Historical slavery

Ownership and survival: life debt and slavery

Understanding the origins and definitions of slavery

Project summary

The Challenge

To investigate attitudes towards the ownership of people over time.

The Approach

To examine the justifications that societies have given for the ownership of people, by considering the customs and laws that regulated it.

The Outcome

To provide a new framework for understanding why the ownership of people came to be accepted, and also why it eventually came under attack.

Lead academics

Funded by

The Challenge

This project examines the impact of one of the most influential of human emotions – the fear of death – on decisions to sanction the ownership of people. Today such ownership is understood primarily through the institution of slavery, and there is general agreement that this institution had ancient origins, being visible in some of the earliest historical records.

Slavery did represent one form of human ownership, but the challenge is to show that it was not the only one, nor has it existed for millennia across the majority of cultures in the known world; instead it is remarkably modern, coming into view in western Europe only from the late seventeenth century.

Institutional systems of ownership, however, have a much older history and can be found in the majority of societies across time and space. The fear of death initiated a set of reciprocal claims - those whose lives were saved by others found themselves in a situation of life debt, that could only be repaid through reducing their lives to the status of fully alienable possessions.

Historical slavery

The Approach

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.

The Impact

This groundbreaking project provides startling new insights into the history and historiography of slavery that will change the way we think about the ownership of people going forward. It reveals how such ownership became embedded in many of our religious, philosophical and legal texts, why it enjoyed the support of kings, priests and philosophers over a long period of time, and why this model of ownership has to be separated from the one we associate with slavery today.

The project also shows that the idea of life debt - which supported the ownership of people in the past - has not been consigned to history, even though we may no longer allow people to gain legal ownership of those whose lives they save. The desire for survival continues to make individuals vulnerable to claims by others for labour in return for food and protection, as the study of modern slavery reveals.

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