ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the importance of war for the phenomenon of slavery risks adding to its 'natural' character and restricting all the more the significance of its historical analysis. It discusses the difference between the two fundamental types of slavery in the Greek world: community servitude and chattel slavery. The chapter explores the importance of war and piracy has been greatly reduced as an external source of slaves relative to other ways, especially to trade. It explains that the chattel slavery developed in the Greek world particularly from the time when, towards the sixth century, long distance commercial exchanges appreciably increased, as witness, for instance, the increase in the export of ceramics. This chapter concludes that we have drifted into a 'modernist' conception of the ancient economy and that we conceive it as a form of 'market economy' in which the trade in slaves was the result of individual initiatives developing in an atmosphere of free competition.
