Hunger Games: Labor Contracting from Mesopotamia to Rome
Friday May 8, 2015 – Please note the new location of our meeting:
2:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public.
Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Forum
5701 S. Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60637
Program
Seth Richardson (University of Chicago), "Bound and Indeterminate: Measuring Labor and its Alternatives"
David Lewis (University of Edinburgh), "The Homeric Origins of Spartan Helotage"
Noel Lenski (Yale University), "Slaves and Serfs in Late Antiquity: The Late Antique Colonate and its Relationship to Chattel Slavery”
Abstracts can be found at the conference website.
The cultures of the ancient world, from Mesopotamia to the Late Roman Empire, provide an exceptional diversity in terms of forms of exploitation of the labor force. War, razzias and massive enslavement of foreign populations are famously the infamous characteristics of this world. Violence is always part of the picture. But hunger and economic pressure were certainly most of the time the primary factor of the creation of a bound work force. The three papers of the Working Group on Comparative Economics's Spring Symposium will address three different situations: Mesopotamia, Archaic and Classical Sparta, and the Late Antique Roman world. They will offer the opportunity to compare three very diverse situations and to address fundamental questions on the exploitation of the workforce well beyond the case of ancient cultures.
