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Anatomy of the Vampire bat

a
Brent D. Shaw
a
Dept of History , The University of Lethbridge , 4401 University Drive, Lethbridge,
Alberta, T1K 3M4, Canada
Published online: 28 Jul 2006.
To cite this article: Brent D. Shaw (1984) Anatomy of the Vampire bat, Economy and Society, 13:2, 208-249, DOI:
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Review article by Brent D. Shaw
Anatomy of the vampire bat
Text reviewed:
G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek
World, from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests, London,
Duckworth, 1981, 732 pp. (corr. paperback ed., 1982).
Although Marxist ideas have had a profound impact on the develop-

ment of historical interpretation in the English-speaking world,
major analyses of ancient society that are specifically and avowedly
Marxist in approach are rather rare. On this account alone, there-
fore, one should welcome the attempt by Geoffrey de Ste. Croix
Downloaded by [University of Montana] at 16:34 02 April 2015
to provide just such an explicit and detailed application of Marxist

historical theory to the case of Graeco-Roman antiquity. All the
more so, since the author is a professional historian of proven
credentials, whose command of the primary source materials and
standard working methodologies used by ancient historians is
admired even by 'orthodox' non-Marxist scholars in the field. That
is no small benefit. Hitherto most Marxist interventions in ancient
history in English-language scholarship have been by amateurish
interlopers who, however well-meaning their intentions, simply
have not possessed a training adequate to the task they have set
themselves. What is more, Ste. Croix devotes a large section at
the beginning of his work (31-111) t o a clear outline of what he
understands to be the central tenets of a Marxist historiography
and holds himself t o applying them in the second half of the book.
The publication of The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World
therefore offers historians of antiquity, both Marxist and non-
Marxist, the opportunity to observe and to assess the efficacy of
a clearly explicated set of Marxist principles in the interpretation
of one problematic, that of 'class struggle' in Graeco-Roman
society. It thus widens the field of debate and argument over both
the validity of the general principles themselves and of Ste. Croix's
interpretation and use of them.
One must express some sympathy for the attempt. In the
Anglophone world Ste. Croix is working in a virtual vacuum; the
surrounding milieu is latently hostile t o attempts t o fill it. There-
fore, insofar as he consciously rejects interpretations already pro-
vided by his continental Marxist colleagues, most of his analysis
Anatomy of the vampire bat 209
has to be done de novo.' What decent Marxist historiography

there is in English is largely concentrated in seventeenth t o nine-
teenth century English social hi~t0r-y.~The research done by
historians such as Foster, Hill, Hobsbawrn, Neale, Thompson, and
others, however, is concerned with a period that is economically
and socially so different from that with which the ancient historian
must grapple that many of their working assumptions do not
apply to the world of antiquity. Most of their specific approaches
and methods are therefore of marginal use to anyone seeking t o
develop a type of analysis appropriate to ancient societies. There
are, of course, some exceptions. Brenner, Hilton, and other
mediaeval historians, have dealt with social formations that are
closer to an ancient type. And Perry Anderson's essay Passages
from Antiquity to Feudalism, though only written as a pro-
legomenon t o his study of the development of the modern
absolutist state in Europe, remains one of the most idiosyncratically
brillant works of its type. All told, however, this is not a very
promising milieu in which to write, ex nihil, an Anglo-Marxist
interpretation of the whole of Graeco-Roman antiquity. There
has been no long tradition of Marxist scholarship in English on

the ancient world, and no on-going Marxist debates in the academic
disciplines within which Ste. Croix is working, to provide the sort
of active context that is conducive t o good historical writing. It is
therefore a truly lonely effort.
More troublesome difficulties, however, are those inherent t o
the subject itself. Although it may be conceded that Marx oriented
much of his analysis around the concept of class, Ste. Croix
realizes that Marx himself issued no definitions of the concept,
indeed had no consistent use of the term (46). An even greater
problem, despite Marx's training in the classics and ancient history
(23-28), is the plain fact that he wrote relatively little on the
ancient world deserving the label of a Marxist a n a l y ~ i s .His
~ one
great and consistent oeuvre was devoted to the anatomy of a peculiar
socio-economic system -that of mid-nineteenth century capitalism.
No pastiche of quotations, excerpts, and one-liners torn from
context can possibly compensate for this troublesome lacuna.
Not even the 'relevant sections' of the Grundrisse represent a
satisfactory point of departure. Consequently every Marxist
analysis of ancient society is at once an essay in reconstruction,
based on guesswork and extrapolation from a system originally
devised for what most would admit (at least Marx himself did) is
a radically different type of social order from that found in the
ancient ~ e d i t e r r a n e a n . ~
Ste. Croix is therefore justifiably cautious. His reconstruction is
offered only as a possible Marxist interpretation (30). Having
210 Brent D. Shaw
made that concession, however, the author is less flexible on other

matters. If the category of class is only one of a host of concep-
tions used in historical analysis, it is by far the most important in
a hierarchy of such categories and the one which is most productive
in terms of explanation and understanding of historical processes
(3, 45). He therefore rejects that current mode of pessimism, of
hand-wringing desperation, which advises us to abandon class as a
useful sociological tool (e.g. Calvert 1982: 216). Linked to the
allied conceptions of 'exploitation' and 'class struggle' (as defined
by Ste. Croix, 42 ff.) class is to provide the key to unlocking the
social dynamic of the ancient world. From this base Ste. Croix
advances through more than 530 pages of densely packed text and
another 130 pages of even more densely packed notes (approaching
half a million words on my calculation) to demonstrate the validity
of class analysis in interpreting the major social conflicts of the
ancient Greek world. Together with a clear introductory out-
line, a comprehensive bibliography, and a near-exhaustive index,
the general reader for whom the book is intended is well-armed to
undertake his Marxian Odyssey.
At the end of his massive seven-hundred page opus, having con-
templated that 'most awful scene' in the history of mankind, the

decline and fall of the Roman empire, the author considers the
metaphoric evaluation of the stupendous concentration of wealth
in late antiquity by the finest modern interpreter of the period,
Peter Brown: 'Altogether, the prosperity of the Mediterranean
world seems to have drained to the top.' Ste. Croix objects, 'If
I were in search of a metaphor to describe the great and growing
concentration of wealth in the hands of the upper classes, I would
not incline towards anything so innocent and so automatic as
drainage: I should want to think in terms of something much
more purposive and deliberate - perhaps the vampire bat' (503).
True to the trope, the book is indeed a bit like an inquest into
both bat and victim, an intricately detailed coroner's report,
replete with investigative asides, recent leads, and a ubiquitous
legal terminology.
In temporal span Ste. Croix's anatomy covers the period between
archaic Greece and the fall of Rome (the fifth century in the west,
the seventh in the east) - a vast epoch of more than fourteen
centuries. In geographical and ethnic terms the diagnosis is devoted
to areas and peoples much wider than its title indicates. Ste.
Croix defines the 'Greek World' as 'broadly speaking, the vast
area . . . within which Greek was, or became, the principal language
of the upper classes.' He then proceeds to delineate an area between
the Adriatic Sea in the west and the Persian Gulf in the east (7-8,
13). But in practice most of the book is devoted to the Roman
Anatomy of the vampire bat 21 1
empire, including the whole half west of the Adriatic. Most of

the evidence utilized is basically Roman, and imperial, and relates
as much to the western as to the eastern half of the empire.'
Finally, the book builds up to, and culminates in, an explanation
for the fall of the Roman empire in the west. Even if Ste. Croix
had remained within the confines of his original definition, how-
ever, one would still have to take issue with it. No good theoretical
justification is offered as to why the language spoken by a small
elite (i.e. the upper classes in Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and
Palestine) should be regarded as an adequate defining characteristic
of a social formation in a Marxist study. Even if these local aristo-
cracies did develop a certain competence in speaking and writing
Greek, and an attraction for things a la grecque, it is difficult to
understand how this factor alone offers the ancient historian a
clear definition of the community to be studied. It is as if one
were to embark on an analysis of class conflict in early modern
Europe, both east and west, and then to label it 'the French
World' simply because Prussian junkers, the Polish szlachta and
the Russian dvorianstvo developed a fluency in French, and a
mania for Parisian fashion and literature.

The point raised here is not just an academic quibble about
an author overstepping the self-imposed bounds of his study (we
all do at times), nor of the simple stylistic inappropriateness of
a label. It cuts to the heart of the question of the applicability of a
concept like class across so many other social boundaries. If, for
example, one mentally subtracted the local Greek-speaking elites
from the peripheral Hellenistic societies of which they were part,
one would be left with a wholly non-Greek world in every sense.
For the eastern part of the Roman empire, Ste. Croix attempts
to overcome this basic objection by contending that the core unit
of the 'Greek economy', the polis, was cloned throughout all of
the east as the common type of social, political, and economic
organization (9-10). But in any meaningful sense the proposition
must be rejected. Most of the ancient world was indeedcharacterized
by some sort of urban-rural division, but not always by the particular
type that marked the Greek polis of the fifth and fourth centuries
B.C. in mainland Greece. Ste. Croix says as much himself when he
states that terms like polis (city) and chora (country) did not
mean the same thing in Egypt and Anatolia as they did in Greece
(9-10). What is more, he quotes one of best-informed authorities
on the Greek East of the period, A.H.M. Jones, to demonstrate
how superficial Hellenistic urbanization was, how the village
remained the basic unit of society in the region, and how com-
pletely the countryside was separated from the city (19).
If this basic economic connection with the 'Greek world' is
21 2 Brent D. Shaw
t o be abandoned for most of the east, as it must, then we are

left with the isolated cultural phenomenon of a lingua franca
indulged in by the political and cultural elites in lands outside
Greece. Ste. Croix is then faced with the awesome task of analyz-
ing class relationships across an immense area (virtually, as stated
above, the whole of the Roman empire) and across a vast number
of utterly distinct cultures and societies that are included under
the rubric of 'the Greek world'. Can it be done? That depends on
the validity and limitations of the concept of class, and on the
real equivalence of class across all these other social boundaries.
To gauge this problem, we must first consider Ste. Croix's
definitions of class. 'Class (essentially a relationship) is the collec-
tive social expression of the fact of exploitation' (43-44).6 As
for class struggle, he contends that 'strdggle' is a relationship
between classes that entails either exploitation or resistance to
it. Given his definition of class, we may deduce that 'class
struggle' must always involve exploitation, but only sometimes
might entail resistance to this process ( 3 , 44). He seems to hold
that exploitation alone with no (conscious) resistance to it is a
possible scenario. Class struggle, then, does not necessarily involve
any concerted action of a behavioural type by the 'exploited class'

itself, least of all any overt action on the 'political plane' (57). Ste.
Croix makes this conclusion explicit (66) when he states that the
economic fact of exploitation in itself constitutes a 'class struggle'
(cf. 50, not just a 'contradiction'). In antiquity the class struggle is
the master-slave conflict (40), although masters were able to carry
on this struggle successfully, even effortlessly. It is still a 'struggle'
in spite of the latent nature of the dominated class, Ste. Croix
claims, because of the vast apparatus of domination, both insti-
tutional and psychological, required by the slave owners to main-
tain the system.
Perhaps all one can do at this point is to demur over the semantical
point of using 'struggle', with all its connotations in everyday
language of purposive and conscious action, to describe what
appears to be a mechanically inherent conflict that will exist
whenever two (or more) classes happen to exist. If one accepts this
structural view of class, perhaps one also commits oneself in
consequence to attempts, such as those of the Franco-Marxists, to
find an alternative term like 'contradiction' to describe such a
latent p r o ~ e s s .But
~ there are two nagging doubts about the whole
connection between Ste. Croix's definitionalapparatusandhistorical
reality that particularly trouble me. The first is that he seems
(unconsciously?) to subscribe to a highly structuralist interpretation
of Marx's ideas. Phrases that occur repeatedly throughout the
work such as 'political plane', 'ideological plane' (apparently as
'levels' that are somehow autonomous), of determination 'in the

long run' or 'in the final instance', remind one of the same sort of
jargon used by Althusser, Balibar, Poulantzas, and their English
imitator^.^ Certainly this impression is strengthened when one
considers the integral relationship between these concepts and the
mechanistic metaphor of class used by Ste. Croix.
I am one who shares Edward Thompson's view that something
less than desirable happens when a practicing historian embraces
ahistorical constructions like these.g Moreover, I believe that
there are two good grounds embedded in Ste. Croix's own argu-
ments for rejecting his pessimistic retreat into such a mechanical
model of class. First, as he himself points out in the case of the
master-slave relationship, his conception of struggle can be justified
on the basis of the massive apparatuses needed to maintain a slave
system. He presents this as a defence for his structural view of
class struggle, but surely the observation is as much proof as any-
one would want of a generalized resistance by slaves to the system
in which they were involved. The anger, the resentment, the destruc-
tion of property, the disruption of normalrelationships, thenecessity
of compulsion to work,. the horrendous scales of punishment, the
problem of fugitives, the occasional open violence, murder, and

even (if rarely) large rebellions, tell why that system of property
and compulsion was in place, and why there was fear, even if latent,
amongst the owners (409 f.).
Another basis for scepticism is the fact that I am more than a
little suspicious that a major problem in writing a book like this
(in spite of appearances to the contrary in its size) lies in the
massive default in the ancient historian's source materials. There
are so few of these that can reveal anything like the detail of, say,
nineteenth-century English society to which an E.P. Thompson
has access.1° The fact is, the historian who is prepared to make
brave statements about 'consciousness' must have access to inform-
ation on expressive behaviour and sentiments at a level that is
almost wholly absent in all our ancient source materials: the world
of popular values, the alternative cultures, the resentment of clients
of all degrees, feelings of hatred that could have no organized
resistance, the subtle resistance entailed in making the existing
systems of dependence work in reverse (e.g. corruption). All this
and much more is totally hidden from view simply because of the
technical nature of our source data. I think, then, that it is a massive
gamble to suppose that 'class consciousness' or, much better, some
experiental element that has a component of mental awareness in
it, was n o t an active and everyday part of social conflict in the
ancient world. Personally, I remain unconvinced by the heavy
arguments advanced by many Marxist historians of the necessity
214 Brent D. Shaw
of postulating an hypostatized 'thing' called Class Consciousness.

It would have to be an unbelievably stultified example of the
species who would not be 'aware' of the fact that he is being
screwed. To postulate more than this type of 'consciousness' as
necessary for any member of a class is to indulge in hyper-
modernistic assumptions about the efficacy of communication
and movement of persons and ideas that would be wholly in-
appropriate to the ancient world. It involves one in the tautology
that class consciousness in that world was not the same as the
awareness (and hence organization and common action) of workers
in later phases of the industrial revolution in England."
Ste. Croix is also an essentialist in his view of class; that is to
say, he claims that ancient Graeco-Roman society was marked
by the class struggle, namely that between slave owners and slaves
(Marx is corrected on this point, 64). We are not faced, then, as
some might think, with a series of class conflicts. Many modern
historians have also tended to take an essentialist position with
regard to class; they delimit the field of historical explanation to
dominant class models, whether they be one (Laslett), two, three,
four, or even five (Neale) that 'really matter'. As the author
points out in defence of his interpretation, it is true that in the

Communist Manifesto (1848) Marx and Engels (insofar as this
document reflects their authorship alone) did opt for a basic
two class model. But it should also be noted that they did so
for what they considered to be wholly exceptional reasons: because
the massive power and dominance of modern industrial capitalism
had so ruthlessly stripped away all traditional social structures that
it left only the bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat in naked
confrontation (Marx 1973: 69-70).
The highly charged and simplified polemical language of a
political pamphlet of 1848 is probably not the best standpoint
from which to judge Marx's considered thought on the subject.
But even the bare language of the Manifesto clearly suggests that
before the revolutionary impact of industrial capitalism no such
neat dyadic class structure was evident in society. Although in
Capital Marx did cling to an essentialist model of class conflict
(though this time of three 'great' classes) it was with considerably
less conviction that this simplified model of class structure was
everywhere evident in actual social experience.12
It is undeniably in England that this modern society and its
economic articulation is most widely and most classically
developed. Even here, though, this close articulation does not
appear in its pure form. Here, too, middle and transitional
stages always conceal the boundaries.
In the two works written by Marx himself subsequent to the

Manifesto which approach modern historical analysis in type
(The Class Struggles in France, 1850; and The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte, 1852) we find no such clear-cut dyadic class
relationship for mid-nineteenth century France, but rather a rich
variety of classes and fractions of classes involved in a complex
set of struggles.13 Further, if Marx could characterize France of
the 1840s and 1850s as a collage of different modes of production
in which even industrial capitalism was not dqminant - where the
majority of the population were involved in either peasant or
petty-bourgeois (e.g. artisanal) production - and if this quantitative
dominance by traditional types of production was decisive for the
form the state took, one may reasonably suggest that Marx never
held that one could ignore the quantitative element in which
the vast majority of production was performed.14
Even if one concedes Ste. Croix the possibility of an essentialist
two-class model for the ancient world, he is still left with the
problem of the precise determinants of class position in the Graeco-
Roman world. Initially he takes a fairly hard line, an economic
one based on the primacy of production as the essential determin-
ant of class. But this model assumes a type of primacy of 'the

economy' in antiquity that has been severely questioned, even
rejected, by most ancient historians. It seems more probable that
the localized structure we call 'the economy' was embedded in
other institutional apparatuses that had determinate effects on it.
If we then think of class as a fundamental social relationship that
is determined directly by 'the economy', it is doubtful that this
conception can be transferred unaltered into the ancient world,
even on the basis of Marx's own thought. Marx categorizes the
labour regimes typical of non-capitalist formations as 'direct
compelled/forced labour'.'' That is to say, labour is forcibly ex-
tracted from the primary producers by the use of political and
other types of social force (i.e. rather than the economic com-
pulsion of the capitalist system). For the problem of class in non-
capitalist societies, therefore, one would have t o adopt the opposite
postulate: that it is not 'the economy' alone which primarily
defines class but rather the concatenation of social and political
forces which Ste. Croix has abstracted as 'political' and 'ideo-
logical' levels, and as Rechtsstellung.
The relationship between 'the economy' and other elements of
the social structure in antiquity raises directly the problem of
status, and the whole debate amongst ancient historians over the
respective roles of class and status in the matrix of ancient society.
Understanding the interaction of status and class is important for
ancient historians precisely because of the objective existence of
21 6 Brent D . Shaw
corporate social groups in ancient societies that were defined by

communal power, usually by the state (e.g. citizens, metics,
senators). Fortunately the debate has now passed beyond the trivial
point - there are few ancient historians today who would adopt
the absurd position that ancient society was only an estate society
where the social phenomenon of class did not exist.I6 The fact
remains that status had a far greater material importance in
antiquity than it has had in any post-industrial society - there-
fore the need to establish a precise theoretical relationship between
class and status.
Most often, as in Ste. Croix, this problem is conceived of as an
acerbic debate between Marx and Weber, though this hardly seems
the most fruitful way of approaching it (i.e. as an 'either-or' choice
to be made by the historian). The author begins his approach to
the problem with an attack on Weber's concept of status which is
faulted primarily for its lack of explanatory power and its lack of
heuristic capacity. Weber's concept is conceded some importance
as a descriptive catego y, but is firmly contrasted with class which
explains in a way that status does not (3-4, 45, 93-94).'' He
further postulates that social status and political power derive
from class position (45), and that distinctions other than class
tend to resolve themselves into the economic categories of class.
On the other hand, he clearly allows Rechsstellung (i.e. legal or
constitutionally defined social position) as a factor that 'deter-
mines' class insofar as it affects the type and degree of exploitation
practised or suffered (42, 44). Surely this is correct. The posses-
sion of Athenian or Roman citizenship, the fact that one was a
senator or equestrian in Rome, or a thes or a pentakosiomedimnos
in Athens, did make a difference. But it is difficult to understand
in what sense these statuses necessarily derive from class position.
In most cases they are ascribed by communal power, primarily
through the agency of the state. As such, they may indeed be
coherent with class position, though not necessarily so. The plain
fact that emerges from much of Ste. Croix's own exploration of
the relationship between class and status, is that status had a pro-
found effect on the relationship he calls class. How then is it
possible that status has 'no explanatory power, no heuristic value'?
A host of examples from the ancient world that appear through-
out the book plainly shows that status must have considerable
explanatory power.
As Ste. Croix himself says, the degree of exploitation experienced
by an individual was much influenced by his Rechtsstellung.
Several examples come to mind. One is Roman citizenship, posses-
sion of which exempted a whole range of persons from taxes
and tribute which Ste. Croix categorizes as 'indirect/collective ex-
ploitation'. On the other hand, it also exposed the possessor t o

some taxes (for example, the 5 per cent tax on inheritances)
that non-citizens escaped (cf. 208), and rendered the citizen liable
to duties such as military service which, by and large, persons of
servile status escaped. The status of citizenship also provided some
legal protection against arbitary use of force (he cites the cases of
St. Paul and the peasants of the Saltus Burunitanus in north Africa,
215, 456). Indeed, Ste. Croix classifies as basic a social position
as being 'slave' or 'free', which pretty well determined the fund-
amentals of exploitation in the ancient world, as a technical one
of 'status' (66-67, 91).
Citizenship in Greek communities often defined access t o
land, the basis of the ancient economy, and to numerous other
ancillary privileges. Though Ste. Croix claims (95) that citizenship
could not in itself determine class, it clearly appears that in this
case at least it did.'' It is Rechtsstellung at its finest and did (see
42) affect exploitation as decisively as any other factor in Graeco-
Roman antiquity. Despite his firm statement that citizenship can-
not determine class, Ste. Croix immediately advances t o give an
example in which he states the opposite: that of the non-citizen

or outsider (xenos) t o the Greek city-state. 'The non-citizen,
however, the xenos who lacked even the civil rights of citizenship,
would certainly fall into a different class', apparently, from his
wording, on that basis alone.19 If Ste. Croix would like to say that
status by itself does not always and absolutely alter a class relation-
ship, he would undeniably be right. The positive formulation
allowed by him, that status always affects the nature of a class
relationship and sometimes might shift it decisively, casts a
different light on the whole matter. Status can no longer then
be said to lack explanatory power. In all cases it is surely both
explanatory and de~criptive.~'
The example of the metics or 'resident aliens' in Athenian
society highlights the problem. Ste. Croix attempts to circumvent
the obvious objection (i.e. of their status decisively changing their
class) by claiming that metics came to live in Athens 'by choice'
and that they still retained full citizenship rights in some other
community (i.e. their city of origin). But it is very unclear, on the
basis of the available evidence, whether or not the majority of
immigrants who had come to Athens t o work and who had lived
in the city for some generations still maintained any effective rights
of citizenship in their community of origin. Such an assertion,
moreover, hardly does justice to their real-life situation. For the
sake of comparison, let us take Ste. Croix's treatment of a parallel
case, that of the Gastarbeiter in western Europe (67 f.). Their
social position revolves around their Rechtsstellung - about
218 Brent D. Shaw
the fact that they have no political rights in the countries in which
they work (which affects, amongst many other things, their
right to belong to, or to form, trades unions). Ste. Croix then goes
on to point out the considerable repercussions produced in local
society by the residence of this outsider group (even on the local
working class, with the formation of a 'labour aristocracy'). More-
over, the degree of exploitation (one of his critical class variables)
t o which the outcaste group is exposed is another clear delineation
of their class position. By transferring Ste. Croix's earlier argu-
ments about the metics to the case of the Gastarbeiter, however,
one could object that the 'guest workers' have full civic rights in
their country of origin (whether it be Turkey, Algeria, or Morocco)
and that they are in West Germany, France, etc., 'by choice'. The
simple fact is that for a second or third generation Turk in West
Germany in the early 1970s the possession of full citizenship in
another country or the fact that he came to Germany 'by choice'
is small comfort. For these people, as for the Athenian metics, it
is surely status which largely determines class. Oddly enough,
that is exactly the position which Ste. Croix espouses . . . for the
Gastarbeiter. He vigorously disputes (68) Castles and Kosack's
claim that immigrant workers are of the same 'working class' as

German workers. Ste. Croix, who emphasizes his position on
Rechtsstellung here, claims that the 'guest workers' should, on that
basis, be regarded as a different class. Why not then the metics?
We may now turn to his postulates that (a) social status and
political power derive from class position, and (b) that distinction
made on bases other than class (e.g. status) tend to resolve them-
selves into the economic distinctions of class (45). If one is an
Athenian citizen or a Roman citizen, however, how can this be
said to derive from class position? We may also consider the case
of the wealthy plebeian in early Republican Rome: how can his
status be said to derive from his class position? Surely in this case
there was a conflict between class position and ascribed status.
That dissonance goes a long way to explain the form civic conflict
took in the early Roman Republic. The matter is further complic-
ated when in other contexts Ste. Croix seems to hold the opposite
of this position. For example, in discussing the shift in emphasis
in the Roman penal system from a ranking based on status (e.g.
senator, equestrian, decurion, citizen, non-citizen) to the broader
social distinction of honestiores and humiliores, he says that 'The
earlier set (i.e. of status categories) had no direct connection with
class in my sense: its categories were purely political, with citizen-
ship as the determining element' (461, my emphasis). Here status
appears as something which does not essentially derive from class,
but rather is 'political' and hinges on the critical element of citizen-
ship. Given his own evidence, it would seem that Ste. Croix's
second position must be closer t o the truth - that status is, in a
sense, an arbitrary social definition which may initially conflict
with categories of 'economic class' but which may later merge
with them. The whole problem raises the issue posed at the be-
ginning of this critique when the question of the validity of class
across other social boundaries was posed. What indeed are the
limitations of 'class' in the ancient world?
We might tackle this problem in two different ways. First, as
an internal question - Parkin's problem of defining the effective
frontiers of a given class.21 And, second, by examining the external
limits at which any given class may exist and the concept be applied
as a useful tool of historical analysis. On the first aspect, Ste.
Croix himself takes Weber to task (90) for not defining his bound-
aries of class sufficiently clearly. But it is not a problem which will
go away easily. Take, for example, Ste. Croix's own assertion
that, in spite of all internal variations and permutations of type,
'peasants are a class' (211). (Women are another problematic
case, see ch. 11.6) On the basis of his descriptive criteria, which
include disparate occupational groups ranging from fishermen
t o pastoralists, the spectrum covered by the 'class' peasants in-

cludes everyone from serfs and debt-bondsmen at one end t o
those peasants who merge with the 'propertied class' at the other
(210). What Ste. Croix seems to be arguing for is a very fluid
definition of class as an almost infinite set of relationships (of
e ~ p l o i t a t i o n ) .The
~ ~ problem for the historian becomes a critical
one of analytical and descriptive power. If peasants are 'a class',
but peasants in mediaeval England and those in fifth century
Attica are in fact radically different, then one is compelled t o the
position that the differences must be expressed in legal and
political terms (212). In this, and in many other examples, we find
Ste. Croix in fact resorts t o a finer model of a spectrum of statuses
in his actual writing of history - simply because the historian
needs such categories in addition to that of class in order t o make
any sense of ancient history.23
The second aspect of the limitations of class is probably more
profound than is realized, and yet the matter is hardly, if ever,
broached by Marxist historian^.'^ Let us take the case of the
metics referred to above. In spite of their residence and work in
the city of Athens, there are fundamental objections t o their
inclusion in the same class as any Athenian. This example alone
suffices to show that there is a very important sense in which
'community' sets bounds beyond which classes cannot be regarded
as homologous, beyond which one simply cannot equate them in
any meaningful sense. In the ancient Mediterranean it is difficult
220 Brent D. Shaw
to say where one community began and another ended. Matters

of communication, especially that of language, vitally affected
economic exchange and control, and point to the all-important
factor of culture in determining community frontiers. So too,
there were many different types of communities - some were de-
fined by state apparatuses (e.g. where 'Athens' and 'the Athenians'
coincide), others by purely cultural correlates (e.g. kinship in the
case of ethnic groups or so-called 'tribes'), and so on. One finds
repeated instances in Ste. Croix where this factor of community
is quite evident, though it is not consciously brought into the use
of class as a tool of historical analysis. What I am suggesting, in
short, is that class (along with status and other concepts) has
validity within defined communities, but loses much, if not all,
of its equivalence once such communal frontiers are crossed.
One would therefore like to see as much attention given to the
problem of the limitations of class as is given to its assumed
validity within determinate social contexts. Class may not offer
any common denominator or unity to the ancient world. We may
have to find the connecting points between communities in their
inter-communal relationships: in inter-state dealings, war, and
imperialism, however much these may have been fuelled by class

conflicts internal to the respective communities.
Ste. Croix, however, does tend to find a unity in the ancient
world at the level of class. He feels confident that Graeco-Roman
society as a whole can be defined as a 'slave society' or a 'slave
economy' (cf. 209). This is not because most production was in
the slave sector. He is quite happy to agree that, 'at most times
and in most areas in antiquity it was free peasants and artisans
who had the largest share in production'. The label 'slave society1
economy' is justified, he feels, 'because the propertied classes
derived their surpluses above all through the exploitation of unfree
labour' (4, cf. 52, 133). In passing from the first to the second
part of this general statement, however, we note a disturbing
elision: the categories of 'slave' and 'unfree' are collapsed to the
extent that the contention that Graeco-Roman society was a slave
society ultimately reposes on the much vaguer claim that the
propertied classes derived their surpluses in the main from unfree
labour. The obvious objection which many readers will make
at this point is that there has hardly existed a major pre-industrial
society where the ruling orders have not derived their surpluses
from some sort of 'unfree' labour.25 This would certainly be a
valid generalization for almost any society in antiquity, no matter
how one would care to define it, from the organizational and com-
munal complexes of Sumer and Babylon, to the private landed
estates of late Roman Gaul and Spain. But to define all these
societies as slave societies (or economies) simply because the

'propertied classes' derived their surpluses from 'unfree labour'
is t o ignore the significant differences between them and t o rob
oneself of any explanation of the shift from one type of unfree
labour t o another.
In other places Ste. Croix does attempt a finer foimulation of
the problem when he states that the propertied classes derived
their surpluses from 'unfree labour of various kinds' (including
debt-bondage and serfdom under this heading) but that slavery
(i.e. chattel slavery) was 'the most important form of unfree
labour' (39) or was 'in the forefront' (172). Unfortunately, these
impressionistic phrases are never fully glossed. Do they mean that
chattel slavery was quantitatively dominant, or qualitatively
determinant? From the initial part of the statement quoted above
(and repeated instances elsewhere in the book) I take it that Ste.
Croix absolutely abjures the first of these possibilities, so we must
accept that in the matrix of the ancient economy slavery was
'the most important form' in some qualitative sense (172). The
first part of the statement quoted above seems t o suggest that
chattel slavery was 'most important' because t h e propertied classes

extracted most of their surplus from this form of labour. But this
appears t o be gainsaid by the second part of the same statement
where they now acquire it from 'unfree labour'.
~ e f o r epursuing this conundrum further, however, we might
make a brief excursus into the realm of the 'surplus' being taken
by the 'propertied classes'. This process is the one which Ste.
Croix labels 'exploitation' (43, 52). As such the conception of
exploitation is wholly dependent upon the auxiliary conceptions
of 'surplus' and 'surplus value'. The author is fully aware of the
problems with the definition of surplus (36-37) but the further
linkage with the problem of exploitation is left unexplored. Here
I would like to recall Dalton's forthright question: 'How exactly
are peasants exploited?' (Dalton 1974). After observing that almost
no human society of any degree of complexity can operate with-
out appropriation of surplus, Dalton maintains that any mechanistic
definition of exploitation in terms of an 'appropriated surplus' is
bound to be so flabby as to be virtually useless as a tool of historical
analysis. He then re-asks the question: What exactly do we mean
by 'exploitation'? Half a dozen retorts, mainly by Marxist-oriented
writers, seem to me to have failed miserably to answer it (Dalton:
1975, 1976, 1977). I do not believe that their failure necessarily
means that we should abandon the term exploitation as a useful
and accurate one for historical analysis. But one conclusion
emerges fairly clearly from the debate. Any mechanistic neo-
classical economic definition of the term will not suffice. Appropri-
222 Brent D. Shaw
ation of surpluses will exist in almost any human society. Which

will and will not qualify as exploitation cannot be defined simply
in terms of a narrowly defined 'economic' process. And it seems
that Marx's definition is one that attempts to define the process
in some purely economic way. As such, it seems to rely on a
narrow economic conception of surplus value which has been
subject to a damning critique by Morishima, and which ought to
be abandoned as the basis of defining e~ploitation.'~What we
need, as Dalton so rightly demands of us, is a better definition.
Surely the 'end use' to which any appropriated surplus is put
(one of Dalton's points) is a critical factor in the evaluation of
exploitation. But any analysis that includes this factor will
necessarily entail some estimate of the value judgments or the
political psychology of those from whom the surpluses are
appropriated. Do they feel that the appropriations are 'just' or
Once one enters into a realm of psychological evaluation
there are areas of doubt. I am fully aware of the objection that
peasants, for example, might feel that the landlord's exactions
are 'just' because they have become accustomed to accepting the
lord's claims to legitimate control of their land.28 Nevertheless,
the thorn must be grasped if a satisfactory definition of exploit-

ation is to be obtained, especially for non-capitalist social form-
ations.
When Ste. Croix wishes to label all antiquity a 'slave' society
or economy, therefore, we must be fully aware of exactly what
this proposition entails. It is, first of all, limited to the much
smaller claim that this is how the propertied classes acquired
most of their surplus. But even this qualified assertion is hedged
by the following remarks: that the bulk of production in. most
areas was done by free peasants and artisans, and that the pro-
pertied classes derived their surplus 'above all' through the ex-
ploitation of unfree labour (3-4, 133). These statements are then
further qualified: whatever else they may be, peasants are
emphatically not slaves (210-1 I), and second, the propertied
classes derive a part, even a substantial part, of their surplus from
peasants (213). The latter statement must be true (in terms of
labour in the fields, not management) for vast areas of the Roman
empire. As Ste. Croix himself admits, in Asia and all lands to the
east chattel slavery never played 'an important part' in agricultural
production. One must assume, then, that for at least a third of his
Greek world slavery could not have produced the surpluses of the
propertied classes (227, cf. 242). He also seems to agree with those
ancient historians who hold that latifundia worked by slaves were
a predominant economic form only in the 'insular' core of the
western Roman empire. Elsewhere estates were probably worked
in the main by peasants, serfs, or other types of tied and dependent

labour (233). 29 The cumulative force of these arguments suggests
that in the main period of the Roman empire most production on
most estates owned by upper class landlords was not performed by
chattel slaves, and that most of the surplus that the propertied
classes received from these lands was produced by a non-slave
workforce of some type. Of course, one must also add t o this
source of surplus for the propertied classes the state connection,
since Ste. Croix admits that the state is an instrument of class
domination and that various forms of taxation, including military
labour, were a type of 'indirect/collective exploitation'. Almost all
of this surplus which accrued t o the propertied classes came
principally from free and dependent peasants since slaves, strictly
speaking, would not have been subject to the burdens of taxation
and military service.
Given these facts - that most of the Graeco-Roman world in
terms of area was not run on a system of agrarian chattel slavery
and that a substantial part of the surplus acquired by the propertied
classes came from peasants - it is difficult t o see how one can
justify the appellation 'slave' economy or 'slave' society for the

Greek world (211,226). On the other hand, one can quite justifiably
say that in certain periods, and for certain social formations or
communities within the Greek world, slavery was critically import-
ant to the whole political economy. In regions outside the urban
core of the Greek polis or the political core of the western
Mediterranean in the Roman period, however, the situation is
far less clear. In these zones the principal labour forces seem t o
have been of a peasant type, though slaves were everywhere
present in controlling and disciplining these work forces in a
managerial role (for both private and imperial domains). The
importance of slaves in this managerial and enforcement role
as middlemen in the production process should not be under-
estimated. But it should not be allowed t o obscure for the general
reader a clear and unambiguous picture of the actual make-up
of the work forces performing the manual labour in the fields.
This brief consideration of Ste. Croix's characterization of
the essence of the ancient world as 'servile' has led us, ineluctably,
t o the question of labour itself. It is singularly laudable that the
author has provided us with a set of clear definitions of types and
categories (133-36). But there is one surprise. They are not in
any sense Marxist definitions. For a work so committed to a Marxist
interpretation of class struggle in the ancient world, it is unsettling
to be confronted at this critical juncture with committee definitions
emanating from a Slavery Convention organized by the League
of Nations in 1926, and from a supplementary United Nations
224 Brent D. Shaw
convention in 1956 (134). Given their origins, these definitions

bear all the hallmarks one would expect of committee decisions
of the type: they are fundamentally ideal and legalistic in nature.
For example, slavery is not defined as a type of labour, but as
'a legal status or condition' (135) and a type of 'ownership'.
Serfdom is defined not as labour but as 'a type of tenure', again
with emphasis on ' o ~ n e r s h i p ' . ~Similarly,
~ debt-bondage is seen
not as a form of social labour but as a legal act in which 'pledges',
'securities', and 'debt liquidation' are involved. It is not that these
definitions are not serviceable for the historian - it is simply that
they are not generated out of a body of Marx's historical analysis,
and do not seem particularly well adapted to a Marxist analysis of
ancient society. Most Marxists, for example, would tend to define
slavery in terms of a specific type of control of means of produc-
tion, including the ultimate tool - the body of the labourer him-
self.31 Surely this is a more valid historical conception, since it
allows us to cope with societies in which legal conceptions such as
'labour', 'ownership', and 'tenure', are not operable in the terms
envisaged by the UN d e f i n i t i ~ n . As ~ ~ for serfdom, Ste. Croix
himself later cites a much more satisfactory definition which,
limited though it is to western European experience, stresses the

elements of labour type, production, and social control (210-1
Within the brief scope of this critique it is not possible to review
all of Ste. Croix's analysis of the three major forms of exploited
labour he assigns to the ancient world: (chattel) slavery, serfdom,
and debt-bondage. By far the best treatment of any of these types
is his discussion of debt-bondage, for which there is no other
analysis (of which I am aware) that is of equivalent power or
persuasiveness (162-70, 2 38-40). Its important conclusions
ought to be heeded by historians. Ste. Croix shows in detail how
debt was an instrument used extensively throughout all antiquity
as a major mechanism of controlling labour. And he demonstrates
conclusively that, in spite of optimistic prognostications in our
textbooks about abolition of debt servitude in the Roman world
(at least within the citizen community after the passing of the Lex
Poetelia, c. 320 B.C.), personal execution against the debtor to
control his labour services remained a pervasive aspect of social
life throughout the Roman Republic and Empire. As fascinating
as this important subject is, however, attention here must be
directed to two of the more problematical areas in Ste. Croix's
analysis, those of slavery and of serfdom, in order to highlight
arguments necessary to his general thesis.
One of the most important problems Ste. Croix sets himself
is to explain the shift from (chattel) slavery at the core of the
production in which the propertied classes were owners to the use
of serf labour (the Roman colonate, 226 f.). Basically his argu-
ment is that any slave system by its very nature has t o be fed with
raw materials provided by warfare or other forms of enforced
importation. Once these sources 'dry up' slave populations cannot
reproduce themselves (at least not with anything like the economic
efficiency of the import system). This problem inherent to the
reproduction of the slave system eventually compels large land-
owners to turn to other means of controlling labour services.
Successful slave reproduction, insofar as it could be achieved,
necessitated the formation of family units and the breaking down
of the 'barrack system'. Most historians would agree. The next
step is t o specify this transition as the internal contradiction in
any system of slavery: if one shifts to a family mode a slave
reproduction the 'rate of exploitation is lowered'.
The proposition that this course of development is a necessary
one is simply not borne out by historical studies of slavery in the
Americas. Slave populations can successfully reproduce themselves
demographically - a well-known case being that of the American
ante-bellum The demographic constraints affecting most
slave systems are similar; life expectancy is very low, but not much
lower than what we presume to be the 'average' for populations
in the Roman empire.35 Therefore, there is no historical reason to
believe that slave communities organized in the familial mode
could not reproduce successfully. The question then is: does the
shift from a barracks or predominantly male-oriented work gang
system to a familial system 'lower the rate of exploitation'? Well,
perhaps somewhat, if one considers units of labour as isolated in
themselves. But there is no reason to believe that this would be
true of the family-organized slave system as a whole - not, at
least, given the specific reasons proffered by the author.
First, one must consider his claim that women who raised
children would be less available fo: work (231). This is simply
not true, as anyone who has read that terrible personal document
of slavery, the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, would
realize. Women received little or no 'time off' for raising children
and other family chores. These were consistently done in addition
t o the normal work load as performed by the men.36 Secondly,
children were not, as Ste. Croix tries t o calculate, a burden on the
slave owner (2 3 2) - they too were raised by the slave family at its
expense and on its time. After a childhood of utter destitution,
sometimes rarely seeing its parents, the slave child in the ante-
bellum South, as in antiquity, began hard labour in the fields
between ages 5-10.37 There are several pieces of evidence from
the ancient world cited by Ste. Croix himself that are quite
consistent with this picture of the harsh and exacting treatment
226 Brent D. Shaw
of women and children known from modern slavery. For example,

Dio Chrysostom in his treatise On Slavery and Freedom (158)
observed that slave mothers frequently resorted to infanticide
in order not to bear both the burden of raising children and
the normal labours of servitude.
Whatever small drop in the 'rate of exploitation' resulted from
the shift to a familial mode was surely more than offset by the
internal reproduction of the work force itself. And by another
important benefit recognized .by the slave owners themselves,
both ancient and modern: the greater self-discipline induced in the
slave force by the switch to the family system - a fact illustrated
by Ste. Croix from ancient evidence (148). In this case he admits
the economic utility of forming slave families as recognized by the
slave owners, and the fact that the threat of the break-up of these
families 'kept the slaves in line'. Therefore, I think that there are
good reasons to doubt any theoretical scheme that posits a necessary
internal economic contradiction in the system of slavery itself.
This objection, if valid, has serious implications for the major
explanation Ste. Croix wishes to advance at the conclusion of the
book. But before we turn to that subject, let us consider an even
more problematic case of labour, that of 'serfdom'.

The basic proposition which Ste. Croix wishes to stress in his
section devoted to serfdom (148 f.) is that this form of labour
was an isolated and localized phenomenon in the ancient Greek
world. Only in the later Roman empire was a genuine serfdom
introduced 'top down' over the whole of the Mediterranean by
the legal fiat of the Roman government (e.g. 249 f.). Both propos-
itions deserve closer examination. The first problem emerges from
his definition of serf (135) which, as we have remarked above,
is basically a legal one that seems to have the peculiar western
European mediaeval form in mind. As with any historically
peculiar form of labour, the difficulty is that other historical
epochs are unlikely to produce something exactly like it. There-
fore, there may indeed be a certain (tautologous) legitimacy to the
claim that 'serfdom' in these precise terms was not widespread
until the later Roman empire.38 But surely this gives a rather
misleading impression to the general reader and the non-ancient
historian who read the book? If we accept Hilton's Marxian (though
still Eurocentric) definition of a serf as a person who has owner-
ship of his own person and possession of the means of production,
but whose labour is given under compulsion like a slave, then
clearly something closely analogous to serfdom was widespread
in the whole of the ancient Mediterranean and the Near East. It is
simply that the form of compulsion does not assume the peculiar
western European type.
Moreover, Ste. Croix does recognize earlier forms of serfdom in

his precise sense rather widely: the Spartan helots ('state serfs'),
the penestai of Thessaly, and agrarian populations in Crete, Asia
Minor, and Syria (149-50) in what is obviously only a selection
of available examples. In spite of the long list of such cases, he
denies that serfdom was widespread in Asia Minor, the Seleucid
kingdoms, and Ptolemaic Egypt. In his own terms he is probably
correct, but the formulation tends t o disguise a real problem
rather than t o solve it. The plain fact is that there existed in Near
Eastern societies a type of controlled, if not coerced, labour
which, although it may not fall directly under the western European
category of 'serfdom', does deserve some sort of label. And if we
are offered only three categories from which t o choose (i.e.
chattel slaveryldebt-bondagelserfdom), which is it to be? Saying
that it is 'not serfdom' leaves few alternatives. Chattel slavery it
clearly was not. Although the economy may have operated in part
with a vocabulary and ideology of indebtedness, and at least part
of the labour was thus tied, clearly debt-bondage was not the
essence of its system of labour either.
The problem of operating with only three categories of labour

is further exacerbated when the author tries to explain to the
reader the actual condition of these labourers, as, for example, the
basilikoi georgoi (king'slroyallstate farmers) in Ptolemaic Egypt.
They 'are free in the sense that they are not slaves' although they
'were subject to very strict controls and supervision t o a greater
extent than any other non-serf peasants I have come across in the
Greek world' (1 5 3). He goes on to give many examples from Strabo
of temple work-forces in Asia Minor (or the first century BCIAD)
'who could not be sold independently of the land nor reduced t o
slavery' (1 5 3 ) . The point here, surely, is not to say that this is 'not
serfdom' but to say positively what is involved. The problem is
that none of these labour forms fit precisely into the western
European legal categories of slave or serf. Rather, we are dealing
with a type of nexus between statelorganization and workforce
that is peculiar to the Near Eastern world. That it does not fit the
semantical term 'serfdom' is not particularly illuminating. The
labour is controlled in a way which is neither serfdom nor slavery
but which is every bit as important and effective in its own right as
either of these alternatives.
Ste. Croix may indeed be right t o reject the appellation 'Asiatic
Mode of Production' for this Near Eastern type (155) but surely it
is egregious to disagree so absolutely with Kreissig and Briant's
position that 'this type of production is a different type from that
found in Greek areas'. Rejecting the label of the AMP does not
efface the problem. It merely means that we have to seek another
228 Brent D. Shaw
shorthand way of describing a dominant economic process which

is clearly distinct from those found in the Graeco-Roman world
(the Greek-speaking Mycenaeans excepted). The rejection of this
type of economic organization as 'serfdom', however, does permit
a rather stark contrast between this labour regime and that of the
later Roman empire, and allows Ste. Croix to postulate the first
appearance of serfdom on a massive scale when it was imposed
by law. In making the contrast he goes so far as to deny any com-
parison between the two labour regimes as 'patently ridiculous'
(155). Admittedly they are different, but perhaps not as utterly
distinct as is claimed. If one considers the relapsing of the later
Roman empire to a gigantic system of bureaucratically organized
taxation in kind (amounting to a state operated system of re-
distribution), the great increase in 'bureaucracy', the emergence of
a quasi-divine absolutist monarch and court, the reversion to a
legally controlled and compelled type of labour, the rise of a
'temple organization' parallel to that of the 'palace', and so on,
the comparison between the two systems is perhaps closer than
comfort will bear. Then again, we cannot be certain about the
degree of actual change wrought by imperial legal pronunciamentos

in the region of the Near East. Perhaps the systems of labour
control were not so radically different before and after the imperial
legal enactments of the late third and fourth centuries.
Certainly Ste. Croix's basic claims - that this type of labour
regime ('serfdom') disappeared in the east after contact with
Graeco-Roman forms of economic organization, that this 'serfdom'
was only a transitional stage, and that temple (and similar organiz-
ationally) controlled work forces were only 'relics' of this trans-
ition - are simply mistaken. Given the temporal and spatial
transformations one would expect, the type of 'serfdom' which
he describes so well represents one of the common forms of the
control of labour in the whole of the Near East from the inception
of a more complex social organization in the region around 3500
B.C.39 Far from being a 'transitional stage' this labour system was
a fairly normal and traditional means of production in the whole
region from its earliest written history. Most of Ste. Croix's argu-
ment in this section in support of his hypothesis that local society
shifted to a Graeco-Roman matrix of labour with slavery as the
dominant form, is based on silences rather than positive evidence.
Having quite rightly cautioned his readers against reaching fixed
conclusions about labour types in the region based on a handful of
examples, and having warned about the great lacunae in the data
(156),he thrice goes on to base his argument for the absence of
serfdom in the region on 'the lack of evidence' for it (1956-57-
5 8).
In lieu of evidence, one is left with hypotheses. One of these

which is difficult to accept is the contention that the shift from
the type of organized-tied labour described above to 'the Greek
economy' was effected by laoi ('peoples') on king's/royal/state
land being shifted to the 'ownership' of Greek cities. How this was
actually done in any one case is unknown, and the total possible
number of such cases is so small as not to be worth the argument.
Similarly, the transfer of land, and indeed of whole communities
and regions, to 'friends of the king' is no new pattern - it is
merely the continuation of an ancient and traditional practice of
social relations in the Near East that was antecedent t o the world
of the Greek polis, and therefore is most unlikely t o have been the
vehicle used t o achieve an economic r e v o l ~ t i o n .Further
~~ t o assist
the transition to 'the Greek economy' Ste. Croix postulates that
a proportion of the old peasantry was reduced t o slavery (a pure
hypothesis) and that the others became katoikoi or paroikoi
('dwellers by') of a city; that is, 'non-citizen but free settlers of a
city, paying taxes t o it'. An appeal is made t o Tarn. But Tarn's
interpretive schema is itself highly prejudiced by his assumption
of the superiority of 'Aryan' (i.e. Greek) forms of social organiz-

ation over the 'Oriental'.41 Even so, we have t o hope that katoikoi,
a Greek term transferred t o a Near Eastern context, has the same
meaning as it does in Greece itself. But, if on Ste. Croix's own
admission, polis and chora do not, then why should the term
katoikoi necessarily have had the same social content of 'freedom'
that it did in Greece?
The whole point of an extended discussion of the difficulties
posed by this one type of labour is to demonstrate that any
analysis that operates with such a limited categorization of labour
and human control of labour resources (i.e. chattel slaveryldebt-
bondagelserfdom) is bound to run into severe problems of its own
making. Even supposing that some sort of theoretical closure were
possible with these terms at any given moment, the bothersome
fact is that human beings are devilishly inventive; they would find
y k t new ways of controlling labour, as clearly they did at the
'dawn of civilization' in the Near East (and elsewhere). That such
a manner of control cannot be made to merge with the western
European mediaeval category of serfdom need not surprise; but it
at least ought t o provoke a reconsideration of the historian's
inherited categories of analysis. The proposition that serfdom
was first introduced on a widespread scale 'top-down' by legal
means in the later Roman empire then becomes one of elusive
value.
The fact is that human communities the world over (whether,
for example, the Tawantinsuyu in South America, the Maya or
230 Brent D. Shaw
Aztec in Mesoamerica, or the communities of Sumer, Babylon,

and Assyria in Mesopotamia) made the move to more complex
social formations by the development of autonomous organiz-
ations which, amongst other things, 'bureaucratically' organized,
controlled, and coerced labour. This system of human cybernetics
does not fit into any of the nineteenth-century, European, property-
oriented categories used by Marx. How could it? It was not even
known or 'thought of' at the time Marx was writing. But this does
not excuse the ignorance of historians in the later twentieth
century of the patent findings of a hundred years of Assyriology,
nor the easy self-limitation to the Graeco-Roman world where
the warm glow of 'European tradition' and 'Classical education'
make us feel at home with the use of equally traditional categories
of analysis. Thus, one has to suspect that the intense argument
made by the author regarding 'serfdom' is provoked by the need
to 'save the appearances' of an outmoded system of analysis.
There seems to be some effort, given Ste. Croix's prior definition
of 'the Greek world', t o show that this cultural definition is
justified by the fact that Greek-speaking elites were part of an
economic vanguard that changed the make-up of Near Eastern
society, and that acquired 'most of their surplus' from a Graeco-

Roman mode of labour that had chattel slavery as 'its most
important element'. In doing so Ste. Croix seems to be attempting
t o preserve an evolutionary development through various labour
forms (i.e. x to slavery to serfdom) in a way that eerily replays a
whole series of arguments made by Soviet ancient historians in
their wrestling with the 'Asiatic Mode of Production' as a 'stage'
in historical development. Some of them were driven to the point
of asserting that 'in essence' all the ancient world was typified by
'slave' labour; it was only a difference in degree that separated the
'serf' and the 'slave' - they are mutations of the same basic
ty~e.4~
Some working knowledge of the economic forms of Near Eastern
societies remains an absolutely necessary precondition to an
adequate explanatory framework for the Graeco-Roman world.
Such a desideratum, however, is no closer to being fulfilled today
than it was a century ag0.4~The point is that if one were to typify
the classical forms of ancient Near Eastern societies, one would
have to give priority of emphasis to the organizational apparatuses
that gave them their critically novel form. One must then recognize
the priority of 'the political' and the 'mode of organization' of
production as critical in the developmental process. This shift
draws attention to the excessive emphasis sometimes placed on
production alone, as opposed to the critical elements of distribution
and consumption in the whole economic process.44 This means,
simply, paying as much attention to Polanyi as to Marx. To illustrate

what I mean, we must now turn our attention to the problem of
the state.
The state initially appears as not much more than the physical
expression of the organizational system developed by men for the
control of their environment. Near Eastern societies, as I have
stated above, were in essence characterized by large-scale admin-
istrative systems that coalesced into the supra-familial/communal
thing we call the state. When we come t o the world of the Greek
polis, however, one of its aspects that immediately strikes us is the
absence of powerful and overarching 'bureaucratic' elements as an
integral part of its state apparatus. Citizens or members of the
community were 'free' (in this precise sense) to interact with each
other in new modes. Why? The change demands explanation, not
mere assumption. Obviously the process has something t o do with
the frontier location of Greek society, and actual historical process.
We know now that some early Greek societies were organized
according t o a variant of the 'Near Eastern mode', but that this
peripheral expression of it was physically destroyed and replaced.
The process of replacement meant that something had to substitute

for the major functions that had been organized 'bureaucratically'
in the Near Eastern mode. What was this replacement? Polanyi
reasonably suggested 'market forces'.45 The fact is that market
forces or some such replacement is necessary to explain the com-
plete absence in the Greek city states of 'bureaucracy' (whether
of the temple or palace), and therefore the form that social
relations in the polis took. That is t o say, we explain the pos-
sibility of a more direct, unmediated interaction between citizens,
the control of labour by non-administrative means, and the form
and role taken by the state. In most polis and in Rome (Sparta,
and the later empire, respectively, excepted) the state did not
assume the role, as it did in the Near East, of a direct controller
of labour. This observation has critical implications for Ste. Croix's
whole analysis of class struggle, since the state is one of the most
important distinguishing features of the type of archaic society
studied by ancient historians (as opposed to the small scale societies
normally studied by anthropologists). Obviously it has considerable
effect on the variable of class, and yet it receives no consistent
separate treatment in this book. If one is to postulate the class
struggle as that between masters and slaves, then the role of the
state in the process surely needs some specification.
As mentioned above in the discussion of Ste. Croix"s ideas on
class and status, he allows 'legal position' (Rechtsstellung) as a
factor that determines class, affecting, as it does, the degree of
exploitation (42). Hence class now appears as a variable that is
232 Brent D. Shaw
altered by the type and degree of state power that issues and en-
forces different types of status distinctions. The author says as
much (96) when he underscores the importance of political
power (in democracy it critically affects the 'rate of exploitation').
If class is the collective social expression of exploitation, then it
logically follows that the state must radically alter the fact of
class. What, then, is the relationship of classes to the state? In his
definition of 'a class society' (44) Ste. Croix defines it as a social
system in which one class can exploit another either directly or
indirectly through a class-dominated state. From this formulation
one would deduce that the state must be regarded as an autonomous
entity that is capable of being dominated or controlled by different
classes. The state is frequently referred to as an instrument of
class domination (166, 206, 265). Ste. Croix gives at least one
clear example in his schema of where the state made a supreme
difference to exploitation, namely in the whole sphere of 'indirect
exploitation' entailed by governmental imposts in various forms:
taxation, labour services, and military duties (205 f.). For an
instrument that can have such a massive effect on class, it is
surprising that Ste. Croix devotes so little attention to it as a
separate subject.
Not that he doubts the importance of the state. He gives one
clear example where, in his mind, the state played a critical role in
class struggle: that of Athenian democracy. That is curious. If,
as he contends, the class struggle in antiquity was that between
masters and slaves, it is difficult to see how this conflict was
somehow transferred to or manifested on the 'political plane'.
His account of Athenian democracy stresses a number of circum-
stantial factors. First, that very many Greeks owned little property
and no slaves; these persons, therefore, must have constituted a
considerable majority of 'the people' (the demos) in any given
citystate (286). Second, it is these people who then struggle for
control of 'the state. This is a struggle which he regards (rightly
I think) of supreme importance in ancient history. As an entree to
the argument, one might note that this conflict is not the class
struggle in the ancient world as defined by Ste. Croix. The major
social groups involved in this civic conflict are not defined along
(economic) class lines. They are located within a given community,
and are polarized into two opposing sides: those who are materially
and socially powerful and who can therefore coerce others, and
those who are weak and therefore vulnerable to abuse by the more
powerful. These groups are not slave owners and slaves, but rather
large and powerful landowners on the one hand, and small peasants
and artisans on the other. In fact, slaves are pendant to this
struggle within the community/city and are used by both sides
(though more directly by the landed powerful) as pawns in their

political battle. As extracommunal persons, slaves were com-
pletely deprived of access to the power represented in the political
institutions of the state. By definition they could not struggle for
control of one of the most important determinants of class in the
ancient world - the very instrument which defined them as
slaves.
The slaves' relationship to the principal owners in the community,
therefore, was a rather complex one. Certainly their interests did
stand against their immediate owners, but the plain fact is that the
more successful the struggle of the poor and weak citizens for con-
trol of the state mechanisms that protected them, the more
these selfsame weak citizens became vicarious beneficiaries of
slave-owning by the large landowners. In this precise sense, the
ancient state must be seen as a potential communal 'owner' of the
slaves inside its frontiers, and the primary relationship of the slaves
was to the system of exploitation embodied in it. In placing the
central class conflict between citizens and slaves, therefore, Marx
and Engels may not be as mistaken as Ste. Croix insists (41, cf. 61).
It is just that they accorded far greater strength and priority to

the power of the state in defining class relationships in the ancient
world, and drew the fundamental boundary in antiquity at the
frontier between citizen and non-citizen (as indeed did Weber).
As Ste. Croix himself says in another context, the slaves were the
ones who suffered in consequence of the protection gained by
weak citizens in their acquisition of state power (141). Both the
elements of slave-owning amongst the powerful and the greater
democratic power afforded the weak by state institutions are thus
close correlates of an increasing reliance on slavery by the whole
community. The powerful citizens employed slave labour in in-
verse proportion to their ability to coerce and extract different
types of dependent labour from persons within the community
itself.46
Thus it is difficult for the general reader to comprehend the
theoretical primacy given to the slave owner-slave conflict. Ste.
Croix's instinct to accord priority to a description of the successes
of the poor and the weak citizens in the Athenian community
must seem more cogent as historical analysis. But the protection
afforded by 'democracy', which the author finds such a laudable
achievement ( 9 6 ) ,was the result of a political struggle for the state
(286-89) the very success of which depended on the availability
of slaves. Nor does it seem to have been any inherent contradiction
in the slave system itself that brought democracy t o an end.
Whether they possessed slaves or not, the powerful continued their
struggle to subjugate the weak citizens within the community;
234 Brent D. Shaw
their acquisition of slaves did not bring their efforts at domination

t o an end. But resistance to them also continued; civic stasis of
one type or another remained a hallmark of every polis. The single
factor which allowed the landed and powerful to foreclose the
struggle once and for all was, as Ste. Croix himself shows with
devastating thoroughness, foreign military intervention (97, 300-
26, and appendix IV). This had always been a factor in the struggle
between 'the few' and 'the many' in Greek city states, but the
decisive intervention of imperial states like Macedon and Rome
spelled the end of democratic politics.
In Rome the struggle amongst the citizenry for political power
was not as successful as in most Greek city states (141). Ste. Croix
tends to lay the blame for the poorer showing by the Roman
citizenry at the door of 'the complicated political machinery
of Rome' (355). The accusation suggests that the very form
taken by a state could determine the outcome of the battle
between the weak and powerful elements of the citizenry. In the
case of Rome this form was decisively altered by the fact of
imperialism, the results of which are to be analyzed in terms of
class (349, 355-56). But why should imperialism, and other
social forces like patronage, appear as exogenous factors, as

simple givens whose existence is to be accepted and whose results
are to be analyzed in the field of class struggle? In the case of
patronage, surely it is the abortive debt-struggle of the Roman
citizenry which largely explains why 'social indebtedness' became
such an entrenched and pervasive aspect of Roman life (as opposed,
for example, to social relations in fifth-century Athens). The
peculiar force of clientelism in Roman society, therefore, demands
an explanation; it should not just be posited as an eternal aspect of
Roman society that simply happens to be there and then arbitrarily
affects the whole nature of Roman social relations, including
that of class (see, e.g., 175, 334, 341 f., 362 ff.). Similarly, the
fact of warfare and imperial expansion appears repeatedly in the
book as one of those exogenous factors that decisively alters
class. The presence of such forces lurking outside the field of
'class struggle' presents two distinct difficulties to the historian,
one internal and one external.
The internal problem relates to the prevalence of class as a
cate ory of explanation over other exogenous categories. This
5
prob em is related to the author's claim that class is determinate
'in the long run' or 'in the final instance'. The difficulty facing the
historian who flirts with potential 'trapdoors' like these is a
credible definition of the 'long run'. When does the longue dur2e
begin? To take but one example, one could say that Roman
citizenship or status definitions of liability to certain forms of
punishment (see below) resolve themselves into economic distinc-

tions of class. Class is therefore determinant 'in the long run'. But
is it? Quite apart from the problem of many other social forces
that are causal factors in the process, we find that the exogenous
factor of frontier warfare decisively alters the whole structure of
the Roman state by the late third century A.D. Whatever long
range effects class struggle may have wrought on its own are then
rudely interrupted, arbitrarily re-arranged, and 'the class struggle'
has to begin all over again from an entirely new point of departure.
The second problem is the other trap door, that of the ceteris
paribus assumption behind making 'class struggle' an adequate
explanatory tool. The 'if' or 'but' qualifications underlying holistic
statements made on the basis of class keep recurring in a most
bothersome manner.47 Hence the 'class struggle' with its
mechanistic parts is to eventuate in such-and-such a deterministic
way, ceteris paribus. That sort of thinking is difficult to maintain
in the face of a host of examples that demonstrate the prior
importance of factors like military conquest in a hierarchy of
causation which the historian must e~tablish.~'In studying the
world of antiquity this choice may be a mere scholastic one; in

analyzing ours it means realizing the cold fact that the class struggle
continues, all other things being equal, that is, until the nuclear
warheads begin raining death.49
However that may be, the struggle amongst the citizens at
Rome was so decisively closed in favour of the powerful that, in
Ste. Croix's view, there was no substantial change in the form of
the Roman state throughout the three great episodes usually de-
lineated by modern historians (i.e. Republic, Principate, and
Later Empire or Dominate). He re-iterates that such changes in
the state were essentially nugatory or cosmetic: 'it is a mistake to
imagine a fundamental change in the nature of imperial rule,
from "Principate" t o "Dominate", with the inception of the
Later Empire.' (251, cf. 8, 356, 370, 373 f.). Insofar as this
observation refers to the common perception of the position
of the emperor, there is an element of truth in it.50 As against
this position, however, one may list the substantial changes in
the nature of imperial rule which Ste. Croix himself notes for
the period after A.D. 300: an increase in taxation and a more
pervasive and efficiently organized tax system, an imperial army
of considerably increased size, a civil service likewise inflated,
and finally, the huge ecclesiastical structure now allied to the
state and the fact that Christianity (or rather, one type of
Christianity) became official state ideology (489-92 f.). All
these changes, and more, deliberately instituted as part of the
state apparatuses in the late third and early fourth centuries,
236 Brent D. Shaw
could hardly leave the 'Dominate' in essence what the 'Principate'

had been. And the changes were not just nugatory in the sense of ,
being of primary interest only to the ruling orders. If we are to
follow Ste. Croix's own interpretation, they had the most pro-
found consequences for the lower orders as well.
In short, it seems that too narrowly based an 'economic' position
on class has led Ste. Croix to undervalue critical social structures,
such as the state, in his analysis of class conflict. If he can justly
praise Hinton's Fanshen (82, 84, 212) as giving us a clear and
unequivocal view of class struggle at the level of a peasant com-
munity, he might then be equally willing to consider the same
author's reevaluation of the subject (in fact, the same Chinese
peasant village of Long Bow) two decades later. It is, to say the
least, considerably less rosy than the first assessment. What
happened? The bright prospects of peasant democracy at village
level, so evocative of class struggle in the immediate aftermath of
the revolution, have given way, almost inexorably, to the factors
of a central state power reasserted at a local level, embodied,
above all, by a revitalized traditional burea~cracy.'~If Marx was
right about 'directly compelled labour', perhaps we should see
class as one of those embedded elements that is strongly influenced

and shaped by other social forces and structures? It is to be noted
that even the most 'orthodox' Russian historians of antiquity give
a priority to the importance of the state, and seem fully cognizant
of its critical role in the determination of 'class struggle'.'*
In criticism of an inadequate treatment of the state we might
also note a similar default that seems to affect other 'ideological
structures'. As mentioned above, these seem to be abstracted as
'levels' operating independently of the main account, so that the
author treats them as if they were in different 'containers' from
the historical phenomena which he accords centre stage. Although
he often concedes the incredible power of belief and its great force
as a mover of human behaviour and actions (e.g. 26, 173, 425,
446) we are never really told why this should be, nor are any
of the actual ideologies he studies (e.g. Christianity) analysed in
a way that would be concordant with his avowal of the power of
mental production in human society. In other cases, for example
that of law, we seem to encounter the reverse of this process;
instead of an isolation of ideology, it is so inextricably enmeshed
with the narrative framework that it becomes difficult for the
general reader to distinguish ideology and 'reality'. Ste. Croix is
aware of the fact that there is a gap between legal injunctions and
real conditions, and warns the reader of the fact (e.g. 236). But
elsewhere he seems to accept considerable coherence between law
and reality (e.g. 169). As noted above, by embracing formal defin-
itions of labour he commits himself to a rather juridical view of

production relations which often reduces to seeing 'slave' and
'serf' primarily as legal statuses (see, e.g., 65, 91, 147). So too, in
the matter of land holding, we often find a tacit assumption that
land tenure is equivalent to the actual patterns of land economy
and even of persons themselves (see, e.g., the whole argument at
213-14, and 227 f.). But it is a dangerous assumption. Where
modern historians have parallel and separate data with which to
check legal conceptions, they have often found that they are in
reality dealing with complex, criss-crossing property regimes in
which a given person 'owns' several different legal types of property
and in which it is the amount of such land held that is often a
more important historical fact.53 It seems, then, that the whole
problematical area of ideology and mental production needs a
more coherent and thorough analysis than it receives in this book,
and that, given the author's own admission of the actual power
of thought and its real force in producing human behaviour, this
would not be without consequence for his general thesis.
The massive work culminates, in its eighth chapter, with an ex-
planation of the 'Decline and Fall' of the Roman Empire (45 3 f.).
The claim is again lodged here that a 'Marxist analysis on class
lines can help to explain, and not merely to describe, a historical
process' (45 3). The steps in the argument are as follows. First, the
inherent conflict in the slave system (i.e. declining profitabiltiy
and the inability of the system to reproduce itself economically)
compelled the propertied classes to turn the screws on the non-
servile populations under their control (453). The turning of the
screw consisted, primarily, of the legal/governmental process of
legislating away the rights and privileges which free men and
citizens had enjoyed in the first centuries of the empire (454 f.).
This second point seems to be the substance of the extended
discussion of the honestiores-humiliores problem and the decline
in value of the Roman citizenship (454-62). 'It was because
slavery was not now producing as great a surplus as it did in Rome's
palmiest days that the propertied classes needed to put more pres-
sure on the free poor' (463, cf. 465). An extension of this same
process involved the exertion of a massive downward pressure on
the lower ranks of the propertied class itself (the so-called 'decurial
class', 466, 469-71). The result of this increased exploitation
and oppression of the vast majority of the population of the
empire was a general indifference to the fate of the political
structure of the empire amongst the common populace. As the
military pressures on the frontiers grew, the ordinary citizenry
were either apathetic, or fled to the 'barbarians' and actively
aided and abetted their attacks (474-76, 483-85).
238 Brent D. Shaw
There is no doubt that the major processes, and even minor

events, described by Ste. Croix did in fact take place. There
was indubitably a convergence in the conditions of servile and
free persons in the course of the later empire. But it seems entirely
unclear that the postulated internal contradiction in the slave sys-
tem helps explain these changes. As noted above, there are good
reasons to doubt the postulated internal contradiction. If it need
not have existed, and certainly there is no way the fact can be
demonstrated from the ancient evidence alone, then there is no
reason to accept it as the explanation for the phenomenon of
status c~nvergence.'~And there are factors which considerably
nuance the explanation. Let us take one of them here: the prob-
lem Ste. Croix himself notes with Roman citizenship.
If we took a notional cross-section of all the populations
encompassed by the political unit 'the Roman empire' in the early
first century, we would find that a relatively small percentage of
all persons had the status of Roman citizen (5-10 per cent of
adult males would probably be a rather generous estimate). If we
took a similar section some two centuries later, we would find that
a much greater percentage now had this same status (perhaps
75-80 per cent). What happened in the interim was not a significant
rise in the wealth, power, and status of 70 per cent or more of the
populace of the empire. Rather, there existed an arbitrary and
autonomous process, involving the extension of a determinate
status over most of the population. Given this fact, we can deduce
that the value of Roman citizenship must have suffered auto-
matically from 'inflation'. In the late third century it would no
longer have had the great value as a social definer that it had had
in the early first century. The critical problem, then, is as follows:
even if class boundaries had not changed substantially in the
interim (narrow 'economic' class boundaries, that is) there would
still have been an inherent tendency to status convergence. In
other words, African peasants and Spanish shepherds, Gallic farm
labourers and Thracian herdsmen, who may have been arbitrarily
maltreated in the period of the early empire when they did not
possess Roman citizenship were unlikely to have been treated
much differently in the third century (or even earlier) when they
acquired this status. And for them the acquistion of citizenship
may have been by an act as simple and arbitrary as the emperor
Caracalla's empire-wide grant in A.D. 212 (the so-called Constitutio
Antoniniana). The fact is that the power inherent in the status
had been diluted by the very process of its widespread distri-
bution.
If we now turn to consider the legal aspect of this question (i.e.
the revised status-ranking of punishment instituted from the early
second century onwards) we see that there is at least one other

significant element in its explanation. The legislation which now
sought to define penalties and punishments along different status
lines (i.e. opposing honestiores to humiliores) than those of the
early Principate might be nothing more than an obverse aspect of
the extension of Roman citizenship noted above. That is to say,
the spectrum of penalities and punishments 'legal' for certain
persons was re-adjusted to make it consistent with what had
always been common practice. It does not necessarily mean that
persons now designated as humiliores had been treated better in
the past simply because of their acquisition of Roman citizenship
(cf. the peasants of the Saltus Burunitanus), or were now treated
more harshly than they had been in the past. Hence the legal
texts may no more than reflect the problem inherent to the wide-
spread extension of Roman citizenship and its lack of coherence
with social boundaries at the time of its extension. It is easy to see
how the problem would arise. The original citizens of Rome had a
reasonable claim to privileged treatment based on their 'member-
ship' in the community. But with the isolation of citizenship as an
autonomous status that could be granted arbitrarily to any in-

dividual or group, all sorts of extra-communal persons were
automatically absorbed within the status who had no claim to
special rights based on their real economic power or communal
membership.
To take another link in Ste. Croix's chain of argument, we
might consider the depression of the condition of the so-called
'curial class'. Once again, there can be little dispute about the
facts (many orthodox historians, such as A.1-I.M. Jones, have
outlined them in detail). The claim of an explanation linking the
two steps in the shift from slavery to colonate with this one,
however, seems dubious. For one thing, as Ste. Croix points out,
the pressure under which the curiales were put stemmed from the
state, and the state was under pressure because of the increased
expenditures required by warfare on a much increased scale from
the mid-second and mid-third centuries onwards. Further, we
know that there is no necessary connection between state revenues
and landowners' profits (469). Therefore it is difficult to see the
causal connection. The pressures on the curiales were the direct
result of the peculiar form of linkage they had with the Roman
state (in no small part as tax collecting agents) and the fact that
this linkage was now becoming disadvantageous to both parties.
But this was not really due to any 'decline in the profitability of
slavery'. Rather, it was connected to the exogenous factor of
greater military pressures on the frontiers of the empire (468,
491 f.) There may indeed have been some cross-linkage between
240 Brent D. Shaw
the two processes, but the author does not provide it within his
'explanation'. So too, much of the apathy and of the flight to 'the
barbarians' was in fact encouraged and led by local landowners,
baronial lords who were nominally part of the 'curial class'
(compare the so-called Bagaudae in late Roman Gaul). They
thereby asserted their effective autonomy against the central
state, its tax and administrative claims, and in the process took
'their' peasants with them out of the empire."
Having reached the fall of the Roman empire in the west, we
have also reached the conclusion of our lknatomia del pipistrello
vampirico. But we must end by warning that, having struggled
under the constraints of the space afforded by a journal (however
generous), we have done less than justice to a large, rich, and com-
plex work. We have had to concentrate, perforce, on more prob-
lematical areas of interpretation in the hope that mutual inquiry
will open new perspectives and provoke useful debate. The author
has rightly remarked that any study of ancient society which
seeks to close the scholarly chasm between 'us' and 'them' by the
unity of its terms of analysis is inherently threatening to 'us'
(45). A host of academic reviews seems to have more than con-
firmed his suspicion.56 That may be the book's greatest tribute:

the stirring up of a hornet's nest of debate, argument, and animosity
that will provoke some life in an otherwise moribund subject. If
the author is to be faulted with any one thing, it is that he has
tried to do too much. Given the extreme default in Marxist
studies of antiquity in the English-speaking world noted at the be-
ginning of this critique, the author finds himself faced with too
great a task t o accomplish at a stroke, even a seven-hundred page
one. The difficulty of the task is compounded by the author's
self-imposed restriction to a reconstructed pristine version of
Marx. Not only is that regimen unnecessary, it also (I think)
neglects the fact that Marx himself was a part, albeit a most
important one, of a tradition that preceded and followed him.
Even Marx did not claim any originality in his use of the concep-
tion of class in historical analysis. The twentieth-century thinkers
who have followed in his steps have attempted to expand and to
develop the tools of historical materialism, beginning work on
some of the vast lacunae left by Marx's immensely suggestive
ideas. Wholly to ignore this tradition, including individuals like
Gramsci and groups like the Frankfurt School, is to make the effort
more herculean than it need be." Such heroic individual assaults
on the whole problem have more often than not been the case,
alas, not only with Marx himself, but with many of the epigonoi
who have mimicked his image. At the beginning of the Eighteenth
Bmmaire Marx was prompted to remark that history tends t o
r e p e a t itself, the first time a s tragedy, the s e c o n d time a s farce.

And historiography?
Dept of History
The University of Lethbridge
4401 University Drive
Lethbridge
Alberta
Canada
T1K 3M4
Notes
1. See Ste. Croix, 22 f. and esp. n.7, 542-43; further reference to current
work in French may be found in Favory (1981), and t o work in Italian in
the collection edited by Giardina and Schiavone (1981) for the Gruppo di
Studio di Antichistica of the Istituto Gramsci at Rome.
2. The historiographical tradition in American slavery represented by Foner,
Genovese, and Gutman, is, even within that field, an exception.
3. His survey of Marx's background in the classics, then part of almost any
sort of higher education, is good, but misses the important role played by
Savigny and his historical treatment of Roman law, indeed of law in general,
as a formative part of Marx's approach to the materialist analysis of ideological
systems; see Jaeger (1967).
4. The extent to which this process can involve speculative reconstruction
is evident in Carandini (1979), an attempt which is discursive in the extreme
- a sort of 'stream of consciousness' commentary on the Grundrisse. It seems
more probable to me that some of Carandini's major 'discoveries' (e.g. that
the 'slave mode of production' was only a transitory phase in dominance in
ItalyISicily over a determinate time period) are due more to his reflection on
the empirical facts than t o any reconsideration prompted by theorizing on
the First Draft.
5 . In the whole book sections II.iv, V, and VII.ii, are the only ones devoted
to the Greek world as such; by contrast, IV, iii-v, VI, VII, iii-v, and VIII
(i.e. 190 t o 4 0 pages of text) are devoted to the Roman empire. The balance
is about the same in the remaining sections where more general theoretical
questions are under consideration. Moreover, in many instances the author
has to have recourse t o Roman evidence, and then gloss it as 'equally applic-
able' t o the Greek world (see, e.g., 16.5, 169). This seeming imbalance of
treatment of the traditionally central periods and questions of Greek history
(e.g. the tyrants, Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries) may disturb some,
especially given the title of the book, but the net gain of looking at Greek
history in the long term and with emphasis on other than traditional periods
is probably worth the apparent sacrifice. Consider, for example, the better
perspective the author is able to give on the systematic destruction of
democracy in the Greek polis.
6 . The concept still does not seem to be defined adequately; given the
generative model presented to us on p. 3 5 f., 'family' would seem to be a
social category homologous with class. Why then is it not to be accorded a
242 Brent D. Shaw
similar status, indeed any mention at all, amongst the social relations of pro-
duction into which men enter?
7. See, for example, Ste. Croix, 50, 63 f. on Vernant (1965) who probably
derives his conception of 'contradiction' from Althusser, via Parain.
8. See Thompson (1978b) 281 ff. for a critique; Poulantzas (1975) 13 f.
epitomizes this approach, with 'political' 'ideological' and 'economic' levels
acting as various structural elements 'determined in the last instance' by 'the
economic'. See Cutler et al. (1977) where certain of the epigonoi, including
Hindess and Hirst, now abjure such formulations completely.
9. We need not re-iterate all the arguments here. See Thompson (1978b)
262 ff. who notes the convergence with modern trends in structuralism.
Anderson, Thompson's ablest critic (1980) chs. 1-3, has not been able to
mount any significant defence against the main thrust of Thompson's argu-
ments. Warde (1982) has attacked the epistemological bases of Thompson's
arguments, which are a bit dubious, but he does not disturb Thompson's
central critique of the ahistorical methodology that characterizes Althusserian
(and similar structuralist) approaches to the writing of history.
10. I am thinking of the sort of materials found in Thompson (1968) passim,
(1973-74), and in (1978a) 256 f. Only in some patristic sources, and then at
second hand, d o ancient historians ever get records that approach the type of
expression of popular sentiments that modern historians take for granted in
their analyses.
11. See e.g., Thompson (1978a), Foster (1974), Morris (1979), and Perkin
(1969). The whole debate as to when the English working class achieved
something called 'Class Consciousness' I find a hollow and pointless one. The
contortions into which historians are driven in order t o make history fit this
prior model are proof in themselves of the needless problems it causes. Marx
himself never called for any model of 'Class Consciousness', and never once
used a term for it (e.g. Klassenbewusstsein). When he did mention Bewusstsein
(or Selbstbewusstsein) it was in the common sense of 'consciousness' or
awareness (and these references are almost wholly limited t o his early works
which were still under the heavy influence of Hegelian philosophical concep-
tions). Marx probably does not deserve to have a complex Hegelianlidealist
theory of 'Class Consciousness' replete with its jargon of bei sich and an sich
foisted on him. By the time he wrote the famous passage in the Eighteenth
Brumaire Marx seems to have abandoned this type of Hegelian language;
he only speaks of the material separation of peasants in terms of their actual
ability to communicate with each other and to act as a group.
12. Marx (1981) 1025; cf. Neale (1981) 21, with a different translation,
seems to misrepresent Marx as postulating a two-class model here whereas
the preceding sentence, one of the last to be written by Marx and surely
most representative of his final thoughts on the matter, clearly mentions
three great classes: the industrial proletariat, the bourgeoisie, and the great
landowners. It is equally clear that in using the adjective 'great' Marx accepted
the existence of other minor classes which he did not deem necessary t o
specify at that point in his analysis.
13. One might be tempted to see in the plural title of the 1850 work a
decisive argument. Unfortunately, the title is one given to the collection of
original newspaper articles by Engels in 1895, seeMECW, 1 0 (1978) xv. Still,
in this, as so many other matters, if the much-maligned Engels naturally
understood this to be the correct interpretation, who are we to read Marx
better?
14. This tends to confute the author's claim that the quantitative element in
which most production is done can be ignored in favour of the qualitative
element of the manner in which one class acquires its surplus, see Ste. Croix,
49-53, etc. The quotation from volume three of Capital (ch. 47.2=Marx
(1981) 926-27), even accepting his revised tra?slation, does not support the
specific interpretation he wishes t o give t o a two-class in dominance model of
society - its terms can be used just as easily t o support a much more complex
view of class interaction.
15. Ste. Croix, 52, 54, 133, citing Marx (1973) 245, cf. 51-52, and note
there Marx's inclusion of the state as a critical element in the 'direct extrac-
tion' of labour in antiquity (Capital, 111, ch. 47.2=Marx (1981) 927).
16. See Calvert (1982) chs. 1-3, for a recent statement in support of this
position; his introduction t o the subject is hardly, in spite of its subtitle,
historical (etymology excepted). It is still championed by some historians;
see, e.g., Perkin (1969) ch. 2, 17-62, and, oddly enough by some Marxists
(e.g. Hobsbawm in Mkzar6s (1971) 7, though with considerable nuances,
see 1 0 0 f.). The 'estate model' is still used by some early modern historians
who seem t o accept the consciously elaborated 'status model' of society as
expressed by elites as the actual model of society itself. See Briggs (1960), a
light-weight paper whose impact has been entirely out of proportion t o the
significance of its semantical 'discovery' (i.e. that a vocabulary of 'class', using
the term itself, first emerged in the early nineteenth-century). Contrast
Wrightson (1982) chs 1-2.
17. The author's statement that Weber does not often use status t o explain
is, in a sense, correct. But the big questions that came to occupy Weber,
namely ones of mentaliti in the great differences between social development

in East and West, were not ones that were particularly open t o explanation by
either class or status. One might also note that explicit appeals to class as an
explanation are also missing from numerous works of Marx where the subject
matter simply does not call for such an analytical tool. Moreover, much of
what Weber was attempting t o d o has been grossly misunderstood; see,
especially, Marshal1 (1982).
18. This seems so obvious that it has misled some, like Hindess and Hirst
(1975) 8 2 f., into assuming that citizenship must be the primary class
relationship of the 'Classical Mode of Production'.
19. Ste. Croix, 95, giving exclusion from land ownership as the basic reason.
20. See the parallel debate in Chance and Taylor (1977) and (1979).
21. See Parkin (1979) on this problem of 'closure'.
22. Cf. 4 4 and 471 ff. for similar cases. I d o not wish t o enter into any
personal polemic in which the author himself has engaged, but I cannot
refrain from noting here that the very reasons for which he finds fault with
Finley's use of status (i.e. an element of elasticity or vagueness, see 92) are
the same ones he himself later uses t o defend his own concept of 'unfree
labour' (172); it is indeed the fluidity of the concept which he ultimately
finds most useful.
23. See, for example, his account at 333 f., 405 f., 471 f.
24. There is a subliminal awareness of it. Take, for example, the remarks by
Hobsbawm in Mkzar6s (1971) 1 1 f. where, in a discussion of class conscious-
ness, he admits that it is the modern 'nation state' that sets an effective limit
on the operation of 'a class'. In the text I make clear why I prefer the
category 'community' t o 'state' as a general category that not only subsumes
the latter, but is also a better explanation of the process - i.e. the cultural
frontiers are more important than the political ones ('political' narrowly
speaking).
25. See Hilton (1969) 9: 'In the long history of pre-industrial societies one of
the constant features has been the existence of social groups whose members
244 Brent D.Shaw
were unfree', and 'just as there were always numerous variations in the
opportunities, that is the freedoms, of men who were called free, there were
similarly many variations in the forms of unfreedom' (my emphasis); it is
accepted as generally true for all of the ancient world, see D'iakonov (1976-
77) 57.
26: Morishima (1973) seems to hold good, in spite of the remarks made by
Mandel in the preface to Marx (1978) 38 f., cf. Cutler et al. (1977) pt. I on
the problems with Marx's nineteenth-century conception of 'value' and the
related conception of 'exploitation'.
27. Dalton (1974) 556 f. and (1975) 126 f. makes the point that such
appropriation surely takes place in the Soviet Union and other 'socialist'
countries as well (on a purely mechanistic basis). So too, Chinese peasants
seem now to hand over more surplus t o the state than they did t o landlords in
pre-revolutionary days. But on the whole their sentiment (we take it), is that
the appropriation of more of their surplus is not exploitation because of its
end use (see Dalton (1976) 645, with references). We seem, therefore, to be
more in the realm of Barrington Moore's 'injustice' (1978). This seems t o be
the position reached by Giddens (1981) 58 f., though by a different route.
Although I broadly agree with Giddens' conception of exploitation, I cannot
accept what seems t o be one of his corollaries regarding the relative un-
importance of surplus in early societies.
28. Ste. Croix, 210-11, cites the case recorded by Hinton for the village of
Long Bow.
29. See, e.g., Lewuillon (1975) and Wightman (1978) for studies of the
labour regimes in Roman Gaul from the Republic t o the late Empire.
Although their analyses are done from opposing ideological perspectives, their
conclusions are generally concordant with those expressed here.
30. Ste. Croix himself admits later (160 f.) that this definition of serfdom
which he accepts conflicts with Marx's own definition; for Marx the form of
Arbeitsrente was central.
31. Cf. Hindess and Hirst (1975) 125 ff.
32. See Kopytoff (1982), Watson (1982), and Lovejoy (1983) for some of
the problems involved in analyzing 'non-classical' forms of slavery.
33. From Hilton (1975) 13.
34. The idea seems to have been developed at length not by Marx, but by
Weber, see (1976) 397 ff.; nevertheless, the contradiction is frequently
asserted by Marxist writers (e.g. Hindess and Hirst (1975) 143) but with no
empirical data; cf. Fogel and Engerman (1974) ch. 1, 'The International
Context of United States Slavery', 13-37 (esp. 27-29), and 'The Myth of
Slave Breeding', 78-86; cf. Sutch (1975) and Engerman (1979).
35. See J.E. Eslen, ch. 9 (in) Engerman and Genovese (1975) 211-17; for
the Roman world see Harris (1980) who gives full references to the relevant
work on demography.
36. Baker (1982) esp. 47-50; Blassingame (1979) ch. 4, 'The Slave Family',
149-91: on the effects of better discipline achieved by the switching to the
family system, and on the treatment of pregnant women and their work
routine after birth (179-81); cf. Genovese (1974) esp. 494-518, who
presents a meliorist picture true of some cases, but who still substantiates the
fact that women did their household work in addition t o the equivalent work
day as performed by men.
37. See Baker (1982) 47 f. for both the extremely poor clothing (etc.) with
which children were provided and their minimum means of subsistence; and
the sources cited in the previous note for the average age at which children
began earning their keep. For a thorough critique of these 'economist' argu-
ments on internal contradictions in slavery, see Dock& (1979) ch. 2 where

they are systematically demolished in respect of the very problem Ste. Croix
is attempting to explain.
38. Compare the parallel problems of specifying the origins of 'serfdom' in
Russia, see Hellie (1971) 1-1 8. The problem of defining serfdom in terms of
a legal attachment t o the land then necessitates the positing of a series of set
relationships between legal apparatuses, the state, and agricultural labour. In
the debate in Russian historiography between 'the decree' and the 'non-
decree' schools of interpretation (the latter concentrating the long-term
effects of indebtedness and lack of de facto movement), one finds much the
same arguments that mark debates over the origins of the Roman colonate.
As Hellie states (1971:15), 'Much of the disagreement on the issue of en-
serfment stems from differing definitions of "serf".' Hellie himself concludes
by siding with the 'decree' school, but then his own definition of serf (1971:
IS), which includes the critical element of being 'legally bound to a plot of
soil', assures that he must take this line.
39. The bibliography is far too massive to cite in detail here, but one might
consult Robertson (1981) for an initial impression of the evidence. Cf. Murra
(1980) for a precisely similar process occurring independently in a geo-
graphical context far removed from that of the Near East.
40. See Herman (1980-81) and his forthcoming Cambridge University
doctoral dissertation on the institution of 'ritualized friendship'.
41. See Tarn (1961) 130 ff. whose whole account seems t o me excessively
optimistic on supposed Greek influences. Its biases are, indeed, quasi-racist in
nature. Consider the following remarks on the origins of temple estates:

'They dated back to a pre-Aryan social system based in matriarchy (sic),
utterly foreign to Greek or Persian ideas (sic)'; what follows is an even worse
travesty of history.
42. See Dunn.(1982) 21-23, 44-49, 70, 91 f., for a summation of the argu-
ments; I must dissent here, however, from Dunn's inexplicable conclusion
that there was 'real debate' involved here, free from political constraints; both
D'iakonov (1976-77) and Zel'in (1968) combatted these views, but then
relapsed on the 'everyone's basically a serf' thesis (i.e. 'unfree labour' is the
basic type of all antiquity).
43. Most books, e.g. Anderson (1974), begin with 'ancient Greece' as if all
the developments in 'the West' can be perfectly well understood from a
tabula rasa of civilization etched on by 'the Greeks'.
44. Ste. Croix, 46, justifiably criticized Lenin on this point, but does not
seem to follow through adequately on the whole of the economic process
himself in his interpretation of Greco-Roman antiquity. M a n himself held
that production and consumption (and therefore distribution) were integral
parts of the same whole, see, e.g., Marx (1970) 195 ff. But both Marx and
his followers have tended to place much less emphasis on the processes of
consumption and distribution in their analyses of the historical process.
45. See Polanyi (1981) for a critique of his views and their application t o
various types of non-capitalist social orders. The posthumous (1977) is a
better reference for what Polanyi would have attempted in terms of an
explanation for the origins of the process in the Greek world, although it is
now largely outmoded, even in his own terms. Polanyi's basic approach,
however, is now accepted by many Marxists, who in fact claim that it is
substantiated by Marx's own views, see e.g. Wood (1981). It is also a position
now taken by positivist sociologists; see, e.g., Giddens (1981) 4 f. who goes
further and argues that 'in non-capitalist societies co-ordination of authori-
tative resources forms the determining axes of social integration and change.'
246 Brent D . Shaw
Many Marxists now seem to accept a position like that reached by Giddens,
and d o not see it as fundamentally incompatible with Marx's own views on
the relationship between economy and class in non-capitalist societies; see
Wright (1983).
46. So, it seems, almost every episodic movement towards the institution of
large-scale chattel slavery is prefaced by a failure to coerce sufficient labour
from within the community itself - even in the case of slavery in the
Americas; see Galenson (1981) on the history of white indentured service. In
fact, most of what goes on under the label of 'slavery' is a species of coerced
labour within the cultural community, cf. Hellie (1981) 1.2-3, 27-85.
47. Engels was already busy in 1890 qualifying the lead sentence of the
Manifesto; the problem was that he opted for the absurdity that prior to
written history (now the limited field of 'class struggle') we were to find true
'primitive communism' as unearthed by 'recent historical discoveries', see
MECW, 6 (1976) 482.
48. See Runciman (1 983a) 164 f. and 178 f. on the use of ceteris paribus
arguments, and the necessity of establishing an explicit order of causation .
49. See Thompson (1980) who argues that socialist historians may have been
deluding themselves in the priorities they have almost unconsciously accepted
in their historical analyses.
50. That is, it is not an excuse t o see Augustus' rule as anything other than
the imposition of an absolutist power, something which it was and was seen
to be, especially in the Greek world, from the very beginning. See Ste. Croix,
371 f. - a position just now being reached by 'bourgeois' scholarship after
three decades of painful sifting and re-evaluation of the evidence.

51. See Hinton (1983).
52. See, e.g., Staerman (1982), esp. her point '6', at 104-05: the difference
in the prior form of the Spartan, say, as opposed t o the Roman state,
determined to a large extent the way in which conquered peoples were
absorbed as labour into their respective social systems - in the one case as
'state serfs', in the other as slaves, debt-bondsmen, 'serfs', and others,
attached to a local citizenry which was then attached t o the Roman state. On
the role of the ancient state see, in English, Mann (1977), Runciman (1982)'
and Wood (1981).
53. See Wrightson (1982) 31, 'In fact, as local research has clearly revealed,
social status among countrymen depended far less upon the form of a man's
land tenure than upon the amount of land he held.'
54. Indeed, there is n o reason why it should be a good explanation for the
'Fail' a t all, see Runciman (1980) 162-66 on Anderson (1974) 97-98, 266.
As I have remarked in the text, the problem itself is created by the assump-
tion that there was a major shift to chattel slavery in the peripheral areas of
the western Roman empire and that an explanation is therefore required for
the shift from chattel slavery t o 'serfdom'. This is indeed the assumption
Dockks (1979) has to make, though the evidential basis for it (i.e. the spread
of the villa system of exploitation) has yet to be connected with the use of
slavery in the rural regions of the Roman West. Optimistic prognostications
based on archaeological data of this type have often proven illusory; the so-
called 'slave quarters' of the villa at Settefinestre on which many hypotheses
were based, have turned out to be pig sties; see Carandini and Settis (1979).
I am no more persuaded by the hypothetical 'slave quarters' of villas like that
at Montmaurin, on which Dockes places such great emphasis. There is no
doubt that the villa system of exploitation, tied to a Roman state system, was
the typical and most widespread of all centralized economic systems in the
Roman west. But the leap t o the assumption that slaves were the dominant
labour form attached to these villas has yet t o be justified.
55. See Dockks (1979) ch. 4 and Dockks and Servet (1980); he seems t o
place far more credence in the 'peasant revolt' aspect of the Baguadae than
seems iustified bv our sources. This may be a problem with interpretive bias
in oura1upperclass' sources but the assurhption bf large-scale peasant rebellion
should be presented as such, not as something underwritten by t h e empirical
evidence as it stands.
56. Contrast, for example, C . Hill, L o n d o n R e v i e w o f B o o k s 4.2 (4-17 Feb.
1981) 13; E.A. Thompson, T h e Agricultural History R e v i e w 13.3 (1983) 63;
and R. Browning, Past & Present 100 (1983) 147-56, with P.J. Cuff,
A t h e n a e u m 60 (1982) 575-81; R. Sealey, E c h o e s d u m o n d e classique 2.6
(1982) 3 19-35; and C.G. Starr, Journal o f Interdisciplinary History 13
(1983) 521-22. It is not just that these reviews are virulently pro o r con;
they are frankly, even aggressively, ideological from the perspective of the
present t o a degree that is unusual in the modern historiography of antiquity.
On the other hand, an eminent historian not usually noted for his sympathy
for the left, who has spoken bluntly of those who see history 'through the
blood-red spectacles of Marx', has praised the book as a major turning point
in the modern historiography of antiquity: '. . . the writing of ancient history,
a t least in English, will never be quite the same again as a result of this work'
(compare E. Badian, Imperialism in t h e Late R e p u b l i c , 2nd ed., Oxford,
Blackwell (1968) 16, with his review in the N e w Y o r k R e v i e w o f B o o k s 28.19
(2 Dec. 1982) 47-51, at 51). Would that such a change of heart were in
prospect for t h e discipline; I for one, however, will not hold m y breath in
anticipation of the coming revolution in Professor Badian's approach t o
history.
57. F o r example, their work might have suggested more productive ways of
dealing with the problem of religion and dissent, which is handled by the
author in a rather 'black and white' manner (see 445 f.). The fact is that the
relations between religious belief, ecclesiastical organization, and secular
religion are never clear-cut and straightforward. Nevertheless, they d o exist
and cannot be dismissed simply because the correlation is not direct and
obvious - compare Thompson's treatment of Methodism (1968) 28-58.
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Economy and Society

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Anatomy of the vampire bat

Although Marxist ideas have had a profound impact on the develop-

to provide just such an explicit and detailed application of Marxist

has to be done de novo.' What decent Marxist historiography

has been no long tradition of Marxist scholarship in English on

made that concession, however, the author is less flexible on other

templated that 'most awful scene' in the history of mankind, the

empire, including the whole half west of the Adriatic. Most of

mania for Parisian fashion and literature.

t o be abandoned for most of the east, as it must, then we are

any concerted action of a behavioural type by the 'exploited class'

'levels' that are somehow autonomous), of determination 'in the

problem of fugitives, the occasional open violence, murder, and

of postulating an hypostatized 'thing' called Class Consciousness.

points out in defence of his interpretation, it is true that in the

In the two works written by Marx himself subsequent to the

ant of class. But this model assumes a type of primacy of 'the

corporate social groups in ancient societies that were defined by

ploitation'. On the other hand, it also exposed the possessor t o

example in which he states the opposite: that of the non-citizen

claim that immigrant workers are of the same 'working class' as

t o pastoralists, the spectrum covered by the 'class' peasants in-

to say where one community began and another ended. Matters

imperialism, however much these may have been fuelled by class

societies as slave societies (or economies) simply because the

chattel slavery was 'most important' because t h e propertied classes

ation of surpluses will exist in almost any human society. Which

the thorn must be grasped if a satisfactory definition of exploit-

in the main by peasants, serfs, or other types of tied and dependent

justify the appellation 'slave' economy or 'slave' society for the

convention in 1956 (134). Given their origins, these definitions

limited though it is to western European experience, stresses the

of women and children known from modern slavery. For example,

more problematic case of labour, that of 'serfdom'.

Moreover, Ste. Croix does recognize earlier forms of serfdom in

The problem of operating with only three categories of labour

shorthand way of describing a dominant economic process which

degree of actual change wrought by imperial legal pronunciamentos

In lieu of evidence, one is left with hypotheses. One of these

of the superiority of 'Aryan' (i.e. Greek) forms of social organiz-

Aztec in Mesoamerica, or the communities of Sumer, Babylon,

society, and that acquired 'most of their surplus' from a Graeco-

simply, paying as much attention to Polanyi as to Marx. To illustrate

The process of replacement meant that something had to substitute

(though more directly by the landed powerful) as pawns in their

It is just that they accorded far greater strength and priority to

their acquisition of slaves did not bring their efforts at domination

social forces like patronage, appear as exogenous factors, as

punishment (see below) resolve themselves into economic distinc-

world of antiquity this choice may be a mere scholastic one; in

could hardly leave the 'Dominate' in essence what the 'Principate'

class as one of those embedded elements that is strongly influenced

itions of labour he commits himself to a rather juridical view of

There is no doubt that the major processes, and even minor

second century onwards) we see that there is at least one other

autonomous status that could be granted arbitrarily to any in-

firmed his suspicion.56 That may be the book's greatest tribute: