Slavery is a term that has proved difficult to define, even if most people today classify it as the condition of African Americans in the United States before the Civil War. Joseph C. Miller has sought to get around this limitation in two ways: first, by eschewing institutional definitions (as a list of, for example, traits), and second, by considering it historically and within historically created environments outside its locus classicus. In his brilliant opening chapter, targeting the influential attempt by Orlando Patterson to create a cross-cultural, universal definition of slavery (as ‘social death’), Miller argues that slavery could never be social death since slaves exist in society and have society even within their own community. Slavery, he contends, must be viewed as a process, not as a finished product.

With this statement out of the way, Miller then takes on the more difficult challenge of placing slavery in a historical content. He begins this by examining slaves (here defined as mobile outsiders) from the perspective of the development of ancient Eurasian societies. He attempts to show that, as societies developed, leaders sought to use the services of these unattached people to build power and create individual spaces for the centralization of authority.

Keeping to this perspective, Miller next turns his attention to Africa, about which, as a senior scholar of the continent, he is best qualified to comment. Africa also gets pride of place because it was the first source of slaves for the American societies that relied on them, and because it is the focus of much of the subsequent historiography concerning slavery. Miller argues that African societies were essentially communal and small-scale, and even those that historians have called ‘kingdoms’ or ‘empires’ often did not escape the pressures of their communal base and ethos. As in Eurasia, slavery was a way out for the elite of African communal societies to gather resources and consolidate power.

In the African case, the capacity to generate slaves for domestic use went hand in hand with the demand for slaves from outside the continent: to begin with, from the Mediterranean world (notably, the world of the early Muslim empires of North Africa); subsequently, and more consequentially, from the expansion of western Europe and the development of slave-based plantation societies in the New World. Thus, the emerging African elites enslaved other Africans and sold them to these outsider, frequently commercial, groups, while retaining enough wealth in both slaves and other resources to build their power. However, for African societies, this power-building had a cost, resulting from dealings with merchants who offered their goods on credit. The politics of debt, which figure prominently in Miller’s argument, placed pressure on African elites to continue supplying slaves to creditors from North Africa and, especially, Europe. In so doing, their aggrandisement became intimately tied to the slave trade.

In the final chapter, Miller applies the logic of debt and control to the slave-using societies of the Americas. He notes that concepts such as ‘free labour’ do a bad job of defining labour forms in the Americas, which were cash poor and relied on mechanisms other than wages to compel labour, not just for imported Africans but also for European and indigenous people. He shows how merchant groups anchored in metropolitan societies drew on the power of credit to gain control and wrest profits from the slave-using elite of the Americas, perpetuating the cycle of debt and enslavement in which the Africans had already been caught. This in turn pushed slave-trading merchants in Africa to participate in slavery to the Americas, despite their position of disadvantage vis-à-vis the ultimate players in this game, the monarchs of western Europe and their commercial allies, who manipulated the alliance to establish absolutism.

Miller’s argument is quite original, though aspects of it have already been presented in some detail for the cases of Angola and Brazil in his classic 1988 study, Way of death. The argument’s originality, however, is problematic in this larger study. This is because Miller deliberately goes against a good deal of the historiography on Africa and America (and Eurasia in his earlier chapter) concerning political power and governance, as well as that on the specifics of the mechanisms of the slave trade. The data underlying his argument is presented at a high level of abstraction without much in the way of examples from case studies or direct examination of the evidence. Often, the secondary literature that is cited (sparingly, it must be said) on Africa does not frame the data in terms that readily support his argument.

Thus, Slavery as history should probably not be considered a summation of existing knowledge, or even a reworking of existing knowledge. Whether its argument can be sustained awaits more thorough historical and archaeological research. It is a book that challenges scholars to investigate the subject further.