Greek and Roman Slaveries

8 Slavery and the Wider World

The link between slavery and the wider world is based on a crucial distinction between slaving zones and no-slaving zones.¹²⁵ The slaving zone of a particular society is the areas from which it derived its slaves through practices such as violent capture (8.2) or trade (8.5). Slaving zones could focus on outsiders (8.4), or they could also include members of the same ethnic or religious community (8.3). In the course of antiquity, imperial conquest and the expansion of commercial networks (8.6–8) created slaving zones that covered the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, temperate Europe, and the Near East (8.1).

No-slaving zones are areas whose inhabitants were not subject to enslavement as a result of warfare or other practices. Many ancient communities took measures to ensure that their members could not be enslaved within their community (8.10); they thus drew a communal moral circle, caring for those within it but considering those outside as fair game (8.11, 8.15). In other cases, we find calls to expand the moral circle to include people who belonged to the same ethnic or cultural group (8.12). Political communities could take practical measures to ensure the ransoming of enslaved members of the community (8.13), but empires and monotheistic religions were crucial in expanding no-slaving zones in antiquity (8.17). Empires could choose to protect their subjects from enslavement under certain circumstances (8.14); that said, imperial no-slaving zones ...