Slavery’s Rome

Scholars have produced a great many studies of slavery in the Roman world. What we lack are studies of the history of Rome in the context of enslavement, of the Roman world that enslavement made—in short, of slavery’s Rome. I took the invitation to deliver the inaugural “X-lecture on economic power and dominance in the ancient world” at the University of Buffalo in 2023 as an opportunity to sketch out the contours of such an approach, which calls for new ways of looking at Roman history as a whole.