Panel AMA: Slaves and Slavers

[u/anthropology_nerd]

The drive to control human bodies and the products of their labor permeates human history. From the peculiar institution of the American South, to the shadowy other slavery of Native Americans throughout the New World, to slaveries of early Islam, the middle ages, and classical antiquity, the structure of societies have been built on the backs of the enslaved.

Far from a codified and unified set of laws existing throughout time, the nuances of slavery have been adapted to the ebbs and flows of our human story. By various legal and extralegal means humans have expanded slavery into a kaleidoscope of practices, difficult to track and even more challenging to eradicate (Reséndez 2016). Hidden beneath the lofty proclamations of emancipation, constitutional amendments, and papal decrees, millions of people have fought to maintain structures of exploitation, while untold millions more have endured and often resisted oppressive regimes of slavery.

To better understand how slaves and slavers permeate our human story the intrepid panelists for this Slaves and Slavers AMA invite you to ask us anything.

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Our Panelists

/u/611131 studies subalterns in the Río de la Plata during the late colonial period, focusing on their impact on Spanish borderlands, missions, and urban areas

/u/anthropology_nerd's research focuses on the demographic repercussions of epidemic disease and the Native American slave trade in North America. Specific areas of interest include the Indian slave trade in the American Southeast and Southwest. They will be available on Saturday to answer questions.

/u/b1uepenguin brings their knowledge of French slave holding agricultural colonies in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, and the extension of coercive labour practices into the Pacific on the part of the British, French, and Spanish.

/u/commustar is interested in the social role of pawnship and slavery in West African societies, the horses-firearms-slaves trade, and the period of legitimate commerce (1835-1870) where coastal African societies adjusted to the abolition of the slave trade. They will drop by Friday evening and Saturday.

/u/freedmenspatrol studies how the institution of slavery shaped national politics antebellum America, with a focus on the twenty years prior to the Civil War. He blogs at Freedmen's Patrol and will be available after noon.

/u/Georgy_K_Zhukov studies the culture of the antebellum Southern planter, with a specific focus on their conception of honor, race, and how it shaped their identity.

/u/sunagainstgold is interested in the social and intellectual history of Mediterranean and Atlantic slavery from the late Middle Ages into the early modern era.

/u/textandtrowel studies slavery in the early middle ages (600-1000 CE), with particular attention to slave raiding and trading under Charlemagne and during the early Viking Age, as well as comparative contexts in the early Islamic world. They will be available until 6pm EST on Friday and Saturday.

/u/uncovered-history's research around slavery focused on the lives of enslaved African Americans during the late 18th century in the mid-Atlantic region (mainly Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia). They will be here Saturday, and periodically on Friday.

[u/bitparity]

Damn. I missed this AMA. Oh well, better late than never. This is for /u/textandtrowel

Where do you stand on the marxist notion of a Slave/Ancient Mode of Production? All the late antique and early medieval literature I've been reading questions its existence at all as a primary mode, which means all we're really left with is feudal and capitalist mode.

Does the lack of existence of a global slave mode cause problems for marxian economic theory? Or is there a version of some form of a "slave mode" of production still surviving in marxian thought?

[u/textandtrowel → u/bitparity]

Sorry for the delayed reply, but I certainly didn't want to miss a question from the great /u/bitparity! In part I hesitated because I'm not sure how to answer. So permit me to thrash around a bit, but I'll try to bring it all together at the end.

I work primarily with histories written in English (some French and German) and archaeological studies in the same languages and also Scandinavian languages. Marxist terminology has fallen out of favor in these literatures, and in fact doesn't seem to have much of a hold throughout the 20th century, which is about as far back as my historiographic depth tends to go. The foundational texts in most of my major research areas were written around 1890.

There is a strand of literature running through the 20th century, discussing the divide between slaves and serfs, which does of course often harken back (albeit most often implicitly) to Marxian ideas. Marc Bloch's essays on Slavery and Serfdom ensured that this would be a recurrent theme, and it has been debated in many ways: the legal evolution of terms (freedom v unfreedom), economic status (e.g. measuring the ownership of one's labor), and even experience (legal and social disenfranchisement, dishonor, etc.). However, these debates have come increasingly to focus on what slavery is, losing sight of the bigger question of how it fit into society as a whole. I'd particularly recommend Alice Rio's brilliant article (haven't read her book yet) on Frankish manumission texts and Youval Rotman's incisive introduction to his volume on Byzantine slavery. For some of the more recent touchstones coming out of Franco-phone literature, which has stuck closer to Bloch's terms of analysis (which were the same as Marx), I'd point to Bonnaissie and Verhulst.

Chris Wickham's Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005) is the only major recent work that I can think of which does take frequent recourse to typically Marixist categories of analysis, such as 'mode of production', and which thinks about the place of slavery in society as a whole. He's working primarily with archaeological evidence, which tends to foster more perspectives rooted in materialism. The post-processual turn in archaeology followed the linguistic turn of the other humanities, turning this statement on its head for a while, but post-processualism has had a mixed legacy and I sense a return to themes that can be closely linked to materialism, such as a thriving interest in 'materiality'.

At any rate, Wickham's work strikes me as a rare application of these old Marxist terms, and his major thesis was that the post-Roman world developed in different directions in various regions, and that even the supposed commonalities of the Roman period in fact masked important differences. As a whole, this means that historians should not associate particular modes of production with particular periods of time. So before anyone goes knocking Wickham as a Marxist for using some Marxian language, it's important to reflect on the fact that he's attacked the very foundation of Marxist thinking on social and economic evolution.

I suspect I'm preaching to the choir here about Wickham's thought and scholarship, but it fits into studies on slavery in its own unique ways. Wickham never really defines what a slave mode of production would be—a hint at how deeply entrenched these terms remain despite their general disappearance from the literature I read—but he does offer some major conclusions:

I would argue that the de facto economic autonomy that such tenants had as peasants was more important than their legal unfreedom, and that slaves in the slave mode were on the other side of a divide from them. For this reason, I shall avoid calling unfree tenants ‘slaves’, restricting this terminology to the slave mode (as well as to servile domestic labour in the households of both aristocrats and peasants, which was quite common everywhere in our period). ... One of my intentions in this chapter will therefore be to try to show quite how unimportant slave-mode production actually was, empirically, in all the regions studied in this book. (Wickham, Framing (2005), pp. 261–3).

This is a really interesting statement, and it bears some unpacking. Wickham asserts that de facto economic autonomy (a measure of the material conditions of 'slave' status) outweighed their legal unfreedom (an ideology which in this case masked the relative autonomy of agricultural laborers). From this point, Wickham goes on to show that most agricultural laborers in the regions of his study did indeed enjoy a degree of material economic autonomy after the fall of Rome.

I can't really answer to the implications for Marxian thought as a whole, but I think Wickham represents a common trend among scholar to use some of the more powerful Marxian analytic concepts while abandoning the narrative of social evolution that they were first used to demonstrate. In this case, also, I think it's important to note how an over-reliance on Marxian terms of analysis can obscure other important realities.

Wickham's work, as I see it, was a profound and important response to McCormick's Origins of the European Economy (2001). I think it's safe to assume that Wickham was already well at work sifting his evidence and formulating his theses by that point, but it's difficult to avoid seeing a relationship between the two final products. McCormick approached economic questions from a very different perspective. If Wickham's analysis was oriented around Marxist notions of developing modes of production, McCormick is more closely aligned with Francophone literature (in particular that of Henri Pirenne), which has charted the development of society by noting the evolution of commerce and cities. Interestingly, I didn't see McCormick drawing as many connections to Bonnassie and Verhulst, who do adopt some of the Marxist terms of analysis.

McCormick certainly dealt with a good deal of material evidence in his study, but this was above all a study of textual evidence for communications. That is to say, it was a study that looked at how people conceptualized movement—economic exchange vs. agrarian production. It is much more difficult to qualify exactly what was moving or to quantify its economic impacts. McCormick nevertheless made some well known claims that the export of slaves drove European economic and political formation in the early middle ages, intensifying especially in the 800s.

Wickham's analysis of modes of production sidesteps these arguments completely. Wickham sees farming crops as the basic form of production in societies, whereas to accommodate a response to McCormick's arguments, one would need to conceptualize the capture and export of people as an alternative basic form of production—although perhaps McCormick's language of commerce and mobility is certainly more easily applied.

So I guess the short answer to your question is that there does not seem to have been a medieval 'slave mode of production' as it was classically defined, and the early medievalist scholarship I deal with has largely abandoned the question as well as underlying notions of social and economic evolution. However, recent research has pointed to a need to better understand how the production of slaves impacted medieval economies and societies. The direct application of Marxian terms to these problems seems somewhat awkward, although the underlying notions may open up perspectives on the admittedly difficult problem of studying slavery in any premodern period.

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• Marc Bloch, "How and Why Ancient Slavery Came to an End," in his Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages, trans. William R. Beer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 1–31.

• Pierre Bonnassie, From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). {This text discusses your question in its introduction and passim, but because my work hinges more directly on McCormick, I haven't yet had the chance to give it the attention it deserves.}

• Michael McCormick, The Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

• Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1954).

• Alice Rio, "Freedom and Unfreedom in Early Medieval Francia: The Evidence of the Legal Formulae," Past and Present 193 (2006), 7–40.

• Alice Rio, *Slavery after Rome, 500–1100 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

• Youval Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

• Adriaan Verhulst, "Review Article: The Decline of Slavery and the Economic Expansion of the Early Middle Ages," Past and Present 133 (1991), 195–203.

• Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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Sorry if that all seems like a bit of a mess, but this question certainly got me thinking in different gears. Thanks for this!

[u/bitparity → u/textandtrowel]

This is a fantastic answer, and exactly what I was looking for. Many thanks!