This is the first volume of The Cambridge World History of Slavery, dealing with the major slave societies of classical Greece and Rome. Slavery has been among the most ubiquitous of all human institutions, across time and place, from earliest history until, some would argue, the present day. Yet its durability and ubiquity are not widely recognised and, where they are, they seem poorly understood by the general public and scholars alike. A central aim of these volumes, which cover many different times and places, is to help to place the existence and nature of slavery against the backdrop of the broader human social condition.

Slavery has appeared in many different forms and is not always easy to separate from other forms of coerced labour. Nevertheless, there are basic similarities that emerge from the contributions that follow.Most critical of these is the ownership of one human by another, and the ability to buy and sell the human chattel such ownership creates. A second common characteristic is the fact that chattel status is a heritable condition passed down through the mother. Such characteristics are not to be found in the more general category of ‘coerced labour’, as normally practised. The latter typically involves a general loss of citizenship rights, but not necessarily ownership of one person by another and inherited status. Some scholars regard slavery as part of a spectrum of coerced labour and dependency, but the institution has maintained a distinctive legal existence in almost all societies.