Pierre Dockes, Medieval Slavery and Liberation, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (London: Methuen 1982).
I got this book through the post yesterday from the secondhand book company, World of Books. I ordered it because it seems to me that there is too little awareness of the existence of indigenous White European slavery and serfdom. It very much seems that anti-racist and Black activists are presenting a false view of slavery as something that only White Europeans and Americans did to Black Africans. Its existence in ancient and medieval Europe, as well as in Africa and Islam, is deliberately ignored or downplayed. At the same time, the Tories are also intent on presenting their terribly simplified view of British history as a kind of ‘merrie England’ when everyone was free and prosperous, and the peasants lived happily under the benign rule of the aristocracy and factory masters. Dockes, the author of the above book, was professor of political economy at the university of Lyons. He’s described as a member of the Annales school of French historians. I was taught in the historiography part of the MA history course at UWE that the Annales school is, roughly, the French equivalent of History Today. In other words, mainstream academic history. He seems to be approaching the subject from a left-wing direction, as several sections concentrate on the role of class conflict and warfare.
The blurb for the book runs:
How and why did ancient slavery come to an end in the Middle Ages? In this study, Pierre Dockes, a controversial figure in the younger generation of Annales historians, approaches the question not only from the historian’s legitimate concern to understand the transformations of ancient societies but also out of the belief that slavery is more than merely a simple moment in the past. It is rather the primary relationship of exploitation, from which serfdom and wage-labour have stemmed.
Dockes criticises the deterministic accounts of ancient slavery and medieval liberation put forward by both bourgeois and Marxist scholars. He describes the organisation of the Roman villa and its place in the slaveholding society and in the formation of the imperial state, and goes on to show how it was ultimately slave revolts that erased this form of exploitation. Imperial society was reduced to two antagonistic classes and, the author argues, it was slaveholding which undermined the social base upon which Caesar’s and Augustus’s state was constructed.
The end of slaveholding took centuries to accomplish. Each resurgence of the power of the state meant the resurgence of slavery, which did not end until the late ninth century when slave revolts contributed to the breakdown of the Carolingian political order. Dockes concludes that imperialism and slavery are inextricably intertwined, and that even today, ‘after centuries of struggle, exploitation does indeed continue to exist. Only the form has changed.’
The book contains the following chapters and constituent sections.
Introduction
Definition of slavery
The Role of the Class Struggle
The Class Struggle and the State
Appendix: Note on the Determinism of the Productive Forces in History.
- The Villa, Society and the State
Genesis of the Villa Slave System
“Ends” of Slavery
Forms of Exploitation in the Early Middle Ages and Challenges to Them
The Elaboration of a “New” Feudal Mode of Production
Outline of the Following Chapters
2. Questions to Historians about Economism
The Question of the Rationality of the Great Slaveholding Landowner
The Question of Productivity
The Question of the Profitability of Slavery
Reproduction of the Work Force: Razzia and Breeding
Marc Bloch’s “Economic Conditions”
The Moral and Religious Factor
3. Productive Forces and Feudal Relations
The Collapse of the Slave Empire, or the Struggle of the Lower Classes
“Build the Material Foundations of Feudalism First”
“Large” Water Mills: Where Does Technological Progress Come From?
Appendix: The Banal Mill – Advantageous to the Peasant or Not?
Dues of the Banal Mill
The Time “Wasted” in Milling by Hand
Estimation of the Average Costs
A Calculation at the Margin
4. Class Struggles in Europe (Third to Ninth Centuries)
Slaves and the Struggles of Others
Slave Struggles and the State
5. Epilogue: By Way of Conclusion.
I’m sure that in the nearly forty years since its publication parts of the book have become dated. For example, Dockes states that slavery continued in England until the 13th century, while more recent books state that slavery had died out by the end of the twelfth century as serfdom became the predominant form of unfree labour. Nevertheless, I think it’s an extremely useful examination of medieval European slavery and the role of class warfare and struggle in its removal and transformation.
Tags: Annales School, anti-racism, Blacks, Class, Feudalism, History Today, Lyons, Marc Bloch, marxism, Medieval Slavery and Liberation, Middle Ages, Pierre Dockes, racism, Roman Empire, Serfdom, University of Lyons, University of the West of England, Whites
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