In Book III of the Plato’s Laws, we are told that under the ancient constitution of Athenian, citizens ‘lived in willing servitude’ to the city’s laws and to its officers (archontes). How are we to understand the servitude (douleia) invoked in this slogan, and what are we to make of the qualification of the servitude as willing (hekontes, ethelontes)? Against those who suggest that Plato here construes willing servitude as a kind of freedom, I argue that the slogan is intended to emphasize the ways in which the ancient Athenians were unfree. Plato uses it to promote, as a political ideal, acceptance of the limitations on freedom that are the inevitable concomitant of political rule.

This chapter outlines the essential characteristics of servitude, including its creation through written contracts, its binding nature on successive property owners, and the necessity of registration for enforceability against third parties.

The second section focuses on habitation rights, a form of personal servitude allowing individuals to reside in a property owned by another. It explains the creation of habitation rights through contracts and wills, highlighting the mandatory registration process to ensure these rights are recognized against third parties. The chapter examines the interaction between habitation rights and other property interests, such as mortgages and bona fide purchasers, emphasising the legal protections and potential conflicts that arise.

By providing a comprehensive overview of servitude and habitation rights, this chapter offers readers a detailed understanding of these unique property interests and their practical implications in the Chinese legal system.

This chapter focuses on six groups that were forced to migrate and become bound laborers at English sites of overseas expansion. It examines the poor, criminals, and prisoners of war from the British Isles forced into servitude, the indigenous people of the circum-Caribbean who wound up enslaved, enslaved West Africans from the Gold Coast, people sold into slavery in India during times of famine (especially on the Coromandel Coast), the Malagasy people of Madagascar sold for firearms, and the indigenous peoples of the Indonesian archipelago forced to labor for the East India Company. This chapter will stress the political and socioeconomic conditions that made these groups vulnerable to enslavement or other closely adjacent forms of bondage. The chapter highlights the ways in which the Little Ice Age created famine and political and social upheaval that shaped forced and free migration. It also emphasizes the added political destabilization that came with the expansion of global trade, the introduction of firearms as a trade good, and competition for access to coastal trades. This destabilization and change made people in the tropics more vulnerable to enslavement.

Chapter 3 uses the letters of Gregorios Antiochos to explore the scholar’s body. Antiochos, who experienced chronic illness from a young age, combined his own bodily feeling with gender discourses to create a subversive image of the scholar which challenged ideals of military masculinity. He juxtaposed the strong body of the soldier, forged through physical exercise, to the frail body of the learned man hunched over his books, and declared his preference for the latter. He also expressed his own relationship with books and the furniture that facilitated his scholarly work, in disability terms: his cane, staff, armrest and guides. When at points the connection with scholarship was severed, Antiochos felt truly disabled. A body in crisis emerged that was assailed by unwanted becomings, prime among them the possibility of becoming-horse and losing his rationality. Despite this emphasis on reason, speech and self-determination, Antiochos’ letters present us with unexpected configurations of human and non-human bodies which blur the lines between organic and inorganic and help decentre man. In doing so, they posit the Eastern Roman scholar with his books and study furniture as a kind of antipode to the Western knight and his horse.

In this chapter, the subjection of the Israelites in Egypt and their later liberation from oppression is examined with extracts from the Hebrew Torah, and the Greek Septuagint. The vocabulary of servitude of both Hebrew and Greek is discussed through the account of Joseph’s service and disgrace in the house of Potiphar, followed by the suffering of the Israelites, the later descendants of Jacob. The oppression inflicted by the Egyptians and their pharaoh on the Israelites in Egypt is to be seen in their forced labour in making bricks and construction work. Liberation involved leaving the country together, under the leadership of Moses. A final section examines a few further literary texts dating from the Hellenistic and Roman periods that treat related Jewish subjects.

Africans were commodities during chattel capitalism, producing that was appropriated by Whites. This was instrumental discrimination: racially differential treatment because it was profitable. Chattel capitalism was ended by government policy, during the US civil war. White control of Black citizenship was the core element of structural racism during servitude capitalism. Instrumental discrimination included convict leasing, debt peonage, sharecropping, and the chain gang: policies that held down black wages and wealth accumulation, reduced public expenditure on services to the African American community, and public infrastructure that transferred wealth from Blacks to Whites. Lynching was used to enforce racial identity norms. Labor market discrimination increased during the Nadir, even as Blacks closed the skills gap with Whites. Black self-help was also expressed in The Great Migration and Urbanization (1914–1965). African American self-help, President Roosevelt’s New Deal, World War II era changes in federal hiring and the utilization of Black troops, and President Johnson’s Great Society gave rise to racialized managerial capitalism. Thereafter, exclusion is expressed as differential socioeconomic opportunities due to racial wealth disparity and identity norms governing access to resources, especially managerial power, along with relatively greater injustice in the criminal legal system and greater exposure to hate crimes.

Structural racism arose with European exploration, enslavement and colonization of Africans, triangular trade, and the historical development of capitalism as a world system. Structural racism consists of public policies and institutional practices with persistently racially disparate outcomes, cultural representations that continuously encourage invidious comparisons across racial groups, and norms of social interactions that encourage the reproduction of racialized social identities. Structural racism then is distinct from personal racial prejudice, that is, racially biased decisions, and from personal racial bigotry, that is, racially hostile actions or values based on irrational opposition towards those perceived as different. Structural racism allows “privileges associated with ‘Whiteness’ and disadvantages associated with ‘color’ to endure and adapt over time. … (Aspen Institute, 2004).” In addition to the formation of racial identity as a social norm, wealth inequality, involuntary unemployment, and the exploitation of labor are economic mechanisms that create the conditions for permanent structural racism. Racial differences in wealth, initially created by chattel and servitude capitalisms, reproduce racial disparities in economic, political, and social outcomes. These disparities embed a disproportionately large fraction of Whites in positions of power and authority within hiring institutions.

This chapter discusses the prohibition of slavery, servitude and forced labour as protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, other Council of Europe instruments, in EU law and in international instruments. It also pays attention to human trafficking and exploitation. In the final section, a short comparison between the different instruments is made.

In his theory of the family, Pufendorf treats it as a complex society composed of three simple societies or associations: those between husband and wife (matrimony), parents and children (paternal society), and master and servant, or slave (societas herilis), which are united under the domestic rule of the paterfamilias, or head of the family. Given that Pufendorf holds all human beings – women no less than men – to be naturally equal in virtue of their humanity, that is, the common moral status that they acquire through their subjection to the law of nature, the question arises as to how he justifies authority in the private realm of the family: how does his patriarchal account of marriage, and his justification of servitude, or slavery, fit with the egalitarian premise of his natural law theory? In focusing on the role of pacts and consent in the founding of the various modes of domination within the family, the chapter highlights Pufendorf’s critical attitude to traditional justifications of authority, but also indicates the limits of the egalitarian premise of his natural law theory. The chapter ends with a comparison between the rule of the head of the family and supreme sovereignty in the state.

Chapter 4 turns to Huguenot texts printed in the aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres: the Reveille-matin des François, a pair of dialogues which features a Politique character, and several texts from Simon Goularts Mémoires de l’estat de France sous Charles IX, especially the dialogue ‘Le Politique’. Here we see a figure sometimes overlooked in historiography: the explicitly Protestant politique. In these writings there is a sense that politiques could turn bad, and an attempt to prevent that. This chapter addresses the connection between the figure of the Machiavel and the politique, and the status of the politique character in Protestant arguments for liberty. I argue that these issues are bound up with Renaissance practices of reading and writing. The paradigmatic example of the connection between the issue of liberty and somewhat coercive textual practices is the illicit, unattributed printing of extracts of Etienne de la Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire in the texts discussed. Finally, the chapter addresses the question of memory and the wishful ‘poetics of memorialisation’ at work in these representations of politics and politiques.

Identity in seventeenth century colonial Virginia was in a liminal state. Enter Elizabeth Key, an African-Anglo woman living in the colony during the middle of the seventeenth century. Key sued for her freedom when the overseers of her late master’s estate classified her in the estate inventory as a negro rather than a servant. To the overseers the term negro implied a permanently or perpetually unfree person, an inheritable condition. In contrast, the term servant implied someone born free who voluntarily relinquished her freedom for a definite period.  Thus, Key’s classification raised serious questions about her legal status and the status of at least one of her two children. Hers is one of the earliest freedom suits in the English colonies filed by a person with some African ancestry. Her representative argued that because her father was an English subject, she could not be enslaved for life. A negative consequence of her successful lawsuit was a law consigning the children of enslaved women to permanent servitude. In effect, Key’s attempt to emancipate herself from slavery and its concomitant forms of oppression resulted in larger changes to the racial status quo.