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Roman Inequality: Affluent Slaves, Businesswomen, Legal Fictions

Roman Inequality: Affluent Slaves, Businesswomen, Legal Fictions

Author: Edward E. Cohen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780197687345
Published In: July 2023
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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Description
Contents

Details

Roman Inequality explores how in Rome in the first and second centuries CE a number of male and female slaves, and some free women, prospered in business amidst a population of generally impoverished free inhabitants and of impecunious enslaved residents.

Edward E. Cohen focuses on two anomalies to which only minimal academic attention has been previously directed: (1) the paradox of a Roman economy dependent on enslaved entrepreneurs who functioned, and often achieved considerable personal affluence, within a legal system that supposedly deprived unfree persons of all legal capacity and human rights; (2) the incongruity of the importance and accomplishments of Roman businesswomen, both free and slave, successfully operating under legal rules that in many aspects discriminated against women, but in commercial matters were in principle gender-blind and in practice generated egalitarian juridical conditions that often trumped gender-discriminatory customs. This book also examines the casuistry through which Roman jurists created "legal fictions" facilitating a commercial reality utterly incompatible with the fundamental precepts-inherently discriminatory against women and slaves--that Roman legal experts ("jurisprudents") continued explicitly to insist upon. Moreover, slaves' acquisition of wealth was actually aided by a surprising preferential orientation of the legal system: Roman law-to modern Western eyes counter-intuitively-in reality privileged servile enterprise, to the detriment of free enterprise.

Beyond its anticipated audience of economic historians and students and scholars of classical antiquity, especially of Roman history and law, Roman Inequality will appeal to all persons working on or interested in gender and liberation issues.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Inequality

Chapter 2. Fiction: Reconciling Economic Reality and Juridicial Principles

Chapter 3. Opportunity: From Freedom to Slavery-From Slavery to Freedom

Chapter 4. Businesswomen: In Servitude and in Freedom

Chapter 5. Servile Imperialism: In Power, In Servitude

Works Cited

General Index

Index of Passages Cited