Collective Manumission Acts

Abstract In this chapter, the close connection between freedom and justice appears in full sight. Liberating decrees of justice were part of royal propaganda to highlight that the just king not only enforced justice but, by doing this, also granted collective liberation. Within the social institutions of corvée and debt slavery, collective liberation emerged in special political situations. The social institutions of corvée and debt slavery, the fugitive’s flight therefrom, as well as individual debt releases, are part of the socio-economic longue durée of the ancient world. However, sporadic royal acts of collective release belong to the political history of ancient Near Eastern kings. Collective liberation set sporadic limits to the fact that the powerful could and did, time and again, force the weak into debt slavery. The idea of justice entailed manumission decrees by the king to limit the economic freedom of the powerful and grant liberation of the indebted weak. Typically, at the beginning of a new reign, the new king legitimized himself by enacting “decrees of justice”, by which the people of the land were released and their debts nullified. Solon and Nehemiah are two famous examples of political leaders who enforced collective liberation in ancient Greece and Israel, respectively, when the kingdom had vanished from the scene. In Solonic Athens, chattel slavery was totally abolished, perhaps even debt slavery.