Slavery

And Other Forms of Unfree Labour

Leonie Archer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134988853
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1988. Bringing together normally self-contained areas of research, this book presents penetrating analyses of the nature and perpetuation of slavery through the ages.

One

Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour¹

G.E.M. de Ste. Croix

I sent in the title of this talk, ‘Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour’, in the hope that it might be adopted as the general title of this particular workshop, as it has been. While preparing the talk, I knew virtually nothing about the contents of the other contributions to the programme, and I cannot pretend to be giving a general introduction to the proceedings, which cover many aspects of slavery proper and a wide variety of forms of unfree labour from Greek and Roman times to the present day. I must explain that my own thought on these subjects has been formed largely on the basis of what I know about the Greek and Roman world as an ancient historian, roughly from the eighth century BC to the mid-seventh century of the Christian era; and I hope that those who are experts in the history of other societies will bear with me if I betray the limits of my own detailed knowledge rather too often. Fortunately, as it happens, the ancient world does provide a remarkable amount of solid evidence (not only literary); and in it we find not only the most severe form of slavery (chattel slavery, as it is usually called) but also all sorts of other kinds of unfree labour—to a far greater extent, I think, than most classical scholars and even ancient historians have realised. I therefore feel justified in confining myself mainly to the societies I know best: those of the Greeks and Romans.

I admit that I have a passion for defining the concepts I use as precisely as possible. So, after a few more introductory remarks, I shall state what I think is the most useful way of classifying the main categories of unfree labour under three general heads: chattel slavery, serfdom, and debt bondage, and then explain exactly what I mean when I speak of each of those three categories. I realise that this classification may omit certain forms of unfree labour which some people may immediately think of: indentured labour, for example, which existed even in the Greek and Roman world, at least as a particular form of what was called in Greek paramone. So I freely admit that my definitions do not explicitly take into account all possible forms of unfree labour. But I do believe that they cover the great bulk of such forms, with one conspicuous exception: forced labour, imposed not by private individuals or organisations but by states, for example upon prisoners of war, or as a form of punishment or disciplinary treatment, for crime or for behaviour considered reprehensible by the state concerned—often, of course, behaviour which is considered legitimate in other states.² This is a well-known minefield; and it is not surprising that the whole question of forced labour exacted by states was carefully ignored by the two important International Conventions of 1926 and 1956, whose definitions I shall be adopting presently—the subject raised delicate questions on which different states can have fundamentally different opinions.

In presenting my definitions in a moment, I want to emphasise that they go right to the heart of the matter in their emphasis on labour. As a Marxist, the very first thing I want to know about any society above the most primitive level is the way in which the dominant classes extract unpaid surplus labour (in Marx's sense) from the primary producers.³ So, for me, what has to be kept in the forefront all the time, in dealing with our subject today, is that slavery and the other systems I shall be discussing are forms of extraction of labour, and most are profitably considered from that point of view. Slavery and the other systems tend to have exceedingly unpleasant features; but the essence of them all, the basis on which they all rest, is extraction of labour for the master, the feudal lord, the creditor, etc.

At this point I want to say a brief word about what constitutes a slave society. If we proceed as I do, on Marxist principles, there can be no doubt about the conclusion; and the result agrees admirably with the way in which the expression has been applied to the Greek and Roman world, the American Old South, and other such indubitable slave societies. As I have indicated already, the most significant distinguishing feature of a given mode of production is not so much how the bulk of the labour of production is done, as how the dominant propertied classes, controlling the conditions of production, ensure the extraction of the surplus which makes their leisured existence possible. Some Marxists in the past have tried to pretend that in the Greek and Roman world slaves did most of the actual work of production; but this got the argument off in a seriously wrong direction, because in fact it is perfectly clear that most production in antiquity was done by free peasants and artisans, except perhaps for brief periods in parts of Italy and Sicily in about the last century BC. But, as I hope I have already demonstrated sufficiently in print,⁴ the dominant classes in the Greek and Roman world derived the surplus on which their leisured existence was based from unfree labour, especially that of chattel slaves. It was that which made the Greek and Roman world a slave economy. A fundamental difference between antiquity and the modern world is that the propertied classes, which in capitalist society derive their surplus primarily from wage labour, derived it in antiquity from slave and (to a less extent) other unfree labour.

When in 1959 Sir Moses Finley published a much-quoted article with the title, ‘Was Greek civilisation based on slave labour?’,⁵ he found himself unable to answer his own question, and eventually substituted a very different one: ‘Not whether slavery was the basic element, or whether it caused this or that, but how it functioned’— an enormously wide and open-ended question, to which of course we can do no more than provide fragments of an answer. At that time Sir Moses was refusing to employ even the most basic Marxist categories of class and exploitation.⁶ Yet he has always in fact spoken of the Greek and Roman world as a ‘slave society’. And in recent years he has come round a little. In the early 1980s he proffered a definition of what he meant by a slave society: it was where ‘slaves provided the bulk of the immediate income, from property,…of the élites, economic, social and political’.⁷ But ‘élites’, especially in that very broad sense, is an unfortunately imprecise term; and as it happens it is particularly inappropriate for Greek and Roman society, where many well-to-do and even middling peasants, whom no one could conceivably wish to number among an élite of any sort, might own slaves to do their farmwork, as might some quite humble people engaged in manufacture or trade.

It is time now to set out my three categories of unfree labour, and produce definitions. Fortunately, we have an excellent set of readymade definitions from two international conventions: for slavery, the Slavery Convention of 1926, organised by the League of Nations, and, for the other two forms of unfree labour, the Supplementary Convention resulting from a conference at Geneva, organised by the United Nations in 1956, and attended by representatives of fortyeight nations. In a useful book called Slavery, published in 1958, a leading specialist on the subject, C.W.W.Greenidge, gives all the relevant texts, which I have also summarised and briefly discussed.⁸

Slavery in the full sense (often referred to as ‘chattel slavery’) is defined in the 1926 Convention as ‘the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised’.⁹ This is a brilliant piece of drafting, because the essential purpose of the Slavery Convention was to prohibit, and help to stamp out, all forms of slavery, and not to allow any to escape on technical grounds. Now there have been forms of slavery in which individual slaves have not actually been the property of those whom they serve; but of course even they would be caught by the definition, which refers to persons ‘over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised’—so that it does not matter whether or not a master actually owns a particular slave, if he exercises powers over him that are normally associated with ownership.

In the 1956 Convention we have a definition of debt bondage, as ‘the status or condition arising from a pledge by a debtor of his personal services or those of a third person under his control as a security for a debt, where the value reasonably assessed of those services rendered is not applied towards the liquidation of the debt or the length and nature of those services are not respectively limited and defined’. Notice that the debt bondsman is not a slave, even though his services, his labour, are to a considerable extent in practice (if not always in theory) at the disposal of his creditor. This, the fact that the debt bondsman is not a slave, can be very important, as it was in classical antiquity, where outright enslavement for debt did occur, but seems to have been increasingly replaced by debt bondage, where the debtor, if a free citizen, would remain a free citizen in theory and would regain his original status when he had worked off his debt, if indeed he ever did so.¹⁰ It is impossible to say what proportion of Greek and Roman debt bondsmen were able to do this; but I suspect that many remained in bondage to the end of their lives, and probably their children after them, as still happens today, of course, in countries where debt bondage, even if in theory illegal, still persists. There are some fascinating Greek and especially Latin sources showing how thin the line could be between debt bondsman and slave; but at least in principle the bondsman was free rather than slave, and there was always the possibility that he might be able to become genuinely free by paying off his debt or getting a relative or friend to do so.

I referred earlier to the Greek institution of paramone,¹¹ which can be conveniently grouped with debt bondage in general, because it was often a result of defaulting on a debt (and sometimes even of incurring one), although its terminology could also be used for contracts of service or apprenticeship; and in some of its forms it seems to com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• History Workshop Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour
• 2 Serfdom in Classical Greece
• 3 Herodotus and the Man-Footed Creature
• 4 Greek Theatre and the Legitimation of Slavery
• 5 Slavery as a Punishment in Roman Criminal Law
• 6 Biblical Laws of Slavery: a Comparative Approach
• 7 Debt Bondage in Latin America
• 8 Slaves and Peasants in Buganda
• 9 Perceptions from an African Slaving Frontier
• 10 Sudanese Military Slavery from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century
• 11 Mark Twain and the Ideology of Southern Slavery
• 12 All Americans Are Part African: Slave Influence on ‘White’ Values
• 13 Slave Trading and the Mentalities of Masters and Slaves in AnteBellum America
• 14 Runaway Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Barbados
• 15 Haiti: Race, Slavery and Independence (1804–1825)
• 16 The Social-Psychological Analysis of Manumission
• 17 ‘Many Clear Words to Say’: Afro-American, Oral and Feminist History
• 18 Slavery—its Special Features and Social Role
• Bibliography
• Index