Empire and slavery in the Roman world: notes for continued reflection

Abstract

This response to Joly and Knust’s article revisits Jeffrey Fynn-Paul’s twin concepts of zone of enslavement/non-enslavement, which the authors use to structure their interesting proposal for approaching ancient Mediterranean slavery from the perspective of Global History. The genesis of the concept of zone of (non-)enslavement and its development will be briefly reviewed. Next, a brief assessment will be made of how this model can be related to historiographical debates on the problem of the diversity of forms of enslavement in force in the Roman Empire in the first two centuries of the Christian era, noting the empirical obstacles that complicate attempts to quantify such forms of enslavement and their expressiveness in the maintenance of the slave system of the Roman Empire. The Fynn-Paul model of the (non-)enslavement zone seems to understand the concept of empire as a specific type of territorial state that creates a cohesive and peaceful internal civil society, whose demand for enslaved labor is met primarily (although not exclusively) through the systematic enslavement of people from territories outside the imperial borders. There seems to be scope for continued reflection on the extent to which such a model could be rethought and/or adapted in view of the historical specificities of the different forms of enslavement existing in the Roman Empire, as well as the uncertainties about the demographic and/or economic expressiveness of each of them for the maintenance of the Mediterranean slave system in the context of the Roman Empire.