CHERRY Discussion Paper Series CHERRY DP 13/2 Death, obligation and the origins of slavery. Judith Spicksley Judith Spicksley Department of Economics and Related Studies University of York. [email protected] Death, obligation and the origins of slavery.1 Abstract Despite the fact that slavery existed historically in almost all known societies, historians have as yet been unable to identify any shared values from which the institution could have arisen. This article reconstructs slavery as a form of debt or obligation, by suggesting that slavery occurred when an individual with no apparent alternative but that of imminent death offered the sum total of his life services in exchange for the chance to survive. Slavery may then have emerged in response to the threat of famine, as a result of judicial punishment, or through situations of conflict, for example. The slave trade was likely to have been a later development, as groups requiring additional labour supplies sought to sell or exchange subject individuals for an agreed price. This transfer of a life debt , which encapsulated within it all the future labour services of the debtor (slave), supported the development of a market in lives that is now recognized as the cornerstone of slavery as an institution. Distraint on the body of the debtor was the earliest form of debt recovery. Enslavement then appears as a peculiarly exploitative form of distraint, with obligation as its primary justification. Key words: debt, obligation, slavery, distraint, slave trade, dependence, labour, law JEL classification: N30; P48 1 This article was written as part of a three-year project funded by the Nuffield Foundation, that set out to examine the links between debt and slavery in historical perspective; the author is extremely grateful to the Foundation for its support. The author would also like to thank David Brion Davis for his generous insights, and many other individuals who have commented on this article, including the staff and students at the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation and the Department of History at the University of Hull, participants at the conference on ‘Debt and Slavery: the History of a Process of Enslavement’, Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, in May 2009, and those at the ‘Charting New Courses in the History of Slavery and Emancipation’ Conference at the University of Southern Mississippi, Long Beach, Mississippi, USA, March 2010. 1 It has often been argued that the fight against modern forms of slavery and slave-like practices is hampered by the lack of a universal definition that makes such practices readily identifiable. The position has been little easier for those studying the history of slavery. Wide variations in the conditions in which slaves lived and worked, for example, and the plethora of dependencies that existed cross-culturally in the past, have made the notion of slavery as a historical institution problematic. Historians in any case are rarely comfortable in dealing with universal explanations; while recognising that human bondage existed in ‘almost all known historical societies and cultures’, they have not yet been able to identify ‘any specific set of shared social values’ from which the institution arises.2 Yet the very fact that slavery has existed across practically all known temporal and geographical boundaries makes the search for the key elements in social interaction that create and justify enslavement so crucial.3 One such element is now emerging. A survey of global enslavement practices from the third millennium BCE to the present day reveals at least one commonality in the records of enslavement - the idea of obligation or debt. The extent to which slavery as a legitimate social practice may be linked to concepts of indebtedness is therefore the subject of the discussion below.4 I. Currently, the central organising concept of slavery, at least from a legal perspective, is that of ownership. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a slave is 2 Ehud R. Toledano, As If Silent and Absent Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (Yale, 2007), 1. 3 Evidence of slavery can be found in the earliest written records of the Middle East, and appears in the ancient civilisations of Africa, Asia, Europe and America as well as the modern civilisations of the east and west. The literature is immense, but see for example, Robert McC. Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico (1966, paperback edition New Brunswick, 2005); Bernard J. Siegel, Slavery During the Third Dynasty of Ur, American Anthropologist, 49, 1, Part 2 (January, 1947); I. Mendelsohn, ‘Slavery in the Ancient Near East’, The Biblical Archaeologist, 9, 4 (1946); M.I. Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiquity Views and Controversies (Cambridge, 1960); idem, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, ed. Brent D. Shaw (Princeton, 1998); K. Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge, 1994); William Christie Macleod, ‘Debtor and Chattel Slavery in Aboriginal North America’, American Anthropologist, 27 (1925); W.E. Maxwell, ‘The Law Relating to Slavery Among the Malays’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Straits Branch, 22 (1890); David A.E. Pelteret, Slavery in Early Medieval England From the Reign of Alfred until the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1995); John S. Moore, ‘Domesday Slavery’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 11 (1981); Ruth Mazo Karras, Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (Yale, 1988); Diane Rapaport, ‘Scottish Slavery in 17th-Century New England’, History Scotland, January-February (2005); Henry Woodd Nevinson, A Modern Slavery (1906; BiblioBazaar Reproduction Series, n.d.). 4 Continuing work is exploring the implications of this: if we can link slavery to debt, then changes in the nature of debt, and in the ways it is both conceived and recovered are likely to have impacted on the institution of slavery. 2 primarily defined as ‘one who is the property of, and entirely subject to, another person, whether by capture, purchase, or birth’. Such understandings, moreover, are built into universal laws that sought to eradicate slavery on a global level. It was in 1926, in the first article of the Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery, that the international community, through the League of Nations, first decided to adopt the condition of ownership as its primary means of identification: ‘Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised’.5 This definition was upheld by the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, in September 1956.6 Such notions have apparently been with us for some time. Siegel claimed that during the Third Dynasty of Ur (20-21st century BCE), prisoners of wars and foreign slaves were ‘characteristically chattels’, even though ‘the inland slave was differentiated in a number of ways from other forms of property and was considered legally and socially as a human being.’7 Mendelsohn took a similar line with regard to the slaves of the Ancient Near East: ‘Legally the slave was considered a chattle. He was a commodity that could be sold, bought, leased or exchanged.’8 In Ancient Egypt too, it has been argued that ‘slavery in the full sense is certainly to be found. There are persons who are the property of others, in the sense that those others have full and exclusive rights to make use of them by sale, exchange, hire and so forth, as of other moveable property.’ Nevertheless Bakir was aware that the definition he applied to ‘slave’ was anachronistic, derived from a backward projection of the meaning it was to acquire later under the influence of Roman law. While there seems to have been a fundamental understanding of people as either free or unfree in Ancient Egypt, the unfree included people with various degrees of liberty, some of whom could be sold and others who could not. 9 In the west at least, this was to change under the influence of Rome. The relativistic concept of property that obtained in Ancient Greece, in which there was no clear distinction between possession and ownership, was increasingly anathematic in 5 http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/3ae6b36fb.html [accessed 16 Mch 2012] 6 http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/slavetrade.htm [accessed 16 Mch 2012] 7 Siegel, Third Dynasty, 49. 8 Mendelsohn, ‘Ancient Near East’, 80. 9 Abd El-Mohsen Bakir, Slavery in Pharaonic Egypt (Le Caire, 1952), 8, 124. 3 the Roman context.10 Slaves - along with land - constituted a major form (and marker) of individual wealth; and given the degree to which Romans depended upon slavery for their social, economic, and even cultural success, it is not surprising to find that Roman jurists sought to clarify the division between free and slave in an attempt to gain control over the latter. They chose to do this through the introduction of the legal fiction of absolute ownership, ‘a new legal paradigm in which there could be no room for ambiguity in deciding what was and what was not the object of property’.11 The emergence of the notion of dominium, or absolute ownership, was, according to Patterson, of key significance. Though problems remained in defining the slave as res (thing) the description not only served to demarcate slavery from a range of servile positions that were similar to it (nexus, auctoratus, addictus for example), but also sealed the identity of the slave as a chattel,