Use Of Slave Labor Research Articles

From Stores to Banks

The Brazilian retail sector has been experiencing a dynamic involving, on the one hand, a strong approximation toward the financial institutions and, on the other hand, an intense concentration process, foreign capital participation, initial public offers, and business operations internationalization, boosting the retail financialization environment. This paper explores this dynamic by focusing on the organizational impacts resulting from the diffusion of a financial logic on Brazilian financial retail field construction, gathering together different actors struggling to define the field’s rules. The paper uses secondary sources as well as 57 interviews with employees from the country’s 19 largest retail stores about their work transformation. Interesting insights ranging from embarrassment stemming from the failure to fulfill goals, retail workers’ rights (being legally considered banking workers), to the use of slave labor by multinational fashion supply chains are garnered. All of these elements connected underpin the Brazilian Financial Retail field. O setor varejista brasileiro passa por uma dinâmica envolvendo por um lado, uma forte aproximação com as instituições financeiras e, por outro, por um intenso processo de concentração, atuação de capital estrangeiro, aberturas de capital, internacionalização dos negócios, profissionalização da gestão, fomentando a financeirização do varejo nacional. Esta pesquisa visa contribuir explorando os impactos organizacionais resultantes da difusão dessa lógica de inspiração financeira sobre o varejo brasileiro que logra unir diferentes atores e suas respectivas fontes de (diferentes e divergentes) capitais na definição dos contornos e regras de um novo campo de atuação para as empresas varejistas. Os resultados desta pesquisa envolvem dados de fontes secundárias, além de informações colhidas junto a 57 entrevistas realizadas com funcionários das 19 maiores varejistas atuantes no país sobre mudanças na organização de seu trabalho. Os resultados apresentados envolvem desde situações embaraçosas relacionadas ao não cumprimento das metas, passando pela equiparação de funcionários do varejo a bancários, até o uso de mão-de-obra escrava por grandes cadeias de moda varejistas. Juntos, estes elementos corroboram a construção do campo do varejo financeiro brasileiro.

Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River by Matthew Salafia (review)

Reviewed by: Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River by Matthew Salafia Ted Sickler (bio) Keywords Slavery, Ohio River Valley, Border states, Labor systems, Servitude Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River. By Matthew Salafia. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. 320. Hardcover, $55.00.) Matthew Salafia steps into his well-layered study, Slavery’s Borderland, with a scene familiar to readers of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Early in the novel, Eliza, a slave and maid, flees Kentucky with her child by running across a frozen Ohio River in a desperate dash north toward freedom. Dogged by slave hunters that shout at her from the frozen shore, she steps barefoot from one cragged ice block to the next. Will they catch her and return her south to slavery? Frequently drawn or etched in subsequent years by various artists, including a lithograph produced by Currier and Ives, the moment produces the same kind of horror Stowe sought while stoking antislavery furor in 1852. But Salafia argues that viewing the river as simply a historical demarcation between slavery and freedom only underscores a fiction. Rather than a dividing line between northern and southern interests, the Ohio River Valley of the nineteenth century—specifically the borderlands of Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio—is best understood as a complicated region of contested meaning and, at times, compromised intent. Starting with an account of eighteenth-century European settlement and political development of the Ohio Valley, Salafia arranges his chapters in chronological order, slowly building to the Civil War era. Along the way, he deftly employs an organizational technique that revisits overlapping periods from multiple points of view. This allows the author to explore how whites within the region’s cross-river economy resisted the sectional schism over slavery by taking steps to control African Americans’ northward migration while also developing different labor systems in different states. At times, for example, the southern slave who looked northward likely saw only a slightly different version of the life he or she knew. The urge to run to freedom waxed and waned as a result. For whites, however, “accommodation” became a watchword. Regionally, states in opposition over the use of slave labor, and wary of agreement— for different reasons—about the necessity of limiting African Americans’ mobility, pushed for social stability as a shared cause. Profit came first. The result, according to Salafia, was a borderland better understood as “a reasonable and rational alternative to the growing sectional conflict” [End Page 309] of Civil War (14). With this “many borders” thematic approach, the work provides a comparative stance akin to the “many souths” and “many emancipations” conceptual considerations now employed by historians of American and global slavery. To support his study, Salafia re-examines slavery from a variety of sources. First, he turns to the narratives and advertisements regarding fugitive slaves. These individuals experienced a shift in their identities and status as they passed across the borderlands. Their numbers, too, often rattled northern whites, who were forced to rethink how an influx of freedom-searching African Americans might impact a region where slavery was not the predominant labor system. For additional evidence, Salafia looks at narratives left by members of Kentucky’s slave population. These individuals, wrestling with their unending status as bound laborers in an area so close to free soil, provided nuanced understandings of what the author refers to as a slave/free dichotomy. Finally, he looks at how the region’s African American population, both slave and free, shifted over time and sparked concerns among whites about the loss of laborers on both sides of the river. The evidence points to three factors: northern whites’ racist views of African Americans regardless of their working status, similarities and fluidity between bound and free laborers on both sides of the river, and the high risk attached to running away from a southern master resident within the borderlands. These factors, Salafia argues, limited a slave’s desire and ability to become a free laborer on the northern side of the Ohio River. Two of Salafia’s insightful observations are particularly valuable for historians working on other borderlands between...

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Ernst Hasenclever em Gongo-Soco: exploração inglesa nas minas de ouro em Minas Gerais no século XIX

Based on the report of Ernst Hasenclever on his visit to the Gong-Soco gold mine in 1839, this article seeks to understand the labor and administrative organizational system implemented by the English gold mining companies in Minas Gerais, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century at a time when the slave-based system was in its final stages. Our objective is to show the continuity of the administrative system and the use of slave labor by the English companies from the 1830s until the end of the century, despite the pressure applied by England against the transatlantic slave trade and the prohibition of Her Majesty's subjects to own slaves anywhere in the world.

THE ROLE OF SLAVE LABOR IN GROUNDNUT PRODUCTION IN EARLY COLONIAL KANO

ABSTRACTThis article reinforces the interpretation of numerous scholars who have highlighted the role of slave labor in groundnut production during the ‘cash-crop revolution’ in West Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also expands Jan Hogendorn's argument on the African initiatives involved in the expansion of groundnut production in colonial Northern Nigeria. In particular, it provides evidence of the key role of the emir of Kano (Abbas) and important merchants in the transition to groundnut cultivation and the significant use of slave labor by these large estate-holders. The article focuses mainly on the Fanisau unit of Kano.

Príncipe eclipsed: Commemorating the confirmation of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity

This article reflects on the West African island of Príncipe as the venue of one of the most significant events in 20th century science, the confirmation of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity during an eclipse expedition led by Arthur Eddington. It takes as its starting point the 2009 commemoration of the event, involving international institutions promoting scientific knowledge and tourism, and overlays this with another, colonial history of Príncipe as the focus of a controversy around the alleged use of slave labour in its early 20th century cocoa plantations. What is the anthropologist's license in problematising the commemoration, and what are the specific ethnographic insights afforded by this unique event?

Front and Back Covers, Volume 25, Number 5. October 2009

Front and back cover caption, volume 25 issue 5FIELDWORK AND TECHNOLOGYThe images on the front and back covers illustrate two of several reflections in this issue on the impacts of technology on the world studied by anthropologists. On the front cover, an internet cafe is one of the first sights to greet visitors to Dhunche, once a ‘remote’ area in northern Nepal. On the back cover, a youth tries out a telescope during the commemoration of the confirmation of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity at Roça Sundy, Príncipe, where Arthur Eddington observed a total solar eclipse.In his editorial, Bob Simpson remarks on how much the craft of fieldwork has changed as a result of the widespread on‐site availability of communications technology, placing even the remotest sites within reach of home or employer. In this post‐Malinowskian fieldwork, where the distinction between back here and out there has disappeared, what are the implications of this for our craft and for the quality of our obversations?Gisa Weszkalnys reflects on her fieldwork site of Príncipe as the location of one of the most important events in 20th‐century science, the confirmation of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. She overlays the 2009 commemoration of this event, with international institutions promoting scientific knowledge and tourism, with another, colonial history of Príncipe as the focus of a controversy around the alleged use of slave labour in its cocoa plantations.As Kristín Loftsdóttir argues in her article, science and technology are among a range of markers used to determine who is most in need of international development, thus contributing to what she calls the ‘racialization of development’.Akbar Ahmed alerts us to the fear in Washington, DC and Islamabad that the Taliban, who have recently taken over his field site in Swat Province, could potentially destabilize world order by appropriating nuclear technology.There are evidently many ways in which science and technology can and do affect our field sites. One of the greatest challenges for anthropology will be to experiment creatively and innovate with appropriate technologies in partnership. In this way we can generate more egalitarian conversations in an atmosphere of mutual respect, trust and tolerance. Whatever fieldwork becomes, it must be founded on such engagement with the broadest of publics, while making the most of these new technologies.

The pharmaceutical industry and the German National Socialist Regime: I.G. Farben and pharmacological research

Before the National Socialist party came to power, the German pharmaceutical industry constituted an international reference as far as the development of new medicines was concerned, having been responsible for synthetic analgesics (phenacetin, phenazones, acetylsalicylic acid), arsphenamine, barbiturates and sulfonamides. The year 1925 saw the founding of I.G. Farben (Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG), a conglomerate of companies that would monopolize the country's chemical production and come to own all its major pharmaceutical industries. During the World War II, I.G. Farben participated in numerous operations associated with the criminal activities of the Nazi executive, including the use of slave labour in plants built close to concentration camps, such as that at Auschwitz. With regard to medical and pharmacological research projects, I.G. Farben became involved in experimental programmes using patients from the Nazi regime's euthanasia programmes and healthy subjects recruited without their consent from concentration camps, on whom various pharmacological substances were tested, including sulfamide and arsenical derivatives and other preparations whose composition is not precisely known (B-1012, B-1034, 3382 or Rutenol, 3582 or Acridine), generally in relation to the treatment of infectious diseases, such as typhus, erysipelas, scarlet fever or paratyphoid diarrhoea. Furthermore, I.G. Farben played a decisive role in the German army's chemical warfare programme, contributing to the development of the first two neurotoxic substances, later known as 'nerve agents', tabun and sarin. Some of these activities came to light as a result of the one the famous Nuremberg Trials in 1947, which saw 24 executives and scientists from I.G. Farben brought to justice for, among other offences, the use of slave labour in the concentration camps and forced experimentation with drugs on prisoners.

The Paradoxes of Slavery in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko

The Paradoxes of Slavery in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko Diana Jaher Critics generally base their analyses of ambivalent representations of slavery in Oroonoko, Thomas Southerne's popular 1695 play, on its hero.1 By concentrating on Oroonoko, an African prince, many scholars argue that Southerne (1660–1746) objects, not to slavery, but to either the enslavement of aristocrats2 or the institution's excessive brutality.3 Like his prototype in the play's source, Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko; Or The Royal Slave (1688), Oroonoko, is, in fact, an extraordinary case: an idealized member of the nobility whose English owners condemn his bondage and exempt him and his wife, Imoinda, from the harsh labor and punishments that slaves typically experience. Lesser-born slaves, the play appears to conclude, deserve their condition, if not its associated cruelties. Southerne's Oroonoko, however, depicts a third slave of almost equal importance to the prince and his wife: Oroonoko's attendant, Aboan, second only to the title character in the original production's printed cast list.4 While some scholars include Aboan in their critiques of Southerne's attitude toward slavery, they often minimize his presence5 or characterize him as a "kneeling, supplicant African."6 Yet he proves himself Oroonoko's equal—at times his superior—in insight and initiative throughout the play and voices much of its antislavery rhetoric. By focusing on Aboan, I explore a tension in Oroonoko that registers a fundamental critique of slavery as an institution that is absent from Behn's novella: Southerne subverts one major rationalization he offers for enslavement—the traditional aristocratic justification that slaves are naturally inferior and therefore suited to bondage7 —by presenting an exceptional, nonaristocratic slave.8 [End Page 51] Southerne's personal beliefs regarding slavery are impossible to discern in Oroonoko: the play presents a range of attitudes. Rosenthal and Jordan and Love mention that at the time Oroonoko was written, the playwright sought financial support from Christopher Codrington (1668–1710), a wealthy slave owner who treated his slaves with unusual benevolence by baptizing and educating them.9 While the influence of Codrington's humanitarian actions (which did not extend to freeing the slaves) may have informed some of the play's language—Aboan's graphic descriptions of physical abuse, for example—Southerne's desire for a patron's money is not necessarily evidence of the dramatist's own opinions. More likely, the playwright shared his countrymen's prevailing attitudes toward slavery: despite English distaste for the institution—slavery was not legally sanctioned in England, although it was in her colonies10 — many recognized "its apparent contribution to the collective wealth and power of the empire."11 Whatever their personal feelings, most English accepted slavery with an accommodation made more palatable by the institution's distance—Surinam, Oroonoko's setting, was an ocean away—and thought little more about it.12 Given their views, it is unlikely that English audiences for Southerne's play closely analyzed its position on slavery. Not until the late eighteenth century, when antislavery rhetoric was more widespread, was Oroonoko considered an abolitionist text.13 English enthusiasm for "collective wealth" informs much of the play's pro-slavery stance. The Whigs, the decade's dominant party, favored property and property owners, for they believed that "men who possessed sufficient wealth to give them a firm stake in society"14 had the incentive and ability to contribute to the economic and political health of their country. Southerne's political beliefs are hazy: initially a Tory, the playwright changed sides after the Glorious Revolution of 1688—perhaps only outwardly—possibly to aid his professional advancement.15 He dedicated Oroonoko to William Cavendish (1641–1707), the Duke of Devonshire and a prominent Whig. Moreover, he wrote in an era dominated by Whiggish values. Given that the financial success of most English colonial ventures, including the Surinam plantations for which Oroonoko's slaves are bought, was unimaginable without the use of slave labor, several passages in the play evoke key aspects of Whiggish political oratory that emphasize and support slaves' status as property and slave [End Page 52] owners' rights to their property.16 When Aboan begs Oroonoko to lead a...

Perfeita civilização: a transferência da corte, a escravidão e o desejo de metropolizar uma capital colonial. Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1821

Esse artigo desenvolve uma análise do processo ambivalente de transformação da capital colonial em corte real, verificado no final do período colonial no Brasil após a fuga da família real de Portugal para o Rio de Janeiro. Ao "metropolizar" a cidade, oficiais régios buscaram limitar a demonstração pública da presença da escravidão e redefinir as fronteiras físicas e sociais interpostas aos escravos africanos e afro-descendentes, contingente que somava cerca da metade do total da população da cidade. Esses esforços foram, entretanto, limitados pela intensificação do uso do trabalho escravo e o apego dos oficiais a certos ideais coloniais acerca dos melhores meios para assegurar a ordem na cidade.

"Fifty–Four Days Work of Two Negroes": Enslaved Labor in Colonial Somerset County, Maryland

Abstract The uses of enslaved labor outside the context of staple crop production become evident through an examination of colonial Somerset County, the southernmost Maryland county on the Chesapeake Bay’s Eastern Shore. By the early eighteenth century, conditions in Somerset amounted to something of a paradox. The county’s planters were thoroughly embedded in the larger Chesapeake plantation society and replicated, insofar as they were able, the features of that society, including the use of slave labor and cultivation of tobacco. Yet poor soil conditions pushed residents to the edges of the tobacco economy. Unable to grow tobacco profitably, Somerset’s men and women identified alternative export commodities that were more suited to the resources at hand, including lumber, meat, and ships. In addition, many Somerset residents were active in an expanding coastwide trade that linked economic activity in the county to markets elsewhere in the colonies. Russo examines the allocation of enslaved labor in Somerset’s diversified economy using information drawn from judicial, tax, probate, and land records. Consideration of the evidence for Somerset County indicates that scholars need to devote more attention to the characteristics of slavery in anomalous areas that exist within broad staple-producing regions.

"Fifty-Four Days Work of Two Negroes": Enslaved Labor in Colonial Somerset County, Maryland

The uses of enslaved labor outside the context of staple crop production be? come evident through an examination of colonial Somerset County, the southernmost Maryland county on the Chesapeake Bay's Eastern Shore. By the early eighteenth century, conditions in Somerset amounted to something of a paradox. The countys planters were thoroughly embedded in the larger Chesapeake plantation society and replicated, insofar as they were able, the features of that society, including the use of slave labor and cultivation of to? bacco. Yet poor soil conditions pushed residents to the edges of the tobacco economy. Unable to grow tobacco profitably, Somersefs men and women identified alternative export commodities that were more suited to the re? sources at hand, including lumber, meat, and ships. In addition, many Som? erset residents were active in an expanding coastwide trade that linked eco? nomic activity in the county to markets elsewhere in the colonies. Russo examines the allocation of enslaved labor in Somersefs diversifted economy using information drawn from judicial, tax, probate, and land records. Consideration ofthe evidence for Somerset County indicates that scholars need to devote more attention to the characteristics of slavery in anomalous areas that exist within broad staple-producing regions.

A Survey of Jewish Slave Labour in the Nazi System

This article surveys the development of the Nazi use of Jews for slave labour. It considers continuities and shifts in the use of labour, differences over time, between places and between German institutions that used slaves. It also assesses the differing motivations for use of slave labour, and the differing conditions in which slaves worked. Finally, it addresses the relationship between slave labour and the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’.

Ultra Vires Lives! A Stakeholder Analysis of Corporate Illegality (with Notes on How Corporate Law Could Reinforce International Law Norms)

This paper argues that a remaining vestige of the ultra vires doctrine sets off illegal activities as beyond the power of corporations. Though largely unnoticed and unexamined until now, this part of the doctrine has been retained because none of the important corporate stakeholders has an interest in authorizing the corporation and its managers to commit illegal acts. From an ex ante perspective, the principal stakeholders in the corporate contract would want the corporation and its management to forego illegalities as a way to increase the value of the firm. Any of the stakeholders would be a potential victim of the corporation's lawbreaking and would want to receive assurances that they would not be harmed by such conduct. Even for the shareholders, the difficulties inherent in distinguishing in the corporate contract between profitable and unprofitable unlawful acts would either be insurmountable or quite costly to resolve. On the whole, the risks of corporate or managerial illegalities would be too great, and the potential rewards too tenuous, to expect anything other than a corporate contract that would prohibit such acts. As evidence that this stakeholder analysis reflects positive law, the paper points to state incorporation statutes and individual companies' articles of incorporation, which almost invariably charter corporations only for lawful purposes. The continuing (though limited) existence of the ultra vires doctrine has important implications. First, because unlawful acts are ultra vires, such activities become subject to the enforcement powers of corporate law, in addition to the enforcement powers of whatever governmental or private entity is charged with enforcing the underlying, substantive legal requirement. Corporate law thus provides shareholders the right to sue to enjoin corporations' continuing unlawful activities. Because the ultra vires doctrine is alive in a form that makes general law compliance an enforceable obligation within corporate law its continuing life also has implications for the duty of corporations and their managers to maximize profits. If corporations must obey the law, then such obedience must come at times when it is not profitable to do so. This notion is in contrast to the views of those scholars who have written that corporations should, with only some small exceptions, seek to maximize profits even when it requires the firm to break the law. Finally, that the obligation to obey the law is at the heart of the corporate contract means that corporate law cannot be thought of as concerned only with the internal governance of the firm. The remaining vestige of the ultra vires doctrine imports into corporate law a concern about general law compliance, and the lawfulness that matters is not merely the laws of the incorporating jurisdiction. In this view, a corporation is required under its charter to act lawfully wherever it does business, whether in Delaware, California, or in a foreign jurisdiction. State corporate law would thus have something to say about a shoe company's compliance with minimum wage laws in Vietnam or an oil company's use of slave labor in Burma.

Espace et société dans les départements d’Outre-Mer

From the beginnings of colonisation until the middle of the 19th century, France’s possessions now known as the overseas departments (DOM) were subjected to economic cycles based on the export of tropical products. From the 1960s, financial transfers took over. A space-time pattern highlights the succession of economic cycles and changes in social structures. The legacy of the use of slave labour during the colonial period continues to affect DOM societies today.

In the Absence of Towns: Settlement and Country Trade in Southside Virginia, 1730-1800.

During the period from 1730 to 1800, not one town was developed in Southside Virginia, despite tremendous economic development and population growth. Charles Farmer asserts that the characteristics of the tobacco production and trade and the use of slave labor were the primary reasons for the lack of development in the region. In this text, Farmer examines these issues as well as the importance and persistence of country store trade.

Reversible Social Processes, Historical Memory, and the Production of History

In my research on gender relations and household dynamics in the handicraft textile industry of the western Sudan, I have been frustrated by the silences in the oral record concerning changes during the early colonial period. Whereas I have been able to reconstruct the social history of the precolonial era, including the changes induced by increased use of slave labor, my informants have been silent on what I would consider equally significant changes in the early colonial period.Using colonial sources, I have been able to reconstruct the broad contours of the period following the end of slavery, which hint at profound changes in the nature of the textile industry, gender relations, and household dynamics. These would, I anticipated on the basis of my previous fieldwork, be exactly the kind of transformative social change which would be recalled in the oral record. They ought to have become a central part of the social construction of the meaning of historical processes. But, as far as I have been able to determine, this has not been the case. Detail on gender relations and the productive processes appear again in my informants' accounts for the period just before and after World War II, drawn from personal experience. This paradox—apparently richer evidence in the oral record for an earlier era than for a chronologically closer one—has implications for both fieldwork strategies and for social history.

Congregate and control: the peasantry and labor coercion in Puerto Rico before the age of sugar, 1750-1820

Discussion of Puerto Rican rural relations in general, and on slavery in particular. The author argues that the island's claim to uniqueness among slave societies does not lie in its scant use of slave labour in the export sector, but in the delicate coexistence of two incompatible models of labour extraction.

R.A. Sargent: “From a Redistribution to an Imperial Social Formation: Benin c. 1293–1536”

R.A. Sargent's article raises more questions than it provides answers, but this should not be taken as adverse criticism. To a generation of historians of Africa, answers have come rather too easily; it is now time to look for the questions we have been answering. Sargent is prepared to accept for his present purposes the reconstruction of Benin chronology made by F.B. Ataba. He inherits, too, the very considerable and respectable corpus of work on Benin by such writers as J.U. Egharevba, R.E. Bradbury and A.F.C. Ryder. Sargent is not concerned with criticizing these works but rather with identifying the trajectory of change in Benin history from the late thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. In particular, he is interested in those changes in government and administration which were initiated in the reign of the late-fourteenth-century Oba Edwedo and which, over the next century and a half, were radically to transform the nature of the Benin polity. Sargent describes a process that transformed Benin from a segmentary redistributive social into imperial trading formation. Much of the interest of his article, however, lies in his argument that throughout the period in question the Otu system remained the mode of production in Benin, having an inordinate capacity to expand and develop productive ability. Sargent does, nevertheless, allow for the development of a mode of production based upon the increasing use of slave labor, inevitably raising issues of a singularly controversial and even intractable kind. What, for example, is the relationship between social formation and mode of production? How is the social formation to change if the mode of production does not? Are we being drawn, without being told so, into the recurrent debate on the so-called Asiatic mode of production? Should we speak of dominant and secondary modes of production, or is it more rewarding to regard the latter as indicative or diagnostic of a transition from one mode of production to another? Sargent himself describes the and modes of production as complementary, yet proceeds (if I understand him correctly) to show that they were in fact in

The Civil Status of Corydon

There is a suspicion in the minds of a number of Virgil's modern commentators that Corydon, the lover-shepherd of the second Eclogue, is himself a slave, and that the dominus of his beloved Alexis (who may be the Iollas of line 57) is his master too.1 It is the purpose of this note to show that the suspicion is baseless.None of the ancient commentators appears to know of such an interpretation. This should be significant in that they probably shared the poet's assumptions about literary decorum. We can gather how Virgil viewed the function of slaves in poetry of an exalted genre by looking at the Aeneid and the Georgics. The essential considerations were set out by W. E. Heitland in Agricola (1921), pp. 218-41. Virgil was less ready to introduce slaves into his epic than Homer had been. More startling is the complete silence of the poet in the Georgics on the use of slave labour in contemporary farming. Literary decorum induces this reticence; slaves are too mean to have a voice or place in epos. How do matters stand with pastoral?