slavery

Slavery refers to a variety of forms of unfreedom, such as serfdom and bonded labour. However, it is normally associated with chattel slavery, in which the human being is a thing to be bought or sold, and does not have the status of personhood. Chattel slavery is thus distinguished from other forms of slavery by its property dimension. Slaves are not paid for their labour or services (even in cases where they can handle money or economic transactions). Thus they can be regarded as instruments of production.

There are both historical and recent cases of enslavement of peoples conquered in warfare. In modern, early capitalist situations, chattel slavery was used as an efficient (or, more accurately, cheap) labour system by the planters and slaveowners of the Americas between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the labour-supply ensured through the slave trade.

Plantation slavery could only exist through a codified legal system and mechanisms for its enforcement. These modern slave systems also existed in mining enterprises and industrial production. In plantation slavery the slave is the property of the master. By contrast, in the enslavement of whole peoples by conquest, the slave becomes the property of the whole society. The difference rests in the fact that plantation slavery is found in state societies and conquest slavery in pre-state societies.

There is a huge literature documenting the history of slavery (see, for example,, Fruits of Merchant Capital, 1983). For sociological and anthropological treatments see, New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America (1986) and The Anthropology of Slavery (1991). See also cliometrics ; compadrazgo ; patron-client relationship.