Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics Slavery in the Roman Provinces: North Africa

The formation of slave societies based on chattel servitors was a seacentered and seaborne phenomenon. From the ancient Black Sea to the modern burgeoning of the Atlantic system, this type of slavery was also an insular fact. The Mediterranean world of the Roman empire was no exception. Chattel servitude developed into its most intensified forms in the coastal lands of the empire that circled the Mediterranean Sea and on the islands of the inland sea. By contrast, the great continental land-centered empires of Han and Song Dynasty China experienced chattel slavery as a marginal rather than a central social and economic force. In the West, the gradual shift in the center of gravity of economic development after the sixth century CE from the Mediterranean to the western European hinterland emphasized forms of rural servitude other than chattel slavery. The still later historical transition from the world’s largest inland sea to the Atlantic Ocean shifted chattel slavery from the confines of the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean to the western shores of Africa and to the New World. In its most concentrated forms, this new slavery was found, onc