Debt slavery as a historical social contingency. A sociopolitical analysis

Debt slavery, i.e., the phenomenon in which a free individual, as a result of indebtedness, could become an unfree slave under the conditions of a slave society, meets the criteria of a social contingency phenomenon as defined by contemporary social policy. In textbooks on the history of social policy, however, this social event is usually given only marginal attention, to the extent of a few lines, and even then most often only in the context of ancient Greece and Rome. It was a phenomenon that emerged in the context of the property differentiation of society and was originally considered—like all slavery—to be the natural state of affairs. Within the various causes of slavery, however, the debt slave exhibited certain specificities that made possible the emergence of forms of intervention that enabled the debt slave to return to the ranks of free men. From the Sumerian Empire onwards, these were initially only forms of slave protection, shortening the allowable period of debt slaver, later individual redemption, etc., until finally, in ancient Rome, it resulted in the de facto (albeit only partial) equalisation of slaves and free citizens.