The Long Way Back to Ourselves

4.3

Slavery: The Longest Institution

This episode opens with a Roman sale contract in which a seller had to guarantee a woman's health and disclose any tendency to run away, the same language used for livestock, introducing sociologist Orlando Patterson's definition of slavery as domination, dishonor, and severance from kinship. It notes the institution's spread before turning to what made the Atlantic system different: hereditary status through the mother and skin color as a fixed marker, with twelve million shipped and ten and a half million surviving. The episode tests Eric Williams's thesis that abolition followed lost profitability. You learn historian Seymour Drescher instead found the trade at a peak, not decline, when banned, owners compensated twenty million pounds and the enslaved nothing.