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<jcm7a@cms.mail.virginia.edu> One extension of John's (characteristically) clear thinking about "slavery", which is at the heart of the diverging positions that he and I take also (and in another ongoing string on H-LUSO-AFRICA) on the nature of the "state" in Africa. Readers will have noted that John rightly shifts the emphasis in the usual "legal" definition of slavery from "saleability" to the state's concession of power to private individuals. It's a good move. But in it lurks a further assumption that he does not specify: that the "state" has/claims a comprehensive and direct power over individuals within its domain. This notion of comprehensive state power grew with the development of "absolute monarchies" in early modern Europe, setting up the later counter claim (in the British North American colonies, then later elsewhere) in terms of a comparably comprehensive "state" authority based in the "natural rights" of those so comprehended. But this is another of those nasty modern notions that we all have trouble seeing beyond. Earlier and other polities (known among anthropologists as "composite" or "compound") did not make this sort of claim. It was the case all-but-universally in Africa (and here is where John and I do not agree), and also in the ancient world, Asia, and so on. There the overarching authority (however "despotic" in theory) was partial and negotiated. Hence I would modify John's definition to emphasize that a global definition of slavery in these terms must acknowledged that most polities in world history did not "transfer" the power he attributes to them but rather attempted to intrude on the presumed comprehensive power of their constituent entities (communities of various sorts, including large households). This communal locus of authority (or, as they saw it, "belonging") eludes the many observers who have trouble distinguishing among the various sorts of transfers that communities made routinely among themselves (e.g. "wives", "pawns", and other linkages that we falsely distinguish by attributing our modern distinctions to them). Early modern European monarchs were the first to intrude on it in a definitive way. The rest of the history of "nationalism" flows from the resulting key premise of modernity. And the notion of "private citizen" is similarly limited - since it rests on the premise of individualism that exists in a communal political (or social) ethos only very problematically. JOE MILLER (University of Virginia)
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