SCIAM: How Captives Changed the World

Catherine M. Cameron describes How Captives Changed the World.

Although captives formed the lowest social stratum of the groups they entered, they nonetheless influenced these societies in profound ways. They introduced their captors to new ideas and beliefs from their natal group, fostering the spread of technologies and ideologies. And they played key roles in the creation of status, inequality and wealth in the groups that abducted them. These factors may well have laid the groundwork for the emergence of a much more sophisticated social structure: the state-level society, in which one person or small group of people hold significant power and authority over a population numbering more than 20,000 and in which group membership is built not on kinship ties but on social class or residence within the boundaries of a nation-state. For all the misery they endured, captives changed the world.

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Cameron disputes …the idealized image of small communities of people who treated one another as equals. In other words, primitive Communism may never have existed. And the earliest societies were slave-owning with slaves being obtained through raiding. This would appear to be more in line with some right-wing thinking in that all societies were based on war and acquisition.

Also, this view would also contradict the notion that slavery originated from insolvent debtors. It would appear that slavery could pre-date the origins of money and debt. Cameron cites some cases in which slaves functioned as a …unit of value and was used as a method of payment.

Perhaps the most surprising finding from my study is that captives were a potent source of social and political power for their captors. In small-scale societies, social power stemmed from the number of followers a leader controlled, most of whom were relatives. However, unwillingly, captives added significant numbers of nonkin followers and thus increased the status of their captors. Captors, especially women of reproductive age, allowed leaders or status-seeking men to increase the size of their family or number of followers without incurring a bride price to the bride's family. And by definition, captives created instant inequality in the societies they joined. As the most marginal and despised members of the group, they raised everyone else's standing.

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Cameron argues that this surplus production from slaves freed a leader from the constraints of kinship. One of which was to restrain growth of inequality within a kin. This surplus production allowed the generation of reciprocity from nonkin through gifts and feasts. This would have allowed a leader to assemble a greater war-band which would allowed for the acquisition of more captives. A positive feedback would then increase further the power and reach of such a leader.

Given the impacts of captives on the cultures they entered, I suspect that they played an important role in one of the fundamental social transitions in human history: the formation of complex, state-level societies. University of Michigan archaeologist Norman Yoffee has argued that state-level societies did not emerge until socioeconomic and governmental positions were no longer linked to kinship. And most archaeologists and other social scientists agree that states were at least in part the result of a few people creating and controlling surplus goods. Captive taking helped early human groups meet both these conditions for the evolution of statehood. Captives were not the only factor in the formation of states, of course. They existed in many small-scale societies around the world without effecting this dramatic social change. But captives were (and still are) taken to bolster the social status of ambitious men and, in my view, gave some of these men the opportunity to accrue the quantities of wealth and power that must have been the foundation of early states.

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This still adheres to the Marxist idea that surplus production gave rise to the class society. In the conventional view, it was specialization, such as pottery-making, etc., that lead to inequality in wealth distribution. Or a priesthood had emerged to compel the generation of surplus goods.

It would be interesting to discover what other factors led to formation of states.

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