Orlando Patterson: The Origins of Slavery and Slave Society A Critique of Nieboer-Domar and Case Study of Slavery in Ancient Athens

We will meet in person in William James Hall 1550 this Friday, October 27 from 12:00pm to 1:30pm. We are also offering a hybrid virtual option – the Zoom link is: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/97543817915?pwd=MVNBWHhLSUJMMHRORXpQbmd6TmF6UT09

Passcode: 555659

Lunch will be served in 1550. 

If you plan to attend this workshop, please RSVP to jviator@fas.harvard.edu.

The Origins of Slavery and Slave Society

A Critique of Nieboer-Domar and Case Study of Slavery in Ancient Athens

Slavery is humanity’s most extreme form of inequality, its most ancient and its most persistent, with an ILO estimated 50  million women, men and children still living in modern-day slavery. How and why did it originate in the pre-modern world? Where was it most advanced? The talk has 3 objectives: (1) I briefly distinguish between slavery, as an institutionalized relation of domination, and slave society, its macrosocial form; (2) I summarize and critique the most famous theory of its origin, independently developed by the Dutch comparative and historical ethnographer H.J. Nieboer, and the M.I.T economist and economic historian Evsey Domar, in the course of which I present an alternate approach; (3) I then provide historical and cultural context through a brief outline and  discussion of the development of the world’s first large-scale slave society, ancient Athens, the seedbed culture of Western civilization. The talk is based on a chapter of my forthcoming book, Enslavement: Past and Present (Polity Press, 2024).