Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study

By Orlando Patterson

Book Overview

This is the first full-scale comparative study of the nature of slavery. In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time. These include Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, China, Korea, the Islamic kingdoms, Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the American South. Slavery is shown to be a parasitic relationship between master and slave, invariably entailing the violent domination of a natally alienated, or socially dead, person. The phenomenon of slavery as an institution, the author argues, is a single process of recruitment, incorporation on the margin of society, and eventual manumission or death. Distinctions abound in this work. Beyond the reconceptualization of the basic master-slave relationship and the redefinition of slavery as an institution with universal attributes, Patterson rejects the legalistic Roman concept that places the "slave as property" at the core of the system. Rather, he emphasizes the centrality of sociological, symbolic, and ideological factors interwoven within the slavery system. Along the whole continuum of slavery, the cultural milieu is stressed, as well as political and psychological elements. Materialistic and racial factors are deemphasized. The author is thus able, for example, to deal with "elite" slaves, or even eunuchs, in the same framework of understanding as fieldhands; to uncover previously hidden principles of inheritance of slave and free status; and to show the tight relationship between slavery and freedom. Interdisciplinary in its methods, this study employs qualitative and quantitative techniques from all the social sciences to demonstrate the universality of structures and processes in slave systems and to reveal cross-cultural variations in the slave trade and in slavery, in rates of manumission, and in the status of freedmen. Slavery and Social Death lays out a vast new corpus of research that underpins an original and provocative thesis.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067481083X
• ISBN13: 9780674810839
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 511 Pages
• Weight: 1.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Analyzes The Internal Dynamics Of Slavery In Sixty-Six Societies

"In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson ANALYZES THE INTERNAL DYNAMICS OF SLAVERY IN SIXTY-SIX SOCIETIES over time. These include Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, China, Korea, the Islamic kingdoms, Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the American South....." [from the back cover of book]

Natal alienation

Patterson's book is groundbreaking for many reasons. That is, unlike other scholars of slavery, Patterson does not solely restrict himself to describing slaves and the institutions of slavery by juridical terms (eg Moses Finley). What is crucial to understanding the station of slaves in all societies, African: the various tribal slave systems, European: Roman,Greek,French,Dutch and English;Asian: Jewish, Islam,Indian, Korean etc is that the slave is defined by the absence of power. The slave is compelled to forgo his or her rights and concede to the domination of the owner. The slave is powerless before his or her master.This absence of power on the part of the slave was common to all slave societies, least of all the American slave society who had embraced the Aristotlean notions of slavery and discarded the Romans' who saw slavery as an outcome of fate.

A Fine compartive study of slave societies

Patterson's book is one of the best books on slavery as an universal phenomena. There is simply no parallel to this vaunted study. That is, he reveals lucidly that slavery was an important factor among all civilizations, tribals groups among the pre Christian Europeans, Africans, and the Near and Far Easteners. Also, Patterson is one of the few to note that skin color was not the deciding factor of a slave. Wars, ransom, meagre economic circumstances all contributed to one's enslavement. Among the early African slaves in America, their hair symbolized their enslaved status. What he does not mention, though, is the fact that to understand the fullest implications of Nazi German racial laws, one must seek to understand the enslavement of the Slavs by the Germans.