This Palgrave Pivot offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the concept of slavery in economic history through an interdisciplinary perspective. It interweaves historical semantics and linguistic analysis to argue that modern slavery as we understand it - an economic proposition based on property - was not legitimized by biblical and religious doctrine.

The book presents a concise, accessible argument that focuses on the English bible and older socio-legal models of ownership that sit in tension with modern ideas of slaves as commodities, to be bought and sold on the market. It explores how two different models of slavery emerged in the early modern period and shows how, as the nature of political and religious authority came to be re-evaluated, the ‘slave’ provided a powerful metaphor of critique for models of ownership that drew on concepts of hereditary obligation in particular. Uniquely among studies of slavery in the Bible, it does not seek to enter the debate as to whether or not the Bible supported 'slavery' , arguing instead that this fundamental premise is mistaken. The Bible did not support 'slavery' as an institution that reduced individuals involuntarily to the status of property, because this institution was a product of modernity. This is a study with far-reaching implications for a range of disciplines including economic and legal historians, biblical scholars and slavery studies, as it seeks to problematize and illuminate blind spots in the prevailing economic model.

Judith M. Spicksley is an economic and social historian with an interest in language. She worked in the Department of Economics at the University of York and in the Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull. She has written about the lending activities of never-married women in early modern England, and the role of debt in the transatlantic slave trade. Her long overview of ownership, Owning People: Survival, Life Debt and Slavery from the Ancient World to the Enlightenment, is currently in production with Cambridge University Press.