Medieval slavery has received little attention relative to slavery in
ancient Greece and Rome and in the early modern Atlantic world.
This imbalance in the scholarship has led many to assume that slavery
was of minor importance in the Middle Ages. In fact, the practice of
slavery continued unabated across the globe throughout the medieval
millennium. This volume – the final volume in The Cambridge World
History of Slavery – covers the period between the fall of Rome and the
rise of the transatlantic plantation complexes by assembling twentythree original essays, written by scholars acknowledged as leaders in
their respective fields. The volume demonstrates the continual and
central presence of slavery in societies worldwide between 500 CE and
1420 CE. The essays analyze key concepts in the history of slavery,
including gender, trade, empire, state formation and diplomacy, labor,
childhood, social status and mobility, cultural attitudes, spectrums of
dependency and coercion, and life histories of enslaved people.
Craig Perry is Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle
Eastern and South Asian Studies and the Tam Institute for Jewish
Studies at Emory University. His research on slavery in the medieval
Middle East has been supported by fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, Oxford University, and the
Foundation for Jewish Culture.
David Eltis is Emeritus Professor of History at Emory University, and
has held visiting appointments at Harvard, Oxford, and Yale
Universities. He is author of four prize-winning books and articles
on slavery and the slave trade.
Stanley L. Engerman is Emeritus Professor of Economics and former
Professor of History at the University of Rochester. He has held
visiting appointments at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge
Universities, and has written over one hundred essays and coauthored or co-edited 25 books on slavery and related subjects. He
is a recipient of the Bancroft Prize and the Guggenheim Fellowship.
David Richardson is founder and former director (2004–2012) of the
Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation, Hull
University. He has held visiting positions at Harvard and Yale
Universities. He has written extensively on transatlantic slavery and its
impacts and more recently on contemporary slavery in historical perspective. He authored (with David Eltis) the award winning Atlas of the
Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010).