The City and Its Slaves : Slavery and the Making of Democracy from Athens to the Modern World

Paulin Ismard offers a new analysis of Athenian slave law in The City and Its Slaves, arguing that slavery shaped the very fabric of the Greek city and defined its boundaries. Moving freely between antiquity and the present, Ismard underscores points of connection across labor law, cybernetics, and modern forms of political representation.

What bound the invention of democracy to the practice of slavery in ancient Greece? In this bold book, Paulin Ismard explores that entanglement, offering a new analysis of Athenian slave law. He shows how slaves were defined as “human chattel,” how their labor was organized, and how their speech was weighed in the courts. More than a legal study, the book argues that slavery shaped the very fabric of the Greek city. Athens used slavery to define its own boundaries, and in the process brought into focus its relation to the body, to writing, and to representation itself. The political imagination of Athens—so often celebrated as the cradle of democracy—was itself forged through the experience of slavery. The City and Its Slaves also traces unexpected connections between antiquity and the present. If we are heirs of Greco-Roman civilization, how has slavery, the very condition of that civilization’s development, left its mark on our own history? Moving freely among labor law, cybernetics, and modern forms of political representation, and invoking figures from Herman Melville to Aimé Césaire, Ismard suggests that the Athenian model, in a certain sense, remains our own.