The Slave View of Slavery: Slave Hopes and the Reality of Slavery
The Slave View of Slavery: Slave Hopes and the Reality of Slavery
Chapter 7 focuses on how enslaved persons conceived and experienced slavery and their own identities. The first section of the chapter explores the diverse modalities of slavery that co-existed in ancient societies. Slavery could be conceived as an instrumental relationship; an asymmetrical negotiation of power between masters and slaves; a relationship of benefaction and reward; or an extreme form of bad luck. The existence of different modalities of slavery allowed masters and slaves to negotiate their respective positions and enabled slaves to conceive slavery and their relationship to their masters in their own ways. Slaves tried to modify slavery from a unilateral and instrumental form of power exercised by their masters into something more negotiable, even if in asymmetric ways. The second part of the chapter uses the various hopes of enslaved persons both about life in slavery and life beyond slavery in order to explore the identities and communities that enslaved persons constructed and adopted.
Keywords: Hope, modalities of slavery, asymmetry, negotiation of power, bad luck, instrumental relationship, paternalism
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