William L. Westermann between Antiquarianism and the Comparative History of Slavery
A Rereading of The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2177-4218.v10i2p187-208Keywords:
Ancient Slavery, Comparative History, William L. Westermann, Frank TannenbaumAbstract
William L. Westermann’s The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, published in 1955, is until today a reference guide to the study of ancient slavery. However, this book is often criticized for its antiquarian structure and, therefore, for a lack of any theoretical approach to slavery in the ancient world. This viewpoint was mainly stressed by Moses Finley, with his Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (1980), and became since then a kind of consensus in the historiography of slavery. This paper argues that such approach neglects the place of Westermann’s book in the debates on the comparative history of slavery that took place in the United States during the second half of the 20th century. There are similarities between Frank Tannenbaum’s thesis of the different levels of severity in the slave systems in the Americas, presented in his Slave and Citizen (1946), and Westermann’s view of ancient slave systems. This similarity is quite understandable if we take into account that both scholars participated in seminars on the history of labor and slavery at Columbia University.
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