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Symposium: Orlando Patterson's Enslavement
Moving forward in comparative slavery: Orlando Patterson’s critique of “slave society”, “slave systems”, and the “second slavery”
Enrico Dal Lago
Pages 661-668 | Received 02 May 2025, Accepted 06 May 2025, Published online: 30 May 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2025.2504612
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ABSTRACT
Orlando Patterson’s critique of the concept of “slave society” in his recent book Enslavement: Past and Present offers us an occasion to reflect upon the use of this term by scholars engaging in studies of comparative slavery in the ancient and modern worlds. It is possible to relate Patterson’s critique of “slave society” to a discussion of the cognate concept of “slave system”, taking inspirations from important recent studies by historians of ancient slavery in comparative perspective. At the same time, it is equally important to keep into account the important comparative work done by an innovative group of scholars on the “second slavery” in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Patterson’s concept of dependence as the main feature that defined slavery can help us moving forward in comparative slavery studies by providing guidelines for a comparison of “slave systems”, including the ones that characterized the “second slavery”.
KEYWORDS:
Slave society
slave system
second slavery
comparative history
dependence
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The profound influence of Orlando Patterson’s work and ideas on scholars interested in comparative slavery is undeniable. His classic magnum opus Slavery and Social Death (Patterson [Citation1982] Citation2019) provided a definition of slavery utilized in countless scholarly works since then, and it was at the same time celebrated for its ongoing relevance and also made object of sharp criticism. Particularly significant in this respect have been, in recent times, a seminal edited collection entitled On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death (Bodel and Scheidel Citation2016) and a special issue of Theory and Society (Greenland and Steimetz Citation2019) published in occasion of the republication of Patterson’s best-known book. The recent publication of Patterson’s Enslavement: Past and Present (Citation2025, from now on EPP) provides scholars with further food for thought in relation to the theoretical underpinnings of studies in comparative slavery and Orlando Patterson’s developing views in this sense. In this essay, I focus specifically on Patterson’s critique of the definition of “slave society”, which is a crucial concept first put forward by classical historian Moses Finley in the 1970s and, since then, adopted, in particular, by historians of the nineteenth-century U.S. South and also commonly utilized by comparative scholars of slavery. I argue that Patterson’s critique of the definition of “slave society” in Chapter 3 of Enslavement helps us move forward in understanding slavery in comparative perspective, especially when we place it in dialogue with other definitions utilized by historians and historical sociologists in comparative studies, most recently with regard to the ancient Mediterranean and the nineteenth-century Atlantic, such as “slave system” and also the “second slavery”.
“Slave society” in enslavement: past and present
In EPP, Patterson constructs a critique and a genealogy of the concept of “slave society”, which has dominated scholarship on slavery, especially comparative slavery, and traces its ideological influences to both the Marxist “slave mode of production”, in which slavery’s primary function was economic, and to Weber’s conditions for the existence of large-scale societies rooted in plantation economies and well-supplied slave markets – both interpretations which Patterson dismisses as either overtly materialistic or too general to be of any use in historical comparison. Patterson, then, proceeds to criticize classical historian Moses Finley’s well-known definition of “genuine slave societies”, which famously applied only to four civilizations in the past: “classical Greece (except Sparta) and Rome, the American South, and the Caribbean” (Finley Citation1968, 308). These four examples were the only ones in which, according to Finley, the enslaved were at least 20 percent of the population, they played a significant role in surplus production, and they exercised a pervasive cultural influence; further, Finley distinguished clearly these four “genuine slave societies” from “societies with slaves”, which, even though characterized by the presence of slaves, did not share the same features with the former.
As Noel Lenski did also a few years ago in an edited collection entitled What is a Slave Society? (Lenski Citation2018), in EPP Patterson criticizes Finley’s model as ethnocentric, inaccurate in its fixation on the 20 percent number of enslaved and also in its requirement of pervasive cultural influence – all features that leave out especially a number of non-western “slave societies”. It is important to notice, at this point, that both classical historians, most notably Keith Hopkins (Hopkins Citation1978), and modern historians of slavery have fruitfully utilized Finley’s definition, especially for comparative purposes and also to provide a comprehensible model of development of slavery over time in certain regions of the world, which went from “societies with slaves” to “slave societies”, as Ira Berlin did with regard to the colonial American South (Berlin Citation1998).Footnote1 In fact, it is possible to claim, as Matt D. Childs has done, that “the great slave societies of the Americas in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern part of the United States all started as societies with slaves before they became slave societies” and that this distinction provides “a useful analytical tool for studying the specific roles of demographics and labour in shaping such topics as family relations, possibilities for manumission, and more broadly cultural accommodation and resistance” (Childs Citation2011, 173) – and this still maintaining the validity of both Lenski’s and Patterson’s criticisms. In fact, where Patterson’s criticism to Finley’s model proves particularly helpful is in the matter of definition of the term “slave society”, rather than in its application as an analytical tool. In EPP, Patterson shifts the focus of this definition on a deeper multi-faceted understanding of the structural dependence at the heart of societies that utilized slaves and on how this determined “the modes or patterns of articulation of slavery, leading to different slave formations” (Patterson Citation2025, 69).
Patterson first focuses on the nature of dependence, which he intends broadly as encompassing either the economic, or the social, or the political, or the military sphere, or two or more of these combined. Here, it is particularly enlightening to see Patterson’s assertion that economic dependence characterized especially slavery in ancient Rome and in the modern capitalist version of it, since this validates the several attempts at diachronic comparison between these two types of slavery made by historians of different ideological orientation who started precisely from this assumption (see, for example, Bush Citation1996 and Dal Lago and Katsari Citation2008b). Patterson next focuses on the degree of dependence, highlighting the importance of the number of slaves in a particular society and the extent of their dependence, and he reminds the reader of Appendix C in his Slavery and Social Death, in which he listed sixty-six slaveholding societies, which he called large-scale slave societies based on the criterion of the size of the slave population in them being mostly between 20 and 90 percent, and in a few cases even more (Patterson [Citation1982] Citation2019, 354–363). Based on this sole feature, therefore, the colonies of the American South, where the percentage of the slave population was well over 20 percent in the eighteenth century, could be said correctly to have been large-scale slave societies already by that time, as Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan, among others have argued (Berlin Citation1998; Morgan Citation1998). Finally, Patterson looks at the direction of dependence, distinguishing between “passive articulation”, in which slavery did not have a major impact on economy, society, and culture – as in the case of Korea between the 10th and 20th centuries – and “active articulation”, where the opposite was the case – as in the cases of the Caribbean between the 18th and the 19th centuries (Patterson Citation2025, 71–72), and, similarly, of the American South during the same time period.
“Slave societies”, “slave systems”, and slaving zones
In fact, Patterson’s exact definition of “large-scale slave societies” in Slavery and Social Death is actually worded as “large-scale slave systems”, i.e. systems “in which the social structure was decisively dependent on the institution of slavery” and in which this “dependence was often, but not necessarily economic” (Patterson [Citation1982] Citation2019, 354). This is an important point, because the distinction between the two definitions helps us overcoming the perceived heuristic poverty of the expression “slave society” – for all the reasons pointed out by Patterson himself and Lenski – and provides us with an alternative expression – “slave system” – which is at once more flexible and adaptable and also more in tune with some important recent work on comparative slavery, especially with regard to the ancient Mediterranean. While, at a first glance, the expression “slave system” might give one the impression of being simply “slave society” writ large, the truth is that the former contains within itself the ideas of integration and organization, together with those of scale and pervasiveness, of the institution of slavery.Footnote2 It is “the organic integration among its different parts, which created an economic mechanism that was both self-contained and self-sustained”, which “allowed a specific system to operate efficiently”, and therefore the expression “slave system … describes a self-contained, self-sustaining set of organic relationships, both at the economic and the social level”, at the heart of which was the institution of slavery (Dal Lago and Katsari Citation2008a, 4). Taken in this sense, “slave system” can fruitfully replace “slave society” in studies of comparative slavery, maintaining, crucially, the focus on the nature, degree, and direction of dependence described by Patterson as the constituent elements of the organic relationships at the heart of an organic, integrated, interconnected social and economic system in which slavery was pervasive on a large scale, as recent work on slavery in the ancient Mediterranean clearly testifies.
In a recent article on comparative ancient slavery in the Mediterranean, Fabio Joly and José Knust called for a refashioning of the categories of scholarly interpretation of slavery in the Roman world, moving from the critiques to Finley’s concept of “slave society” and its application by different historians. Commenting on Lenski’s criticism of “slave society” as an attempt to reboot the concept with a wider sample fitting the category, Joly and Knust noticed how “the emphasis on the methodology of constructing ideal types maintains those traditional forms of slavery, such as “Roman slavery” and “slavery in the US South”, as well as it hinders an understanding of these slaveries in the larger slave systems – Mediterranean and Atlantic – in which they were inserted”, both of them crucial contexts in their own different ways (Joly and Knust Citation2024, 380). Further, Joly and Knust praised the work of Kyle Harper, who described the type of slavery that characterized the Mediterranean under Rome both as an integrated and homogenous slave system in which “a convergence of forces acted to intensify both the supply and demand for slaves over an extended arc of time” (Harper Citation2011, 61). Thus, in this model, “slave societies” would be the constituent elements of an interconnected and “broader slave system in time and space, which would itself be reproduced by local systems of slavery”, while at the same time representing a specific developmental phase of slavery in the Mediterranean context (Joly and Knust Citation2024, 382). In building their new model for the analysis of ancient Mediterranean slavery, Joly and Knust refer specifically to two crucial concepts elaborated by other scholars. The first is the concept of slaving zone, elaborated by Jeff Flynn-Paul, according to whom “a slaving zone is defined as the geographical area impacted by a given society’s demand for slaves, and a no-slaving zone is the area considered off limits for slave raiding by that society” (Flynn-Paul Citation2009, 4; on slaving zones, see also Lewis Citation2018). The second is the concept of epichoric “slave systems”, elaborated by Kostas Vassoupolos, according to whom, in the ancient Mediterranean, there were “multiple and diverse slave systems which developed their own peculiar features as a result of the local concatenation of economic, social, political and cultural processes” and which were, eventually, incorporated into an entangled, interconnected, homogenous Mediterranean “slave system” under the Roman Empire (Vlassopoulos Citation2024, 415).
“Slave systems”, the “second slavery”, and comparative slavery
Thus, in this perspective, following Joly and Knust’s suggestions, the overall course of development of the ancient Mediterranean would have seen a number of epichoric “slave systems” ending up incorporated in the larger Roman “slave system” through a process characterized by the continuous creation of non-slaving zones in the core of different slaving powers, such as ultimately Rome itself, and slaving zones at the peripheries where the latter waged wars for conquest. This model has the advantage of proposing a dynamic idea of the development of slavery, also following important suggestions by Joseph Miller on the importance of the concept of “slaving” (Miller Citation2012), replacing the static “slave societies” with the continuously changing, adapting, epichoric “slave systems”, which were ultimately integrated into a larger “slave system”, while also opening up the possibility of engaging in historical comparison between different “slave systems”. At the same time, the model also chimes with Patterson’s own understanding of “large-scale slave systems” and with his definition of the nature, degree, and direction of dependence as the constituent elements of slavery, since it was the combination of these three elements in integrated large-scale economies and societies, and within the context of important cultural developments, which drove the political creation of slaving zones that originated and also maintained different “slave systems”.
The implications of the new perspective adopted by recent works on ancient Mediterranean “slave systems” and of its combination with Patterson’s analysis of dependence in EPP are far-reaching, not just for comparative studies on ancient slavery, but also, specifically, for comparative studies of slavery in the nineteenth-century Atlantic, which has recently undergone a regeneration as a result of the scholarship on the “second slavery”.Footnote3 In the past two decades, a group of scholars investigating slavery in the Atlantic World, headed by Dale Tomich, have put forward a model of interpretation of slavery in the nineteenth-century Atlantic as a “second slavery”, which succeeded a first phase of colonial slavery and was characterized by its tight links with the capitalist world market through the production of specific staple crops – cotton, sugar, and coffee – in three particular areas of the Americas (Tomich Citation2004). Dale Tomich and Michael Zeuske have described the process at the origin of the “second slavery” in these particular areas as “the formation of highly productive new zones of slave commodities in the Atlantic and particularly in the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil” (Tomich and Zeuske Citation2008, 91). In turn, the organization and labour management of plantations in the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil – which were completely geared toward the production of the three staple crops that dominated the nineteenth-century world-economy in the Atlantic – betrayed the aggressively capitalist, profit-driven, world-market oriented, and highly exploitative nature of the “second slavery” (Blackburn Citation2017; Dal Lago Citation2009). It is important to notice, though, that this was not merely an economic phenomenon, since the “second slavery” produced very distinctive forms of slave dependence from their masters and exploitation, often camouflaged through the rhetoric of paternalism, together with original cultural and political expressions, which, notably, led to the flourishing of a slaveholding type of nationalism in the three areas of the Americas cited above (Marquese Citation2004; Tomich Citation2016).
In essence, thus, the three areas of the Americas in which the plantation economy focused on the production of the three specific cash crops of cotton, sugar, and coffee for the world market – the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil – as described and analysed by scholars of the “second slavery” were the seats of the three major “slave systems” that formed the Atlantic economy in the nineteenth century, and they had characteristics akin to the slave systems of the ancient Mediterranean described by Joly and Knust, though with obvious strong contextual differences (Joly and Knust Citation2024). Thus, the U.S. Southern, Cuban, and Brazilian “slave systems” were organic, interconnected, and highly dynamic economic and social phenomena whose defining feature was the practice of slavery – based, in Patterson’s terms, on a structural dependence – on a large scale. Their dynamic nature showed in their expansionist drive – which was at the heart of their cultural and political slaveholding nationalisms – through which these nineteenth-century Atlantic “slave systems” created the equivalent of no-slaving zones at their cores and slaving zones at their peripheries or frontiers, driven by an ever-increasing demand for slaves, and ultimately caused major conflicts over the expansion of slavery as a result of the changing regional political climates (Blackburn Citation2024).
Keeping in mind, on one side, the suggestions coming from Joly and Knust, and, on the other side, the scholarship on the “second slavery”, it is possible to envision a way of moving forward in comparative slavery studies by making comparisons between different “slave systems”, either synchronically, within the ancient Mediterranean or the nineteenth-century Atlantic, or diachronically, by comparing the former with the latter. In doing this, Patterson’s critique of “slave society” and his description of dependence with the three qualifications he applies to it would be well suited to act as a guideline in the comparative analysis of “slave systems”, whether in an ancient or a modern setting. The nature of dependence would apply to the comparison of the socio-economic, political, and military bases of the “slave systems” – and in the case of the “second slavery”, it would be strongly connected to the nineteenth-century capitalist world economy. The degree of dependence would apply to the size of the slave population, which was massive in every “slave system”, and, together with its integrated and interconnected nature, distinguished it from other socio-economic systems. Finally, Patterson’s use of the concept of direction of dependence would allow us to distinguish between the “slave systems” characterized by “passive articulation” – perhaps, the smaller, regional epichoric “slave systems” – with a low impact of slavery on their economy, society, and culture, and the “slave systems” characterized by “active articulation” – which certainly included both the Roman Empire and the nineteenth-century “slave systems” of the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil under the “second slavery” – with a high impact of slavery on their economy, society, and culture.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In the same vein, in the most recent survey of American slavery, Calvin Schermerhorn utilized Finley’s terminology with regard to the 18th-century Chesapeake and Carolina Low Country slave societies (Schermerhorn Citation2018, 5), while, a few years earlier, Laird Bergad, in his important comparative study of Atlantic slavery, employed it to describe Brazil’s development into the “first true slave society in the Americas” (Bergad Citation2007, 40).
2 Significantly, the first to apply the term “slave system” to a comparison of large-scale slave societies was William Westermann, who focused on the classical world (Westermann Citation1955); however, his understanding of the term had more to do with legal provisions constituting the status of slaves as property than with broader implications of economic integration.
3 Significantly, the concept of and scholarship on the “second slavery” was also a source of inspiration for Joly and Knust (Joly and Knust Citation2024, 387–388).
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slave system
second slavery
comparative history
dependence
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The profound influence of Orlando Patterson’s work and ideas on scholars interested in comparative slavery is undeniable. His classic magnum opus Slavery and Social Death (Patterson [Citation1982] Citation2019) provided a definition of slavery utilized in countless scholarly works since then, and it was at the same time celebrated for its ongoing relevance and also made object of sharp criticism. Particularly significant in this respect have been, in recent times, a seminal edited collection entitled On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death (Bodel and Scheidel Citation2016) and a special issue of Theory and Society (Greenland and Steimetz Citation2019) published in occasion of the republication of Patterson’s best-known book. The recent publication of Patterson’s Enslavement: Past and Present (Citation2025, from now on EPP) provides scholars with further food for thought in relation to the theoretical underpinnings of studies in comparative slavery and Orlando Patterson’s developing views in this sense. In this essay, I focus specifically on Patterson’s critique of the definition of “slave society”, which is a crucial concept first put forward by classical historian Moses Finley in the 1970s and, since then, adopted, in particular, by historians of the nineteenth-century U.S. South and also commonly utilized by comparative scholars of slavery. I argue that Patterson’s critique of the definition of “slave society” in Chapter 3 of Enslavement helps us move forward in understanding slavery in comparative perspective, especially when we place it in dialogue with other definitions utilized by historians and historical sociologists in comparative studies, most recently with regard to the ancient Mediterranean and the nineteenth-century Atlantic, such as “slave system” and also the “second slavery”.
“Slave society” in enslavement: past and present
In EPP, Patterson constructs a critique and a genealogy of the concept of “slave society”, which has dominated scholarship on slavery, especially comparative slavery, and traces its ideological influences to both the Marxist “slave mode of production”, in which slavery’s primary function was economic, and to Weber’s conditions for the existence of large-scale societies rooted in plantation economies and well-supplied slave markets – both interpretations which Patterson dismisses as either overtly materialistic or too general to be of any use in historical comparison. Patterson, then, proceeds to criticize classical historian Moses Finley’s well-known definition of “genuine slave societies”, which famously applied only to four civilizations in the past: “classical Greece (except Sparta) and Rome, the American South, and the Caribbean” (Finley Citation1968, 308). These four examples were the only ones in which, according to Finley, the enslaved were at least 20 percent of the population, they played a significant role in surplus production, and they exercised a pervasive cultural influence; further, Finley distinguished clearly these four “genuine slave societies” from “societies with slaves”, which, even though characterized by the presence of slaves, did not share the same features with the former.
As Noel Lenski did also a few years ago in an edited collection entitled What is a Slave Society? (Lenski Citation2018), in EPP Patterson criticizes Finley’s model as ethnocentric, inaccurate in its fixation on the 20 percent number of enslaved and also in its requirement of pervasive cultural influence – all features that leave out especially a number of non-western “slave societies”. It is important to notice, at this point, that both classical historians, most notably Keith Hopkins (Hopkins Citation1978), and modern historians of slavery have fruitfully utilized Finley’s definition, especially for comparative purposes and also to provide a comprehensible model of development of slavery over time in certain regions of the world, which went from “societies with slaves” to “slave societies”, as Ira Berlin did with regard to the colonial American South (Berlin Citation1998).Footnote1 In fact, it is possible to claim, as Matt D. Childs has done, that “the great slave societies of the Americas in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern part of the United States all started as societies with slaves before they became slave societies” and that this distinction provides “a useful analytical tool for studying the specific roles of demographics and labour in shaping such topics as family relations, possibilities for manumission, and more broadly cultural accommodation and resistance” (Childs Citation2011, 173) – and this still maintaining the validity of both Lenski’s and Patterson’s criticisms. In fact, where Patterson’s criticism to Finley’s model proves particularly helpful is in the matter of definition of the term “slave society”, rather than in its application as an analytical tool. In EPP, Patterson shifts the focus of this definition on a deeper multi-faceted understanding of the structural dependence at the heart of societies that utilized slaves and on how this determined “the modes or patterns of articulation of slavery, leading to different slave formations” (Patterson Citation2025, 69).
Patterson first focuses on the nature of dependence, which he intends broadly as encompassing either the economic, or the social, or the political, or the military sphere, or two or more of these combined. Here, it is particularly enlightening to see Patterson’s assertion that economic dependence characterized especially slavery in ancient Rome and in the modern capitalist version of it, since this validates the several attempts at diachronic comparison between these two types of slavery made by historians of different ideological orientation who started precisely from this assumption (see, for example, Bush Citation1996 and Dal Lago and Katsari Citation2008b). Patterson next focuses on the degree of dependence, highlighting the importance of the number of slaves in a particular society and the extent of their dependence, and he reminds the reader of Appendix C in his Slavery and Social Death, in which he listed sixty-six slaveholding societies, which he called large-scale slave societies based on the criterion of the size of the slave population in them being mostly between 20 and 90 percent, and in a few cases even more (Patterson [Citation1982] Citation2019, 354–363). Based on this sole feature, therefore, the colonies of the American South, where the percentage of the slave population was well over 20 percent in the eighteenth century, could be said correctly to have been large-scale slave societies already by that time, as Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan, among others have argued (Berlin Citation1998; Morgan Citation1998). Finally, Patterson looks at the direction of dependence, distinguishing between “passive articulation”, in which slavery did not have a major impact on economy, society, and culture – as in the case of Korea between the 10th and 20th centuries – and “active articulation”, where the opposite was the case – as in the cases of the Caribbean between the 18th and the 19th centuries (Patterson Citation2025, 71–72), and, similarly, of the American South during the same time period.
“Slave societies”, “slave systems”, and slaving zones
In fact, Patterson’s exact definition of “large-scale slave societies” in Slavery and Social Death is actually worded as “large-scale slave systems”, i.e. systems “in which the social structure was decisively dependent on the institution of slavery” and in which this “dependence was often, but not necessarily economic” (Patterson [Citation1982] Citation2019, 354). This is an important point, because the distinction between the two definitions helps us overcoming the perceived heuristic poverty of the expression “slave society” – for all the reasons pointed out by Patterson himself and Lenski – and provides us with an alternative expression – “slave system” – which is at once more flexible and adaptable and also more in tune with some important recent work on comparative slavery, especially with regard to the ancient Mediterranean. While, at a first glance, the expression “slave system” might give one the impression of being simply “slave society” writ large, the truth is that the former contains within itself the ideas of integration and organization, together with those of scale and pervasiveness, of the institution of slavery.Footnote2 It is “the organic integration among its different parts, which created an economic mechanism that was both self-contained and self-sustained”, which “allowed a specific system to operate efficiently”, and therefore the expression “slave system … describes a self-contained, self-sustaining set of organic relationships, both at the economic and the social level”, at the heart of which was the institution of slavery (Dal Lago and Katsari Citation2008a, 4). Taken in this sense, “slave system” can fruitfully replace “slave society” in studies of comparative slavery, maintaining, crucially, the focus on the nature, degree, and direction of dependence described by Patterson as the constituent elements of the organic relationships at the heart of an organic, integrated, interconnected social and economic system in which slavery was pervasive on a large scale, as recent work on slavery in the ancient Mediterranean clearly testifies.
In a recent article on comparative ancient slavery in the Mediterranean, Fabio Joly and José Knust called for a refashioning of the categories of scholarly interpretation of slavery in the Roman world, moving from the critiques to Finley’s concept of “slave society” and its application by different historians. Commenting on Lenski’s criticism of “slave society” as an attempt to reboot the concept with a wider sample fitting the category, Joly and Knust noticed how “the emphasis on the methodology of constructing ideal types maintains those traditional forms of slavery, such as “Roman slavery” and “slavery in the US South”, as well as it hinders an understanding of these slaveries in the larger slave systems – Mediterranean and Atlantic – in which they were inserted”, both of them crucial contexts in their own different ways (Joly and Knust Citation2024, 380). Further, Joly and Knust praised the work of Kyle Harper, who described the type of slavery that characterized the Mediterranean under Rome both as an integrated and homogenous slave system in which “a convergence of forces acted to intensify both the supply and demand for slaves over an extended arc of time” (Harper Citation2011, 61). Thus, in this model, “slave societies” would be the constituent elements of an interconnected and “broader slave system in time and space, which would itself be reproduced by local systems of slavery”, while at the same time representing a specific developmental phase of slavery in the Mediterranean context (Joly and Knust Citation2024, 382). In building their new model for the analysis of ancient Mediterranean slavery, Joly and Knust refer specifically to two crucial concepts elaborated by other scholars. The first is the concept of slaving zone, elaborated by Jeff Flynn-Paul, according to whom “a slaving zone is defined as the geographical area impacted by a given society’s demand for slaves, and a no-slaving zone is the area considered off limits for slave raiding by that society” (Flynn-Paul Citation2009, 4; on slaving zones, see also Lewis Citation2018). The second is the concept of epichoric “slave systems”, elaborated by Kostas Vassoupolos, according to whom, in the ancient Mediterranean, there were “multiple and diverse slave systems which developed their own peculiar features as a result of the local concatenation of economic, social, political and cultural processes” and which were, eventually, incorporated into an entangled, interconnected, homogenous Mediterranean “slave system” under the Roman Empire (Vlassopoulos Citation2024, 415).
“Slave systems”, the “second slavery”, and comparative slavery
Thus, in this perspective, following Joly and Knust’s suggestions, the overall course of development of the ancient Mediterranean would have seen a number of epichoric “slave systems” ending up incorporated in the larger Roman “slave system” through a process characterized by the continuous creation of non-slaving zones in the core of different slaving powers, such as ultimately Rome itself, and slaving zones at the peripheries where the latter waged wars for conquest. This model has the advantage of proposing a dynamic idea of the development of slavery, also following important suggestions by Joseph Miller on the importance of the concept of “slaving” (Miller Citation2012), replacing the static “slave societies” with the continuously changing, adapting, epichoric “slave systems”, which were ultimately integrated into a larger “slave system”, while also opening up the possibility of engaging in historical comparison between different “slave systems”. At the same time, the model also chimes with Patterson’s own understanding of “large-scale slave systems” and with his definition of the nature, degree, and direction of dependence as the constituent elements of slavery, since it was the combination of these three elements in integrated large-scale economies and societies, and within the context of important cultural developments, which drove the political creation of slaving zones that originated and also maintained different “slave systems”.
The implications of the new perspective adopted by recent works on ancient Mediterranean “slave systems” and of its combination with Patterson’s analysis of dependence in EPP are far-reaching, not just for comparative studies on ancient slavery, but also, specifically, for comparative studies of slavery in the nineteenth-century Atlantic, which has recently undergone a regeneration as a result of the scholarship on the “second slavery”.Footnote3 In the past two decades, a group of scholars investigating slavery in the Atlantic World, headed by Dale Tomich, have put forward a model of interpretation of slavery in the nineteenth-century Atlantic as a “second slavery”, which succeeded a first phase of colonial slavery and was characterized by its tight links with the capitalist world market through the production of specific staple crops – cotton, sugar, and coffee – in three particular areas of the Americas (Tomich Citation2004). Dale Tomich and Michael Zeuske have described the process at the origin of the “second slavery” in these particular areas as “the formation of highly productive new zones of slave commodities in the Atlantic and particularly in the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil” (Tomich and Zeuske Citation2008, 91). In turn, the organization and labour management of plantations in the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil – which were completely geared toward the production of the three staple crops that dominated the nineteenth-century world-economy in the Atlantic – betrayed the aggressively capitalist, profit-driven, world-market oriented, and highly exploitative nature of the “second slavery” (Blackburn Citation2017; Dal Lago Citation2009). It is important to notice, though, that this was not merely an economic phenomenon, since the “second slavery” produced very distinctive forms of slave dependence from their masters and exploitation, often camouflaged through the rhetoric of paternalism, together with original cultural and political expressions, which, notably, led to the flourishing of a slaveholding type of nationalism in the three areas of the Americas cited above (Marquese Citation2004; Tomich Citation2016).
In essence, thus, the three areas of the Americas in which the plantation economy focused on the production of the three specific cash crops of cotton, sugar, and coffee for the world market – the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil – as described and analysed by scholars of the “second slavery” were the seats of the three major “slave systems” that formed the Atlantic economy in the nineteenth century, and they had characteristics akin to the slave systems of the ancient Mediterranean described by Joly and Knust, though with obvious strong contextual differences (Joly and Knust Citation2024). Thus, the U.S. Southern, Cuban, and Brazilian “slave systems” were organic, interconnected, and highly dynamic economic and social phenomena whose defining feature was the practice of slavery – based, in Patterson’s terms, on a structural dependence – on a large scale. Their dynamic nature showed in their expansionist drive – which was at the heart of their cultural and political slaveholding nationalisms – through which these nineteenth-century Atlantic “slave systems” created the equivalent of no-slaving zones at their cores and slaving zones at their peripheries or frontiers, driven by an ever-increasing demand for slaves, and ultimately caused major conflicts over the expansion of slavery as a result of the changing regional political climates (Blackburn Citation2024).
Keeping in mind, on one side, the suggestions coming from Joly and Knust, and, on the other side, the scholarship on the “second slavery”, it is possible to envision a way of moving forward in comparative slavery studies by making comparisons between different “slave systems”, either synchronically, within the ancient Mediterranean or the nineteenth-century Atlantic, or diachronically, by comparing the former with the latter. In doing this, Patterson’s critique of “slave society” and his description of dependence with the three qualifications he applies to it would be well suited to act as a guideline in the comparative analysis of “slave systems”, whether in an ancient or a modern setting. The nature of dependence would apply to the comparison of the socio-economic, political, and military bases of the “slave systems” – and in the case of the “second slavery”, it would be strongly connected to the nineteenth-century capitalist world economy. The degree of dependence would apply to the size of the slave population, which was massive in every “slave system”, and, together with its integrated and interconnected nature, distinguished it from other socio-economic systems. Finally, Patterson’s use of the concept of direction of dependence would allow us to distinguish between the “slave systems” characterized by “passive articulation” – perhaps, the smaller, regional epichoric “slave systems” – with a low impact of slavery on their economy, society, and culture, and the “slave systems” characterized by “active articulation” – which certainly included both the Roman Empire and the nineteenth-century “slave systems” of the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil under the “second slavery” – with a high impact of slavery on their economy, society, and culture.
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Notes
1 In the same vein, in the most recent survey of American slavery, Calvin Schermerhorn utilized Finley’s terminology with regard to the 18th-century Chesapeake and Carolina Low Country slave societies (Schermerhorn Citation2018, 5), while, a few years earlier, Laird Bergad, in his important comparative study of Atlantic slavery, employed it to describe Brazil’s development into the “first true slave society in the Americas” (Bergad Citation2007, 40).
2 Significantly, the first to apply the term “slave system” to a comparison of large-scale slave societies was William Westermann, who focused on the classical world (Westermann Citation1955); however, his understanding of the term had more to do with legal provisions constituting the status of slaves as property than with broader implications of economic integration.
3 Significantly, the concept of and scholarship on the “second slavery” was also a source of inspiration for Joly and Knust (Joly and Knust Citation2024, 387–388).
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