The politics of an archaeology of global captivity

Extract

In 1922 Carter Woodson lay a brief but nevertheless sweeping foundation for a history of captivity that reached into the earliest recesses of the classical world. Invoking the classical paragons of democracy, Woodson argued (1922, 15) that slavery

was once the normal condition of the majority of the inhabitants of the world. In many countries slaves outnumbered freemen three to one. Greece and Rome, the most civilized of the ancient nations in which the so-called democracy of that day had its best opportunity, were not exceptions to this rule.

Woodson rhetorically turned to Greece and Rome to illuminate the contradictions of American democracy and underscore the profound inequality that has existed within democratic states from their very creation, painting captivity as a nearly timeless institution.