Published

War and Peace in the Ancient World
Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub

Household and Family Religion in Antiquity
Edited by John Bodel and Saul Olyan

Epic and History
Edited by David Konstan and Kurt A. Raaflaub

Geography and Ethnography: Perceptions of the World in Pre‐Modern Societies
Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Richard J. A. Talbert

The Roman Empire in Context: Historical and Comparative Perspectives
Edited by Johann P. Arnason and Kurt A. Raaflaub

Highways, Byways, and Road Systems in the Pre‐Modern World
Edited by Susan E. Alcock, John Bodel, and Richard J. A. Talbert

The Gift in Antiquity
Edited by Michael L. Satlow

The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy
Edited by Johann P. Arnason, Kurt A. Raaflaub, and Peter Wagner

Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World
Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub

Peace in the Ancient World: Concepts and Theories
Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub

The Adventure of the Human Intellect: Self, Society and the Divine in Ancient World Cultures
Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub

On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death
Edited by John Bodel and Walter Scheidel

Figures

Tables

Heather D. Baker has been Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History at the University of Toronto since September 2014, having previously held research positions at the Universities of Helsinki and Vienna. Her work focuses on Mesopotamia in the first millennium BCE, with specific interests in Babylonian urbanism, house and household, the Neo‐Assyrian royal palace, and the integration of textual and archaeological evidence.

Anthony Barbieri‐Low, Professor of Early Chinese History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, specializes in the social, legal, economic, and material‐culture history of early imperial China. His first book, Artisans in Early Imperial China (2007), was awarded numerous international book prizes. His recently published book, Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China (2015), offers a study and translation of recently excavated legal manuscripts from early China.

John Bodel is W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics and Professor of History at Brown University. He studies ancient Roman history and Latin literature and has special interests in epigraphy, slavery in antiquity, Roman religion, funerals and burial customs, writing systems, and the ancient novel. His books include two other co‐edited volumes in this series: Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (with S. Olyan, 2008) and Highways, Byways, and Road Systems in the Pre‐Modern World (with S. E. Alcock and R. J. Talbert, 2012). Since 1995 he has directed the U.S. Epigraphy Project, which gathers and shares information about ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions in the United States (http://usepigraphy.brown.edu).

Catherine M. Cameron is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is an archaeologist whose work focuses on the northern part of the American Southwest during the Chaco and post‐Chaco eras (900–1300 CE). Her Southwestern work has been published as a monograph (Chaco and After in the Northern San Juan, University of Arizona Press, 2009) as well as in articles and book chapters. She also studies captives in prehistory, especially their role in cultural transmission, and has published Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), an edited volume, articles, and book chapters on this topic. She has been a co‐editor of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory since 2000.

Indrani Chatterjee is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her doctoral dissertation (University of London) was published as Gender, Slavery and the Law in Colonial India (1999). She is the editor of Unfamiliar Relations: History and Family in South Asia (2004) and co‐editor (with Richard M. Eaton) of Slavery and South Asian History (2006). She is also the author of many articles, chapters in edited volumes, and, most recently, of a monograph titled Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages and Memories of Northeast India (2013).

Junia Ferreira Furtado is Full Professor of Modern History at the Department of History, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) and 1A Researcher with the CNPq and Programa Pesquisador Mineiro/FAPEMIG.

Sandra E. Greene, the Stephen ’59 and Madeline ’60 Professor of African History at Cornell University, has published four single authored books and co‐edited four volumes, including Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast (1996), Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter (2002), West African Narratives of Slavery (2011), African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, Vols 1 and 2 (2013 and 2016), and The Bitter Legacy: African Slavery Past and Present (2013). In addition to writing and teaching courses on African and African Diaspora history, she has served in a number of administrative positions including Chair of the History Department at Cornell, President of the African Studies Association (USA), and Editorial Board member of the American Historical Review. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Kyle Harper is Senior Vice President and Provost and Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425 (2011) and From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013). He is currently working on a study of the environmental history of the high and later Roman Empire.

Peter Hunt is a Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His first book, Slaves, Warfare and Ideology in the Greek Historians (Cambridge, 1998), explores the disjunction between the actual extent of slave and Helot participation in Greek warfare and the relative neglect of their role in the contemporary historians (Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon). His second book, War, Peace, and Alliance in Demosthenes’ Athens (Cambridge, 2010), focuses on deliberative oratory as evidence for a more sympathetic and complex view of Athenian thinking and feelings about foreign relations. He is currently finishing a synthetic work, Greek and Roman Slavery: Comparisons and Case Studies, and beginning research on a larger project on the Athenian “frontier” in Thrace.

David M. Lewis has held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, and took up up the role of Assistant Professor in Greek History at the University of Nottingham in 2016. His forthcoming book Greek Slave Systems and their Eastern Neighbours: A Comparative Study will be published by Oxford University Press.

Michael McCormick studies the fall of the Roman Empire and the origins of Europe. He is the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History at Harvard University, where he chairs the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past (http://sohp.fas.harvard.edu). His books include the prize‐winning Origins of the European Economy (2002) and Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land (2011); he recently led the first multi‐proxy scientific and historical reconstruction of climate under the Roman Empire (Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43 (2012): 169–220). He edits the free, student‐created online Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations (http://darmc.harvard.edu), and is active archaeologically in France and Spain.

Orlando Patterson is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His academic interests include the comparative study of freedom and slavery, and the socio‐cultural roots of poverty and underdevelopment in the Caribbean and US. His books include, The Sociology of Slavery: Jamaica, 1655–1938 (1967); Slavery and Social Death (1982); Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991), for which he won the American National Book Award for non‐fiction; and Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (1998). Patterson was, for eight years, Special Adviser for Social Policy and Development to Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991.

Fernando Santos‐Granero is a Senior Staff Scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Having graduated from the London School of Economics, he has done extensive fieldwork among the Yanesha of Central Peru, as well as historical research of Upper Amazon indigenous societies and regional economies. He is the author of The Power of Love: The Moral Use of Knowledge amongst the Amuesha of Central Peru (1991) and Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life (2009), and co‐author with Frederica Barclay of the books Selva Central: History, Economy, and Land Use in Peruvian Amazonia (1998) and Tamed Frontiers: Economy, Society, and Civil Rights in Upper Amazonia (2000).

Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy‐Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. He has published widely on ancient social and economic history, premodern demography, and the comparative history of labor and state formation.

Professor Ehud R. Toledano is the Director of the Program in Ottoman and Turkish Studies at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv University (TAU), Israel. With a PhD from Princeton University, he conducted extensive research in Istanbul, Cairo, London, and Paris, and taught courses on Middle East history at TAU, UCLA, Oxford, and other leading universities. Noteworthy among the 11 books he has written and edited are The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, 1840–1890; State and Society in Mid‐Nineteenth‐Century Egypt; Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East; As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in Islamic Middle East; African Communities in Asia and the Mediterranean: Identities between Integration and Conflict (ed.); and Society, Law, and Culture in the Middle East: “Modernities” in the Making (ed., with Dror Ze’evi, in press).

This volume has grown out of two meetings devoted to the impact of Orlando Patterson’s cross‐cultural work on slavery. At a conference held at Brown University on April 13–15, 2012, under the title “Being Nobody? Understanding Slavery Thirty Years after Slavery and Social Death,” 13 scholars were asked to engage with the key concepts of social death and natal alienation under slavery. On this occasion, Patterson delivered a keynote lecture that was in some ways a sequel to his 1991 book on the history of freedom. Much was gained from this meeting: while many of the contributions found their way into the present collection, this event also highlighted the need for further case studies to ensure more global coverage. At a smaller workshop at the University of Colorado at Boulder on September 29, 2013, several other colleagues joined our project. That meeting very fittingly piggy‐backed on a larger conference on slave societies in history organized by Catherine Cameron and Noel Lenski, an event that touched on another core theme of Patterson’s work. We are grateful to them for their support in organizing the subsidiary workshop that was more narrowly focused on Patterson’s own concepts.

The subtitle of our volume is ambivalent by design: like the conference from which it originated, it marks the retrospective nature of its assessment of Patterson’s contribution three decades on; furthermore, one prominent theme, as it emerges from several contributors’ critiques of Patterson’s original formulation, is on what comes after enslavement and social death by way of the reformation of social identity and the integration of slaves and ex‐slaves into society. Not by design, on the other hand, is the absence from our volume of a contribution on the reception of Patterson’s ideas in studies of slavery in America. There has been no lack of good work done in this area, much of which is cited by our contributors, and we regret this gap in our coverage, which a late cancellation by a speaker originally scheduled for the conference at Brown left us in the end unable to fill. Others will notice other areas not covered: our goal was not to be comprehensive but to offer a sufficient range of types of slave society to test the universality of Patterson’s ideas.

Our conference at Brown was made possible by the generous support of a variety of sponsors at Brown University: the Program in Early Cultures, the Colver Lectureship Fund, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, the Cogut Center for the Humanities, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, and the Departments of Africana Studies, Anthropology, Classics, East Asian Studies, Egyptology and Assyriology, History, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Religious Studies, and Sociology. The Department of Classics at Stanford University provided additional funding to make this event possible and subsequently funded the workshop at Boulder. We are grateful to all our sponsors for their support; to the students enrolled at Brown in spring 2012 in a course on Slavery in the Ancient World, who considered Patterson’s ideas against the realities of ancient Mediterranean slavery; and to Tara Mulder, who compiled the index and provided invaluable editorial assistance during the final stages.