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Enslavement: Past and Present by Orlando Patterson should be required reading for any economist or economic historian interested in long-run development and growth, race, inequality, political economy, or institutional development. Patterson synthesizes decades of his cross-disciplinary scholarship into an ambitious comparative framework to understand slavery, built on two main pillars: (i) slavery as “social death”, defined as a condition of total domination, natal alienation and dishonor, and (ii) a “bundle of rights” approach that permits systematic comparison across societies and periods. This review, after summarizing the book’s central arguments, offers three critiques—the limited applicability of social death to West and Central African slavery, insufficient attention to the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and the problematic extension to “modern slavery”—and proposes a research agenda focused on agency and resilience, diasporic identity, and reparations.
