Many people on both sides of the Atlantic are unaware of the glaring facts of the massive French involvement in the slave trade: that more slaves were brought to the tiny island of Martinique than to all the United States; that in 1789, Saint-Domingue supplied over half of France’s overseas trade and had a slave population of half a million, more than all the other French and British West Indie...

Despite having key implications for fundamental political science questions, slavery as a global phenomenon has received little attention in the field. We argue that played an important role state-building and international order formation. To counter historical U.S./Atlantic bias, we draw evidence mostly from Middle East, Africa, Asia. identify two slave-based paths to state construction. A “s...