Racialized Commodities : Long-distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greece, c. 700-300 BCE

by: Stedman Parmenter, P.

Price: 99,00 EURO

1 copy in stock

Racialized Commodities
Long-distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greece, c. 700-300 BCE

Christopher Stedman Parmenter

Synthesizes a large number of disparate pieces of evidence from the Archaic and Classical Periods, many of which are typically only studied by specialists
Offers a new, longitudinal study of the ancient Greek slave trade in the Black Sea
Utilizes models from the study of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to make the affirmative argument that ancient slavery existed in reference to the category of race

Description
Between c. 700-300 BCE, the ancient Greeks developed a vivid imaginary of the world's peoples. Ranging from the light-skinned, "gray-eyed Thracians" of the distant north to the "dark-skinned Ethiopians" of the far south, as the poet Xenophanes described them around 540 BCE, Greeks envisioned a world populated by human groups with distinct physiognomies. Racialized Commodities traces how Greece's "racial imaginary"—a confluence of thinking about cultural geography, commodity production, and human physiognomy—emerged from cross-cultural trade between Greece and its Mediterranean neighbors during the Archaic and Classical Periods. It adopts the model of a "commodity biography" to investigate how trade led to the entanglement of cultures, bodies, and things in Archaic and Classical Greece. For merchants, the racial imaginary might be used to play up the "exotic" provenance of their goods to consumers. It might also circulate practical information about customs, pricing, navigation, and doing business in foreign ports.

Archaic Greek attempts to explain foreign bodies were rarely pejorative, and Racialized Commodities begins with some of their earliest images of African peoples, described by Greeks as Egyptians or Ethiopians, before seeking to explain what changed in the early Classical Period. As the Persian Empire loomed and Greek cities became increasingly dependent on enslaved labor, negative stereotypes of Thracians and Scythians became widespread and coalesced into the charged idea of the barbarous—the "barbarian."

Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: The world of the Elephantine papyrus
Chapter 1: A short history of natron
Chapter 2: Egypt in your hand
Chapter 3: From ancestor to 'Other'
Part II: Letters from the Pontus
Chapter 4: Journeys into slavery
Chapter 5: Slavery and the balance of trade
Chapter 6: Inventing whiteness
Postscript
Appendices
Bibliography

Racialized Commodities : Long-distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greece, c. 700-300 BCE

by: Stedman Parmenter, P.

• ISBN-13: 9780197757116
• ISBN-03: 0197757111
• Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2024

Price: 99,00 EURO

1 copy in stock