This chapter explores the implications of the pattern of rights and markets in productive resources for the economic and demographic strategies of individuals—differentiated as they were by rank. Slavery and pawning, as the major means of acquiring extra-familial resources, were crucial to the prospects of demographic and economic accumulation by commoners, and were important also for the wealth of chiefs. Section A relates commoners' and chiefs' acquisition and use of slaves and pawns to their respective patterns of demographic and economic accumulation. Section B reviews the evidence about the degrees and forms of accommodation, resistance and conflict involved in the social relations of production, and reflects on the implications for the evolution of the economy.

Imperfect Markets and Unequal Masters

Those factor markets which existed were highly ‘imperfect’ not only in the sense that they were based partly on coercion, but also in that some of the participants had extra-economic rights which gave them powerful privileges compared to ordinary free commoners (‘free’ in the sense of being neither slaves nor pawns). Thus while the acquisition of more labour was the generic key to expansion, alike for a commoner household or for a major chief, the distribution of specific social categories of labour, such as free wives, pawns and slaves, not to mention the right to corvée, was very unequal even among the free male population. This section examines and compares the options for, and constraints upon, the acquisition of productive resources that faced free commoners and chiefs respectively, and illustrates the paths of accumulation that some of them followed.