Extract from ‘Slavery and Human Progress’ by David Brion Davis
- The vulnerability of young women is suggested by the fact that in the earliest protoliterate tables, the sign for ‘slave girl’ appeared before the word for ‘slave’, which in ancient Sumerian meant ‘male (or female) of a foreign country’.
- Today, however, we automatically contrast slavery with free wage labour or with various modern ideals of individual autonomy. Through most of history such antonyms would have appeared absurd or contradictory. In earliest Saxon law, for example, the ‘autonomous’ stranger who had no family or clan to protect him was automatically regarded as a slave. Similarly, in most of Africa, according to Miers and Kopytoff, ‘the antithesis of slavery’ is not ‘freedom’ qua autonomy but rather ‘belonging’. Significantly, the Giriama of the Kenya coast, when asked to name the opposite of mtumwa (‘slave’), invariably replied ‘Mgiriama’, meaning simply a Giriama’. In premodern societies the salient characteristic of slavery was its antithetical relation to the normal network of kinship ties of dependency, protection, obligation, and privilege, ties that easily served as a model for nonkinship forms of patronagge, clientage, and voluntary servitude.
- Assuming that cultural achievement could never depend on moral evil, most historians and classicists tended to ignore ancient slavery or to regarded it as a deplorable defect unrelated to the glories of Greece and Rome.
- Though far less numerous than in ancient Athens and Rome, slaves were ubiquitous in the Byzantine Empire; in the great Muslim seats of learning, science, and art; in Spain during the brilliant Umayyad dynasty of Cordoba; and in Renaissance Span and Portugal. The importation of tens of thousands of slaves in Venice and Tuscany, in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was partly a response to devastating epidemics that led to labour shortages and economic contraction; yet the presence of such ‘domestic enemies’, as Petarch termed them, hardly stymied cultural and intellectual achievement in Renaissance Italy.
