Rio, Alice: Slavery After Rome, 500–1100 (Oxford Studies in Medieval European History 5). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Alice Rio is Professor of Medieval History at King’s College, London. Slavery after Rome, her second monograph, is dedicated to, as Rio herself expresses it, “the vexed question of the fate of slavery in the centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire” (p. 1). The book has the difficult task of participating in the scholarly discussion on what is normally called the passage from Roman and post-Roman systems of slavery to serfdom, which is generally considered to characterise Western European society by the Central Middle Ages. Rio sees this process as one of strong continuities and slow societal and institutional transformation. While considering Roman practices as a starting point for understanding the early medieval context, the author consciously avoids portraying slavery and serfdom as two mutually exclusive social realities, with the former being supplanted by the latter either in the late or post-Roman period, or in the passage to the Central Middle Ages. Instead, this book studies unfreedom itself as a strategy, used by landed elites to control the land and the labour pool.

The book is divided into three parts. In part one, Rio studies how a person could lose their freedom or leave the status of unfreedom in different parts of the post-Roman world, each of them studied separately. For what concerns practices of slave raiding and trading, Rio demonstrates how such practices were most frequently applied, and most lucrative, in the Northern and Eastern peripheries of the Medieval West. Trading partners for such endeavours could be as distant as the newly established Muslim polities. By contrast, the elites in better established polities in Francia and England relied more substantially on the revenues of landed exploitation and therefore did not primarily engage in slave raiding. Other ways of entering or leaving slavery are showcased, namely self-sale, debt slavery, and penal enslavement, as well as different forms of manumission; here as well, the author divides the study according to the main political entities in early medieval Europe. Rio’s theory of seeing unfreedom as an elite strategy of control proves its great usefulness in disentangling the complex terminology of unfreedom in early medieval sources, which resembled the realities of socio-economic life to varying degrees.

Part two moves to the question of how the status of unfreedom was used as a strategy of social domination in the early Middle Ages, and to what profit. This part again has a strong geographical focus, and both chapters are divided among different polities. In chapter four Rio studies domestic or household slavery, while chapter five is dedicated to slaves working at agricultural estates; in both cases, particular attention is given to the permeability between the different forms of slavery and exploitation of the unfree. She showcases a divide between Northern and Southern Europe: in the North, there was a greater permeability between the work in the household and in the fields. Rio affirms how in Francia, for example, it may have been normal for the same slave to serve both in the field and in the house during their lifetime. For the South – in particularly Southern Italy – she sees a much stronger divide in the social classifications and roles between house slaves and those working further away from their owners, e.g., in agriculture, to the point that different social identities became visible between these two groups.

Part three is dedicated to “unfreedom as an institution” (p. 215). Rio examines the rules and regulations found in the extant legal and normative material. Here the author shows that, while concepts and citations from Roman law remained an important device in the upholding of the legitimacy of masters and landlords, these were used in different manners throughout the period of study and in different areas of Europe. In each case, they generally followed the needs of the landholding elites. While this variation is well known among historians, Rio’s lens on relationships of power provides a convincing and novel explanation of the phenomenon. The book concludes with a quick look at the 12th century, where the author locates the final institutional changes that lead to the establishment of serfdom as the main mode of unfreedom. Again, she favours the view that this was a slow shift that resulted from changing strategies by landlords who adapted to their economic needs. She also mentions the specialisation of secular and canon law in that period, which transformed the legal significance of unfreedom itself.

Slavery After Rome is a stimulating book and an important step in the study of post-Roman slavery, and deserves its wide recognition among not only scholars of pre-modern unfreedom, but also among legal, social and economic historians of pre-modern Europe in general. It is an essential read for any scholar of slavery, but its complexity and profound interaction with past scholarship may not make it the best point of entry for students and scholars new to the topic.