The question of whether history repeats itself has generated countless pithy observations like Santayana’s. The novelist and wit Mark Twain is often misquoted as saying: “History may not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.” Why, then, does it appear to us that history repeats? For, if history repeats, as the biblical author of Ecclesiastes put it: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” But the plantation slavery of more recent times had little in common with slavery in the ancient world.