Browsing by Subject "Slaves"

This dissertation explores the lives of persons enslaved or formerly enslaved to soldiers and veterans of the Roman imperial armies (27 BCE–284 CE). Previous scholarship on the subject has been sparse and one-sided, mostly mirroring the perspective of the elite literary sources on which they are based. They are mainly concerned with the role of slaves in the overall operation and organization of Rome’s armies. Such approaches fall short of informing us about the social location and lived reality of individual slaves and ex-slaves. We set out to close this knowledge gap here by leveraging epigraphic, papyrological, legal, and archaeological sources.After exposing the elite bias of the literary sources, we turn to the extant stone inscriptions featuring slaves and ex-slaves of soldiers and veterans, a corpus of over 900 texts at present. First, a large-scale quantitative survey of the material uncovers general patterns relevant to this much-neglected population. Then follows an archaeologically and historically contextualized consideration of a smaller selection of data from Britain and Pannonia, including inscriptions and wooden writing-tablets, in an effort to retrieve and recount in as much detail as possible a few of the experiences and circumstances of these individuals. Finally, we discuss testamentary manumission as a characteristic feature of slave life in military communities. The evidence presented here corroborates our argument that the lives and narratives of individual enslaved persons can and should be retrieved. Quantitative analysis underscores the pervasiveness of slaveholding in the Roman military across many dimensions, including space, time, service branch, rank, and service status. In fact, my calculations show that in regions where reliable overall quantifications of the epigraphic material are available roughly 10% of the inscriptions involving active or retired soldiers mention slaves or ex-slaves. Such findings clearly elevate slaves in military contexts above the marginal status that is implied by the limited amount of scholarly attention they have received. Close scrutiny and careful contextualization of several altars, epitaphs, and writing tablets from Britain and Pannonia underscore my conclusion that we are subscribing to a partial and impoverished view of the Roman military by keeping slaves and ex-slaves out of view. They were essential to life in the military and their presence was viewed as normal.

In 1760, when British victory was all but assured and hostilities in the northeastern colonies of North America came to an end, the future of the southeastern colonies was not nearly so clear. British authorities in the South still faced the possibility of a local French and Indian alliance and clashed with angry Cherokees who had complaints of their own. These tensions and events usually take a back seat to the climactic proceedings further north. I argue that in South Carolina, by destabilizing relations with African and Native Americans, the Cherokee Indians raised the social and political anxieties of coastal elites to a fever pitch during the Anglo-Cherokee War. Threatened by Indians from without and by slaves from within, and failing to find unbridled support in British policy, the planter-merchant class eventually sought to take matters into its own hands. Scholars have long understood the way the economic fallout of the French and Indian War caused Britain to press new financial levies on American colonists. But they have not understood the deeper consequences of the war on the local stage. Using extensive political and military correspondence, ethnography, and eighteenth-century newspapers, I offer a narrative-driven approach that adds geographic and ethnographic breadth and context to previous scholarship on mid-eighteenth century in North America. I expand understandings of Cherokee culture, British and colonial Indian policy, race slavery, and the southeastern frontier. At the same time, I also explain the origins of the American Revolution in the South.