Editing Debt bondage (section)

====Classical antiquity====
Debt bondage was "quite normal" in [[classical antiquity]].<ref>{{cite book |first=Kurt A. |last=Raaflaub |title=The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece |page=47 | year=2004 |publisher=University of Chicago Press | isbn=978-0-226-70101-1}}</ref> The poor or those who had fallen irredeemably in debt might place themselves into bondage "voluntarily"—or more precisely, might be compelled by circumstances to choose debt bondage as a way to anticipate and avoid worse terms that their creditors might impose on them.<ref>{{harvnb|Raaflaub|2004|loc=pp. 32, 47 ''et passim.''}}</ref> In the [[Greco-Roman world]], debt bondage was a distinct legal category into which a free [[Person (law)|person]] might fall, in theory temporarily, distinguished from the pervasive practice of [[slavery in antiquity|slavery]], which included enslavement as a result of defaulting on debt. Many forms of debt bondage existed in both [[ancient Greece]] and [[ancient Rome]].<ref>{{cite book | last=de Ste. Croix | first=G.E.M. | title=The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests | publisher=Cornell University Press | year=1981 | isbn=978-0-8014-1442-8 |pages=136–137}}, noting that economic historian [[Moses Finley]] maintained "serf" was an incorrect term to apply to the social structures of classical antiquity.</ref>