264 youval rotman
society” historians of the twentieth century and even of the twenty-first century still
use terms such as “chattel slavery,” where slaves are foreigners whose importation
and employment in a condition of “social death” form the backbone of the economic
structure. This led to an identification of ancient Greece and Rome as “slave-owning
societies,” in contrast to other Mediterranean societies, in which “domestic slavery”
made the employment of slaves economically irrelevant. Moreover, this perspective
conditioned scholars to argue also for a “decline” of ancient slavery, and its replace-
ment with “new forms of unfree labor.” Thus, even if the historical research of the
last 50 years in regard to ancient Mediterranean slavery appears to detach itself from
the premise of “class struggle” and from the model of modern Atlantic slavery,
scholars still use concepts which are very much related to them. This prism discon-
nects ancient Mediterranean slavery from its historical context. Moreover, it also dis-
connects Mediterranean slavery from other forms of slavery, and prevents us from
examining the question of the history of slavery within a broad Mediterranean context.
Over the last 20 years, historians dealing with African societies, Atlantic societies, as
well as European and Asian societies have introduced great innovations in research into
slavery. These studies have developed micro-historical approaches which revealed the
unique characters and different forms of slavery that have existed throughout history,
linking them all the same to the broader question about connectivity between different
forms of slavery. This approach, which combines micro-historical study with a macro-
historical conceptualization, is particularly useful for the study of the history of slavery in
the Mediterranean, since it underlines the differences within one common geopolitical
framework. It enables the historian to step out of static and rigid concepts such as: “rise
and decline,” “chattel slavery,” “domestic slavery,” “social death,” “class struggle,”
“slave-owning society,” “slavery versus freedom,” and “unfree labor versus free labor.”
Mediterranean societies did not share one single definition of slavery, nor did they
conform to a single model. In what follows, I would like to put an emphasis on the
variety of slaveries in the Mediterranean and to examine this variety as an organic part
of Mediterranean historical evolution. I will proceed by using the accepted periodiza-
tion of Mediterranean history, and will examine how the definition/s of slavery were
modeled, evolved and changed in each of the periods under examination as part of the
historical processes that the Mediterranean has undergone. If the Mediterranean is an
historical organism, slavery played a cardinal role in its functioning and evolution.
The uniqueness of Mediterranean slaveries lies in their adaptability to the geopolitical,
cultural and social changes of Mediterranean reality, which forms their dynamic char-
acter. Mediterranean slaveries cannot be fully explained if we look for a single defini-
tion to comprise them all. What we need to look for is the ways in which different
forms of slaveries emerged in the Mediterranean and the conditions under which they
developed. Nevertheless, we also need to bear in mind that such conditions were not
necessarily confined to the Mediterranean environment, but were also determined
by links to non-Mediterranean civilizations. A general overview on the sources of
Mediterranean slaves will demonstrate this.
Sources of slaveryOut of the four main sources of slaves, two concern people who become slaves in their
own society: slaves by birth, and freeborn people reduced to slavery through legal or
illegal processes. This could be debt-slavery, penal-slavery, child exposure, self-selling,