Abstract
This chapter is designed to set the deeper diachronic and global scene for the more culturally- and chronologically-focussed contributions that follow. In it, I attempt to steer a path between acknowledging the need for close and tight definitions of phenomena such as chattel slavery (as it might distinguish itself from, say, ‘wage slavery’), while also insisting that what we understand as slavery is often dramatically narrowed by prior assumptions about social structures, especially an idée fixe concerning the naturalness of flat hierarchies in less complex human societies. I argue that the political agendas of the moment, and especially the search for justice in the aftermath of recent European colonialism, obscure a deeper global history and prehistory of slavery, and therefore effectively usurp or monopolize (that is, arrogate) the story of inequality and exploitation to a single aberrant interlude. This has the effect of delegitimating and rendering less plausible readings of archaeological evidence from periods and places where totalizing forms of human exploitation could also have been the norm.
Prominent ideas […] are organic parts of our lives, cognitive and emotional habits, structures that shape our thinking. So they follow conservation laws within it. Instead of dying, they transform themselves gradually into something different, something that is often hard to recognise and to understand.
Midgley (2011: 6–7)
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Acknowledgments
With thanks for many critical comments, useful suggestions, and help with the illustrations: Paul Bahn, the late Ofer Bar-Yosef, Chris Beckwith, Catherine Cameron, Martin Gamon, Kathe Heiss, Marek Jankowiak, Nicholas Loy, Roger Matthews, Wendy Matthews, Philippa Monckton, Mark Pearce, Fabio Saccoccio, Helena Seidl da Fonseca, Oliver Wright, and Sarah Wright. The views expressed are my own.
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Taylor, T. (2021). The Arrogation of Slavery: Prehistory, Archaeology, and Pre-theoretical Commitments Concerning People as Property. In: Biermann, F., Jankowiak, M. (eds) The Archaeology of Slavery in Early Medieval Northern Europe. Themes in Contemporary Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73291-2_2
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