"Large scake skavery begins when the traditional mode of production is dislocated, usually due to warfare, imperial expansion and changes in basic crops, which in turn induces the rural free poor to migrate into the cities and newly opened colonial setttlements. At the imperial center, land and capital fall increasingly under the monopoly of the rich ,while citizen labor grows scarcer. The territorial expansion of the state, by makeing the enslavement of other peoples profitable, temporarily solves the economic problem. [...] The citizen working class becomes further divorced from the means of production because of their aversion to the low status associated with common labor. The slaves, meanwhile, attempt to maintain family and ethnic relationships and to piece together the shards of their old culture. Where the effort succeeds, many of them rise in status and alter their position from its original, purely servile form. Where self-assertion fails because it is suppressed, reproduction declines and large numbers of new slaves must be imported in each generation. The rapid turnover has a disintegrating effect on the culture of slaves and masters alike. Absenteeism rises as the slave owners attempt to spend more of their time in the centers of their own culture. Overseers come increasingly into control. Inefficiency, brutality, revolt, and sabotage increase, and the system spirals slowly downward.
[...] "'Their ascent to maturity is rapid,' [Orlando] Patterson [a sociologist in Harvard U. who first described this cycle] writes, 'their period of glory is short, and their descent to oblivion ostentatious and mightily drawn out."'