8 - Rural Slavery in Late Roman Gaul: Literary Genres, Theoretical Frames, and Narratives

Summary

Historians must tread carefully when they deal with both modern and ancient slavery, for every time they brand the practice as an archaic form of domination, it reappears adapted to new ages. Although most of the modern world, since the nineteenth century, has strived to make the ownership of one human being by another illegal, slavery keeps returning in the most insidious ways. At the turn of the century, when modern societies claimed to have finally gotten rid of it, slavery began to resurface, masquerading as free labour all across the globe (and not just in the Global South), bringing the need to discuss and to enforce policies against ‘practices similar to slavery’ back to international forums. It is striking that while this notion of an ‘insidious return’ has recently appeared in studies on rural slavery in the ancient world, it seems not to have influenced ones focused on late Roman Gaul.