In some human societies throughout history, there existed enslaved people who owned enslaved people. Details of these arrangements varied greatly, but it is possible to identify two broad cases: peculium slavery and elite political slavery.
In Ancient Rome, a peculium was an enslaved person's informal property. Enslaved people were considered property by Roman law, and thus could themselves not own any possessions. However, in everyday Roman life, a large volume of business was overseen by enslaved people, which suited their masters as it freed them to attend to other responsibilities. Thus, an astute slave could save money from such transactions and might buy additional enslaved people, who could assist with business transactions or menial work; in this way there could exist enslaved people who owned enslaved people. The enslaved person overseeing the business operations, unless liberated, was still considered property of their master by law, despite functioning in society similarly to a free citizen. Similar practices to this could be found in Jewish law, slave-era Brazil, Africa, China, and, to a lesser extent, in North America.
In some polities, rulers preferred to appoint enslaved people as government officials, as they were more easily controllable. In the most developed form of this practice, the enslaved person would be separated from their parents at a young age — in some cases, castrated — and brought up in the royal household, knowing no other loyalty. Accordingly, enslaved people of significant ability were gradually promoted to positions of great trust, including military command, management of palace affairs, and sometimes high political office. It was possible for enslaved people to own enslaved people in these situations. As with peculium slavery, unless the ruler chose to liberate the enslaved person, they remained enslaved, and could be degraded, tortured, or killed at the order of the ruler. Societies which practiced this form of slavery existed in the Islamic world, including the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, and large portions of West Africa, along with early modern Russia and imperial China.
Introduction
That slaves acquired slaves of their own may seem surprising to Westerners. But their understanding of slavery has been dominated by a stereotype drawn from the plantation economy of the Americas, which was not typical of all times and places.
In his "ground-breaking" comparative study Slavery and Social Death (1982), Jamaican scholar Orlando Patterson wrote: Patterson did not undertake to prove his claim systematically since it was not central to his book. This article has been compiled from a diversity of secondary sources; they seem to show that slave-owning slaves can indeed be found in many eras and cultures, though not universally (and though eventually forbidden in Russia).
Historical sources for scholars Most slaves are completely forgotten. A given person could be the slave of a slave without it leaving a trace. For example, classical Chinese historians—thorough and painstaking—did not conceive it was part of their duty to record the doings of low persons; when they mention slavery, it is by chance. Slavery is far better known to us from Roman sources, and this for an unusual combination of circumstances.
First, though Roman slaves had no rights themselves their doings were continually affecting those who did. It immensely complicated Roman law. Roman jurists wrote about it abundantly; "there are few branches of the law in which the slave does not prominently appear".For William Warwick Buckland, author of the leading book on Roman slavery law, it was "the most characteristic part of the most characteristic intellectual product of Rome. There is scarcely a problem which can present itself, in any branch of the law, the solution of which may not be affected by the fact that one of the parties to the transaction is a slave, and, outside the region of procedure, there are few branches of the law in which the slave does not prominently appear". (.) Many fragments of their writings have been preserved.The peculium alone is mentioned in over 1,000 fragments preserved in Justinian's Digest; slaves of slaves are mentioned in sixty-four: .
Secondly, there was a peculiar funeral custom. Roman slaves, after years of labour for their owners, were fairly often manumitted (liberated). They were expected to be grateful, and show it, by leaving a suitable funerary inscription, with biographical details. Freed slaves were glad to go along with the custom since it showed their family had gone up in the world. Paradoxically, while ordinary free plebeians ended up packed into unmarked graves (“a uniform mass of black, viscid, pestilential, unctious matter”), ex-slaves commemorated themselves in marble or other durable substances. Three-quarters of funerary inscriptions in Rome concern former slaves.
An astonishing number of these public inscriptions have survived; (and see below). Since 1853 German scholars have been recording every one of them (the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, or CIL). They have been placed online. Then there are archaeological finds in all parts of the empire. Piecing these bits of information together scholars can learn that, for example, Fortunata, a slave girl in first-century London, was bought for a handsome sum by one Vegetus, a civil servant who was himself an official slave of Montanus, an important slave of the Roman emperor himself (title image, and below).
It seems that no other pre-modern society has such a density of detail survived. For the others, it is by chance that the records mention slaves, still less slaves of slaves. On the other hand, in the Islamic world some slaves became famous. In India, the slave of a slave became a king.See below, Islamic world, Delhi Sultanate.
Definitions What is a "slave" is endlessly debated, but is a matter of definition. In this article information is supplied in each pertinent section for the reader to judge.
The expression "slave of a slave" has also been used as a metaphor e.g. for a downtrodden way of life, or as a form of politeness (akin to the phrase "your humble servant").
As part of an upwardly mobile slave's private fortune Although the slave's peculium is best known from ancient Rome, the concept that even a slave could gradually acquire property, including slaves of his/her own, occurs spontaneously in other societies. For example, in Brazil and West Africa it seems that it was evolved by the slaves themselves, often as an emancipation strategy, rarely being mentioned by the elite.
Rome Contradiction
The legal status of slaves was abysmal and they could be treated with great cruelty (see next section). Yet it was a standing joke in Rome that some managed to buy their freedom and retire as rich men. There was even a lawThe lex Papia Poppea: . that said what was supposed to happen if an ex-slave died worth more than 100,000 sesterces. Some retired slaves bought their way into the upper ranks of society; it has been estimated that "about one fifth of the local aristocracy of Italy was descended from slaves". Since slaves were not supposed to be capable of owning property at all, the seeming contradiction should now be explained.
Status
In traditional Roman law (ius civile) slaves were not persons: they were things. They could not own property, contract a valid marriage, sue or be sued in a court of law nor give evidence (except under torture). In criminal cases (except high treason) slaves could not testify against their owners at all.
Slaves could be sold, sexually abused or accidentally beaten to death with impunity, or exposed to die when too old and worn out to serve. According to Jennifer Glancy,
Ordinary human decency, or enlightened self-interest, might well produce humane treatment; but there were practically no effective laws to enforce it.A supposed check — that if a master was cruel to his slave he might be held up to public obloquy by the Roman censor — was, according to Professor Alan Watson, ineffective: . If there were laws that said a master must not deliberately kill or disable his own slave without cause, it was not out of pity for the slave: what was objected to was the wanton damage to heritable property.
In the Eastern Roman Empire under Christian emperors conditions improved in some respects; for example, slaves were forbidden to be forcibly prostituted, though they remained open to abuse and exploitation.
Slaves as business administrators
Large numbers of slaves were employed in a vast array of economic activities, including managing a business.
In Rome it was unseemly for the upper classes of society to engage in commerce. Yet some had large fortunes they meant to increase. Accordingly, they invested in agriculture and, as they acquired more farms, put in confidential slaves to manage them; or they invested in town houses and employed slaves as rent-collectors and property managers, or even set up slave physicians or theatrical performers. "In Rome, clerks, accountants, commercial agents, teachers, doctors, rhetoricians, and even superintendents, were predominantly slaves".It has been argued that to employ slaves was more or less obligatory for rich men since free citizens could not validly act as their agents: . Still other slaves were put to manage shops or factories, or supervise a moneylending business. "Slaves travelled to Africa or Gaul to collect debts, buy things, or run businesses". "As a general rule, supervision of the master's holdings was entrusted to an entire hierarchy of financial agents working in both city and country, who carried out the wishes of their dominus and whom we know from inscriptions".
If a master suspected his slaves were cheating him, he had the right to interrogate them under torture; he did not need a court order. Hence rich men increasingly relied on slaves to administer their affairs: "slaves even became the absolute rule when it came to the administration of money". It has been pointed out that most of the unjust servants mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew were managerial slaves of this class; the author takes it for granted they will be tortured with "weeping and gnashing of teeth". Yvon Thébert thought that, nevertheless, there were some free men (not many) who deliberately sold themselves into slavery in order to get lucrative jobs as business managers. An American economist could not believe managers were appointed from the enslaved classes and argued that they must have been free men who had volunteered for slave status.
A slave who was good at business management was much more valuable; hence some bright slave children were educated as skilled administrators, being taught to keep accounts and so forth.
There were slaves who were allowed to go into business for themselves, see next section, the master getting a cut of the profits. In this way masters indirectly benefited from activities which they could not, or would not, perform themselves. For example, Cato the Elder, being a senator, was legally forbidden to be a shipowner, so he appointed confidential slaves to do it for him, making a lot of money that way. According to the historian Plutarch, Cato He ran a paid brothel for his slaves; they were strictly forbidden to go elsewhere, wrote Plutarch.
Slaves' informal property: the peculium
Already in the Roman Republic slaves were allowed to earn a peculium, which at first was just an informal fund, like a child's allowance. Probably slaves had been 'buying' and 'selling' things informally long before the law had to grapple with the anomaly: they could own nothing, so how could they buy?