Page duBois' new publication is the latest in I.B. Tauris' Ancients and Moderns series; in keeping with the series format it is short (155 pages), takes a diachronic perspective (including material on contemporary and modern slavery), and is designed to provide an overview of the field to first-time students. Moreover, it is part of a recent wave of self-aware, reflective publications on ancient slavery, a trend that began with Keith Bradley's 1994 Slavery and Society at Rome but which only gained mainstream currency with publications such as Niall McKeown's historiographical The Invention of Ancient Slavery (2008) and duBois' own Slaves and Other Objects (2003). Indeed, many of Slavery's main points are reiterations of arguments first made in the latter, simplified and digested for readers who might struggle with the density and heavy theorizing of duBois' earlier publication. It too is polemic, with an explicit humanitarian agenda, and is similarly programmatic, with stand-alone chapters on a range of kindred subjects.

The first chapter (‘Living Slaves’) opens with an interview with a contemporary US slave, born into prostitution, followed by an extract from Lysias 4 (1–2, 7). duBois' intention here seems to be to ‘deprivilege’ the ancient evidence (cf. Bradley 1994, 179 ff.; Proffitt 2009, ch. 2 passim) and to subject it to the same kind of humanitarian scrutiny as the modern sources. She also offers a short definition of slavery, referencing Patterson's Slavery and Social Death (1985). This examination of contemporary slavery is more than extended context setting. Some of the truly horrifying anecdotes detailed (cf. 10–11 on the young, suicidal, Romanian sex slave who ‘apparently suffered from Down's syndrome’) will provide students of ancient slavery with much-needed empathy stimuli. At p. 23 she states that: ‘If I began this book's first chapter with the voices of living slaves, it is because it is so easy to forget the human suffering of slaves now dead, especially those as far in the past as the ancient world of Greek and Roman classical civilisation.’

Ch. 2 (‘Racialised Slavery’) does not attempt to tackle the thorny and oft-raised question of how far ancient historians can and should use comparative evidence from recent slaveries. Instead, duBois uses the plentiful American evidence to highlight the lacunae in the ancient sources, providing a good introduction to the epistemological minefield that is the study of ancient slavery. duBois believes antebellum American slavery to be ‘more accessible than that of the ancient world, in part because we do have evidence that corresponds with our post-modern, individual sense of experience’ (24). Problems, however, appear at p. 25, when, in discussing the differences between ancient, nineteenth-century, and modern sources, she states that: ‘The slave narratives we have from the 19th century in America are documents of the 19th century, untouched by the stylistic innovation of modernism, magic realism and postmodernism, and they therefore have the matter-of-fact, discursive quality of many other texts of their period.’ Is she implying that the advent of post-modernist theory invented self-conscious literature, and that any first-hand account of slavery before then must be verbatim and sacrosanct? What of the genre conventions that shaped the edited, published versions of such narratives?

Ch. 3 (‘Ancient Ideologies’) is the book's first dealing with ancient sources in depth, beginning with slavery in the Hebrew Bible. The largest part of the chapter is given over to a discussion of Aristotle's and Plato's theories of slavery, and their pernicious uses in the American South. Whilst this chapter will add nothing new to the debate in a growing field, it is more accessible than much Aristotle scholarship. Taking one step further her promise in Slaves and Other Objects to emphasize the interrelatedness of slavery and every other aspect of life in individual slave societies, duBois makes conceptual and cultural links between different slave societies remote in time from one another. Her work here lacks detail and covers an overly ambitious amount of material in a little over 150 pages, but to do otherwise is neither the aim of the book nor, indeed, the series.

The fourth chapter (‘Ancient Slavery’) provides an extremely brief summary of the field. It opens with two pages on slavery in the book of Genesis, before moving rapidly through an overview of slavery in the ancient world from Linear B tablets to Marcus Aurelius in the course of thirty-one pages, touching briefly on a range of material including the Odyssey, vase paintings, New Comedy, and Martial.

It is in the book's final chapter that duBois expounds some of her most original — and potentially controversial — ideas. It opens with an interesting, if brief, analysis of the phenomenon of ‘thanatourism’ — the lucrative industry growing around sites of suffering and disaster, such as Auschwitz, the slave forts of Ghana, or former plantations. Although it is true that the tourism of some slave sites may have been sanitized for sightseers, is it really correct to argue that they can ‘comfort those who seek pleasure in a past where they imagine themselves as masters [or Nazis]’ (110)? The implications of this argument are troubling — what of the hundreds of thousands of people who make cultural pilgrimages to the sites of their ancestors' (or living relatives') sufferings in order to better remember and fight against the horrors of past cruelties? Or of those who seek to better educate themselves by visiting such sites? It is in this context that she examines two recent representations of ancient slavery — the films ‘Spartacus’ and ‘Gladiator’, arguing that they too can misrepresent slavery in order to provide audience gratification. It is in this chapter that the polemic nature of duBois' usually watertight and exciting scholarship begins to show its flaws. She does not provide sufficient references to substantiate an extremely controversial point, particularly where her inclusion of Holocaust sites in this category is concerned.

In conclusion, Slavery is unlikely to contribute much that is new to the ongoing debates surrounding ancient slavery; moreover, its occasional but significant flaws in arguments, probably as a result of brevity, prove its major weak point. In offering an overview of more recent slaveries for students of the ancient past, however, and in providing an introduction to self-aware, historiographical approaches to the subject, it will certainly prove a useful addition to any undergraduate reading list.