Being everybody’s slaves? Framing the issue

This paper introduces a series of contributions on public slavery in the Roman and the Modern and Early-Modern World, which are collected in a special thematic issue of the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies (BICS 64-2). The volume stems from an international conference entitled ‘Being Everybody’s Slaves: Public Slavery in Ancient and Modern World’, which was held at Newcastle University on 22–4 March 2018. The event was part of the ‘Servi Publici: Everybody’s Slaves (SPES)’ research project that was based at Newcastle University from 2016 to 2018 and received funding under a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (H2020-MSCA-IF-2015, grant agreement no. 704716). The aim of this introduction is to frame the issue of public slavery in light of the ideas put forward by the contributors and the recent achievement in modern scholarship.