Roman slavery: retrospect and prospect.(Report)

 
   For who can bear to feel himself forgotten? 
      W. H. Auden, Night Mail 
 
   ... for we possess nothing certainly except the past 
      E. Waugh, Brideshead Revisited 

The session this afternoon concerns, as I understand it, the modern historiography of ancient slavery. (1) My charge is to assess the contribution to the study of Roman slavery I have made myself. I am aware that this raises a danger of self-indulgence and of creating the impression of attributing to my work a value it does not have. This is not my intent. If I speak about myself, and speak personally and subjectively, you have only the organizer of the conference to blame.

Self-delusory temptations aside, I can make the required assessment objectively because the work concerned belongs to a twenty-year period, from the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties, that is now well distant; and because, while still broadly engaged with the topic, I am unable any longer, for various reasons, to offer anything substantially new or different on it. Much of what I will say therefore will be explanatory narrative. In an effort to be constructive, however, and also to avoid simply writing my own obituary, I shall include some thoughts about the future of the subject. Other contributors will discuss the work of institutions such as the Mainz Academy and the Besancon group (GIREA), with none of which I have any affiliation. I have always worked independently and cannot locate myself in a specific tradition of research. I have been described as a "Finleyschuler," but this is not true in any formal sense. Finley gave me considerable encouragement and I was much influenced by him. But that is all.

I will begin with the historiography of American slavery. When I arrived in the United States in 1970, I was unaware that the history of American slavery was undergoing a profound transformation; I had then no particular interest in the subject of slavery, whether ancient or modern. It is easy now to understand what was happening. In the wake of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the United States was in the midst of radical social change, and the legacy of antebellum slavery was very much alive in the form of a racism which has not yet altogether disappeared. (2) Recent events had been cataclysmic, especially in the dreadful year of 1968, when the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. produced a new wave of race riots in many American cities, and Tommie Smith and John Carlos drew international attention to the cause of Black Power at the Olympic Games held in Mexico City. Three years earlier, in 1965, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan had stirred controversy when he claimed that the Negro family [sic] was in a state of dissolution directly attributable to slavery. More or less simultaneously there were other forms of social upheaval adding to the chaos caused by the racial question, notably those associated with the women's movement and the accompanying sexual revolution; and there was of course Vietnam. It is hardly surprising therefore that historians in universities, with Black Studies suddenly emerging as an academic discipline, should have been concerning themselves with re-examining the history of slavery. The connection between past and present was at the forefront of national attention, and the country's democratic institutions, especially its foundational ethos of liberty and justice for all, were under severe scrutiny.

It was not that American historians had neglected slavery and abolition beforehand. But the work in progress in 1970, which had begun in the aftermath of World War II and was to continue into the nineties, was heavily revisionist in character, in part because of the rise in the academy of anthropologically based history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, but even more so because of the force of current events. The problem of how to create a polity in which the descendants of slaves might participate equally with other citizens, how racial harmony between the descendants of black slaves and white masters might be achieved, was more pressing than ever. The work was of a very high order, and the period as a whole amounted, in retrospect, to a golden age in American historiography. Its starting-point was the marvellous book by Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, first published in 1956. (3) There followed books of fundamental importance, on a variety of topics, by David Brion Davis, Stanley Elkins, John Blassingame, Eugene Genovese, Herbert Guttman, Philip Curtin, Herbert Klein, Stanley Engerman, and Robert Fogel, to mention only the most prominent of the principals involved. The main issues were, as Fogel has since succinctly put it, "the nature of the American slave system, the conditions of slave life, and the moral problem of slavery." (4) The immense outpouring of research, reflection, and debate that they generated led in turn to new research on other slave systems in the New World, to new histories, that is, of slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. As the historiographical revolution broadened, landmark studies appeared in the seventies and eighties of slavery in Jamaica, St. Domingue, Antigua, Cuba, Brazil, Surinam, and elsewhere. The achievement was extraordinary.

I became aware of this revolution in historiography only in the middle seventies, when I held a temporary appointment at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, itself a city south of the Mason-Dixon line that had known its share of upheaval in the late sixties. My new knowledge was due to the generosity of the American historian Willie Lee Rose, who together with a number of other Hopkins historians and anthropologists--Sidney Mintz, Richard Price, Franklin Knight, A.J.R. Russell-Wood--was deeply engaged in the history of modern slavery systems. (Rose's Slavery and Freedom appeared in 1982.) (5) She was gracious enough to introduce me to some of the issues and controversies involved.

Almost simultaneously I was reading Finley on slavery in antiquity, and was finding myself captivated by an ancient historian's ability to write from a deep knowledge of modern history that is, to write comparatively in a way that was revelatory, given the conservatively based ancient history I had learned in Britain. I quickly discovered, moreover, that Finley was highly regarded by modern slavery historians, an oddity, it seemed, because ancient historians as far as I knew were, and still generally are, unknown to modern historians; and a refreshing oddity because it suggested that ancient history could be relevant to the academy at large and did not have to be the intellectually isolated and increasingly fossilized subject it otherwise appeared to be in danger of becoming. Part of the appeal of Finley's work was that it had an obvious sympathy for the victims of slavery even as it carefully avoided moralistic judgments about Greek and Roman slave-owners. It therefore opened up access to a sector of ancient society which, in conventional education, at least in my conventional education, had received minimal attention: the sixties were, after all, the era of Syme-dominated prosopography, which by definition meant, almost exclusively, the study of the ruling classes--"the better sort" as Syme called them--and the turning of a very blind eye to "the silent and the submerged." Which is no criticism of Syme ipse, who for me remains a seminal figure, but of the narrowness of a system of education completely closed to influences such as that of Braudel and the Annales school of history. It was also in the mid-seventies that Ramsay MacMullen's book, Roman Social Relations appeared, revealing perspectives on Roman society that were new and provocative. (61) began the study of Roman slavery, therefore; thinking that any insight that might be achieved had to be informed by other slavery histories, and that investigation had to be set in the frame of Roman social relations. My admiration for Rostovtzeff's great Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, which seems to have little influence today, was also, and still is, very high. (7)