughout
the Islamic world. More problematic for the student of comparative slavery, how-
ever, is the fact that almost all available studies, whether by Europeans or Arabs,
strongly emphasize the legalistic and cultural attributes of the institution. There
have been few sophisticated works exploring the socioeconomic dimensions of the
institution. This is vitally needed because, while the institution existed in every
corner of the Islamic world and had remarkable legal and religiocultural uniformity,
its structural significance varied sharply from one region to the next. It was, for
example, of major social, military, and economic significance in Medieval Iraq;
indeed, in lower Mesopotamia it attained Brazilian proportions (Popovic 1965).
And the present author, if not many others, is strongly of the opinion that it attained
an economic significance among the Khanates of Central Asia greater than almost
all areas of Spanish America (see, for example, Vamberg 1863, Becker 1968). In
other areas its economic significance was minor, though its political, military, and
cultural role was vital. Indeed, the truly fascinating thing about slavery in the
Islamic world is the fact that there was no necessary congruence between its eco-
nomic significance and its role in other areas of the civilization as we move from
one society to the next (on which, see Haas 1942, Forand 1962). What this suggests
is that the field is a gold mine of information for the student of comparative slavery.
To take one of the more fascinating examples, there is the institution of the Janissar-
ies and its supportive structure, the devshirme. Their origin and status in law and
society still remain, in Repp's words, a "vexed" problem (Repp 1968:137). A good
part of this vexation, we think, might be resolved through a more comparative
treatment of the subject (on which, see Palmer 1935, Vryonis 1956, Popoulia 1963,
422 PATTERSON
Menage 1966). Yet, as with other areas of Islamic slavery, it has been precisely the
comparative study of the institution that has been neglected in the essentially
legalistic and cultural studies of those who currently work in the area (see, however,
Lewis 1971:38-89, 1976; Levy 1957 is dated but still useful).
Sub-Saharan Africa ranks second only to the New World in the intensity and
range of modern scholarship on the institution of slavery. There have been three
kinds of studies: (a) the analysis of the external slave trade, (b) studies of the impact
of the external slave trade on African society and on indigenous African slavery,
and (c) the study of indigenous African slavery. The overwhelming majority of
works on the external slave trade have concentrated on the transatlantic movement
of Blacks from Africa to the New World slave societies. As such, such studies are
really an extension of the study of slavery in the Americas. Curtin's work, and that
of his critics, are of relevance to students on both sides of the Atlantic. From the
African perspective, however, the increasing focus on economic issues (especially
such matters as the profitability of the trade) decreases the relevance of such works,
since the main interest of Africanists is understandably on the social and cultural
impact of the trade on African society. Furthermore, Africanists are just as inter-
ested in the trans-Saharan external slave trade, which has relatively little bearing
on the interests of slave studies in the Americas. Only recently has this other trade
begun to receive the attention it deserves. And the third type of external slave trade
from Africa has been almost completely neglected: that of the movement of Africans
across the Indian Ocean, one that, from preliminary studies, was far more important
than was traditionally thought (see Gemery & Hogendorn 1974, Fyfe 1976, Miller
1976, Harris 1971).
The second cluster of African slave studies focuses on a major controversy re-
cently reviewed in an excellent paper by Fage (1969). On the one hand, there is the
Rodney (1966) thesis that slavery in pre-European West Africa was of minor
significance and grew in importance only with the coming of the Europeans whose
trading activities devastated the traditional cultures of the Upper Guinea area; on
the other hand, there is the view, first explicitly articulated by Mungo Park (largely
under the influence of the Jamaican pro-slavery planter historian Bryan Edwards)
that slavery was already well-developed in West Africa and was simply adapted to
the needs of the European traders. There is also the view that the Atlantic slave trade
had only a marginal impact on the development of West African societies (see, in
particular, Mason 1969). Fage himself presents a balanced middle view on the
subject, but it is highly unlikely that his will be the last word.
Turning to East Africa, no one disputes the view that slavery, especially of the
chattel variety, was entirely the product of Arab trading in the area. Recent work
has begun to reveal the highly developed state of Arab plantation slave systems in
this region. Cooper's work must be singled out as a major contribution to this still
largely unexplored area of the subject (Cooper 1977; see also Landen 1967).
The study of domestic African slavery has only recently become the subject of
full-length research efforts. With the exception of Herskovits (1938), Rattray (1927),
Lugard (1933), Smith (1954, 1955), and Harris (1942), study of the subject was
restricted to traditional ethnographic works in which the institution was treated
SLAVERY 423
merely as one minor aspect of larger studies concerned with different issues. Meillas-
soux was not far wrong in observing recently that "Si la traite europeenne a ete
l'objet nombreuses etudes, l'esclavage pratique par les societes africaines reste un
champ si peu prospecte de 1'ethnologie qu'on a pu douter de son existence" ("If the
European trade was the object of numerous studies, slavery practiced by the African
societies remained a field so little viewed by ethnology that one could doubt its
existence") (1975:11). In addition to the work of Meillassoux and his group, a
growing number of first-class studies on traditional African slavery have begun to
appear (Ayandele 1967, Polanyi 1966, Grace 1975, Oroge 1971, Mason 1973, Klein
1975, Miers & Kopytoff 1977, Trans-Action 1967. Less scholarly, but useful are
Fisher & Fisher 1971 and Derrick 1975). From the sociological point of view, many
of these works are far more sophisticated in terms of the questions they have posed
and the methods employed in answering them. They are also, happily, devoid of the
undercurrent of bitterness that one sometimes finds in the historical literature.
Moving to southeast Asia, the area where the study of slavery is least developed,
although there exists one excellent and comprehensive, though greatly neglected
work on slavery and related forms of bondage (See Lasker 1950). This, however,
is no reflection of the actual incidence and significance of the institution in the area.
We know that the institution was highly developed among many of the advanced
pre-industrial states in the region. To cite a few examples, the institution began to
grow in significance in Thailand after the middle of the seventeenth century and by
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, estimates place the proportion of
slaves in the total population at between 25 and 33% (Lasker 1950:56-59, Append.
A). Slavery was also highly developed in northern Burma, especially in the Triangu-
lar Plateau and Hukawng valley, where as late as the 1920s about one third of the
total population were genuine slaves (i.e. not just the more common debt-slaves)
(League of Nations, 6th Assembly 1925). The Batak of Sumatra also had a highly
developed and peculiar form of slavery derived largely from its rapacious system of
debt bondage (See Wilken 1893:Chap. 18). While most of the tribal peoples prac-
ticed slavery on a minor scale or tended to engage mainly in debt-slavery, it is
nonetheless in this region that we find in one tribe perhaps the most highly developed
system of slavery among all primitive peoples: among certain of the Toradja tribes,
fully 50% of the entire population were slaves. In view of the fact that neighboring
tribes of the same ethnic and cultural patterns had no slaves, the situation presents
the student of comparative slave systems with an excellent case study. Adriani &
Kruijt (1912:137-15 1), by comparing the slaveholding ToLage with the neighboring
non-slaving ToPebato, were able to formulate several fascinating hypotheses con-
cerning the effects of slavery on the economy, social structure, and character of
primitive peoples, hypotheses that are highly suggestive with respect to the study
of the institution among more advanced peoples.
Going much further south and east, we find a highly developed system of slavery
among the Maori that could also reward closer study. The observations of Firth
(1959) on the subject strongly suggest some interesting lines of inquiry concerning
the relationship between slavery, polygamy, and chiefly, power (cf Hulstaert on this
relationship among the Nkundo).
424 PATTERSON
One feature of the data on bondage among the more primitive peoples of the area
should be of great interest to classicists, especially those concerned with the still-
mystifying aspects of Spartan helotage. It is the fact that there are several well-
developed systems of communal bondage that can only be called helotage (rather
than slavery, as many of the original sources do). A study of the origins and nature
of these slave villages would certainly throw much light, in a comparative way, on
certain structural features of Spartan helotry. The Yaps, among whom 20% of the
population were helots, would seem to be a particularly fertile ground for such
comparative work (for the best ethnography of the Yaps, see Salesius 1906).
Finally, although the European imperial powers relied on forms of bondage other
than slavery for their labor in this part of the world, there was one major exception
that would certainly bear study. These are the Banda islands, a group of the Spice
Islands south of Ceram. We find here a highly developed system of large-scale
plantation slavery between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries with features
almost identical to those of eighteenth-century Caribbean slave societies (Lasker
1950:33-34; Ponder 1944:112-13).
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of southeast Asia for the student of slavery
is that it presents a data base that is immensely varied both structurally and cultur-
ally, ranging, on the one hand, from the most primitive to the most advanced
preindustrial systems, and on the other hand, from preliterate religious and legal
systems to those of Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity.
The institution of slavery was, in general, of minor significance among the vast
majority of Far Eastern and East Central Asian peoples and, as such, has not
attracted much scholarly attention except, of course, in Japan, which we discuss
later. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, some traditional peoples, such as
the Gilyak of Siberia, had a small, domestic slave class, comprised mainly of women
(Schrenck 1881-1895:646-52). Slavery was of some significance among the ancient
Manchurian and Mongolian states; in more recent times a slave class of moderate
significance developed among the Buryats of Outer Mongolia, who enslaved the
Tungusic and Turkish peoples, especially during the period of transformation to an
agricultural economy (Washington State University 1956:272-73, 1338; Lattimore
1929:180). Ma Ho-t'ien writes that in several of the Khans of Mongolia, slaves
comprised over 20% of the total population, and in the Tushetu Khan, "more than
half of all the people were slaves" (Ma Ho-t'ien 1949:147). This figure, however, is
quite improbable; more likely, Ma Ho-t'ien indiscriminately lumped the slave and
serf classes together.
There was, however, one major exception to this pattern, of vital significance for
the comparative study of slavery, namely Korea. From as early as the first century
B.C., when slavery on a significant scale emerged with the rise of the Koguryo tribal
state (Hatada 1969:10), down to the final abolition of the institution with the
Japanese annexation in 1910, slavery persisted, in varying degrees of significance,
in Korean society. With the exception of Egypt, which, even in Graeco-Roman
times, never had as highly developed a system (cf Malowist 1974), no other society
in the annals of world history preserved the institution in an unbroken tradition at
the level attained in Korea. The institution grew in economic significance during the
SLAVERY 425
unified Silla period (Hatada 1969: Chap. 3), became predominant under the Koryo
Kingdom, during which it attained a level of significance at least as great as that
of ancient Athenian slavery at its height (Unruh, 1976a, personal communication;
for an appraisal of the sources on Kory6 slavery, see Unruh 1976b), and continued
to develop during the Yi Dynasty to the point where a census of northwestern
suburban Seoul in 1663 reveals that "over fifty per cent of the households and over
75 per cent of the total in-residence recorded population of about 2,400" were slaves
(Wagner 1974:54). He adds that "every indication points to the conclusion that this
high percentage was climbing still higher in 1663." Shin's study of the census returns
for Kumhwa county in Kangwondo supports this conclusion, for it shows a "decline
of almost one quarter of the population to slavery" (Shin 1974:25).
Thus, quite independently of Western influence, Korean slavery in the eighteenth
century, until as late as the American Revolution, attained a socioeconomic signifi-
cance greater than all Hispanic and other New World societies except Brazil and
the non-Latin Caribbean. Quite apart from its scale, Korean slavery presents the
student of comparative slavery with many fascinating problems and opportunities.
Its extreme isolation makes it an ideal control for diffusionary influences in the study
of the structural correlates of slavery. It is the only society known to the present
author that reduced its own native population to large-scale enslavement. The fact
that descendants of slaves experienced relatively little stigma, while members of the
despised Paekchong ethnic group suffered all the ethnic stereotypes that we have
come to associate with descendants of slaves in the Americas, is of extraordinary
significance for the debate over the relationship between slavery and racism. The
Korean data also questions sharply many of the generalizations of Marxian and
non-Marxian scholars alike concerning the negative relationship between large-scale
slavery and landlord-serf or related forms of bondage, since both kinds of labor
exploitation thrived for some fifteen hundred years in this society.
We are not yet able to comment on the Korean works on the subject, but several
works are available in English, some of them quite valuable (see Vinton 1895; Korea
Review 3 1902; Hulbert 1905:432-36; Osgood 1954; Hatada 1969; Shin 1973, 1974;
Wagner 1974; Somerville 1974; Unruh 1976a). Work in progress by Unruh on
slavery during the Koryo period, and by Shin on changes in the supply of labor
during the Yi Dynasty should further illuminate the many crucial issues posed by
this most extraordinary and still largely unexplored case of large-scale slavery.
Marxian Studies of Medieval and Modern Slavery

Marxian studies on modern slavery also began with Marx and Engels. However,
their writings on this subject, especially on the American South, were of a journalis-
tic nature and were meant mainly for popular consumption (Runkle 1963). Unfortu-
nately, early American Marxist scholars have used these writings in a wholly
dogmatic way. Genovese has savagely critized this dogmatic tradition, although one
wonders whether his attack does not at times amount to academic overkill (Geno-
vese 1968: Chap. 15). The main survivor of this early school of Marxist scholarship
on American slavery is Aptheker (1943). Like his Russian and German counter-
parts, Aptheker has concentrated on the revolutionary aspects of American slave
426 PATTERSON
life. The criticisms leveled at his work are almost identical to the devastating critique
of Marxian studies of ancient slave revolts by Vogt (1957). Aptheker sees revolution
and rebellion where they can hardly be said to exist, and, out of a romantic concep-
tion of proletarian culture remarkably similar to that of Bucher's (1874), draws
conclusions about the revolutionary potential of the American slave that in no way
relate to the facts of the case. Even so, we think that the total rejection of Aptheker
has gone too far. The man and his works have literally been purged from the
company of polite scholars. For all its faults, American Negro Slave Revolts cannot
be dismissed as some monstrous emanation of the Communist party line. Like the
work of Elkins (1959), it did break new ground; and like that work it was largely
wrong in its conclusions and biased in its interpretations. We therefore find it
difficult to understand why it is that Elkins remains repectable and continues to be
credited with the initiation of new directions in American slave studies, yet Ap-
theker is totally rejected, even ridiculed. Something is amiss here.
This brings me to a consideration of what I can only call the Genovese problem.
Earlier, we referred to Genovese's works under the heading of non-Marxian studies
of modern slavery. This may have perplexed the reader, in view of the fact that this
scholar has the reputation of being one of, if not the leading, student of Marxian
historical scholorship in America, and so regards himself. In spite of the most
careful and repeated readings of Genovese's works, however, we can find no trace
of what may be termed a Marxian method in his writings, although there is ample
evidence of an awareness of the Marxist literature: an awareness, however, that often
seems to be more a source of annoyance than satisfaction for this eminent but
erroneously classified scholar. We readily concede that this may be due to gross,
dialectical obtuseness on our part, but in our defense we may point out that a
necessary if not sufficient condition of all Marxian scholarship is the use of a conflict
model of society as opposed to a consensus model, and a theory of class that, as
Dahrendorf notes (1959:19), is "not guided by the question, 'How does a given
society in fact look at a given point in time?', but by the question, 'How does the
structure of a society change?' " For the benefit of the reader unacquainted with this
crucial distinction, the following quotation from Appelbaum might be useful. In all
organismic theories:
The parts are postulated to 'hang together' in a system of functional interdependence,

much like a human body or a relatively smooth-running machine. Different theorists have
different positions regarding change, but change is seldom conceived of as altering the
fundamental structure of society. Another class of theories, however, focuses on change
itself, regarding change as inherent in all social organisms ... Conflict theories constitute
the legacy of Karl Marx ... (Appelbaum 1970:81).
There is, of course, a great deal more to the Marxian method than this, and it is
common knowledge that there are a few conflict theorists who reject the rest of the
Marxist paradigm (on which, see Zeitlin 1967, Havens 1972); however, since
Genovese's approach does not even meet this initial condition, there is no need to
elaborate. The most striking feature of Genovese's works is that they rely wholly
SLAVERY 427
on the equilibrium or organismic method. This was already apparent in his earliest
volume, The Political Economy of Slavery (1961) and it is difficult to find a more
perfect specimen of functionalist analysis than his latest, Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974).
This is not, we should emphasize, to denigrate the work in any way. It is simply
to point out the largely unrecognized fact, one that has been the source of much
confusion, that as far as the study of slavery is concerned, Genovese is most decid-
edly not a Marxist scholar, whatever he may label himself, or however he may
subtitle his works (for a more specific discussion of the "problem," see Patterson
1974).
Apart from the works of Cardoso (1962) and lanni (1962) on Brazil, it is to the
Caribbean that we must turn for the two leading Marxist interpretations of slavery
among New World scholars. James's (1963) study of the Haitian slave revolution,
in spite of many scholarly shortcomings, is the standard Marxian analysis of any
Negro slave revolt. Patterson's analysis of Jamaican slave revolts is also written in
this tradition (Patterson 1970). It was James who influenced the writing of what is
still the best Marxian analysis of the relationship between slavery and the develop-
ment of capitalism: Williams's masterful treatise on the subject (1944). It is truly
remarkable that after thirty years the Williams thesis (that Caribbean slavery played
a critical role in generating the capital needed for the industrial revolution and that
the abolition of slavery was due to the shift of imperial and economic interests from
the New World to the Orient) is still the subject of major debate (Anstey 1968, 1972,
1975; Fogel & Engerman 1974; Engerman 1975).
For the other major source of Marxian scholarship on the late medieval and
modern world, we must turn to Russia. One would have thought that the tremen-
dous concern of Marxist scholarship with slavery would have resulted in a consider-
able number of works on slavery in medieval and early modern Russia. It has only
been during the last decade or so, however, that such studies have appeared in any
significant numbers. Partly, this has been due, as Hellie has pointed out (1976), to
Stalinist dogma, formalized academically by Grekov in the view that feudalism was
the dominant and all-pervasive form of society in Russia all through the late medi-
eval and early modern period. Another reason, however, was Soviet, especially
Great Russian nationalism (for a penetrating discussion of which, in its relation to
the study of slavery, see Schteppa 1962:250-64): the view that it was an offense to
national honor to admit that at a time when the West European countries were
abolishing serfdom, not only serfdom, but slavery was on the rise in Russia. After
Stalin, however, there appeared a "burst of studies on slavery" that, according to
Hellie, "exceeds both in quality and in interest recent studies on the origin of
serfdom."
The major concern of the post-Grekov (and post-Stalinist) scholars, Hellie tells
us, "has been how to reconcile the presence of slavery with the rising dogma that
the period under review is formally a 'feudal' one" (1976:2). Russian historians have
concentrated, within this context, on problems such as the definition of the different
types of slaves, on the social origin and benefits of the slave-owning class, and on
the problem of the relationship between serfdom and slavery. The work is still
428 PATTERSON
largely in the monographic stage and has yet to tackle any theoretically significant
issue such as the causes and structural dynamics of slavery in Russia during this
period.
The study of slavery in Japan has been largely dominated by Marxian scholars,
although here the debate has to take account of the criticisms and general skepticism
of non-Marxian historians. Surprisingly, it would seem that at its height, slavery in
Japan was far more developed than at any comparable period in China. Jiro's
balanced paper on the subject, originally published in 1937, is still the prevailing
view among the more moderate of the non-Marxian and Marxian scholars. He
argued that slavery reached its peak of significance during the late Nara and early
Heian period (roughly, between 750 and 900 A.D.), when the number of slaves
constituted between 10 and 15% of the total population (Jiro 1972:107-8). Sanson
agreed with this estimate (1936:214), although most modern non-Marxian Japanese
scholars are inclined toward the more conservative estimate of between 7 and 10%.
There is evidence that the institution, in its household form, existed from prehistoric
times (Munro 1911:494-96).
Many Marxian scholars insist on the existence of a period of large-scale slavery,
"although they admit that this Japanese slavery was something different from that
of Graeco-Roman society" (Comite Japonais des Sciences Historiques 1960:41).
Marxian dialectics center on two basic issues: the nature of the labor force known
as the be, the group of people ruled by the uji kinship group during ancient and early
medieval times, and the composition of the shoen, the Japanese equivalent of the
European feudal manor, which existed in Japan between the eighth and sixteenth
centuries. Marxist scholars such as Yoshimichi Watanabe claim that the people of
the be were slaves; almost all non-Marxists claim that they were serfs. There are
three Marxian views concerning the shoen. Thma heads the school that argues that
between the eighth and tenth centuries, the shoen was cultivated by slaves who were
replaced by free peasants from the eleventh century onward. Ishimoda argues the
second view, that the workers on the shoen were slaves between the eighth and ninth
centuries and that they were replaced by serfs from the tenth century onward.
Finally, Araki takes the most extreme, and untenable, position that "slavery was the
basis of the shoen until the end of the sixteenth century when it finally dissolved"
(Comite Japonais des Sciences Historiques 1960:42; for a general assessment of the
literature, see Pt. 1, Chap. 3 of this work; see also Mitsusoda 1965:1-22). Non-
Marxian scholars such as Funakoshi, Murai, and Toshio strongly and persuasively
attack these more extreme Marxian views. (For an extremely useful collection of
papers on Japanese slavery, see Rekishi Kagaku Kyogikai 1972).
General Histories of Slavery

The study of slavery on a grand historical scale was common during the nineteenth
century and the early parts of this century. No significant attempt at such monumen-
tal efforts have appeared, however, since the third decade of this century. In a
scathing review of general and comparative works on slavery written up to the
middle of the twentieth century, Verlinden very nearly dismissed all of them as
"mediocre" and "confused" (1955). While we largely agree with his assessment, it
SLAVERY 429
is necessary to quality his judgment with respect to a few of the general histories
and to sharply qualify his remarks on the comparative anthropological literature,
which he is clearly not qualified to judge. The latter works are discussed in the next
section. Works such as those of Copley (1852) and Fletcher (1852) can safely be
dismissed as ill-informed propaganda, in spite of their scholarly pretensions. Biot's
work (1840), in spite of its title, is a general study of slavery and, as even Verlinden
concedes, a very competent work of scholarship for its time. It is interesting that
as early as 1840, Biot could write that the probelm of the origin of slavery was
already a "controversial" issue (1 840:viii). Biot's view that "la femme est la premiere
esclave" ("The woman is the first slave") (1840:4), has, for obvious reasons, an
extremely modern ring to it, and was to influence later positivist writings on the
subject of slavery. The work, on the whole, suffers from a too pro-Christian bias.
Without doubt, the most ambitious general history of slavery ever attempted was
Saco's multi-volumed work on the subject (1936-1945). Born of a wealthy slave-
holding family in Cuba, Saco, though never an abolitionist activist, was opposed to
slavery and as a result of his writings was banished from Cuba. In 1834 he began
writing his history soon after arriving in Spain. The plan was to produce three major
works, each a multi-volumed project: one on the history of the institution from the
dawn of antiquity to the modern period of the Old World; the second on Black
slavery in the New World; and the third on Indian slavery in the Americas. The
work was never completed. The first project, on ancient and medieval European
slavery, appeared between 1875 and 1877 in three volumes; volume IV, the first part
of the second project on black slavery was concerned mainly with the Spanish
Americas, especially Cuba, and was published in 1879. Volumes V and VI, pub-
lished posthumously, are merely collections of his materials. However much one
may admire Saco's industry, it is a gross exaggeration to call the work one of "the
masterpieces of former times" as Corbitt does in an otherwise informative review
of the work (1944). Volume I offered little that was new on the subject of the
Oriental world, and was soon made obsolete by major archeological and literary
findings on the Ancient Near East that appeared shortly after his death. The second,
on medieval Europe, was weak, even for the times, and does not compare favorably
with the works of Guerard or Biot, published years earlier. And the bulk of this first
project, concerned with classical slavery, simply does not compare with Wallon's
masterpiece, first published in 1847, a second edition of which appeared two years
after Saco's own work. Of much greater value was the fourth volume on modern
Hispanic slavery, which until the 1940s was still a major reference. One cannot help
feeling that Saco would have produced a far more significant work had he set his
sights a little more modestly. Apart from its incompleteness, the work also suffers
from a too legalistic and political orientation. There is little of theoretical interest
to the student of comparative slavery, except the unfortunate fact that Saco was
perhaps the first important scholar to formulate the now discredited thesis that
Latin American slavery was more humane than that of its West European counter-
part in the New World.
Tourmagne's history (1880), unlike Saco's, was very much concerned with gen-
eral theoretical issues, especially with the then-popular problem of the origin of
430 PATTERSON
slavery, but the work offers little that was original in the positivistic literature and
as a work of scholarship was largely derivative. Allard's work (1884) pretended to
be nothing more than a "modest volume" in the author's own words (p. 3). It drew
almost entirely on the author's earlier work (1876) and on Wallon, and explained
the ending of slave society in simplistic evolutionary terms, i.e. he saw it coming to
an end as a result of the advance of civilization, an extraordinary conclusion for
anyone acquainted with the literature on antiquity. Verlinden's judgment on Letour-
neau's general history (1897), that it was a "travail infinitment mediocre" ("ex-
tremely mediocre work"), though harsh, is not unjust. Bronlow's work (1892) on
slavery and serfdom in Europe has some useful insights on slavery in Britain, but
is otherwise quite inconsequential.
With the decline of positivism in the twentieth century, this kind of grand over-
view of the subject went out of fashion. Since 1900, almost all such general histories
have been written by nonspecialists and have been aimed at a general audience. Even
with this limited objective, however, many of them leave much to be desired.
Ingram's work, written at the turn of the century (1895), was not even a good
summary of the then-available secondary literature. George MacMunn's Slavery
through the Ages (1938) is anecdotal and often inaccurate. Most recently published
general works have been aimed at the layman audience. Of the lot, Bonilla's (1961)
and Metzer's (1971) popular works are perhaps the most competent.
What this review strongly suggests is that there is currently a great need for a
comprehensive, scholarly, interpretive study of the institution. In view of the great
antiquity of slavery and its almost universal distribution, this is clearly a formidable
task. The secondary and monographic literature alone is quite staggering (we have
only examined the more representative works in this paper). It is no wonder,
therefore, that no one has seen fit to take up the challenge in recent times.
Key Issues in the Comparative Study of Slavery

So far, we have examined the subject of slavery from the viewpoint of the intellectual
orientation and regional emphasis of the scholars involved. In this final section we
turn our attention to those groups of scholars whose primary interests focused on
the theoretical issues posed by the institution of slavery. By the very nature of their
interests, such scholars tend to have two things in common: first, they almost all
employ the comparative method; and second, they tend to be either trained in the
social sciences or are greatly influenced by them. In looking at this body of works,
we consider some of the central themes or issues in the study of slavery, including
the following: (a) The problem of the nature of slavery; (b) the problem of the
evolutionary origins of slavery; (c) the problem of the structural causes of slavery;
and (d) the problem of the structure and dynamics of slave society proper, i.e. that
special category of societies in which slavery is the dominant mode of production.
Almost every scholar who has written on the subject of slavery has felt it neces-
sary to agonize over the problem of defining its true nature. The difficulty springs
from the fact that slavery is so closely related to other forms of bondage such as
serfdom, helotage, and peonage. Purely semantic problems also cloud the issue: the
term slavery, an emotionally charged one in most societies, is often used to describe
SLAVERY 431
forms of involuntary labor that are clearly not slavery; on the other hand, other
terms are often used to describe what is obviously a slave relationship, the classic
case being eighteenth-century Russia.
Two distinct traditions prevail in the attempt to define the subject. One is the
legalistic, which emphasizes the fact that slavery is a property relationship: that
condition in which a human being is owned by another or by a group of persons.
This view prevailed during the nineteenth century, was the one accepted by the
League of Nations, and is still the dominant view among such distinguished scholars
as Stampp, Davis, and Genovese (See Sio 1965 for a discussion of this problem). The
second tradition was first introduced by Westermark (1908: Vol 1, pp. 670-710),
who strongly questioned the legalistic interpretation on various grounds. First there
was the fact that in many societies where slavery clearly existed, the owner did not
have exclusive property rights over the slave. Westermark stopped short of indicat-
ing the reasons for this, which are, first, that property rights are either not fully
developed in such societies, or where developed, they often extend equally to many
nonhuman objects, for example, ritual objects or objects in which rights of usufruct
but not ownership exist. Westermark emphasizes as "the chief characteristic of
slavery . .. the compulsory nature of the slave's relation to his master" (p. 671).
We think Westermark's view is by far the more satisifactory of the two. It is the
definition that most modern anthropologists have accepted and built on. As Hersko-
vits (1965:387) notes, in nonindustrial societies, "whatever the manner of acquisi-
tion of slaves, and whatever the work required of them, their status as human beings
invaded to a considerable extent their status as property." Leach, in an important,
though brief, discussion of the institution, has added a significant clarification by
noting that the absence of kinship rights is perhaps the single quality that slaves
share that no other group of bondsmen do (Leach 1967:14). We have used in our
own work the following working definition of the subject: that condition in which
there is an institutionalized alienation from the rights of labor and kinship. To say
that slaves do not have kinship rights, note, is not to say that in practice they do
not and are not permitted to have families. We know of no society, however, in
which the group of persons called slaves have formally recognized kinship rights,
especially those of custody, or in which such rights cannot be violated, whatever
customary practice may have been permitted; and alternatively, we know of no other
group of involuntary laborers in any society whose exploitation involves the aliena-
tion of the rights of kinship.
There are, however, many societies, especially advanced ones, in which the legal-
istic and proprietorial elements acquire major significance. What this immediately
suggests is an elementary distinction between two basic kinds of slavery: that in
which social status substantially invades property rights, and that in which property
rights substantially invade social rights. The two types so distinguished have been
designated household and chattel slavery (See Siegel 1946). The term "household,"
however, is unsatisfactory, in our view, for the simple reason that we know of many
instances of slaves within households who are chattels. Conversely, it is possible to
cite instances of assimilated slaves who nonetheless remain outside the household.
The term domestic slavery would be more appropriate.
432 PATTERSON
This distinction bears directly on one of the most commonly accepted views in
the literature on slavery: the claim that slavery always presents enormous and
unique moral problems for the slaveholding class, especially where there is a strong
legalistic emphasis on the slave as a chattel. It is difficult, the argument goes, to
reconcile the view of the slave as human being and as chattel. This so-called dilemma
was, indeed, the leitmotiv of Davis's first major work. From our own comparative
study of slavery, however, we have been forced to conclude that this is essentially
a non-problem. Where domestic slavery exists, the problem simply does not arise,
for there is no attempt to treat the slave as a thing. Of course, if one accepts a purely
legalistic definition of slavery, then the answer would be that domestic slavery is not
in fact slavery. The issue then becomes a purely semantic one, and, from our point
of view, worthless.
Nor, further, have we found in the comparative data on advanced slave systems
where the legalistic feature dominates, any moral agonizing over the problem of
defining a human being as both thing and person. In modern legal terms, there may
appear to be an inconsistency; however, this way of viewing the problem is a product
of the European Enlightenment. It is anachronistic for modern historians to assume
that ancient Romans and Greeks viewed the matter in the same light (on which,
see Louffer 1960). The available data suggest that they found it possible to live quite
comfortably with this dualism (Raymer 1940; Vogt 1965:69-82; but see also Schae-
hermeyer's 1956 review). And even when the dualism surfaced in modern moral and
legal thought, it still seemed to have presented few problems to the slaveholding
classes of the modern world. We can find, for example, no evidence whatever to
suggest that the Jamaican slaveholder ever experienced the slightest twinge of moral
doubt concerning his treatment of his slaves as things in the fields and as persons
in bed. It may be, however, that our researches have been deficient.
The problem of the evolutionary origins of slavery was largely the concern of the
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century positivists, especially the comparative
ethnologists. The main scholars involved were Spencer (1893), Hobhouse et al
(1930), Thurnwald (1932), and Landtman (1938). These works were largely specula-
tive and based on questionable data, so there is an understandable tendency to
dismiss them today. We do not share the view that these works were useless,
although, it must be added immediately, we do not think that there can ever be a
final answer to the question with which they were concerned. Even so, some of their
generalizations were highly suggestive. Spencer hypothesized that slavery was the
joint product of warfare and cannibalism. It was during the critical period of delay
between capture and preparation for sacrifice-which sometimes may have lasted
for several months-that the idea presented itself of making the captive at least work
for his keep. Under the right socioeconomic circumstances, namely where the
condemned person could produce more than he consumed, the conquering group
would eventually come to see that more might be gained by making the captive a
permanent slave than could be from eating or sacrificing him. Speculative it certainly
was, but I can find nothing the least bit ludicrous in this hypothesis. Hobhouse et
al, Westermark, and Thurnwald, in his earlier work on the subject, like Spencer,
emphasized war and conquest as the major causes of slavery, although they went
SLAVERY 433
beyond Spencer in specifying the socioeconomic conditions under which the sen-
tence of death would be commuted to permanent involuntary servitude. Wester-
mark made a crucial contribution in distinguishing between external and internal
causes of slavery, noting that there were events within a tribe that could lead to
condemnation for death (crimes of various kinds) and therefore have the same effect
of suggesting slavery. Landtman's work drew heavily on these earlier studies, espe-
cially those of Westermark and Nieboer, as well as the more sophisticated anthropo-
logical monographs that had appeared during the first third of the twentieth century.
His main concern was to decide which came first, intertribal or intratribal slavery.
He concluded that captivity in war "constitutes its veritable and dominant source,"
but only after a condition of inequality had already developed within the conquering
group. In the end he suggests that there are no good grounds for excluding purely
internal factors as the causes of slavery, but favors the view that emphasizes external
origins. We have not heard much on this subject since Landtman's work in the
1930s, for by that time anthropology had reacted violently against such studies.
Students concerned with the structural causes of slavery neglect the issue of the
evolutionary origins of the institution. They begin by assuming that slavery is known
to exist and are concerned with explaining how and why a given society creates the
conditions that enhance and sustain the institution in such a way that it becomes
a vital (though not necessarily dominant) part of the society's functioning. There
are six major hypotheses in the literature on this subject. First, there is the Nieboer-
Domar (Nieboer 1910, Domar 1970) hypothesis that slavery will exist to a signifi-
cant degree only where land or some other crucial resource exists in abundance
relative to labor. Under such conditions, it is argued, free labor will not be available,
since every person can become his own master. Thus, unfree labor will have to be
used if the resources are to be developed on a large scale. The hypothesis existed
in the literature long before Nieboer, especially in the works of Wakefield (1849),
Loria (1899), and Merivale (1928). But it was Nieboer who first formalized and
attempted to test it scientifically. Over half a century after Nieboer's work, the
M.I.T. economist revived the hypothesis in a well-known paper. Apart from the
largely neglected criticisms of certain anthropologists, the hypothesis has recently
come under severe attack from two sources: the economic historian Engerman
(1973) and Patterson (1977). Engerman criticizes it on mainly theoretical grounds.
Patterson, in addition to showing that it is not supported by the comparative data
on slavery, also argues that the question, "What are the structural causes of slav-
ery?" may well not be a meaningful one, in view of the fact that slavery developed
and was sustained in different kinds of social systems for entirely different reasons.
Criticism of the Nieboer thesis appeared early in the anthropological literature,
beginning with Westermark (1908), then later coming from Thurnwald (1932), in
his later work, and from McCleod (1929). The most important anthropological
assault on the hypothesis, however, was made by Siegel (1946), who not only
incorporated earlier criticisms and alternative explanations, but offered the major
alternative hypothesis in the anthropological literature. For these reasons, we con-
centrate on Siegel's work in what follows. Siegel begins by clarifying the distinction
between household and chattel slavery, which we discussed earlier. He then exam-
434 PATTERSON
ines the separate functions of household and chattel slavery. The difference, he
argues, has little to do with numbers or sources [as Thurnwald (1928) had argued]:
Rather, these two aspects of compulsory servitude can best be evaluated on the basis of
their differential functional integration with the social structure. In brief, chattel slavery
may be expected to occur in those societies where there is a tendency to reinforce
autocratic rule by means of wealth symbols, and where that process results in a rather
strongly demarcated class structure. Household slavery, on the other hand, is likely to
occur in groups where autocratic control tends to be generalized to family (or extended
family) organization so that compulsory servitude strengthens an existing or potential
patria potestas. It follows that the relationships between master and slave in the latter case
are much more personal than in the former (p. 382).
This is clearly a standard piece of functionalist analysis and suffers from many of
the well-known errors of such works. For one thing, it merely describes a set of
relationships and explains little or nothing. We are left in the dark as to why or how
slavery reinforces autocratic rule with demarcated class structures, or its relation-
ship with household slavery. Second, even as a description of a relationship, it is too
vague and limited in its application. We know for a fact that there were numerous
societies with autocratic rule and class systems based on wealth in which slavery
was insignificant. There is no measure of the tendency he asserts. The argument is
also likely to be tautologous, since in many traditional societies, as Henshaw argues
for Indian slavery in North America (1907-19 10), it is slavery that is the main cause
of the very class stratification that Siegel gives as a precondition of slavery. Siegel's
work also suffers from a problem found earlier in Nieboer, the fact that its general-
izations are drawn almost entirely from small-scale, essentially tribal societies. If one
includes the whole range of societies in which slavery has been known to exist, the
hypothesis falls flat, since the great majority of societies (especially in the Oriental
world), were those in which household slavery existed along with highly developed,
wealth-based class systems. Clearly, what is called for is a comparative analysis of
a representative sample of slave societies in which a set of carefully selected variables
can be subjected to some form of multivariate analysis. Only by a process of
statistical specification can one ever hope to come up with a meaningful statement
concerning the conditions under which slavery is likely to exist, whether generally
or with respect to a clearly defined type of social system.
Four other theorists are worth mentioning under this head. These are Sumner and
his associates (1927), the Arab sociologist Elwahed (1931), Levy-Bruhl (1934, in
Finley 1964), and Weber (1924, 1964, 1970). Like the earlier comparative ethnolo-
gists, Sumner et al attribute the origin of slavery to warfare, but add two necessary
conditions: the existence of regulatory powers and an economy beyond the subsis-
tence stage among the slaveholding groups. They argue, further, that slavery always
has a profound effect on the institutions of marriage and the family, especially in
the way it influences the status of women. By relieving women of drudge work, they
argue, the institution "both elevated and lowered" women's status. Her life becomes
more leisurely, but also more irrelevant. Slavery also bears a significant relationship
to religion, especially those employing sacrifices, and to the development of civiliza-
SLAVERY 435
tion. It "accumulates force and produces organization without which culture would
not have been won, and then it turns into a sort of societal disease which is fatal
to strength and organization." Although some of these remarks are highly sugges-
tive, the data offered in their support are flimsy and frequently derivative. And on
the interesting question of the relationship between slavery and female status, Sum-
ner et al fail to consider a crucial issue, namely, which causes which-is it the
withdrawal of women from the labor force that induces slavery or is it vice versa?
-and if, as we suspect, the causal direction varies in different societies, what
accounts for such differences?
Elwahed attempts to develop a theory of slavery based on a comparative analysis
of five slaveholding societies: the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, medieval Is-
lamic society, and the French Antilles. The work is hardly the contribution to the
theory of slavery it claims to be, but is a simple description of common and contrast-
ing features of the five societies mentioned, concentrating on the different modes of
recruitment of slaves and common elements in the social fate of slaves of birth as
opposed to slaves recruited in other ways. There is also an appended discussion of
the different treatment of male and female slaves in the five societies, especially with
respect to the experience of manumission. Elwahed's work, unfortunately, does not
live up to the expectations of its early pages. His final theory amounts to the wholly
unoriginal idea that "L'esclavage, sous ses diverses formes ... n'est, en derniere
analyse, qu'une substitution a la mort reelle" (p. 243) and that "la principale
fonction de l'esclavage est la preservation de l'homme." ("Slavery, beneath its
diverse forms ... is only, in the final analysis, a substitution for actual death" (p.
243) and that "the principal function of slavery is the preservation of man."). He
virtually celebrates the major role of the institution in the development of the finer
aspects of civilization, but completely underplays its destructive aspects. One cannot
resist the conclusion that this is a conservative and peculiarly Islamic "theory" of
slavery.
The theories of both Levy-Bruhl and Weber were really generalizations based
largely on the Roman data, although both men drew implicitly on their vast knowl-
edge of the comparative literature. Levy-Bruhl argued that slavery was essentially
an institution of interethnic character. During the Roman epoch, we wrote, "l'es-
clave n'est rien outre qu'un etranger sans droits" ("The slave is nothing more than
a foreigner without rights") (p. 152) He was not the first person to note the impor-
tance of ethnicity in the development and maintenance of slavery, but he certainly
was the first and only author to make it the pivotal thesis in his "theorie." The theory
is neatly summed up in the following aphorism: .... tout esclave est un etranger;
tout etranger est un esclave" ("every slave is a foreigner; every foreigner is a slave")
(p. 152). Like all aphorisms, especially Gallic ones, this is hardly even a half-truth.
The first part of the statement makes some sense, and with considerable qualifica-
tions, can be defended. "Si je ne craignais de forcer un peu le sens des mots,"
Levy-Bruhl wrote, "je dirois que l'esclavage a un caractere ethnique et par la-meme
indel6bile" ("If I didn't believe in forcing a bit the sense of the words, I would say
that slavery has an ethnic and, as such, indelible character") (p. 158). He claims,
incredibly, that this is true of all cultures: "l'exclusion de toute endo-servitude est
436 PATTERSON
ici incontestable" ("the exclusion of all intraservitude is indisputable here") (p. 160).
This is certainly not true, apart from the large-scale internal slavery of Korea. It
is a well-established fact that the Greeks, that most ethnic of peoples, while normally
reluctant to do so, nonetheless enslaved fellow Greeks, though, of course, not fellow
citizens. Rome would seem to have been a bad choice of examples to demonstrate
this shaky "theory." If slavery was so indelibly ethnic, we are hard put to explain
the remarkable rate of assimilation of ex-slaves in Roman imperial society (Duff
1928). As for the second part of the aphorism, that, "tout etranger est un esclave,"
it simply cannot be taken seriously, even if we restrict ourselves to the most ancient
of societies. To cite only one example, there is the rapid absorption of P.O.W.s in
early Mesopotamia after a period of temporary state slavery (Gelb 1973).
Weber returned to the subject of slavery in several of his works. His most theoreti-
cal statement is to be found in the Theory of Social and Economic Organization. His
finest analysis of the problem is his famous essay, "The Social Causes of the Decay
of Ancient Civilization," and his most detailed empirical treatment of the subject
is his general agrarian history of antiquity. He examined slavery within the context
of what he called "the condition of maximum formal rationality of capital account-
ing" concluding that slavery on a large scale was possible only under three condi-
tions: ". . . (a) Where it has been possible to maintain slaves very cheaply; (b) where
there has been an opportunity for regular recruitment through a well-supplied slave
market; (c) in agricultural production on a large scale of the plantation type, or in
very simple industrial processes" (1964:276-77). It is possible to challenge every one
of these so-called conditions. We need go no further than the US South and its rich
economic historiography to recognize that conditions (a) and (b) do not hold. The
cliometric literature, if it has demonstrated anything, has shown the falseness of
these first two conditions. As for condition (c), it is difficult to contest unless we
know exactly what Weber meant by "very simple industrial processes." The produc-
tion of sugar in the Caribbean during the eighteenth century was an agroindustrial
process run by slaves that could not reasonably be described as "very simple." In
any event, the data on Greek slavery, which must be considered to have existed on
"a large scale," clearly undermine the third condition.
Without doubt the most important problem facing the student of comparative
slavery is the need to understand the origins, nature, and dynamics of large-scale
systems. As Finley (1968) has pointed out, it is crucial to distinguish between what
he calls "genuine slave societies" "(such as) classical Greece and Rome, the Ameri-
can South and the Caribbean-on the one hand, and slave-owning societies as found
in the ancient Near East, India or China, on the other hand.)" This is a crucial
beginning, but the problem is far more complex than this initial distinction suggests.
It lies in the fact that there is not, as one would initially suspect, a clear-cut
relationship between the degree of significance of slavery and its economic role, or,
even more problematic, between the level of development of slavery and the general
level of development of human societies. To take the second problem first, Patterson
had begun his comparative study of slavery with the rough assumption that, with
one or two exceptions that could be easily handled, large-scale or genuine slave
societies would not be found to exist in primitive societies. A thorough review of
SLAVERY 437
the anthropological literature soon shattered this assumption. While not numerous,
there are a significant number of thoroughly primitive societies that nonetheless
contain vast proportions of slaves that play crucial roles in their economies. With
respect to the first problem, it soon became clear to the author (especially in his
review of the data on Islamic societies), that a society can be totally dependent on
the institution of slavery even where slavery plays a marginal role in its economy.
It soon became necessary, then, to think in terms not only of economic dependence,
but also in such terms as political, cultural, or civilizational dependence. In order
to get around these problems, the author has found it necessary to develop a special
classificatory framework sensitive to both the degree and type of dependence on
slavery.
At one extreme of this classification is that group of "genuine" slave societies that,
using Weberian jargon, one may call pure-type slave societies. In such societies-
Rome, second-century Bc-end of first-century AD, ninth-century Iraq, Brazil in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Banda Islands of the eighteenth
century, eighteenth-century non-Latin Caribbean societies (but not the US South!)
-slave labor dominates the economy, slaves greatly outnumber free persons, and
there is a recognizable pattern of development, maturity, and collapse.
It is just such pure-type slave societies that Marx had in mind, we think, in his
occasional writings on slave society. The same was true, though to a lesser extent,
of Chayanov and Cairnes. It is extraordinary that it is only in the Marxist literature
that one finds any attempt to understand the nature and dynamics of such pure-type
slave systems. Marxists, along with all other students of the subject, tend to neglect
those societies in which the institution of slavery was of secondary economic impor-
tance, but vital in other respects. Welskopf's monumental work is still the standard
Marxian synthesis on the subject (1957). The neglect of this work by Anglo-Ameri-
can so-called Marxists is simply incomprehensible. It is a subtle, brilliantly con-
ceived, and painstakingly researched analysis of the origins of pure-type slavery in
classical antiquity, emphasizing the crucial role of force and imperial expansion, the
ways in which such a system retarded technological development, and true capital-
ism (especially in its built-in requirement for a perpetuation of "the original accumu-
lation" of capital). It also skillfully demonstrates the internal contradictions of such
a system, taking account of factors such as absenteeism and the social life of the
slaves. She dismisses as "banal simplification" the vulgar Engelian view of slave
society as the struggle between masters and slaves. In a typical passage, she notes
that Marx, in a letter to Engels, stated quite clearly that the "inner history" of
antiquity was the struggle between the small and large owners of land. And she adds
(1957:217)
In the centuries of ascendancy of Greece and Rome the peasantry built the broad basis
of society, while slavery was the driving force that determined the direction of develop-
ment. Slavery was the force of progress that in the end destroyed the peasantry.
For any serious student of comparative slavery, this work must be a major point
of departure.
438 PATTERSON
CONCLUSION
This review of the study of slavery has shown that the institution has been the object
of serious scholarship for at least 125 years. Considerable progress has been made
in some periods and regions surveyed, and there has been great progress in methods
employed. Even so, there remain large gaps in our knowledge of the institution, and
major deficiencies in our theoretical approaches.
In regional terms, many areas where the institution flourished still remain unstud-
ied, or the ground barely touched. The distribution of scholarship has been skewed
heavily in favor of the modern slave systems of the Americas, especially the United
States, which is rapidly approaching the point of being overstudied.
It was no accident that the methodological innovations of the cliometricians have
been closely associated with the study of American slavery; it is in the very nature
of the institution, at least in its modern form, that it lends itself to such statistical
manipulations. Slaves, being property, were counted and had a measured price tag.
There is thus more data on them, of the type favored by economists, than on any
other contemporaneous group. As the flag followed trade in the old imperial sys-
tems, so it seems the cliometricians follow certain kinds of facts. This has been good
for the flag-carriers of the cliometric expansion, but its value for the comparative
study of slavery remains limited, although We would not go so far as some critics
of the movement. We are indeed very much in favor of quantitative studies, and we
think that traditional historians who rule out all such studies in their understandable
reservations about cliometrics may well be throwing out the baby with the bathwa-
ter. What we object to are the kind of quantitative analyses that go by the name of
cliometrics. We find their concerns empirically narrow, theoretically sterile, and
methodologically limited. Apart from the United States and one or two of the other
slave societies of the Americas, their techniques are generally useless simply because
the kind of data they require do not exist.
In statistical terms, cliometrics, as currently defined, requires interval-type data;
regression models are only possible where such data exist. However, for the vast
majority of slave societies we possess only nominal data, and, to a lesser degree,
ordinal data. Such data, however, can be quantified. Indeed, if the comparative
study of slavery is to move forward in the direction we favor, it is imperative that
historians and other social scientists concerned with its study learn the statistical
techniques that have been developed to analyze such qualitative data. Until a few
years ago such techniques were admittedly primitive when compared with those
developed for the analysis of interval-type data. Happily, all this has changed within
recent years, thanks partly to the work of Goodman and his leading interpreter
Davis (1973-1974), and to the modern school of cross-cultural anthropologists,
especially those working in the tradition of Murdock & White (1969; see also
Whiting 1969). Until such techniques are adopted, the comparative study of slavery
will remain where Nieboer left it in his classic work published at the turn of the
present century.
More important than the need for new techniques, however, is the need for new
theoretical orientations. It is now time to move from purely monographic and
SLAVERY 439
descriptive studies toward the kind of works that pose issues germane to the institu-
tion of slavery, problems that can only be answered by a theoretically informed and
methodologically comparative approach to the subject. We are still in the dark
concerning such vital issues as the conditions under which slavery developed and
was maintained in different social systems, and the dynamics of large-scale slave
systems. We have yet to probe such fascinating problems as the relationship between
slavery and technology, marriage and family forms, the rise of civilizations, the
status of women (especially their participation in the work force), and the emergence
of the idea of freedom. On the microsociological level, numerous issues, some of
them already posed in the literature, remain perplexing: factors accounting for
differential rates of manumission; the social psychology of slavery; the propensity
to servile resistance. The list is endless. However, none of these questions can be
answered by single-society, descriptive studies; and, with one or two notable excep-
tions, the muddled methods and ill-conceived research designs of those few studies
that currently pass themselves off as comparative analyses ensure that the answers
given will be the wrong ones. Indeed, it is ironic that when not theoretically oriented
and methodologically rigorous, comparative work can and often does become paro-
chial. What van Woodward (1968:12) shrewdly observes about some comparative
studies is still largely true of such works in the study of slavery: ". . . in spite of the
expected and indeed predominant effect of turning historical thought outward, some
of the comparative studies have had the tendency of enhancing the emphasis on
uniqueness formerly associated with the subjective and inward analysis."
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This paper grew out of a comparative study of slavery, now nearing its completion,
funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, grant no.
R0949913499. I would like to thank Professor B. Lewis of the Institute for Ad-
vanced Study, Princeton, for his assistance in my review of works on Islamic slavery,
and Professor E. Wagner of the East Asian Research Center, Harvard, as well as
Ms. E. Unruh for drawing my attention to important sources and issues on Korean
slavery. Mrs. A. Pusey and Dr. Paul Chen provided valuable assistance by translat-
ing several of the more important Chinese and Japanese works on slavery for me.
A part of the research upon which this paper drew was conducted while I was a
visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
440 PATTERSON
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Slavery

Author(s): Orlando Patterson

THE STUDY OF SLAVERY

Non-Marxian Studies of Ancient Slavery

Marxian Studies of Ancient Slavery

now available in English a representative collection of papers by the leading Soviet

Non-Marxian Studies on Modern Slavery

Marxian Studies of Medieval and Modern Slavery

The parts are postulated to 'hang together' in a system of functional interdependence,

General Histories of Slavery

Key Issues in the Comparative Study of Slavery

Adriani, N., Kruijt, A. C. 1912. De Bare'e- Bishko, C. J. 1957. Review of C. Verlinden,

Restoration). See Rekishi Kagaku Harris, J. S. 1942. Some aspects of slavery in

ety of Western Chou Dynasty). See Li Symp. Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,

Munro, N. G. 1911. Prehistoric Japan. Pitman, F. W. 1917. The Development of the

References added in proof:

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