ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the Roman Empire and its parts, that is, most of the rest of Europe and Africa, as Asia and Egypt, had always relied on dependent, rural labour of tenants or day-wage labourers. In Africa pre-Roman productive relations between dependent, the client-like labourers and chiefs persisted as the commonest post-conquest organization form. The chapter explains the voluntary acceptance of slavery by free men, the sale of free children into slavery and kidnapping that were not sudden new developments of the Later Empire. It examines how all the relationships between the landowners and rural labourers fitted into the fragmenting society of the Later Roman Empire as the bureaucratic control slowly disintegrated. This chapter describes the two other aspects of slavery: the final assimilation of slaves and the dependent labourers and their transformation into serfs in the Middle Ages.
