Racialized Commodities

This is a landmark intervention in the study of race in antiquity as well as studies in ancient slavery and Greek culture more broadly. This exciting, innovative, and thought-provoking book breaks new ground by linking the emergence of an ancient Greek idea of 'race' to the dramatic upsurge in long distance trade during the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. This is a persuasive and altogether timely demonstration of how race operated in ancient Greece. * Joseph Skinner, Newcastle University * For those interested in the history of race linked to perceived skin color, this book will be both a revelation and a resource. Drawing especially on histories of trade, the author charts the way the Greeks came to see and associate black skin with prestige and power and, later, the way a certain image of 'whiteness' formed to sanction chattel slavery, particularly in democratic Athens. * Susan Lape, University of Southern California * There is much to admire in this book. [Parmenter] ranges widely and authoritatively over different classes of evidence-literary, epigraphic, papyrological, archaeological, and visual-and he displays a command of the literature for areas such as Egypt, the Aegean, and the Black Sea which are often studied separately. He appears to be as comfortable analyzing literary texts and archaeological artifacts as he is discussing Critical Race Theory or Soviet historiography. And much illumination is provided by reference to comparative materials and approaches-most notably those derived from study of the transatlantic slave trade but also with regard to Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, the Great Migration and its aftermath in the United States, the eighteenth-century British pottery industry, and medieval Genoese and Venetian slave trading. * Classical Philology *