Orlando Patterson (Harvard University)

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).