Slave Systems

A ground-breaking edited collection charting the rise and fall of forms of unfree labour in the ancient Mediterranean and in the modern Atlantic, employing the methodology of comparative history. The eleven chapters in the book deal with conceptual issues and different approaches to historical comparison, and include specific case-studies ranging from the ancient forms of slavery of classical Greece and of the Roman empire to the modern examples of slavery that characterised the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. The results demonstrate both how much the modern world has inherited from the ancient in regard to ideology and practice of slavery; and also how many of the issues and problems related to the latter seem to have been fundamentally similar across time and space.

Enrico Dal Lago is Lecturer in American History at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His books include The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno (2001), Slavery and Emancipation (2002) and Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861 (2005).

Constantina Katsari is Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Leicester. She is co-editor of Patterns in the Economy of Roman Asia Minor (2005) and is completing a monograph on the Roman monetary economy. Her articles on Roman economy and ideology have appeared in edited collections and internationally acknowledged periodicals.