Public Slaves

The chapter presents some manifestations of public slavery in different periods of history, with a focus on the archaeological evidence. Luciani’s contribution offers an overview of public slaves in ancient Rome and other cities in Roman Italy. Binsfeld’s second section focusses on public slaves in the cities of the provinces in the western part of the Roman Empire. Webster’s contribution concerns slaves owned by some of the chartered British and Dutch companies active in the African and Indian Ocean slave trades between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries: the British Royal African Company and the Dutch East India Company. Engmann’s section centres on the archaeology of so-called ‘castle slaves’ who worked at Christiansborg Castle in Accra, Ghana (Africa) in the eighteenth century. Teelock’s contribution focusses on slaves owned by the French East India Company and the French government in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mauritius.