La main d'œuvre agricole en Méditerranée archaïque. Statuts et dynamiques économiques

The present volume assembles studies on the evolution of the status groups defining the agricultural workforce in the Near East, the Greek world and the Western Mediterranean between the 8th and 5th c. AD. Personal statuses are considered not as external determinations of economic behaviour but as signs and instruments of the transformations which during the Archaic period affect the organisation and control of the workforce and the access to land and its resources. The generalisation, if not creation, of status groups of Helotic or Penestic type and chattel slavery, the expansion of slavery for debt and of money in the form of weighed metal are essential events in the process of formation of Greek city-states. These are not isolated; this volume gives their due place to Near Eastern and Mediterranean societies where analogous developments appear. It shows that the essential changes in the Greek world are echoing other, which follow their own periodisation but nevertheless reveal not only connectedness but also analogous structural evolutions and a shared history.