Slave Ownership in the Western World

At the heart of James Q. Whitman's From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands lies the notion of ownership in Western property law.Whitman's boldly argued central thesis is that it is possible to chart a long and gradual transformation from an ancient "property imagination" centered on mastery over humans (and more specifically, enslaved humans) to a modern one centered on lordship over land (pp.9-10).Modern Western property law, Whitman argues, bears traces of a much older legal framework speaking to an idiom of power that has taken centuries to counter: the master/slave relationship.We owe to Ancient Rome, he argues, the modern legal understanding of the "absolute" ownership of things (dominium), and we can only fully understand how and why slavery finally lost its legitimacy in Western law by tracing the transformation that is his subject.This wide-ranging tour de force resists simple classification.It sits at the intersection of a Venn diagram comprising three methodological sets: the comparative global slavery of Orlando Patterson; the longue dure system of the Annales school, and more recent work advocating, if not always achieving, a diachronic approach to ancient and modern slavery. 1 Perhaps best defined as a (very) selective diachronic analysis of the Western ownership of people and land, this book will attract a wide readership among legal historians, ancient historians, classicists, anthropologists, and historians of enslavement and land ownership in all periods.It will, however, be of special interest to those with an interest in "comparative" approaches to enslavement.This is a big book in every way: a 440-page interpretative historiography of ownership from the Upper Palaeolithic to the early modern period, as revealed through a forensic critical analysis of centuries of scholarship on Roman, medieval, and early modern property law.Readers will also encounter arguments drawing inspiration from anthropology, comparative slavery, comparative religion, and Christian theology.