Slavery and empire

Burnard, Trevor

Abstract

Extract:
From ancient times, slavery has been associated with imperial expansion and the conquest of subject populations. All the great empires of antiquity, most of all the Roman Empire, practised slavery on a mass scale. Therefore, there is a large body of scholarship that has looked at connections between slavery and empire across time and space. This chapter will look at the development of this scholarship, with most attention paid to modern slavery, especially in the British Americas and in the United States, where the author has most knowledge, but which is also the period which resonates most with the information in the rest of this volume. What becomes clear in examining the multiple links between slavery and empire over time is that slavery and imperialism were generally compatible for most of their long histories. Thus, an examination of their interaction is less about how one institution shaped the other than about how both slavery and imperialism were mutually reinforcing. It involved one of world history’s principal form of labour organization – slavery – coexisting with one of the most customary forms of political organization – empire – in our understanding of the global past....

Citation

Burnard, T. (2022). Slavery and empire. In D. S. Doddington, & E. Dal Lago (Eds.), Writing the History of Slavery (59-80). Bloomsbury Publishing. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474285612.ch-3

• Online Publication Date: Dec 13, 2021
• Publication Date: Feb 10, 2022
• Deposit Date: Mar 30, 2024
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Pages: 59-80
• Series Title: Writing History
• Book Title: Writing the History of Slavery
• Chapter Number: 3
• ISBN: 9781474285582 ; 9781474285575
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474285612.ch-3
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4614648