Comparative typology may be useful as a heuristic tool, not as an objective in itself. Indeed, to focus on constants can lead to fixing the features underlined by the observer and thereafter to masking the forces, the agents and the processes at work behind the repetitions or the deviations, processes which evidently participate in the ‘fabrication’ of history. Slavery, properly speaking, will be our subject. Other modes of dependence (e.g. collective dependence in antiquity, serfdom, etc.), as well as debt bondage, will be excluded.

Firstly, I will analyse the processes leading to what I propose to call ‘systemic exits’ from slavery, that is to say types of individual or collective deliverance, which do not call into question the equilibrium of a given slave system, while they may even sometimes reinforce it. Then, I will look at how the slaves, through modes of resistance, participated in the process of deliverance from slavery – a type of process, whose nature (systemic or not) will have to be defined. Finally, I will focus on two phenomena, which both led to the non-systemic deliverance from slavery: on one hand, the case of slave systems that seem to have slowly ‘declined’ before vanishing almost completely; on the other hand, that of systems abolished as a result of specific measures or decisions.

SYSTEMIC EXITS

Although numerous, systemic exits refer to specific individuals and do not call into question the very nature of a slave system.