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<beepsie@worldnet.att.net> A definition of slavery that turns upon payment for services, while elegant, is probably not sufficient. If we were to use this distinction, we would face two problems. The first is that very few societies that we regard as slave societies might be considered slave societies, since there are often payments of one kind or another made. I was quite surprised to read in West Indian accounts of slavery of the making of payments of one or another kind. Second the concept of payment requires a monetized economy and payment in money. Not all economies use money very much, especially in earlier times, but perhaps even in colonial times, and one has many forms of coerced labor in less than fully monetized economies. Obviously slaves are paid in kind sufficient to support themselves--they received food, housing and clothing. We might regard these payments as low or substandard, but they are payments. There is no reason why such payments could not be commuted to money in certain types of cash economies, or for periods of time. Consider the so called "peasant breach" problem in American slavery, in which slaves were given days off and opportunities to market crops they grew themselves. Because they were not engaged in constant labor and never owned any property, were these people not slaves? I think the nexus for slavery has to be legal, and not strictly economic in this sense. Slavery is the transfer of the power of the state over a person to private citizens, including the right to sell the power. In many slave systems, the state did retain some ultimate powers, usually the power of life and death, but not always. This legal definition, seems to me to make more sense when describing the condition of slavery than one anchored simply on the degree of exploitation. Under such a definition, forced labor is not slavery, because the state is the origin of it. If full state powers, say including those to regulate marriage, were included in it, and if these were transferred to private persons in the colonial period, we might be allowed to call them slaves. I have to add that Ken Harrow's comment that this probably made little difference to the people undergoing forced labor is certainly also true. All over Africa people referred to this sort of labor by terms that recalled the slavery of the past, and sang the songs that only slaves sang while performing the labor. John Thornton Boston University
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