Lessons from Slavery in World History

The chapter begins by characterizing Patterson’s first problem of slavery as a coordination problem that exists in slave societies. Slave trading normalizes the violent abrogation of freedom. The co-existence of these norms (slavery and freedom) in slave societies has given rise to at least five different slave cultures in world history, each with its own set of institutions for preserving and growing slave wealth: matrilineal, patrilineal, Western, Chinese, and Muslim. Western slave cultures, with patrilineal inheritance of free status and matrilineal inheritance of slaves, is the most efficient at preserving slave wealth over the generations. Western slave culture has given rise to two major slave systems: the Greco-Roman system with the peculium as an institutionalized path to freedom, and modern American slavery with its socially constructed race as a barrier to freedom.