India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza 'India Book'
... These medieval "Arab-Islamic" movements across the Indian Ocean certainly had Arabic-speakers and Muslims at their core, but they also included Jews, Christians and other believers, as well as speakers of other first languages. Certain source materials (e.g., the India Book among the 10/11th-century Cairo Geniza documents; see Goitein, Friedman 2008) indicate that most of these Arab-Islamic expeditions were not initiated by states or governments but by private enterprise. The ships' captains and their leading crew members (including the interpreter and navigator, and probably including a few junior assistants) by necessity had to be experienced as regular sailors but often they were also literate, moving in more or less fluctuating networks of ships' crews. ...
The establishment of the Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and Anthropology in South Tyrol provides a good opportunity in the journal of Italy’s relevant academic association for a reconsideration of the current significance of ethnography, as initiated by Malinowski, for various scholarly fields in anthropology and beyond. One of these fields is historical anthropology and history in the broad sense of the term. This article seeks to explore how the Malinowskian legacy in ethnographic fieldwork may be usefully and productively activated and elaborated for historical fields and for historical anthropology. For this purpose, the first section will outline how Malinowski’s notion of an empirical field was open to all kinds of comparative interdisciplinary inquiries. Eventually, these also came to include history, despite Malinowski’s original well-known caveat in his time (Firth 2002). The second section will then elaborate the case example of maritime pilots as well as other cultural brokers with cosmopolitan expertise in the Indian Ocean, in order to demonstrate how ethnographic insights may support, enrich and complement historical data or, if these are absent, how they may become historically relevant indicators in their own right. A summary section points out that this leads to pioneering new tasks for anthropology.
... 20 In the same era, the Geniza papers include a letter written in Aden in 1140 that mentions a batch of "new slaves" brought by a ship "arrived from the Land of the Zanj." 21 The Rasulid sultanate of Yemen (1229-1454), centered on Aden, has left an exceptional corpus of sources studied by Eric Vallet. The Swahili coast was a minor trading partner for the Rasulids but a regular trade was carried out between the sultanate and the East African coast, particularly ...
Swahili culture is an African, Islamic, coastal, and urban-oriented culture that developed on the eastern coast of Africa. The Swahili coast extends from southern Somalia to Mozambique and to the offshore islands. Urban settlements of various sizes, including prosperous stone towns, were numerous on the coast. The Swahili were engaged in maritime trade and acted as middlemen between the Indian Ocean networks and the mainland networks held by neighboring non-Islamic communities. As evidenced by the earliest historical sources, slave trading and slavery were common practices along the coast, as in other African or Islamic societies. Slavery was regulated by Koranic principles and legitimized by Islamic discourses. Domination and hierarchization were also based on paternalism and the opposition between “civilization” and “barbarity,” the coast and the mainland. Yet, dependence was complex: chattel slavery was just one form of dependence, and like clients, slaves were valued as much as followers as they were producers. As such, slavery was also characterized by patron–client relationships.
The boom of the plantation economy during the 19th century has overshadowed the study of slavery and the slave trade on the coast through the longue durée , and this latter perspective also helps with stepping back from an external (i.e., Arabo-centric) angle, focusing on the Busaidi state of Zanzibar and the experience of slavery in the Middle East. During the Middle Ages, the slave trade from the coast was steady but not massive, mostly furnishing demand in the Gulf and southern Arabia. Networks are better known during the early modern era thanks to a much larger body of evidence. The Swahili never produced slaves but obtained them through contact with their trading partners. Mainland slave trade networks were not widespread, and major exporting areas were always specific: mostly Madagascar until the mid-18th century, northern Mozambique and the Lake Nyasa regionand, later in the 19th century, the hinterland of the Tanganyika coast and the region of Lake Tanganyika. The spread of global capitalism, the boom of the plantation economy, and the economic prosperity from the 1840s led to a dramatic rise of slavery on the coast, where approximately 40 to 65 percent of the population was servile around the 1880s. Slaves were ubiquitous in the urban context and did all sorts of work, from domestic female slaves to skilled workers and hired slaves with a large autonomy. The urban environment offered more opportunities for slaves to gain autonomy, respectability, and the possibility of manumission. This was based not only on access to the commercial economy but also on better access to urban and Islamic life and manners, which were structural features of coastal culture. Within the frame of clientship relations and respectability, enslaved people could thus hope for a better life and emancipation. However, this flexibility was a way to preserve the slaving system, and the experience of slaves was always scarred by violence, oppression, and vexation.
Although the Turks are infrequently mentioned the Cairo Geniza texts, two enigmatic lines in a 12th manuscript refer to a Jewish trader who leaves Damascus with cloth obtained by the Turkmen, but provide no explanation about why this trader would purchase textiles from them. Examination of other Geniza texts reveals a profitable trade in second-hand goods, clothes in particular. Some garments were obtained locally in Egypt, but other second-hand garments and textiles were purchased from unnamed suppliers outside of Egypt. Contemporary Arabic sources from Iraq also mention the trade in second-hand goods, but note that the purchase of Bedouin plunder supplied many of these items. This study suggests that the Jewish trader in Syria may have purchased textiles from the Türkmen who, like the Bedouin in Iraq, were selling their plunder. If this interpretation is correct, this Geniza manuscript along with others shed new light on the activities of the Turks in the Mediterranean basin in the decades following the Seljuq conquests in the Middle East and Anatolia.
This article conceptualises diasporas and homelands not only through the lens of hybrid identities but also as complex locations which represent an intricate picture of oscillation between different points in time and space, which shift in response to broader political and global changes. Our case study is the Bene Israel (literally ‘Children of Israel’ in Hebrew) Indian Jews in Aden, who originated on the Konkan coast south of Bombay (today Mumbai), from the time of the British conquest in 1839 until their evacuation from Aden in 1967. The article begins with a survey of the history of the Jews in Aden during the modern period. It documents their origins, community development and demography in an attempt to understand questions of multi-oriented diasporas and shifting identities for these Indian Jews. The article shows that the members of the Bene Israel diasporic community who resided in Aden vacillated between nostalgia for a historic homeland in the biblical kingdom of Israel to affiliation with the British Raj, which ultimately evolved to identification with a wider Jewish diaspora. Until India got independence, while most Bene Israel, like other Indians, regarded Aden as the diaspora and Bombay as the homeland, in time, the majority of these Indian Jews opted for a new homeland in the State of Israel, in which India, previously the motherland, became a diaspora.
Geoffrey Khan’s pioneering scholarship has transformed the study of Semitic languages, literatures, and cultures, leaving an indelible mark on fields ranging from Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic dialectology to medieval manuscript traditions and linguistic typology. This Festschrift, celebrating a distinguished career that culminated in his tenure (2012–2025) as Regius Professor of Hebrew in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, brings together contributions from a vast and representative array of scholars—retired, established, and up and coming—whose work has been influenced by his vast intellectual legacy.
Reflecting the interconnected traditions that Khan has illuminated throughout his career, this volume presents cutting-edge research on Hebrew and Aramaic linguistics, historical syntax, manuscript studies, and the transmission of textual traditions across centuries and cultures. Contributors engage with topics central to Khan’s scholarship, including the evolution of the Biblical Hebrew verbal system, the intricacies of Masoretic notation, Geniza discoveries, Samaritan and medieval Judaeo-Arabic texts, and computational approaches to linguistic analysis.
As Khan retires from his role as Regius Professor, this collection stands as both a tribute and a continuation of his work, honouring his lifelong dedication to understanding and preserving the linguistic and literary heritage of the Semitic world.
The Cairo Genizah collections provide scholars with a profound insight into Jewish culture, history, and the deeply intertwined relationships between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Among these treasures are often overlooked Arabic poetic fragments from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, which illuminate the shared Abrahamic legacy. This paper explores mainly two unpublished poetic fragments written in Judaeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew script), analyzing how they reflect a shared Jewish–Muslim cultural memory and history, particularly through the reverence for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and other key figures central to both traditions across the medieval Mediterranean and Middle East. By situating these poetic voices within broader historical and cultural contexts, this study underscores the role of poetry in reflecting sociocultural and historical dimensions while fostering cross-cultural and religious coexistence. It demonstrates how poetry acts as a bridge between religion, history, and culture by revealing the shared Abrahamic heritage of Jews and Muslims within two Arabic poetic fragments from the Cairo Genizah.
Based on architectural and archeological evidence and inscriptions, this chapter challenges this long-held notion of Indians being ‘inward-looking’ and given to agricultural pursuits. Instead, it presents an overview of maritime activity in the period from second century BCE to fourteenth century CE from two perspectives: one, the conceptualization of the seas as evident in literary writings and portrayed in temple sculptures. The second relates to the ritual use of sea spaces by analyzing bronze ritual objects recovered from shipwreck sites and discussing these with reference to coastal shrines. It highlights partnerships and networks established across the Indian Ocean as a result of travels by merchants and trading guilds, Buddhist monks and nuns, musicians, scribes, and a host of others. Thus, this chapter stresses the participation of diverse communities of the Indian subcontinent in vibrant trans-oceanic networks and helps contribute to the understanding of maritime history of India.
This article critically reviews four decades of development of maritime and underwater archaeology in India (MUAI). Established in 1981, the first Marine Archaeology Centre at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research—National Institute of Oceanography in Goa, India, has conducted a series of maritime and underwater investigations. The country has also attracted international collaborations mainly focused on maritime ethnographic studies. As such, the discipline has seen steady growth, but its progress unfortunately remains slow and is struggling to keep pace with the developments happening within the discipline globally. A significant setback was in 2015 when the Underwater Archaeology Wing (UAW) of the Archaeological Survey of India was defunct. Furthermore, India is not a signatory to the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage. This raises the question—what does the future hold for the MUAI? The government’s plan to establish the country’s first National Maritime Museum to display maritime past and its intention to revive the UAW to boost research indicates some optimism towards the survival of the field. Nonetheless, there exists gaps in research approaches and methodologies adopted so far and problems and challenges faced by the discipline that are hindering its growth. Along with discussing the aforementioned issues, this paper concludes with prospects for the future of MUAI.
The majority of existing literature on spices is found in the areas of gastronomy, botany, and history. This study investigates spices on a linguistic level and aims to be a comprehensive linguistic account on the items of the spice trade. Some of these dried plant matter were highly desired at certain points in history, due to their attractive aroma and medicinal value, thus they were ideal products of trade early on. Cultural contact and exchange, and the introduction of new cultural items begets situations of language contact and linguistic acculturation, and so in the case of spices, we not only have a set of items that traveled around the world, but also a set of names. This domain is very rich in loanwords and Wanderwörter, but also supplies us with a myriad of cases where spice names are conventional innovations. To make it more interesting, the thesis compares English, Arabic, and Chinese, languages that represent major powers in the spice trade at different times. After selecting a set of 24 spices, I have collected data on their names and related etymologies, and introduced 6 of them in detail regarding their identity, botany, history, spread, and names. The thesis has two main parts. Part one represents the geographic and linguistic diffusion of spices and their names. Basically, I track and explain word origins and subsequent spread by tracing the materials and the propagation of the accompanying Wanderwort. This part relies on philological literature, and tools from historical linguistics, such as etymological research, as well as geospatial visualizations. Part two examines the language of spices, referring to the terminology and nomenclature related to the spice domain from linguistic-cognitive perspectives. Focusing on the structure and components of 360 collected spice names, it is a systematic investigation on how humans name spices: what are the mechanism and motivations behind the naming principles, and how this possibly relates to the salient sensory features of the products (strong gustatory, olfactory, or visual stimuli). Conclusions are made on the connections between the physical properties of the spices, their patterns of diffusion, and the prototypical spices and their effect of naming principles. Besides being a novel and original approach to research and categorize spices from a linguistic point of view, this study offers new insights to our knowledge about wandering loanwords, and the effect of the highly sensory nature of spices in the naming process when adopted by a community. It is also intended to be a basis for a useful working database for future research, and aims to dispel some of the chaos and confusion surrounding spice names.
Ifriqiya (roughly Tunisia and eastern Algeria) is believed to have played a significant role in the diffusion of ceramic glazed technologies into other regions of the Western Mediterranean. However, due to limited analysis on North African glazed ceramics, its role in technology transfer remains poorly understood. This paper uses SEM–EDS and petrographic analyses to understand the technology employed in the production of Tunisian ceramics through the study of 30 polychrome glazed ceramics from a medieval settlement at the site of Chimtou (ancient Simitthus), Tunisia, dated to the late ninth-twelfth century. The results show that these are lead-rich glazes with varying contents of alkalis, coloured with copper, iron and manganese oxide and applied over a calcareous body. Opaque glazes were obtained using cassiterite crystals as opacifier or by adding crushed quartz. The use of lead stannate as a colourant and opacifier in one light yellow glaze raises questions about the mechanisms of introduction of tin opacification technology in North Africa. Scrap metal seems to have been used as a source of lead for the glazes; while iron slag was probably used as a source of iron to colour the glaze in one sample, pointing to a cross-craft interaction between glazemaking and metallurgy.
Islam, Merchants, and Capitalism” draws attention to the missing link between early and central medieval Islamic socioeconomic history (ca. 650–1250) and the history of capitalism. This intertext essay starts from reassessing the work of French Marxist Islamicist Maxime Rodinson, who first made a programmatic attempt to forge such a link in his seminal 1966 Islam and Capitalism . It then proceeds to lay bare the reasons why Rodinson’s call went largely unheard in the following decades, identifying the persistence of a pervasive decline paradigm within medieval Islamic socioeconomic history as the key obstacle preventing advances in the field and foreclosing avenues for theoretical discussion. Regrettably this paradigm, while outdated and no longer tenable, still remains authoritative and is frequently invoked by modern theorists of “underdevelopment.” The essay then discusses some examples of recent groundbreaking scholarship that deploy new archaeological and documentary sources to decidedly move away from decline, showing the way forward out of this historiographical impasse. Finally, the essay returns to the question of capitalism, and of the forms in which this ambiguous term can, or cannot, be applied to early and central medieval Islamic societies, calling for a recentering of the Islamic Middle Ages in a longue-durée global history of capitalism.
In this volume a distinguished international team of scholars examines the history of drugs within all the major medical traditions of the medieval Mediterranean, namely Byzantine, Islamicate, Jewish, and Latin, and in so doing analyses a considerable number of previously unedited or barely explored texts. A Mediterranean-wide perspective permits a deeper understanding of broader phenomena such as the transfer of scientific knowledge and cultural exchange, by looking beyond single linguistic traditions or political boundaries. It also highlights the diversity and vitality of the medieval Mediterranean pharmacological tradition, which, through its close links with cookery, alchemy, magic, religion and philosophy, had to be able to adapt to multiple contexts, not least to changing social and political realities, as in the case of drugs as diplomatic gifts.
The popularization of Madhva’s realist Vedānta was accompanied by forceful critiques of its alleged enemies. Although the movement’s challenges to other Vedāntas has been well studied, its sustained engagement with Jainism has not. The anti-Jain writings of Madhva’s followers offer an important but neglected perspective on the early history of Mādhva Vedānta and its rise to power. This article examines the anti-Jain polemics of an influential intellectual named Vādirāja Tīrtha (c. 1520–1600). By situating Vādirāja and his writings in the vibrant and volatile world of post-Vijayanagara coastal Karnataka, this paper treats the archive of anti-Jain polemics not as a record of timeless doctrinal disagreement, but as a repository of local struggles over patronage, livelihood, and influence. Reading interreligious disputes with an eye to local context allows me to make a larger point about polemics and community formation. Work on polemics has tended to focus on ideas of verbal warfare and destructive debate; this paper suggests, however, that acts of polemical othering in early modern South Asia were productive forms of boundary keeping and community formation. This paper argues that Vādirāja constructed and ridiculed the Jain other as a way to galvanize a coterie of beleaguered Brahmans in a moment of duress. Vādirāja’s anti-Jain writings, in other words, were condemnation as catharsis and community-building.
The Chinese term rou doukou has generally been taken to mean ‘nutmeg’. This identification dates from the nineteenth century. However, there is reason to think that rou doukou was originally not nutmeg, but the fruits of a plant of the ginger family, Zingiberaceae. Early descriptions and illustrations of rou doukou are clearly not of nutmeg: in Chinese pharmacopoeias, it is usually listed with herbs, not trees. The earliest reference to nutmeg is probably in the Zhu fan zhi of 1225. However, most Chinese references to rou doukou long after that date still refer to a plant of the ginger family.
From its emergence in the 7th century until its fall in 965, the Khazar Khaganate played a decisive role among the tribes and peoples settled in Eastern Europe. The Pax Khazarica contributed to the stabilization of ethnic and political relations in the region, which in turn gave the khaganate a high status in contacts with the Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate. The Khazars benefited from the favorable geographic location and the benefits they gained from participating in long-distance trade. With the arrival of Scandinavian newcomers and the development of their settlement in the northern and north-eastern part of the Ruthenian lands (the area around Lake Ladoga and the upper Volga basin), contacts with them played an increasingly important role in the history of the Chaganate in the 9th-10th centuries. Oleg’s taking of power in Kiev and the territorial development of the Ruthenian state was a crucial moment. Although the Khazars maintained a strong position among the peoples and tribes of Eastern Europe during the first half of the 10th century, it was not without difficulties. The reason was the growing activity of the Scandinavians not only among the Slavs who settled in the basin of the Dnieper, Oka and the upper Volga, but also in the lands that were the immediate hinterland of the khaganate (Black Sea region, the mouth of the Volga and the Caspian region). In addition to merchant expeditions, the Varangians organized - with great panache and range - raids of a looting nature (e.g. Prince Igor’s campaigns). It cannot be ruled out that they inuenced the nature of the relationship between the Khazars and their dependent tribes in Eastern Europe. The collapse of the Khaganate, which took place as a result of the war campaigns undertaken by Prince Sviatoslav (965, 969), may indicate a more significant (than previously assumed) internal weakening of the Khazar state. Undoubtedly, it was related to the change in the current system of political and ethnic relations in Eastern Europe, and the actions of the Kiev princes played a decisive role. Another reason was the change in the course of the existing long-distance trade routes, and thus the reduction of the influence that the Khazars obtained from their control. Despite the progress in research on the history of the khaganate, little is known about its relations with the Scandinavians settled in Eastern Europe, as well as with Slavic tribes, including those remaining outside the Khazar sphere of influence, and the consequences of the fall of Khazar domination for the region’s economy. The research conducted so far shows that the influence of the Khazars, although not confirmed in all spheres, was more intense, as evidenced by the reception of the kagan title in relation to the Ruthenian rulers in the 10th-11th centuries.
The political fortunes of recent campaigns targeting “modern slavery” and human trafficking have been shaped by strategic calculations and institutional interests. Different actors have been attracted to the category of modern slavery for different reasons. For civil society campaigners, modern slavery offers a way of harnessing the iconography of transatlantic enslavement to draw attention to “exceptional” cases of exploitation. Conversations about modern slavery can also be strategically useful for many governments and corporations, since they can help to deflect or displace more challenging questions about the systemic abuse and exploitation of precarious migrants and workers. These calculations play a key behind the scenes role when it comes to determining whether different cases of exploitation and coercion are classified as the same as, similar to, or separate from historical systems of enslavement.
The National Socialists regarded the population of Eastern Europe, if they were not to be killed or left for dead, as a reservoir of slave labor that would guarantee the Germans a higher standard of living. The Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler, formulated this in unvarnished clarity in his infamous Posen speech from October 4, 1943: “Whether the other peoples live in prosperity or whether they die of hunger, that interests me only to the extent that we need them as slaves for our culture, otherwise it does not interest me.” This chapter examines the use of state-sponsored slave labor in Nazi Germany.
During the medieval period, people in the Black Sea region both owned slaves and exported them. The majority of Black Sea slaves were not born into that status; they became enslaved either through capture or sale. Once enslaved, they might be kept locally for domestic and sexual service, or they might be commodified and sold into long-distance commercial networks that extended east toward China and west toward the Mediterranean. An end to enslavement could not be taken for granted: some slaves were ransomed, some were individually manumitted, some escaped, but many died in slavery.
In the early 1840s and following the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade by several European nations and the United States, European humanitarians—particularly the British—embarked on an earnest campaign to outlaw the vigorous enslaving activities thriving in the Middle East and North Africa. This chapter examines the extent to which the marked increase of enslavement activities and their suppression through the pressure of European abolitionism fits into the saga of the nineteenth-century transformation processes characterized by the rise of European domination of the region. Focusing on the enslavement of Black Africans, the chapter examines the impact of state modernization schemes and the rise of European capitalism on the expansion of enslaving activities and their suppression and argues that no prior historical development has shaped the contours of African slavery in the Middle East and North Africa more than the effects of the nineteenth-century transformation process.
The chapters of this handbook presented slavery both as a global practice having existed from Old Babylonia to the present day and as an institution with globalizing effects connecting people, places, and commodities, sometimes over great distances. The contributions have shown how people have entered enslavement, been exploited as slaves, and attempted or managed to exit slavery across time and space. At any given time, people have been born into slavery and captured or kidnapped by soldiers, warriors, or pirates.
This chapter seeks to clarify the most relevant tensions at stake in the notion of “modern slavery,” considering it less as a discrete set of phenomena than as a controversy around the legitimate modes of perception and representation of various practices of human bondage and exploitation in the global economy. The first section presents the main conceptual steps taken from the abolition of chattel slavery to the umbrella term “modern slavery”; the second section presents an immanent critique of the ongoing classification struggles around “modern slavery”; the third and final section considers the so-called “root causes” and their frameworks.
This chapter provides an introduction to the multifaceted history of slavery in the principalities of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in the early modern period. Utilizing the tripartite structure proposed by the editors, it explains the heterogeneous and often ill-defined character of slavery in the Empire. Besides describing the various entryways of enslaved individuals into the Empire and the disparate expressions of slavery encountered there, the chapter aims to provide readers with a clear understanding of how slavery interacted with and was often obscured by a range of conditions of dependency and hierarchy permeating early modern German society.
This chapter focuses on slavery in the Mediterranean region from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and especially in the Northern Mediterranean basin, including the Italian states, France, Spain, and Portugal. Comparing the situation in Southern European states to that in the Ottoman Empire and its satellite states enables an analysis of the forms of reciprocity and the commonalities inherent in slave trade practices around the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean was at the center of larger slave trading networks whose slaves originated from all over the world. More specifically, this chapter examines various forms of enslavement and types of work performed by slaves, along with the different levels of coercion involved in them. In its conclusion, the chapter details some of the exit strategies that enabled slaves to become free—both in socio-economic terms and from a legal perspective.
This chapter explores the continuing existence of slavery-like practices within the United States itself and in its sites of imperial interest between the years 1870 and 1939. It also probes the changing ways that chattel slavery has been remembered and memorialized in the United States. It constructs a narrative of the nation’s selective forgetting and obscuring of slavery. The United States worked to sever its present from the past of “our slavery days,” refusing to countenance any continuities. There was also a denial of the persistence of slavery-like labor forms within the United States. This was vocally and actively challenged, resisted, manipulated, and adapted by the African American community and its allies; the chapter also tells this story.
This chapter examines the issues of enslavement, slavery, and pathways to freedom in the nineteenth-century West African states established through revolutionary jihad in what is now mostly contemporary Mali and northern Nigeria. The jihads were primarily anti-slavery movements. Yet, the leaders of these movements were not interested in outlawing slavery for everyone, but in protecting people they considered to be freeborn Muslims from enslavement and in regulating slavery according to their interpretation of the Mālikī madh’hab , the Sunni school of law that was dominant in precolonial Muslim West Africa. Ironically, for states founded with the priority of instituting more “ethical/legal” slavery policies, slavery actually increased in the region as demand for agricultural products produced by enslaved labor, mostly women, increased.
The Arabian Peninsula remains a blind spot in recent scholarship on slavery in medieval Islamic contexts. Given the limited secondary literature on the subject, this chapter will rely largely on primary sources to provide a case study from Yemen during the eleventh to fifteenth centuries CE. Medieval texts offer rare insights into the lives of enslaved persons during that era, revealing a remarkable breadth of occupations and tasks assigned to them in Yemeni societies. They also provide evidence of slave trading practices from East Africaacross the Red Seato Yemen. Taken together, primary sources sketch a vivid picture of what it meant to be a slave in medieval South Arabia.
The introduction to this volume explains the condition of slavery (including its definition and its place at the far end of a broad spectrum of coercion and unfreedom); illuminates conceptual and methodological choices; and discusses the layout and main intentions of the handbook. In particular it discusses how scholars approach the study of slavery, as well as some common themes in global slavery scholarship. It also underscores the intention of this volume to both historicize and spatialize slavery—i.e., to historicize it by moving beyond linear stories that trace slavery from Graeco-Roman antiquity and end with transatlantic slavery and abolition; and to spatialize it by recentering the geography of slavery, illuminating regional contexts of slavery around the world.
During the nineteenth century, abolitionist movements developed from small, but vocal, movements in the Atlantic world to establish global networks, based on shared ideas and support for international agreements to ban the slave trade and slavery. The global spread of abolitionism was conditioned by local contexts, particularly religion and economic conditions. This injection essay will conclude by analyzing the impact of the abolitionist movements on the ending of slavery and the limits of their influence.
This chapter examines the development of slavery in the early modern Americas in two major periods. The first period consisted of the co-option and expansion of “pre-Columbian” indigenous slaveries by European colonizers in the different societies of the Americas. The second witnessed the introduction, establishment, and development of Atlantic slavery, which gave rise to a massive slave trade from West Africa to the Americas but also included the adoption and further development of many indigenous forms of slavery. This epoch of colonial Atlantic slavery, which some historians have dubbed “the first slavery,” had taken root by the mid- to late seventeenth century (depending on the region) and lasted more or less until 1800. How did slavery take root in the Americas from the earliest phases of European conquest and how was it characterized? This chapter explores the rise of various slave systems and examines how and why people became enslaved, how their labor was exploited, and how some managed to exit situations of enslavement.
A survey of Mesopotamian slavery provides an opportunity to evaluate how foundational or institutional the practice was in its earliest known forms. The entry to and exit from slavery were relatively asystematic, the status often ended up being temporary, and the functions and status of slaves are difficult to distinguish from those of other persons (e.g., servants and dependents) who also performed labor under coercion. This chapter considers these aspects as well as developments and changes in Mesopotamian slavery in the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000–1600 BCE), focusing on this specific historical period as a model to comment on slavery in cuneiform culture as a whole (which lasted from ca. 3300 to 300 BCE).
In Southeastern Europe, slavery was present in various forms from antiquity until the nineteenth century. During the 1800s, slavery as a social reality still existed in the Ottoman Empire (including its European provinces) as well as in the Romanian principalities. Wallachia and Moldavia had slaves and slavery since their founding in the fourteenth century. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the roughly 250000 slaves living in the two countries represented seven percent of the total population. There were three categories of slaves: state slaves, slaves owned by monasteries, and privately owned slaves. The slave population was diverse in numerous ways. In terms of their ethnicity, most slaves were Roma, while some were of Romanian or other origin. As in previous centuries, they played an important role in the country’s economy—primarily by way of the enslaved craftsmen who practiced their crafts itinerantly in villages. This chapter reconstructs the history of slavery, abolitionism, and emancipation in the Romanian principalities between the 1830s and the 1850s, with reference to previous periods and similar processes taking place around the same time in other geographical areas.
Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) was one of the most enduring slave societies in world history. This chapter discusses how slavery as an institution evolved during the Chosŏn dynasty, paying particular attention to the emergence of a large-scale slave society, the socio-economic values of slavery within the social hierarchy, slaves’ legal status and their agency in managing their lives, various means through which slaves achieved their freedom, and the socio-economic, legal, and moral factors that contributed to the dissolution of slavery.
This chapter deals with the practice of exploiting North Korean workers in the European Union through human trafficking, forced labor, and the suspension of most personal liberties. As a form of state-driven contemporary slavery, it starts from legal premises: the workers arrive with valid visas, residence permits, and work permits. They then find themselves in a miniaturized reproduction of North Korean society: with their minder came the entire socio-ideological structure of constraint—daily compulsory meetings, confession and criticism sessions, ideology instruction lectures, etc.—, which is recreated in situ in order to legitimize and make practically possible the extraction of labor and the removal of personal freedoms.
Slavery is not a commonly discussed topic in late imperial Chinese history—indeed, as much as late imperial China is not an area usually discussed in world and global slavery studies. The ubiquity of the “feudal” analytical framework in Chinese historiography and the image of the archetypal “slave” have resulted in the widespread idea that there was no slavery in (early-) modern China (and Eastern Asia). This chapter reevaluates this widely accepted preconception by shedding light on the overlooked and unique succession of “slave revolts” that erupted in China’s economic centers between the 1630s and the 1660s. The focus on this particular moment in Chinese history and on the sources produced in its aftermath serves as an entry point to understanding the life experiences of Chinese nubi , a category of enslaved people that persisted until its formal abolition in the last years of the imperial regime.
This chapter examines the era of “second slavery” from roughly 1800 to 1888. The second slavery in the Atlantic world refers to the renewed expansion and the creation of new frontiers of slavery, with modern capitalist characteristics, especially (but not exclusively) in the nineteenth-century slaveholding societies of the US South, Brazil, and the Spanish Caribbean (especially Cuba). It began during the Age of Revolutions and mirrored the piecemeal abolition of slavery in other parts of the Americas. The chapter starts with the rise of the second slavery in the wake of the Atlantic revolutions, including the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade by the US and Great Britain in 1808. It then discusses the intensification and modernization of plantation agriculture in the main regions of the second slavery, supplemented by the rise of slave trading in the hidden Atlantic (the Atlantic after the formal abolition of the Atlantic slave trade with its contraband economies) as well as internally within slaveholding societies (especially in the US South and Brazil).
The Roman Empire developed one of the largest and most economically and culturally integrated systems of slavery in world history. It thrived on a remarkably robust supply stream that included enslavement by birth, capture, sale from foreign and domestic sources, the reclaiming of exposed infants, and—in late antiquity—self-sale, child sale, and debt bondage. Enslavement was imposed upon people from all regions, inside and outside the empire, and was never inflicted exclusively on a particular racial or ethnic group. Those enslaved to Rome worked in agriculture, industry, service, and even knowledge production, allowing them to be the primary workforce behind the generation of elite wealth. Escape from slavery could at times involve resistance, including everything from open revolt to flight, but Roman society was also remarkably generous with manumission. This and many other features reflect a hybridity between ancient patterns of captive integration and modern habits of slave exclusion.
Enslavement as a process was complex and multilayered, often encompassing experiences of dislocation and displacement, as individuals were taken from their homes to destinations that could be thousands of miles away. This chapter considers the range of experiences that both African and Asian slaves endured in the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries during periods of intensified exchange of captives between the interiors, coasts and islands scattered across the ocean. While the moment of capture or bondage signaled the beginning of a new unfree state and social position, the experience of enslavement did not necessarily end at that moment; rather, it initiated a process whose trajectories could be expansive and involve multiple stages (and geographies) that shaped the contours of an unfree existence in the ocean.
This chapter analyzes Ottoman slavery as an institution in order to provide readers with insights into how Ottoman society both benefited from slavery and became largely defined by it. The topic will be examined by illuminating the aspects of entry into slavery, extraction of slave labor, and exits from slavery, arguing that these three phases were cyclical rather than gradually evolutionist.
This “injection” comes from the point of view of a historian of slavery turned historian of sexuality. The history of sexuality sits very uneasily with the history of enslavement, however, because of the problem of agency and its relationship to consent. Historians must not erase the personhood of the enslaved and their ability to make choices; but the realm within which they make those choices is so constrained that recognizing their agency can be akin to blaming the victim or implying consent when it cannot really be given.
Slavery in South Asia during the early modern and colonial periods is a broad and diverse category, including practices ranging from agricultural slavery to military to domestic slavery. As a result, scholars have emphasized the need to avoid generalizations and consider this subject in a highly contextualized, historicized manner. This chapter provides an overview of the different forms and experiences of slavery in this region, covering topics such as mechanisms of enslavement, intra- and inter-regional slave trades, practices of manumission, as well as continuities and shifts during the colonial period.
Slavery made the British Caribbean work and it did so largely within the institution of the plantation. British Caribbean plantation slavery was excessively brutal and exploitative but it was thoroughly modern and extremely productive and efficient. It brought great wealth to a few and to the British imperial government. But it made the lives of the majority of plantations workers very miserable as they were perhaps the most overworked and badly treated people in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
Slavery was a defining phenomenon in the history of Greek city-states. This chapter explores the various local slaving systems of ancient Greece and examines their similarities and differences with respect to four factors: the slaving strategies employed by the masters; the geopolitical context of ancient Greek communities; the ways and aims for which the political community intervened in the master–slavery relationship; and the forms of communities in which slaves participated.
Multiple forms of labor coercion were common in West Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter focuses on two of them: one, based on interior slavery, was rooted in the longue durée of regional history. The other, colonial forced labor, was exogenous and introduced by European colonialists between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth century. In Tahoua, the region of today’s Republic of Niger that this chapter focuses on, these two forms of coerced labor co-existed. In 1905 France abolished indigenous slavery in its recently acquired African territories and concurrently introduced a regime of compulsory labor for the building and maintenance of colonial infrastructure. In spite of French legal abolition, indigenous slavery did not die out, but started being contested and resisted more effectively by those who had been enslaved. Those formerly enslaved to local slaveowners and their descendants were also the first to be forcibly recruited to carry out construction work on colonial worksites. These two regimes of coerced labor, with different ideological origins, became intertwined and underwent substantial changes throughout the twentieth century. Their legacies have continued influencing labor relations and forms of personal dependence into the present day.
South Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe were more closely involved with slavery in the Americas than is commonly assumed. Lower costs for labor, raw materials, and solid fuel gave specific regions a competitive edge in the production of commodities used in the barter trade for slaves from West Africa, as well as in provisioning New World plantations. Ironware from the Rhineland; copper and iron from Sweden; Bohemian glassware; and especially Indian cottons and German linen, all contributed to lowering costs in the acquisition of slaves and in the maintenance of plantations. The purchasing power thus generated in Central Europe contributed to the growth of the population and of proto-industries, and ultimately to industrialization. This injection essay illuminates the impact of commodity chains on New World slavery by focusing on the single most important plantation product destined for Europe—sugar—and the two single most important barter commodities destined for Africa: textiles and metalware.
This chapter discusses household slavery in relation to the urbanization process and Mediterranean colonialism taking place in late medieval Europe. It reassesses the Ehrenkreutz thesis that urban slavery in late medieval Europe was a secondary byproduct of power relations in Central Asia and the Black Sea region by evaluating information on the entry of individuals into slavery from fragmented documents. Furthermore, the chapter shows that urban slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean included far more than domestic services and discusses the value of court papers and wills for the understanding of exit scenarios for slaves.
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