Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy. (Reviews).

Steven A. Epstein, Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy.

(Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past.) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. xvi + 1 pl. + 215 pp. $32.50. ISBN: 0-8014-3848-9.

Steven Epstein does not set out to study slavery as an historical institution, rather, the subject of his book is "how the language of Italian slavery began and endured" (xi). From this unique perspective, he tries to make the case that the European experience of slavery matters in understanding the later experience in the New World and that there was a vital Italian contribution to that European experience. In fact, Epstein's attention to language positions him to address the relations between slavery as historical practice and Italian understandings of race -- which seems more a matter of language than slavery per se. Epstein's approach to language is borrowed from pragmatic linguistics -- a communication-based theory of meaning countering postmodernist views that have rendered meaning individualistic, multiple, and uncertain. Epstein works from a conviction that "surviving documents contain clues about their missing context -- the mold now vanished, that once shaped the words we still have" (14).

As might be expected, the book begins with an examination of the legal vocabulary of slavery (terms such as schiavo, servus, and ancilla), but also explores the personal names given to slaves, indirect sources of the slaves' own words, and the learned and literary stories and reflections traced forward to Giuseppe Mazzini and the Italian Antislavery Society (founded in 1903), even to Gramsci. Epstein concludes hyperbolically that habits of expression that excused slavery remain in use and "thus slavery lives on long after the last slave has died" (61).

Pragmatics is also invoked in studying the language of slave law and contracts. Epstein's close attention to terms used in notarial documents takes them as the result of interaction between buyer, seller, and notary, without reference to the overarching rules of law. The virtue of such an approach lies in the capacity to pick up on identifying terms of skin color and place of origin; the problem with it is overvaluing conditions for security of sale. Study of statutes and local legislation (which Epstein takes as an "explicit" law, in contrast to the Latinate and learned law, although it is hard to see how that was not also explicit) yields a variety of rules about sales, manumissions, learning trades, crimes, and more.

The third chapter (the only one not employing the word language in its title) confronts the bodies of slaves as peculiarly colored and shaped, disciplined, and even sexually exploited. Telling descriptions of anatomical parts suited the need to identify human property. If slaves' words cannot be recovered, their deeds can in the acts of rebellion, flight, and insolence that Epstein labels as cultural resistance. Epstein handles this material with a deft touch. But when he unveils implicit defenses of slavery, we are again faced with a problem. Does the fact that an implicit argument can be resurrected mean that it was powerful, important, or widely held? Arguments against slavery were as old as the institution itself, but its general demise had to await the triumph of liberalism and capitalism.

The fourth chapter addresses the moral economy of slavery. Epstein's point about the amorality of markets prefaces his point that "no evidence indicates moral embarrassment about buying or selling slaves" (159). He even allows himself speculation as to how owners may have kept their slaves on the edge of hunger to reduce costs and impel obedience. As he sees it, words maintained the "surround" that kept slaves as slaves in peoples' minds, including those of the slaves themselves: "words accomplished the important task of making slavery banal" (178).

In sum, Epstein sees the language of slavery fully in place when Columbus described Hispaniola as capable of furnishing 4,000 slaves a year. Plantation slavery did not become the dominant labor form in Italy "not because of moral qualms about having slaves, but simply because of the color and type of slaves the market was capable of supplying" (191).

Epstein has moved the Italian slavery experience from a position of marginality to a centrality that it does not seem to deserve. That there was a continuity as well as development of language and rules into the New World is important to historical understanding of slavery. That the New World situation was simply an adaptation of labor to color and climate is surely to go too far, and to let the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English off the hook for their own racism and language. Epstein's argument downplays the differences between Italian slavery (small scale, largely female domestic labor) and that of the western hemisphere (racial from the start, large scale plantation and mining work), and forgets that some Italians regularly found themselves enslaved and cities such as Venice regularized procedures to ransom captives. There is much in Speaking of Slavery that is useful, but it is nor a systematic exploration of slavery or slave law.