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Slavery and Supervision in Comparative Perspective: A Model

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Stefano Fenoaltea
Stefano Fenoaltea
Affiliation:
The author is affiliated with the Department of Economics, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts 01267.
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Abstract

The familiar transaction-costs model is extended to allow for the varying costs and benefits of supervision and pain incentives on the one hand, and ordinary rewards on the other, in differentially effort- and care-intensive activities. Applied to unfree labor, this model accounts for the observed patterns of slave governance and manumission in extractive, industrial, agricultural, and service activities in antiquity and in the New World. Applied to free labor, it accounts for wage work on large estates in labor-surplus medieval England or modern Italy, the choice between bonuses and penalties in industrial contracts, and the growing paternalism of our own time.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , September 1984 , pp. 635 - 668
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1984

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References

1 See for example Fenoaltea, Stefano, “Authority, Efficiency, and Agricultural Organization in Medieval England and Beyond: A Hypothesis,” this Journal, 35 (12 1975), 695–96.Google Scholar

2 While supervision costs are not the only relevant element of a contract, it does not seem likely that they would be incurred for the sake of gains along other dimensions. The economies of scale and team production that may warrant them in modern industry do not seem relevant to agriculture or (most) premodern industry; negotiation costs appear insignificant except in the case of very short-term contracts; and byproduct benefits such as an improved distribution of risk seem obtainable directly, without incurring needless production costs. See Alchian, Armen and Demsetz, Harold, “Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization,” American Economic Review, 62 (12 1972) 777–99;Google ScholarFenoaltea, “Authority,” pp. 696–97, 713–17;Google ScholarReid, Joseph D. Jr, “Sharecropping and Agricultural Uncertainty,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, 24 (04 1976), 549–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Canarella, Giorgio and Tomaske, John A., “The Optimal Utilization of Slaves,” this Journal, 35 (09 1975), 621–29;Google ScholarFindlay, Ronald, “Slavery, Incentives, and Manumission: A Theoretical Model,” Journal of Political Economy, 83 (10 1975), 923–33. The Findlay article, in particular, raises many of the issues pursued here.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 While both effort and carefulness are aspects of “labor,” the distinction between effort-intensity and care-intensity is exactly analogous to that between labor-intensity and capital-intensity. By definition, therefore, isoquants drawn with “carefulness” on the vertical axis and “effort” on the horizontal axis are everywhere steeper for the more effort-intensive activity. The proposed empirical generalization is that the slope, as well as the position, of these isoquants varies with the quantity of the various cooperating factors of production.

5 Lynn, R., Personality and National Character (Oxford, 1971), pp. 65–66, 94–97, and references therein.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Scitovsky, Tibor, The Joyless Economy (New York, 1976), pp. 20, 28;Google ScholarFiske, Donald W. and Maddi, Salvatore R. eds., Functions of Varied Experience (Homewood, Illinois, 1961), pp. 31–35, and references therein. Anger also raises arousal, enhancing efficiency in physical activities but not in mental ones.Google Scholar

7 Keegan, John, The Face of Battle (New York, 1976), p. 309, and also pp. 71, 115, 183, 277, 324; Appianus [Appian], De Bello Civile, 1, 14.118. Despite the training soldiers receive, “the emotional stress of battle tends to raise arousal to too high a level, so that no more than 20 to 25 per cent of men under attack manage to fire their rifles, let alone use them efficiently”Google Scholar (Scitovsky, Joyless Economy, p. 21).Google Scholar

8 Plinius, Gaius Secundus [Pliny the Elder], Naturalis Historia, 18, 7.36.Google Scholar

9 Quoted in Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982), pp. 207–8.Google Scholar

10 Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 12.6–7 (Loeb Classical Library translation).Google Scholar

11 Genovese, Eugene D., Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974). The citations, in order, are from pp. 295, 309, 65, 299, 307, and again 307; the emphasis is added.Google Scholar

12 This would not be the case if labor were so abundant, relative to the available real and human capital, that its marginal product did not exceed subsistence; but there would then be no point to owning men, and the efficient motivation of slaves would not be an issue. See Domar, Evsey D., “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis,” this Journal, 30 (03 1970), 18–32.Google Scholar

13 Subsistence needs would naturally vary with worker effort; see for example Barzel, Yoram, “An Economic Analysis of Slavery,” Journal of Law and Economics, 20 (04 1977), 95,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Sutch, Richard, “The Care and Feeding of Slaves,” in Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery, David, Paul A. et al. (New York, 1976), pp. 266–68.Google Scholar

14 Berliner, Joseph S., “Managerial Incentives and Decision Making: A Comparison of the United States and the Soviet Union,” in Comparative Economic Systems: Models and Cases, ed. Bornstein, Morris (Homewood, Illinois, 1965), pp. 386–417.Google Scholar

15 Cato, Marcus Portius [Cato the Elder], De Agri Cultura, 5. 6;Google ScholarWiedemann, Thomas, Greek and Roman Slavery (Baltimore, 1981), p. 182.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus, Res Rustica, 3, 21,5–6 (my translation).Google Scholar

17 See for example Findlay, “Slavery,” pp. 924, 932; Genovese, Jordan, p. 314;Google ScholarMoes, John E., “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South: Another Comment,” Journal of Political Economy, 68 (04 1960), 184;CrossRefGoogle ScholarWiles, Peter J. D., Economic Institutions Compared (New York, 1977), p. 184.Google Scholar

18 Barzel, “Economic Analysis,” p. 99. He notes, however, that “policing costs were high for slaves who subsequently bought their own contracts.”Google Scholar

19 Findlay, “Slavery,” pp. 925, 928; Moes, John E., ‘Comment on “The Economics of American Negro Slavery,’ by Robert Evans, Jr.,” in National Bureau of Economic Research, Aspects of Labor Economics (Princeton, 1962), p. 252, and “Another Comment,” p. 184. Non-economists have expressed similar views:Google Scholar see for example Brunt, P. A., “Review of William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies, 48 (1958), 164;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFinley, Moses I., “Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labour?” Historia, 8 (1959), 160;Google ScholarPatterson, Slavery, p. 101.Google Scholar

20 Pulling on an oar would appear to be another, and the galley slave is a familiar figure. In fact, however, the technically superior rowing configuration did require skilled oarsmen; and the choice between free and slave crews was further influenced by the permanence of the fleet, the length of the campaigning season, and the use of the crews as fighting men. See Guilmartin, John Francis Jr, Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 108–20, 267–68.Google Scholar

21 So too, in international trade, the sector in which a country's international advantage is greatest is the one where exports will be the last to disappear as the balance of trade deteriorates; it need not account for the greater part of exports until these are sufficiently reduced.

22 Finley, “Greek Civilization”, p. 149;Google ScholarJones, A. H. M., “Slavery in the Ancient World,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 9 (1956), 187–89; Wiedemann, Slavery, p. 90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Frank, Tenney, An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome (Baltimore, 1933–1940; reprinted New York, 1975), vol. I, p. 34.Google Scholar

24 Frank, Survey, vol. I, p. 154, vol. 2, pp. 242, 277–78, vol. 3, p. 590, vol. 4, pp. 415–16, 690, 693; Jones, “Slavery,” p. 192; Westermann, William L., The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia, 1955), pp. 31, 72, 94–95, 120, 126; Wiedemann, Slavery, p. 177. The hardships endured by these workers are described by Diodorus Siculus (5, 38.1) and Strabo (12, 3.40).Google Scholar

25 Finley, Moses I., The Ancient Economy (Berkeley, 1973), pp. 72–73.Google Scholar

26 Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966), pp. 45, 129.Google Scholar

27 Frank, , Survey, vol. 2, p. 242;Google ScholarTandeter, Enrique, “Forced and Free Labour in Late Colonial Potosi,” Past and Present, 93 (11 1981), 98–136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The unfree workers were all in unskilled activities (carrying, grinding), while the skilled pick-men working at the seam face were all free. The high rates of manumission among the slave miners in the Colombian Chocó, noted by Patterson (Slavery, p. 270), are only apparently an exception to the present generalizations: these mines were actually placer operations, so that the extraction of the precious metal was care-rather than effort-intensive.Google Scholar

28 Finley, Ancient Economy, p. 75; Frank, Survey, vol. 2, pp. 21, 278, 637, vol 4, pp. 66–67;Google ScholarMilward, Robert, “The Early Stages of European Industrialisation: Economic Organisation under Serfdom” (paper presented at the Liberty Fund Conference on Economic Organization in Theory and Histry, Port Ludlow, Washington, July 1983), p. 26;Google ScholarDerry, T. K. and Williams, Trevor I.A Short Histry of Technology (Oxford, 1961), pp. 243, 430. Convicts were used on road gangs in antiquity as well:Google Scholar see Buckland, W. W., The Roman Law of Slavery (Cambridge, 1908), p. 403, and Caius Plinius Caecilius Secundus [Pliny the Younger] Epistuale, 10. 32.Google Scholar

29 Higman, Barry W., Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 26, 120ff.Google Scholar

30 Conrad, Alfred H. and Meyer, John R., “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South,” Journal of Political Economy, 66 (04 1958), 95–130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Moes, “Another Comment”, pp. 182–83, and “Comment on Evans,” pp. 247, 253.Google Scholar

32 Findlay, “Slavery,” pp. 925, 928. Moes appears neither in the text nor in the 398-item bibliography of Fogel, Robert W. and Engerman, Stanley L., Time on the Cross (Boston, 1974), and his influence seems quite absent from the subsequent controversy;Google Scholar see David, et al. , Reckoning with Slavery, or for that matter Stefano Fenoaltea, “The Slavery Debate: A Note from the Sidelines,” Explorations in Economic History, 18 (07 1981), 304–8Google Scholar Earlier, the problem of self-purchase had been noted by Evans, Robert Jr, “The Economics of American Negro Slavery,” in National Bureau of Economic Research, Aspects of Labor Economics (Princeton, 1962), p. 226,Google Scholar and by Engerman, Stanley L., “Some Considerations Relating to Property Rights in Man,” this Journal, 33 (03 1973),62–63; but they simply dismissed it out of hand, with arguments the weakness of which Moes had already noted.Google Scholar

33 Moes, “Another Comment,” pp. 184–85, and “Comment on Evans,” pp. 255–56; Matison, Sumner E., “Manumission by Purchase,” Journal of Negro Histry 33 (04 1948), 146–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 See for example Alston, J. and Higgs, Robert, “Contractual Mix in Southern Agriculture since the Civil War: Facts, Hypotheses, and Tests,” this Journal, 42 (06 1982), p. 331;Google ScholarReid, “Sharecropping,” pp. 574–76.Google Scholar

35 Fenoaltea, “Authority,” p. 701. The quantum reduction in supervision that accompanied the transition from gang slavery to sharecropping indicates that the supervision of the slaves exceeded that actually required by the level of their expertise. A slave cannot bargain as a free worker can, however, so that the erosion of supervision that was no longer necessary would naturally proceed more slowly with slavery than without it; once again, therefore, the long-run nature of Moes's argument protects it from direct refutation by the evidence.Google Scholar

36 Ransom, Roger L. and Sutch, Richard, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York, 1977), pp. 209–10, suggest that in 1860 American slaves worked with some $600 of assets per capita; of that, land and buildings together represented 82 percent, and livestock and equipment 18 percent.Google ScholarPrimack, Martin L., Farm Formed Capital in American Agriculture, 1850 to 1910 (New York, 1977), p. 41, indicates that buildings on Southern farms represented some 17 percent of land and buildings together. Land includes improvements, which may have represented some 56 percent of its value;Google Scholar see Fogel, and Engerman, , “Explaining the Relative Efficiency of Slave Agriculture in the Antebellum South,” American Economic Review, 67 (06 1977), 284.Google ScholarHowever, some 90 percent of these improvements were absorbed by the initial clearing of the land and the digging of ditches, and only the residual consisted of capital that was effectively liable to malicious damage (Primack, Capital, p. 139). Overall, therefore, the share of care-sensitive capital in the stock of assets is some 18 percent, plus 17 percent of 82 percent, plus 10 percent of 56 percent of 83 percent of 82 percent, or about 36 percent.Google ScholarThe resulting figure of about $200 was just one-quarter of the value of an average slave, and one-eighth that of a prime field hand (Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, pp. 213, 357). Compare below, footnote 50.Google Scholar

37 See Blassingame, John W., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge, 1977); the index, under the words “brutality” and “whiping,” gives 125 page references, exclusive of duplications. Patterson, Slavery, p. 206, states that in the American South “punishment by the context is simply that in ordinary circumstances slaves could avoid punishment by working enough.Google Scholar

38 See for example Genovese, Jordan, pp. 300, 307, 613–15, 621; also Marx, Karl, Capital (New York, 1906), vol. 1, p. 219.Google Scholar

39 See Fogel, Robert W. and Engerman, Stanley L., “Explaining the Relative Efficiency of Slave Agriculture in the Ante-Bellum South: A Reply,” American Economic Review 70 (09 1980), 672–80;Google ScholarReid, Joseph D. Jr, “TheEvaluation and Implications of Southern Tenancy,” Agricultural Histry 53 (01 1979), 163–64; Fenoaltea, “Slaver Debate”, pp. 306–7.Google Scholar

40 Bergstrom, Theodore, “On the Existence and Optimality of Competitive Equilibrium for a Slave Economy,” Review of Economic Studies, 38 (01 1971), 29–30. Moes, “Another Comment,” p. 185, devotes a paragraph to self-purchase on plantations. He cites two cases: that of an unidentified Mississippi planter who let his slaves buy themselves by installments; and that of John McDonogh. Moes's source for the former is Matison, “Manumissionc,” p. 162;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Matison, in turn, refers back to Booker Washington, T., The Story of the Negro (New York, 1909), vol. I, p. 194; and Washington's more extensive account establishes with virtual certainty that the planter in question was in fact John McDonogh. Moes's two planters thus reduce to one; and an examination of McDonogh's own record reduces that one to zero, since it makes clearthat his business was an integrated brickyard, construction, and real estate firm, employing slaves who were “excellent mechanics” and built fine houses. Moreover, McDonogh turned down $5,000 for a slave whose self-purchase price he set at $600, so that the whole scheme smacks of philanthropic consumption rather than simple profit maximization.Google Scholar See McDonogh, John, “Letter of July 10, 1842 to the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin concerning the liberation of his slaves and the colonization of Liberia” in Some Interesting Papers of John McDonogh, ed. Edwards, James T. (McDonogh, Maryland, 1898), pp. 50, 63, 65–68.Google ScholarMatison, “Manumission,” p. 163, had noted that rural manmission was very rare, and that the ordinary plantation slave could not hope to purchase himself.Google Scholar

41 Barzel, “Economic Analysis”, p. 100; Engerman, “Considerations”, p. 63; Moes, “Another Comment,” pp. 186–87; Patterson, Slavery, p. 260.

42 Goldin, Claudia Dale, Urban Slavery in the American South: A Quantitative History (Chicago, 1976), p. 105. Indeed, the present model directly explains the otherwise perplexing inability of free labor to compete with slave labor on the plantations; see also below, footnote 82.Google Scholar

43 Davis, Problem, p. 221; Genovese, Jordan, p. 65ff; Higman, Slave Population, pp. 68, 121–24; Moes, “Comment on Evans” p. 249; Patterson, Slavery, p. 198; Scarano, Francisco, “Slavery and Free Labor in the Puerto Rican Sugar Economy: 1815–1873,” in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 292:Google ScholarComparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, eds. Rubin, Vera and Tuden, Arthur (New York, 1977), p. 556.Google Scholar

44 In the absence of slave imports, slavery would survive in the North only if the slaves' net revenue product matched that obtained, at the margin, by slaves in the South; with slave imports, viability required only that the capitalized value of that product cover the slaves' import price.

45 Anderson, Ralph V. and Gallman, Robert E., “Slaves as Fixed Capital: Slave Labor and Southern Economic Development,” Journal of American History, 64 (06 1977), 28–29;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBarzel, “Economic Analysis,” p. 94;Google ScholarDomar, “Causes,” p. 30;Google ScholarReid, “Evaluation,” pp. 160–61;Google ScholarCedric A. Yeo, “The Economic of Roman and American Slavery,” Finanzarchiv, n.s. 13, no.3 (1952), p. 468–70.Google Scholar See also Frank, , Surey vol. 2, p. 277; Jones, “Slavery,” p. 199;Google ScholarWhite, Kevin, Roman Farming (London, 1970), p. 372.Google Scholar

46 Barzel, “Economic Analysis,” p. 94, suggests that during the Northern winter “even indoor work was formerly limited by the paucity of artificial light.” One notes, however, that Lancashire is further north than any of the contiguous United States, less sun-lit than New England and the Midwest, and ran its mills in pitch darkness without the benefit of gas or electricity (though these innovations of course reduced the cost of doing so); see Lamb, H. H., Climate: Present, Past, Future (London, 1972), vol. 1, p. 502;Google ScholarFalkus, M. E, “The Early Development of the British Gas Industry, 1790–1815,” Economic Histry Review, 2nd ser., 35 (05 1982), 218–19. In antiquity slaves appear similarly to have worked at night by artificial light; see Cato the Elder, De Agri Cultura, 37.3,Google Scholar and Columella, , Res Rustica, 11, 2. 12.Google Scholar

47 Wiles, Institutions, p. 204; also below, section IV. Factory production did not get established until after legal abolition. Yeo, “Economics,” pp. 469–70, argues that wheat is itself unsuited to slave labor because its relatively low ratio of labor to land raises supervision costs. However, that low ratio does not in fact imply that the workers are dispersed over the estate on any particular day; the contrary, rather, seems implied by the organization of the medieval open fields.Google Scholar See Fenoaltea, Stefano, “Risk, Transaction Costs, and the Organization of Medieval Agriculture,” Explorations in Economic History, 13 (04 1976), 141–44. The frequency of grain cultivation on large estates with supervised labor, whether free wage-earners or barshchina serfs, also argues against Yeo's interpretation.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 In the South, lumbering appears to have used slaves very profitably indeed, and turpentine farms were the last hold-out of pain incentives, prison gangs apart, even after the formal abolition of slavery; see Daniel, Pete, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969 (Urbana, 1972), pp. 36–40;Google Scholar and Starobin, Robert S., “The Economics of Industrial Slavery in the Old South,” Business Histry Review 44 (Summer 1970), 132. Even here, however, the Northern work year may have been interrupted by winter storms, and the North's density of settlement, lack of impenetrable swamps, and proximity to Canada would all have made it harder to prevent escape.Google Scholar

49 See for example Yeo, Cedric A., “The Development of the Roman Plantation and the Marketing of Farm Products,” Finanzarchiv n.s. 13, no.2 (1952), 334–35;Google ScholarYeo, “Economic,” p.463. Given the similarity of the marketing conditions for plantation products in the ancient and modern worlds, it does not seem possible to attribute the decline of the Roman plantations to the fact that “the crops were not mass-products like cotton and tobacco”Google Scholar (Wiles, Institutions, p. 195). On the other hand, Yeo's argument that the ancient and modern plantations were similar in every relevant respect is obviously rejected by the present interpretation, which is closer to that of Wiles in its search for significant agricultural differences;Google ScholarStarr, Chester G., “An Overdose of Slavery,” this Journal, 18 (03 1958), 18, 23, also contrasts the “extensive” agriculture of the South and the “intensive” agriculture of the Mediterranean.Google Scholar The present argument seems most nearly anticipated by Wiedemann, Slavery, p. 136, as he notes that the closer supervision of the slave gangs on the ancient plantations made them less efficient than in the New World; but he attributes this difference to inferior practice by the ancients, rather than to the greater care-intensity of their crops.Google Scholar

50 Columella, Res Rustica, 3, 3.8–9. As noted below, part of the cost of planting the vines represented irreversible improvements; on the other hand, the plantation's capital included buildings, equipment, and animals as well as the vines and trees.Google Scholar The improvements alone cost some 2,000 sesterces per iugerum; an ordinary work slave cost about as much, and could tend about five iugera of established vineyards (Frank, Survey, vol. 5, pp. 150, 235;Google ScholarWhite, Roman Farming, p. 373). The value of the improvements alone, per slave, is thus comparable to the value of an ordinary hand even if the latter is allowed as many as four dependents. Compare above, footnote 36.Google Scholar

51 White, Roman Farming, pp. 237–39.Google Scholar

52 Columella, Res Rustica, 5, 8. 1.Google ScholarFrank, Survey, vol. 1, p. 171, allows olive trees half the planting cost Columella attributed to vines, but the discount appears to be a rough estimate.Google Scholar The elder Pliny (Naturalis Historia, 15, 1. 3) notes that in Hesiod's time olives would be harvested only by the descendants of the planter of the trees, though by his own day they were first harvested just one year after transplanting;Google ScholarWhite, Roman Farming p. 227, renders this passage as “the fruit is [now] picked seven years after planting.” It is of course the olive's tremendous “round-aboutnes” that made it the symbol of peace.Google Scholar

53 For the same reasons, the vine and the olive appear unsuited to wage-work or short-term tenancies. See Aymard, André, “Les capitalistes romains et la viticulture italienne,” Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 2 (07–09 1947), 265, on the superiority of small units of production;CrossRefGoogle ScholarColumella, Res Rustica l, 7. 6, on the damage tenants can do to vines and olive trees;Google ScholarFenoaltea, “Authority,” p. 707, on the parcelling-out of the Bordeaux region's vine-growing demesnes in the thirteenth century;Google ScholarFrank, Survey, vol. 4, pp. 93–95, 477, vol. 5, p. 74, on the tendency to petty tenures where vines and olive trees were grown, noting the multi-year rent remissions to tenants who planted them;Google ScholarPliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, 12, 54. 113, on the battles to defend balsam trees against malicious damage.Google Scholar

54 Columella deprecates cultivation with debt-prisoners and chain gangs; he seeks an overseer capable of managing men without cruelty; and he recommends that slaves be kept in the infirmary even if they are only pretending to be ill (Res Rustica, 1,3.12,8.10;12,3.7). To be sure, there was a hierarchy of slaves on the Roman plantations as on the American ones, and the navvies at the bottom were no doubt treated relatively harshlyGoogle Scholar (White, Roman Farming, p. 355;Google ScholarWiedemann, Slavery, p. 231), just as the American plantation slaves in positions of responsibility were no doubt treated relatively well; what matters is the treatment of the large majority of hands on the estate.Google Scholar

55 Fenoaltea, “Authority,” p. 701.Google ScholarBrunt, P. A., Italian Manpower, 225 B.C.-A.D.14 (Oxford, 1971), p. 121, notes that freedmen seem to be numerous even in rural areas.Google Scholar

56 Bradford, John, Ancient Landscapes: Studies in Field Archaeology (London, 1957), pp. 194, 199, 204, 206, and plates 25, 28, and 49b;Google ScholarWhite, Roman Farming, pp. 22526, 237, and plate 51. On established plantations, it might be more profitable to have such digging done by hired jobbing gangs than by the estates'own slaves, since the latter could not be driven by pain incentives without jeopardizing their future good will;Google Scholarsee Columella, Res Rustica, 3, 13. 10–12,Google Scholarand Genovese, Jordan, p. 307.Google ScholarThe assumption in Yeo, “Economics”, p. 465, that these hired gangs were made up of free workers seems unwarranted;Google Scholar compare Heitland, W. E., Agricola (Cambridge, 1921), p. 214, and Higman, Slave Population, pp. 40–41, 80.Google Scholar

57 Yeo, “Development,” pp. 321–22. While grain continued to be grown in Italy, there is no reason to assume that the only grain impoted from the provinces was that received as tribute; compare Frank, Survey, vol. I, pp. 68–69, vol. 5, pp. 139–40, 182–83; White, Roman Farming, pp. 66, 398.

58 Columella, Res Rustica, l, 9. 4.Google Scholar

59 Yeo, “Economics”, pp. 447–49; also White, Roman Farming, pp. 438–39.Google Scholar

60 Bloch, Marc, “Comment et pourquoi finit l'esclavage antique,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 2 (01-03 1947), 34;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBloch, Marc, French Rural History (Berkeley, 1966), pp. 66–68; Wiles, Institutions, p. 195. On slave reproduction see Appian, De Bello Civile, 1, 1. 7; also Columella, Res Rustica, 1, 8. 19.Google Scholar

61 Yeo, “Economics,” pp. 479–83.Google Scholar

62 Frank, Survey, vol. 5, pp. 281–82. Yeo, “Economics,” p. 481, interprets Domitian's prohibition of vine planting in the provinces as a protectionist response to foreign competition.Since the investments of wealthy Romans were so heavily biased towards the provinces that Trajan felt the need to force senators to own land in Italy, it is highly unlikely that an effective protectionist lobby existed at all;Google Scholarsee Frank, Survey, vol. 1, pp. 387–92, vol. 5, p. 88. A more likely explanation is a concern for an adequate provincial grain surplus, on which depended the quiescence of the mob; this is consistent with the failure to prohibit the planting of olive trees in the provinces, since the latter were more likely to be intercultivated with grainGoogle Scholar(White, Roman Farming, p. 398).Google Scholar

63 Yeo, “Economics,” pp. 482–83, noting that the cited text by Dio Cassius (66, 24.2–3) refers to the immediate aftermath of the eruption. The virtual absence of Campanian and Latian jars among the mainly Spanish ones in Monte Testaccio is not evidence that the Roman market was lost to provincial competition, since few jars of Italian origin from any period have been found in Rome;Google Scholarsee Frank, Survey, vol. 5, pp. 135, 272;Google ScholarYeo, “Development,” pp. 341–42. One conjectures that Italian wines were shipped in barrels, possibly because of the relatively high cost of fuel and therefore of pottery in Italy.Google Scholar

64 North, Douglass C. and Thomas, Robert Paul, “The Rise and Fall of the Manorial System: A Theoretical Model,” this Journal, 31 (12 1971), 779;Google ScholarDockès, Pierre, La libération médiévale (Paris, 1979), pp. 44–45, 106–15.Google Scholar

65 Westermann, Slave Systems, pp. 77, 107; also Frank, Survey, vol. 1, p. 303, vol. 5, p. 50.Google Scholar

66 Tranquillus, Gaius Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum, 2, 32. 1. As noted for example by Bloch, “L'esclavage antique,” p. 31, the troubles of the late Empire brought about a recrudescence of slavery; see also Starr, “Overdose”, p. 28.Google Scholar

67 Barzel, “Economic Analysis” pp. 100, 109; Engerman, “Considerations,” p. 61; Wiles, Institutions, pp. 188, 195.Google Scholar

68 Davis, Problem, pp. 48–49; Patterson, Slavery, pp. 58–62;Google ScholarWalbank, Frank W., “Trade and Industry under the Later Roman Empire in the West,” in Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 2, ed. Postan, M. M. and Rich, E. E. (Cambridge, 1952), p. 73;Google ScholarWiedemann, Slavery, p. 194.Google ScholarBarzel, “Economic Analysis,” pp. 108–9, points out a further advantage of race-specific slavery. Since slaves generally lack the capacity to sue, illegally enslaved citizens would be unable to recover their freedom even if they were not transported to an alien jurisdiction; but the restriction of slave status to an alien race eliminates this risk for the the members of the ruling group. As Barzel notes, however, this issue concerns the overall advantage or disadvantage of allowing slavery, so that it is relevant to legal abolition rather than to the observed erosion of gang slavery by the individual actions of slaveholders. One can also query the validity of his premise: in Roman law, for example, the causa liberalis existed to cover precisely such contingencies (and, in accord with the basic principles of the law, the action had to be brought by a free adsertor libertatis until the late Empire granted legal personality to the slaves themselves); see for example Buckland, Law of Slavery, p. 652ff.Google Scholar

69 See for example Buckland, Law of Slavery, p. 434; Patterson, Slavery, pp. 77–101. In Roman law, “on enslavement the old personality was destroyed and did not revive on manumission”; so too, in medieval English law, outlawry is civil death, and “the inlawed outlaw is not the old person restored to legal life; he is a new person.”Google Scholar See Buckland, W. W., The Main Institutions of Roman Private Law (Cambridge, 1931), p. 49,Google Scholar and Pollock, Frederick and Maitland, Frederic William, The History of English Law, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1898), vol. 1, p. 477. There are of course degrees of servitude, and the socially dead individual without legal rights represents an extreme case. Semantically, however, it seems useful to restrict “slavery” to that specific extreme, since “servitude” already serves as the generic term; the terms are so used here.Google Scholar

70 See for example Davis, Problem, pp. 47, 62ff;Google ScholarHellie, Richard, Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725 (Chicago, 1982), pp. 517–18;Google ScholarPatterson, Slavery, pp. 38–45, 117–18, 125;Google ScholarWestermann, Slave Systems, pp. 30, 43, 124–26;Google ScholarWiedemann, Slavery, p. 39. Both Athens and Rome suppressed slavery for debt early in their history (respectively in 594 B.C., as part of Solon's reforms, and in 326 B.C., by the lex Poetelia Papiria). In the Middle East, by long tradition, individuals could not be slaves to members of their own tribal group; in Ur, the very word for slave implied foreign origin. Debt bondage was limited to three years by the Hammurabi code, and to six by Hebraic law (but only so long as the debt “slave” was also Jewish). Sixteenth-century Muscovite “slavery” is a typical case in point, and Hellie's arguments to the contrary turn on the unusual breadth of his definitions. Internal recruitment was accompanied by extensive legal protection and extremely mild treatment: the “slaves” were not sexually available to their masters, and their marriages and families were inviolable; the “slaves” were not driven or sold away; and entire families could abscond with such ease, if they were dissatisfied with their treatment, that runaways display the same demographic profile as the “slave” population as a whole. As Patterson points out, most of these so-called slaves were simply contractual indentured servants.Google ScholarSee Hellie, Slavery, pp. 18–21, 33ff, 91ff, 115ff, 139, 339–40, 350, 504ff, 556;Google Scholarcompare Patterson, Slavery, pp. 44, 130, 183–84.Google Scholar

71 Bloch, “L'esclavage antique”, pp. 165–70.Google Scholar

72 Patterson, Slavery, p.7.Google Scholar

73 For present purposes, it is of course immaterial whether Stoicism and Christianity caused the legal changes, or were jointly caused with them by something deeper. There has been a tendency, in the English-language literature, to deny the positive role of Christianity; but this seems to have been in essence a reaction to the excessive claims of nineteenth-century abolitionists. See for example Bloch, “L'esclavage antique,” pp. 40–41;Google ScholarDavis, Problem, pp. 55, 89;Google ScholarFinley, Ancient Economy, pp. 88–89;Google ScholarGenovese, Jordan, pp. 4–5;Google ScholarPatterson, Slavery, p. 189;Google ScholarStarr, “Overdose,” p. 28;Google ScholarVolterra, Edoardo, Islituzioni di diriuo privato romano (Rome, 1961), pp. 57, 71, 73; Westermann, Slave Systems, pp. 109, 116–17, 149–162 (which Starr misapprehends); Wiedemann, Slavery, p. 13 (but also p. 178).Google Scholar

74 Buckland, Law of Slavery, pp. 36–38; Codex Theodosianus, 2, 25. 1.Google ScholarWiedemann, While, Slavery, p. 173, no doubt correctly stresses the imperial state's desire to limit the scope of the dominica potestas as of the patria potesras, Claudius did favor the liberty of slaves abandoned for ill health (who were otherwise simply res derelicrae, subject to ownership by occupatio). The Antonine innovations appear to be the critical ones, since with them the servus was no longer “a man without rights, i.e. without the power of setting the law in motion for his own protection”– that is to say, a slave, in the strict sense used here;Google Scholarsee Buckland, Law of Slavery, p. 2. As Buckland makes clear, the notion that a slave is legally a thing and not a person turns on the strict definition of a legal person as one who can be the subject of substantive and procedural rights; it is entirely consistent with provisions which recognize that the slave is a human being, for example for purposes of punishment.Google ScholarCompare for example Davis, Problem, p. 58,Google ScholarGenovese, Jordan, p. 4, Patterson, Slavery, p. 22.Google Scholar

75 Buckland, Law of Slavery, p. 38; also Buckland, Institutions, p. 41, and Westermann, Slave Systems, pp. 108–9, 114–15.Google Scholar

76 In the late Empire, the hutting of slaves appears less likely to resolve itself in formal manumission. With the growth of legislation protecting the person and family of the servus on the one hand, and tying free peasants to the land on the other, the servile quasi colonus became all but indistinguishable from the free colonus. The value of formal manumission to the hutted slave may thus have been reduced enough to make the manumission tax prohibitive despite its low nominal rate.Google ScholarSee for example Jones, “Slavery,” pp. 198–99,Google Scholarand Westermann, Slave Systems, p. 95.Google Scholar

77 Digesra, 15, 3. 16; also Frank, Survey, vol. 1, p. 303. This argument is a relatively weak one, since the hutted slave may have been a former vilicus who continued to work the estate with gangs of slaves; see Heitland, Agricola, p. 369.Google Scholar

78 See for example Genovese, Jordan, pp. 73–74; Hellie, Slavery, p. 505;Google ScholarNardinelli, Clark, “Corporal Punishment and Children's Wages in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Explorations in Economic History, 19 (07 1982), 283–95;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPatterson, Slavery, p. 7. Constantine's assimilation of slave killing to murder specifically excepted disciplinary whipping (Codex Theodosianus, 9, 12. 1–2; Codex lustinianus, 9, 14. 1).Google Scholar

79 Engerman, “Considerations,” pp. 64–65. Provisions similar to those of the late Empire were embodied by the codes of French and Latin America, with notoriously little effect on plantation life; see for exampleGoogle ScholarDavis, Problem, pp. 102, 233–36;Google ScholarFriedman, Lawrence M., A History of American Law (New York, 1973), p. 198. If Constantine's decree on slave killing marked a retrogression from the Antonine legislation, it may be tied to the above-noted recrudescence of slave imports (and, with them, of supervision- and pain-intensive gang labor) in those troubled times.Google Scholar

80 See for example Davis, Problem, pp. 42–43. Since the slaves picked up in the Black Sea could as easily have been transported to Western Europe as to the Levant, it is once again the intrinsic unsuitability of European agriculture to the plantation system that best explains the unimportance of agricultural slavery in medieval Europe on both sides of the Alps.Google Scholar

81 See for example Finley, Ancient Economy, pp. 64–65; Genovese, Jordan, p. 314; Jones, “Slavery,” pp. 187–91; Starr, “Overdose,” p. 21.Google Scholar The discussion of incentive systems in Lewis, Ronald L., Coal, Iron, and Slaves: Industrial Slavery in Maryland and Virginia, 1715–1865 (Westport, Connecticut, 1979), pp. 112–26, suggests that the iron works, like other industries but unlike the mines, preferred incentive payments to the whip.Google Scholar

82 See Goldin, Urban Slavery, pp. 35–47, 104–5; also, for example,Google ScholarRosovsky, Henry, “The Serf Entrepreneur in Russia,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 6 (05 1954), 207–36;Google ScholarStarobin, “Industrial Slavery,” pp. 131–74.Google ScholarFogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, vol. 1, p. 238, suggest that while “the nonpecuniary disadvantage of gang labor was no less to blacks than to whites,… the advantage of slave labor was much less in urban industry than in agriculture [because] the nonpecuniary disadvantage of accepting the monotonous and intense routine of the factories appears to have been offset by nonpecuniary benefits which both black and white workers attached to life in the cities”. The argument seems forced, however, since urban slaves worked predominantly in the crafts, trades, and services rather than in factory industryGoogle Scholar(Goldin,Urban Slavery, pp. 42–46), and “industrial slaves … lived in rural, small-town or plantation settings, where most southern industry was located, not in large cities”Google Scholar(Starobin, “Industrial Slavery,” p. 132).Google Scholar

83 The master may let the slave accumulate funds and buy himself back, or prefer to reward him with his freedom rather than with income. There is little substantive difference between the two:manumission is always gratuitous, since the slave buys himself with funds which actually belong to the master; it is always earned, if granted for services rendered. See for example Patterson, Slavery, p. 210.Google Scholar

84 See for example Matison, “Manumission,” and above, footnote 40; also Davis, Problem, pp.267–68.Google Scholar

85 See for example Frank, Survey, vol. 1, pp. 378, 380, vol. 4, p. 417; Starr, “Overdose”, p. 27.Google Scholar

86 However, the slave can influence his master's choice by determining the shape of the labor (effort, good will) offer curve that the latter faces. The Marxian analysis of the breaking up of the Roman plantations presented in Dockès, La libération, is cast in terms of the class struggle in historic time, while the present transaction-costs analysis is cast in terms of individual interaction in abstract time; but the two seem fundamentally similar.Google Scholar

87 By the same token, slaves will have a general disadvantage in unusually pleasant work. See Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, vol. 2, pp. 113–14, for a masterly exposition of the argument.Google Scholar

88 See for example Finley, Ancient Economy, pp. 82–83;Google ScholarGenovese, Jordan, pp. 333–34;Google ScholarHellie, Slavery, pp. 505, 676, 692, 703;Google ScholarJones, “Slavery,” p. 186;Google ScholarWiedemann, Slavery, pp. 175–76. In our own times, the supply of domestic servants has declined very rapidly with the growth of alternative employment opportunities, and it remains ample only where emigration also continues on a large scale. Examples of minor activities that similarly appear to have been the preserve of unfree laborers because of their unpleasantness include the grinding of ore in Potosí and the cleaning of the cloacae in Roman cities;Google ScholarFrank, Survey, vol. 4, p. 808, vol. 5, p. 99; Tandeter, “Labour,” p. 110.Google Scholar

89 Finley, Ancient Economy, p. 72. There is also a demographic difference, of course: captive women and children tend to become household slaves, as they are sexually attractive and not dangerous, while the men are more often relegated to effort-intensive activities or killed outright. The pattern recurs from archaic times at least into the Renaissance; see for example Finley. “Greek Civilization,” p. 145, on the Homeric poems,Google Scholar and Rodgers, William L., Naval Warfare Under Oars, 4th to 16th Centuries (Annapolis, 1940), pp. 162–63, on the Ottoman capture of Nicosia.Google Scholar

90 Genovese, Jordan, p. 332.Google Scholar

91 See for example Genovese, Jordan, p. 329; Wiedemann, Slavery, pp. 101 (for direct evidence of manumission as a reward for loyal service), 122, 231. In Rome, the contrast between the conditions of rustic and domestic slavery appears sharpest in the late Republic;Google Scholar see White, Roman Farming, pp. 358, 365.Google Scholar

92 Manumission would not necessarily free the domestic from his work, since manumission was often granted on condition of continued service; but it did transform the slave into a legal person, exempt from the punishments specific to the unfree. Manumission thus remained a valuable reward; and it was presumably gratuitous, since domestic slaves lacked the opportunity to earn money with which to pay for themselves. See Wiedemann, Slavery, pp. 46–47, 51, 55–56, 101, 122, 169–71; also pp. 5, 78, 90, on slaveholding for conspicuous display. While the latter phenomenon would normally lighten the slave's burdens, it could lead to perverse effects, from the denial of profitable manumission to the slaughter of the potlatch; see for exampleGoogle ScholarHellie, Slavery, pp. 490ff, 690–91,Google ScholarPatterson, Slavery, pp. 84, 191,Google ScholarRosovsky, “Serf Entrepreneur,” pp. 215–16.Google Scholar

93 Wiedemann, Slavery, p. 146;Google Scholar similarly, for example, Frank, Survey, vol. 1, pp. 377–78,Google ScholarJones, “Slavery,” p. 192.Google Scholar

94 Columella, Res Rustica, 6 and 7;Google ScholarVarro, Marcus Terentius, Res Rusticae, 2;Google ScholarWhite, Roman Farming, pp. 272–327, passim.Google Scholar

95 The peculium applied as much to free citizens alieni iuris as to slaves, since under the Republic the patria poreslas was as unlimited as the dominica; see for example Buckland, Institutions, pp. 57, 64,Google ScholarVolterra, Isrituzioni, pp. 76–78.Google Scholar

96 Starr, “Overdose,” p. 28;Google Scholaralso Dockés, La libération, p. 67,Google ScholarFrank, Survey, vol. 3, p. 316,Google ScholarWestermann, Slave Systems, pp. 64–65.Google Scholar

97 Frank, Survey, vol. 3, pp. 240–46, which includes a particularly cogent critique of the text of Diodorus that underlies the conventional account,Google Scholarand White, Kevin, “Latifundia,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, n. 14 (1967), 75;Google Scholarsimilarly Westermann, William L., “Atheneus and the Slaves of Athens,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, supp. vol. (1941), p. 457n.Google ScholarThe surviving statistics are of enemy casualties, and as such seem to bear little relation to the truth; see for example Brunt, Manpower, pp. 694–97.Google Scholar

98 Finley, “Greek Civilization,” p. 158;Google ScholarFrank, Survey, vol. 3, pp. 243–45;Google ScholarWiedemann, Slavery, pp. 198–223.Google ScholarCompare Brunt, “Review of Westermann,” p. 169.Google Scholar

99 Varro, Res Rustjcae, 2, 10. 1;Google ScholarWiedemann, Slavery, p. 146. Caesar's decree that ne-third of the herdsmen should be free men thus seems prompted by considerations of security;Google ScholarFrank, Survey, vol. 1, p. 378.Google Scholar

100 Buckland, Institutions, pp. 42–43;Google ScholarVolterra, Isriruzioni, p. 55;Google ScholarWiedemann, Slavery, p. 31.Google Scholar

101 Buckland, Institutions, pp. 86–90, 161;Google ScholarFrank, Survey, vol. 1, p. 148, vol. 5, p. 217;Google ScholarPatterson, Slavery, pp. 303–4;Google ScholarVolterra, Isriruzioni, pp. 119–24, 147–49. In classical Roman law, the causa liberalis (above, footnote 69) was one of the few exceptions to the rule against representation;Google Scholarsee for example Buckland, Law of Slavery, p. 655.Google Scholar

102 Frank, Survey, vol. 4, pp. 690–91.Google Scholar

103 Jones, “Slavery,” p. 186;Google Scholarsimilarly Finley, Ancient Economy, p. 76.Google Scholar

104 Recall for example Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 12.6–7, cited above.Google Scholar

105 For this reason, slave agents are more likely to remain slaves than other slaves governed by rewards. That a rural actor died at 60 still a slave is not therefore grounds to infer that rural slaves in general were rarely manumitted; contrast Brunt, , “Review of Westermann,” p. 168.Google Scholar

106 Patterson, Slavery, pp. 180, 264–66, and above, footnotes 40 and 84. The sectoral distribution of manumitted slaves cannot therefore be considered representative of the sectoral distribution of slave employment;Google Scholar see for example Wiedernann, Slavery, p. 133,Google Scholarand contrast Starr, “Overdose,” p. 20,Google ScholarWestermann, Slave Systems, pp. s13, 35.Google Scholar

107 On the correlation of urban residence with high manumission rates in Latin America, the Caribbean, South Africa, Greece, Rome, Han China, and most of the Islamic world see Patterson, Slavery, pp. 180, 269, and references therein.Google Scholar

108 According to the Eighth Census of the United States, vol. 4 (Washington, D.C., 1866), p. 337, in the 1850s American manumission rates were in the neighborhood of 0.06 percent per year.Google ScholarFrank, Survey, vol. 1, p. 384, uses what he identifies as the yield of the tax on manumissions to estimate the manumissions at 16,000 per year from 81 to 49 b.c. Given a slave population of 3 to 4 millionGoogle Scholar (Brunt, Manpower, pp. 4, 124;Google ScholarFrank, Survey, p. 315), one obtains a rate one order of magnitude higher than the American one even when, for the reasons noted above, the pain- intensive sector appears to have been at its most extensive; and Frank's 16,000 may be far too few, if, as seems likely, the tax was not collected on the freedmen who returned to their own lands and were never enrolled by the censorGoogle Scholar (see Wiedemann, Slavery, p. 70). However, Brunt is probably right to dismiss such calculations as simply worthlessGoogle Scholar (Manpower, pp. 549–50).Google ScholarSomewhat sturdier evidence is obtainable for a later period from Diocletian's edict on prices, which values an ordinary male slave 40 to 60 years old at 80 percent of one 16 to 40 years old (Wiedemann, Slavery, p. 105). The ratio of these values, and the very breadth of the categories, suggest that slaves were not valued for their brute strength, or expected to serve very long (though high mortality would have the same effect as prompt manumission);Google Scholarcompare Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, vol. 1, p. 72,Google ScholarHellie, Slavery, p. 340. The strongest evidence here appears to be the literary evidence of common experience, such as Cicero's reference to six years as the normal term of captivity, and the prohibition of manumission, for decades or for life, as an unusual punishmentGoogle Scholar (Wiedemann, Slavery, pp. 32, 51, 117; also 133, 186, on Aristotle's belief that it was advantageous to let all slaves earn their freedom by good service over a clearly stated number of years).Google Scholar

109 The best-documented examples are the freedmen of the familia Caesaris, but the practice appears general; see for example Jones, “Slavery,” p. 193. An inscription listing the public slaves and freedmen in Ostia is particularly telling: it identifies the latter by two names, the former by one—followed by a blank space to allow the addition of the name they would acquire on manumissionGoogle Scholar (Frank, Survey, vol. 5, p. 252).Google Scholar

110 Findlay, “Slavery,” pp. 929–31.Google Scholar

111 See above, footnote 92; also Bloch, “L'esclavage antique,” pp. 42–43.Google Scholar

112 See for example Conrad and Meyer, “Economics of Slavery,” p. 103,Google Scholarand Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, p. 210;Google ScholarColumella, Res Rustica, 3, 3.9.Google Scholar

113 Barzel, “Economic Analysis,” pp. 104–6.Google Scholar

114 See Pryor, Frederic L., “A Comparative Study of Slave Societies” Journal of Comparative Economics, 1 (03 1977), 26–27,CrossRefGoogle Scholarand Hellie, Slavery, pp. 20, 488. Pryor defines slavery broadly but very carefully; and his broad definition seems critical to his argument that it may be rational to choose “an economically secure life as a slave” over “an economically insecure life as a free person,” since an utter lack of rights implies utter insecurity (note for example the evidence of starvation among Barbadian slaves,Google ScholarDavis, Problem, p. 322;Google Scholaralso Wiedemann, Slavery, p. 176). While individuals certainly accept relatively mild servitude voluntarily and for themselves (as in the Muscovite case), strict slavery or pain-intensive conditions seem more typically accepted for one's dependents than for oneself (thus the children sold or abandoned into slavery in antiquity, or sent to work in Lancashire's cotton mills); where an individual's actions result in his own subjection to harsh treatment, that outcome is typically the unfortunate result of an accepted gamble (thus debt slaves and criminals), or of misinformation or reduced volition (thus the immigrants who discovered brutality on turpentine farms, or the “volunteers” who served before the mast).Google ScholarSee for example Daniel, Shadow of Slavery, p. 38;Google ScholarNardinelli, “Corporal Punishment”; Patterson, Slavery, pp. 129–30. In Rome, the recorded cases of voluntary élite slavery are of noncitizens who become slaves of citizens in view of eventual manumission and citizenship;Google Scholarsee for example Volterra, Isrituzioni, p. 67.Google ScholarIn a broader sense, of course, all slavery is voluntary, as it is preferred to death (Patterson, Slavery, pp. 5, 26).Google Scholar

115 Nor was debt slavery voluntary when it did exist, in the sense that the borrower could have posted some security other than his own person (Barzel, “Economic Analysis,” p. 105): the creditor's right to seize the delinquent debtor, and after 60 days to enslave him, was granted directly by the XII TablesGoogle Scholar (Volterra, Istituzioni, pp. 60, 209–10).Google Scholar

116 See above, footnote 74.

117 See for example Fenoaltea, “Authority,” p. 695;Google Scholaralso Frank, Survey, vol. 4, pp. 404–6.Google Scholar

118 The deleterious incentives of temporary slaveholding in effort-intensive activities have been widely noted, not least by legislators contemplating delayed emancipation; see Goldin, Claudia Dale, “The Economics of Emancipation” this Journal, 33 (03 1971), 71.Google Scholar For similar reasons, it was a fortunate convict who survived his term as a galley oarsman; see Tenenti, Alberto, Piracy and the Decline of Venice, 1580–1615 (Berkeley, 1967), pp. 115–16.Google ScholarThe holder of a debt bondsman has similar incentives, but is constrained by the legal personality of his man; it is thus grossly misleading to claim that “indentured servants were in essence temporary slaves, the personal property of their masters” (Friedman, History, p. 71).Google Scholar

119 See for example Jones, “Slavery,” p. 188;Google ScholarEvans, “The Economics,” p. 192ff;Google ScholarGenovese, Jordan, p. 390ff.Google Scholar

120 Genovese, Jordan, pp. 10–12;Google ScholarPatterson, Slavery, pp. 180–81. Individual slaves surplus to their masters' requirements could of course be rented out for agricultural labor, but the contrasting incentives of owners and renters made the arrangement an inefficient one;Google Scholar see for example Olmsted, Frederick Law, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, with Remarks on Their Economy (New York, 1856), p. 100.Google Scholar

121 Frank, Survey, vol. 5, p. 179;Google Scholaralso Heitland, Agricola, pp. 297–98.Google Scholar

122 Genovese, Jordan, p. 22.Google ScholarAnalogous cases of slaves rented to mines in order to be disciplined are noted by Lewis, Coal, Iron, p. 115.Google Scholar

123 Wiedemann, Slavery, p. 96.Google Scholar

124 See for example Hellie, Slavery, pp. 505–6.Google Scholar

125 Pollard, Sidney, “Factory Discipline in the Industrial Revolution” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 16 (12. 1963), 260. The sailing navies were another notorious case in point; strict discipine of adult males was there made necessary by the collective dependence on individual acceptance of severe risk, and possible by a uniquely escape-proof environment. These navies thus appear analogous both to the military and to the post-bellum turpentine farms—and, as in both of these, recruitment seems to have relied largely on compulsion or deceit (above, footnote 114).Google Scholar

126 Nardinelli, “Corporal Punishment,” pp. 293–94.Google ScholarThe extremely long hours worked by these children also suggest that sustained carefulness, at least, was not expected of them; see Pollard, “Factory Discipline,” p. 263. Their young age is also relevant, both in restricting the likely cost from incurring their ill will, and in restricting their freedom not to submit to such employment conditions in the first place.Google ScholarSome employers thus beat only the younger children (p. 260).Google Scholar

127 Robert Owen, among others, could “prohibit [the beating of children] outright,” yet run his mills “at regular high annual profits, largely because he gained the voluntary co-operation of his workers”; the attempt of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to convert the Codrington plantations on Barbados into “model estates where masters and servants would be bound by ties of mutual affection and obligation” proved instead a dramatic failure, and as late as 1827 “Codrington Negroes, including women, were still driven in the fields by whips” (Pollard, “Factory Discipline” pp. 260, 267;Google ScholarDavis, Problem, p. 221).Google ScholarSee also Nardinelli, “Corporal Punishment,” pp. 289–95.Google Scholar

128 See for example Clough, Shepard B., The Economic History of Modern Italy (New York,1964), pp. 103, 142.Google Scholar

129 In medieval England, in contrast, large estates tended to be parceled out to petty tenants, and farm servants were normally hired from harvest to harvest; see for example Fenoaltea, “Authority,” pp. 702–11, and “Risk,” pp. 141–44.Google Scholar

130 Clough, Modern Italy, p. 142.Google Scholar

131 Because the state of the cooperating assets and the quality of the husbandman are so much more difficult to evaluate than the laborer's prospective productivity and working conditions, the time-invariant per-contract transaction costs of rental contracts far exceed those of wage contracts; and even the time-related transaction costs of rental contracts decline, as those of wage contracts do not, with the length of the contract. Rental contracts thus run from an apparently irreducible minimum of one year to de facto perpetuity; see Fenoaltea, Stefano, “The Rise and Fall of a Theoretical Model: The Manorial System” this Journal, 35 (06 1975), 391,Google Scholarand “Authority,” pp. 695–97.Google Scholar The role of uncertainty as to the quality of the parties to a rental agreement is acutely discussed by Mokyr, Joel, “Uncertainty and Prefamine Irish Agriculture” in Ireland and Scotland, 1600–1850: Parallels and Contrasts in Economic and Social Development, ed. Devine, T. M. and Dickson, David (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 94–96.Google Scholar

132 See for example Fenoaltea, “Risk,” p. 133, and references therein.Google Scholar

133 Clough, Modern Italy, p. 142.Google Scholar

134 Barzel, “Economic Analysis,” pp. 90–91;Google Scholarsee also for example Engerrnan, “Considerations,” pp. 45, 57.Google Scholar

135 Domar, “Causes,” pp. 21–23. Subsequent writers have taken Domar to task for stressing the land/labor ratio, noting that the critical variable is rather the surplus over subsistence, which depends also on the quality of the land and technical knowledge; but Domar was not unaware of the need to keep such variables reasonably constant.Google ScholarSee Domar, “Causes,” pp. 31–32;Google ScholarEngerman, “Considerations” pp. 56–57;Google ScholarPatterson, Orlando, “The Structural Origins of Slavery: A Critique of the Nieboer-Domar Hypothesis from a Comparative Perspective,” in Rubin and Tuden, Perspectives, pp. 23–25;Google ScholarPryor, “Slave Societies,” pp. 30–32, 39–40, 46.Google Scholar

136 The debt peon who can borrow his subsistence only if his efforts satisfy the lender is under greater compulsion than the ordinary tenant; but even he is protected, in comparison to the day laborer, by the longer-term nature of his contractual arrangements. See Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, p. 149ff.Google Scholar

137 See for example Chambers, J. D. and Mingay, G. E., The Agricultural Revolution, 1750–1880 (London, 1966), p. 13;Google ScholarDuby, Georges, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (Columbia, 1968), pp. 263–64.Google Scholar

138 Fenoaltea, “Authority,” pp. 706–13.Google Scholar

139 The extent of the phenomenon is not clear. While the conventional accounts of the sixteenth- and eighteenth-century enclosures for capitalist mixed farming explicitly link them to technical progress, only a minority of the accounts of the revitalized demesnes of the thirteenth century do so as well; but the silence of the rest is difficult to interpret. See for example Gras, N. S. B., A History of Agriculture in Europe and America, 2nd ed. (New York, 1946), pp. 157ff, 208ff;Google ScholarFenoaltea, “Authority,” pp. 709–10, and references therein. Emancipation and the First World War here seem analogous to the Black Death, as pressure to break up large units of exploitation appeared in the wake of substantial reductions in labor supply;Google Scholarsee for example Clough, Modern Italy, pp. 206–7,Google ScholarRansom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, pp. 44–47.Google Scholar

140 The standard argument in the historical literature appeals to the inverse relation between profits and real wages, while altogether neglecting the positive relation between profits and rents; see for example Fenoaltea, “Authority” pp. 693–94, and references therein. Innovation and labor-market conditions can of course jointly contribute to the profitability of supervision, and the two hypotheses are complements rather than substitutes.Google Scholar In a similar vein, the opportunity to drive unskilled workers may have contributed to the extent of wage-work during the industrial revolution; a case of skilled workers renting space in a factory instead of working there for wages is cited by Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. and ed. Henderson, W. O. and Chaloner, W. H. (Oxford, 1958), p. 224.Google Scholar

141 Tversky, Amos and Kahneman, Daniel, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice” Science, 211 (01 1981), 453–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

142 Easterlin, Richard A., “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some EmpiricalEvidence,” in Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz, ed. David, Paul A. and Reder, Melvin W. (New York, 1974), P. 90.Google Scholar

143 Lazonick, William and Brush, Thomas, “The ‘Horndal’ Effect in Early U.S. Manufacturing,” Explorations in Economic History (forthcoming).Google Scholar

144 See Fenoaltea, “Authority,” pp. 710–11, noting that the relation of fear to population growth here exactly mimics that of innovation. Since wages are sticky, markets are less likely to clear when the equilibrium wage is changing than when it is constant, and changes in the prospective period of unemployment reinforce the anxiety-producing effects of the wage changes themselves.Google Scholar

145 Tversky and Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions,” p. 456.Google Scholar

146 Pollard, “Factory Discipline,” pp. 261–62, 266.Google Scholar

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148 Davis, Lance E. et al. , American Economic Growth: An Economist's History of the United States (New York, 1972), p. 221.Google Scholar

149 See for example Aurand, Harold W., From the Molly Maguires to the United Mine Workers: The Social Ecology of an Industrial Union, 1869–1897 (Philadelphia, 1971), pp. 80ff, 91, 96ff;Google ScholarLunt, Richard D., Law and Order vs. the Miners, West Virginia, 1907–1933 (Hamden, Connecticut, 1979), pp. 19ff, 91ff.Google Scholar

150 “Delta: The World's Most Profitable Airline,” Business Week, no. 2703 (08. 31, 1981), 68–72;Google Scholar“The Best at the Game: A Survey of Japanese Industry,” The Economist,, no. 7194 (07 18,1981), insert.Google Scholar