In the 21st century, a new emphasis on decolonisation has prompted research on such models of human exploitation as underwrote colonial expansion and inequality. Among them we find slavery and the slave trade, some of the most abhorrent - yet perennial - institutions in human history. But although most people think they know what is meant by the word ‘slave,’ the history of the peculiar institution is far from straightforward, especially before the modern period.

From Late Antiquity through the Early Middle Ages, human beings were a key commodity in commercial networks that spanned the Mediterranean. It was likely the slave-trade that inaugurated the wealth of medieval western Europe’s first major commercial centres, the maritime republics of Italy such as Pisa and Venice. But unlike plantation slavery in the American south, in the Mediterranean there was no one model of human bondage, and the fate of commodified humans was far from uniform. The Italian cities inherited from the period c.300 to c.1000 an ambiguous model of unfreedom, which went through many changes without always consolidating into a strict form of chattel slavery. Although faced with dangers which afflicted slaves in other times and places - not only violence but loss of language, indigeneity, religion or heritage - slaves in this period were not necessarily bereft of agency. Due to the configuration of the sources, the perspective of an enslaved individual is rarely accessible. However, narratives in which slaves make their own decisions, sometimes including the choice to escape - or not to escape - do offer a window on the decision making processes of the unfree. In this talk I will discuss the changing conditions that faced slaves, and the different strategies used by the unfree to negotiate degrees of freedom, wealth, or even power. 

Speaker: 
David Romney Smith is a research fellow at the School of History at ANU with an interest in mobility and trade in the Early Medieval Mediterranean. He has recently published on a lost Christian-Muslim alliance in the 11th century, and has a book in review on how in the period before the crusades, the Italian cities of Amalfi and Pisa integrated into the Muslim-controlled trade network in the Mediterranean of the 10th and 11th centuries. He is presently working on a book on the practical experience of traveling in the early medieval Mediterranean.