A critical re-examination of Orlando Patterson’s groundbreaking Slavery and Social Death, On Human Bondage assesses how his theories have stood the test of time and applies them to new case
studies. More than 35 years after the publication of Patterson’s landmark work, these essays discuss his ideas of social death and natal alienation, as he first presented them and as they have
come to be understood today.
The essays bring together exciting new work by a group of esteemed historians of slavery, based on two conferences devoted to understanding the impact of Patterson’s cross-cultural work. They
provide insights into slave societies around the world and across time, from classical Greece and Rome to modern Brazil and the Caribbean, and from Han China and pre-colonial South Asia to
early modern Europe and the New World. The essays delve into a wide range of topics, including the reformation of social identity after slavery, the new historicist approach to slavery, rituals
of enslavement and servitude, questions of honor and dishonor, and symbolic imagery of slavery. In addition, a final chapter by Patterson himself responds to the other contributions and
advances his own thinking on concepts of property as they relate to slavery; the special connections between women and slavery; and the metaphors of social death and rebirth as dynamic
conceptions of slavery and manumission. ’Ibis collection not only celebrates but also critiques and extends Orlando Patterson’s work, a landmark study of slavery that continues to inspire and
provoke debate.
John Bodel W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics and Professor of History at Brown University, USA. He studies ancient Roman history and Latin literature and has special interests in
epigraphy, slavery in antiquity, Roman religion, funerals and burial customs, writing systems, and the ancient novel.
Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University, USA. He has published
widely on ancient social and economic history, premodern demography, and the comparative history of labor and state formation.
