INTRODUCTION

Genuine ‘slave economies’ – in which slave labour permeated all sectors of the economy and played a central role in economic output outside the sphere of family labour – were rare in history. Classical Greece and the Italian heartland of the Roman empire are among the most notable cases. This raises important questions: how did the Greeks and Romans come to join this exclusive club, and how did the circumstances that determined the development and structure of their regimes of slave labour compare to those that shaped other slave-rich systems? This chapter has two goals. The first one is to improve our understanding of the critical determinants of the large-scale use of slave labour in different sectors of historical economies. This calls for a comparative approach that extends beyond classical antiquity. I hope to show that by adjusting and fusing several existing explanatory models, and by considering a previously unappreciated factor, it is possible to make some significant progress toward the creation of a cross-culturally valid matrix of conditions that situates the experience of ancient slave economies within a broader context. In brief, I argue that the success of chattel slavery is a function of the specific configuration of several critical variables: the character of specific economic activities, the incentive system, the normative value system of a society, and the nature of commitments required of the free population.