The investigation of medieval slavery is still rooted in an approach first laid down by the likes of Adam Smith and John Millar over two hundred years ago. They conceptualised history as a series of stages through which societies moved, driven by the motor of increasing economic sophistication. In this conceptualisation, slavery was an economic institution and its decline in Britain during the ...

Adam Smith made two positive claims about slavery in the context of developing economies. First, Smith explains that slavery is in general highly inefficient. By his account, the net product under freedom is 12 times larger than under slavery. Second, he observes that, despite its inefficiencies, slavery persists in most of the world. Taken together, these claims create a fundamental puzzle: Wh...

The fundamental problem raised by reparations, and particularly reparations litigation, is the question of how to apportion responsibility for historical wrongs. The most controversial harm targeted by reparations litigation is the enslavement of Africans and African Americans and the injuries consequent to that enslavement. The task faced by such litigation, therefore, is to construct persuasi...

Given the volume of recent works produced on the anti-slavery movement of the 19th–century Atlantic world, it was time for someone to create a new synthesis. Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause is a synthetic work that traces the long trajectory of the anti-slavery movement in the United States and places it into an international context. It provides a catalogue of antislavery figures, organizati...

In addition to supervision costs, the labor cost of an enterprise (plantation) in the system of slavery consists of the cost of acquiring the slaves and the subsistence compensation given out to the slaves. In this paper, we leave aside the issue of supervision costs previously taken up in the theoretical literature on slavery, and focus on these two peculiar components of labor costs. We analy...

It is estimated that more than 100 million people were enslaved in the millennium during which the Roman Empire rose and fell (Scheidel 2007: 26), yet the archaeology of Classical slavery is still in its infancy, with many Roman archaeologists still believing that slaves remain 'invisible' to archaeological view (see Webster 2005 for an overview). In the last few years however, a small group of...

BACKGROUND Despite the signing of international peace agreements, a deadly war continues in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and sexual violence is a prominent modus operandi of many military groups operating in the region. METHODS Retrospective cohort study of women who presented to Panzi Hospital in 2006 requesting post-sexual violence care. Data was extracted and analyzed to describe...

Bonded labor has been already widespread since ancient times and has flourished at various periods in most countries. Bonded labor is outlawed by the 1956 U.N. Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, and most countries have passed their own ban. However, it is estimated that millions of people are still held in bo...

How are party coalitions shaped and reshaped? Elected officials choose coalitions to win elections, but they must work to maintain those coalitions. Non-elected political actors, advancing an ideology at odds with the party coalition, can undermine the party. This article explores this possibility in the case of partisan change on slavery in the Antebellum United States. Intellectuals in 1850 d...

This research demonstrates a diasporic connection between slavery on both sides of the Atlantic, English and African interactions on the Gold Coast, and slave resistance in Jamaica from 1655 to the middle of the eighteenth century. This article transfers the site of ‘seasoning,’ the process by which enslaved peoples became physically and socially acclimatised to slavery, from New World plantati...