Yale Alumni Academy Presents: What Is a Slave Society? The Historical Practice of Slavery in a Global Perspective
This presentation will explore the practice of slavery as it has manifested across global cultures from antiquity up to the present. It interrogates a theory first proposed by ancient historian M.I. Finley in the mid-20th century that has become a staple of scholarship in all fields of slavery studies. Finley posited that all slaveholding societies can be divided into two groups, “Slave Societies” and “Societies with Slaves,” and that this distinction shaped social and economic relations in the two kinds of societies in fundamentally different ways.