Slavery has been a common—if often fluid and complex—condition in most world societies throughout history. Only very few societies became so economically, politically, and culturally dependent upon slavery as to ultimately develop into what Moses Finley famously dubbed “slave societies”—a cate-gory he reserved for ancient Greece and Rome, and the plantation regions of the Americas from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. It has been precisely the latter societies, however, that have long dominated static popular images and the historical literature on slavery. That has begun to change. The study of global slavery has grown strongly in the last few decades, as scholars working in several disciplines have actively cultivated broader perspectives on enslavement. Not only has interest in slavery among scholars working on the Atlantic world reached a high point, but scholars have also intensified their study of slavery in ancient, medieval, North and sub-Saharan African, Near Eastern, and Asian and Pacific societies. Practices of modern slavery and human trafficking from South Asia to Europe and the Americas are also receiving more academic attention than ever before, and are now being integrated into historical paradigms of slavery. More importantly, scholars are increasingly looking across borders—temporal, spatial, and disciplinary—to better understand slavery and slaving throughout world history. The recent surge in slavery studies has led to a greater appreciation of slavery as both a global and a globalizing phenomenon in human history.

First, scholars increasingly underscore slavery as a global practice that has existed in innumerable world societies. Historians and anthropologists working on communities as far apart in time and space as ancient Babylonia, medieval Venice, Chos ̆on Korea, the nineteenth-century American South, and twentieth-century West Africa have devoted considerable ink to illuminating local and regional case studies of slavery in extremely diverse settings. To be sure, practices of slavery differed widely across time and space, and categorization in some settings has proved difficult—scholars indeed continue to disagree on what constituted “slavery” in some localized settings. Most studies of slavery, however, converge on situations throughout world history in which human beings were (or are) treated as property that could be bought, sold, or transferred; held captive for indefinite periods of time; subordinated to others in extremely dependent and exploitive power relationships; denied basic choices (including potentially rights over their bodies, lives, and labor); and compelled to labor, provide services, or serve various personal, cultural or societal functions against their will.

Second, scholars now more fully appreciate the globalizing effects that slavery has had on world societies. From antiquity to the present day, slavery has by definition connected societies through forced migrations, warfare, trade routes, and economic expansion. Slaving blazed both maritime and land routes around the globe. Slave-trading routes crisscrossed Africa; helped integrate the Mediterranean world; connected China to the Indonesian archipelago; and fused the Atlantic world. Global and transnational approaches to history focus heavily upon the global movement of people, goods, and ideas, with a particular emphasis on processes of integration and divergence in the human experience. Slavery in various settings straddled all of these focal points, as it integrated various societies through economic and power-based relation-ships, and simultaneously divided societies by class, race, ethnicity, and cultural group.

Both of these developments—the remarkable expansion of slavery scholar-ship in various settings throughout world history and the greater appreciation of slavery’s role in connecting societies—have led to new understandings, definitions, and approaches to the study of slavery. The inevitable cross-pollination of slavery studies from such diverse and global perspectives has greatly influenced the ways in which historians and anthropologists talk and think about slavery around the world. Long dominated by scholarship on the early modern Atlantic and classical Graeco-Roman case studies—which created the very framework for slavery studies, from its terminology to its theoretical approaches—slavery scholarship has in recent years been enriched with new insights into how slavery was understood in various settings, including how it functioned, how it was meant to function, how and why people moved in and out of conditions of slavery, how experiences of slavery were characterized, and how practices of slavery affected regional and interregional power relationships.