This project adopts a historical semantic approach, looking at the meanings of words and expressions over time. Helpful for looking at the conceptual history of ownership comparatively and in the long run, the real benefit of this approach comes from a specific focus on the language of slavery, as it shows how this language came to change the way the ownership of people was imagined.
The project begins by rethinking how the ownership of people may have emerged in the distant past in response to survival. It suggests that the control of resources as a practical response to survival allowed claims to be made first over non-human things that had been occupied, created or seized. The ownership of people, which came later, was also justified by the idea of survival, but here it was sanctioned by reference to the idea of 'life debt' - people who owed their survival to others were required to hand over their lives in return. However, problems arose when lives were seized and sold in the absence of life debt.
Trading in people who had been kidnapped or tricked into their subjection was subject to critique from an early point in time. But for the roots of the major conceptual shift that saw the acceptability of owning people come to be undermined, we have to turn to Europe in the medieval period, and the emergence of the Late Latin medieval term sclavus (‘slave’ in English).
Subsequently adopted into most Western European languages, this new word, sclavus marked a major turning point in the terminology used to describe the ownership of people. The result was an increasingly coordinated attack on that ownership, understood now through the language of slavery, that resulted, in the end, in its abolition.