What Is Slavery?

Our opening discussion asks the foundational question: what is slavery? The persistence of slavery and its profound violence demand that we ask this question anew, while considering its rhizomatic history. We begin with Orlando Patterson's account of slavery as social death, reflecting on his argument that enslavement is perhaps best defined by the violent exclusion of persons from social and political belonging. We pair this with selections from Kostas Vlassopoulos' Historicising Ancient Slavery, which challenges universal definitions of slavery, instead emphasising the historical diversity of ancient systems of enslavement. Together, these readings invite us to consider whether slavery can really be understood through a single conceptual framework, or whether systems of enslavement must always be understood through their diverse histories.

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Main Readings:

- Orlando Patterson. 1982. Slavery and Social Death. Harvard University Press: pp. 35-76.

- Kostas Vlassopoulos. 2021. Historicising Ancient Slavery, Edinburgh University Press: pp. 39-57.

Slavery's Political Economy

This meeting will explore the relationship between systems of enslavement and capitalism. How should we understand slavery within the history of political economy? David McNally argues that modern systems of enslavement were constitutive of capitalist development, challenging the narratives that might aspire to separate free wage labour from unfree labour. Drawing on Marxist political thought, he situates slavery within global processes of accumulation and class formation. We pair this with Helle’s recent reflections on ancient Mesopotamian histories of labour. Helle opens a broader conversation about ancient forms of work that may complicate our contemporary assumptions about systems of slavery and their persistence.

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Main Readings:

- David McNally. 2025. Slavery and Capitalism. University of California Press. 1-17; 108-122.

- Sophus Helle, Human: Babylonian Reflections on Labor, Chapter 1, strike

Writing the Histories of Enslavement

This meeting offers us the chance to consider the methodological problem of writing the history of slavery. Saidiya Hartman's essay, 'Venus in Two Acts,' confronts the limits of archives structured by violence, asking how historians might recover the history of lives that have been systematically erased from that record. Through critical fabulation, Hartman proposes new ways of writing histories which can be attentive to both absence and violence. We pair this with Achille Mbembe's Critique of Black Reason which traces the historical production of Blackness through colonialism and capitalism. Together, these texts consider how historical knowledge itself is shaped by the afterlives of absent voices.

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Main Readings:

- Saidiya Hartman. 2008. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small axe : a journal of criticism, Vol.12 (2), pp.1-14.

- Achille Mbembe. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Duke University Press: pp. 1-37.

Reproducing Slavery

This meeting offers us the chance to examine the reproductions of inequality across generations. Amy Huemoeller's study of the doctrine partus sequitur ventrem ("the child follows the womb”), considers the ways hereditary slavery depended upon the regulation of reproduction. Her work reveals reproduction as a central “technology” through which slavery sustained itself over time. We pair this with Jennifer Morgan's work on accounting in the Atlantic slave trade. Morgan argues that women's reproductive capacities became integral to the political economy of slavery, linking intimate bodily histories to wider systems of racial capitalism. Together, these readings illuminate the reproductive logics through which systems of enslavement became self-perpetuating.

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Main Readings:

- Katharine Huemoeller. 2026. The Child Follows the Womb. Yale University Press: pp. 18-39.

- Jennifer L. Morgan. 2021. Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Duke University Press: pp. 170-206.

Abolition(s) and Political Futures

Our final meeting will be held at the Critical Antiquities Assembly. Here, we will shift our attention from the histories of slavery towards the political question of abolition. Ruth Wilson Gilmore develops a reading of abolition as the collective construction of new social realities capable of sustaining democratic life. Her work invites us to think beyond the afterlives of slavery towards transformative political futures. We read Gilmore alongside Peter Morton's reinterpretation of the Second-Century BC Sicilian slave wars, which situates slave rebellions within wider logics of social transformations. Morton gives us the chance to consider ancient slave rebellion, and the many ways in which the structural contradictions of ancient slave societies in general, seeded new forms of liberation.

Taken together, these texts return us to a persistent question for Critical Antiquities: What is to be done? While we need not accept the answers these authors propose, they do offer a point of departure for collective reflection on political transformation. The endurance of slavery and the institutions that perpetuate it’s violences demand our sustained attention. At the Assembly, we will critically extend these conversations, asking what a Critical Antiquities perspective might contribute to understanding—and transforming—contemporary systems of enslavement.

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Main Readings:

- Ruth Wilson Gilmore. 2022. Abolition Geography. Verso: 107-131.

- Peter Morton. 2024. Slavery and Rebellion in Second-Century BC Sicily. Edinburgh University Press: pp. 96-126.