Verlag für Wissenschaft und Praxis
Categories OPEN ACCESS Reihe: Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series Vol. 11: How to Create a Labour Market in Colonial Situations:
Categories OPEN ACCESS Reihe: Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series Vol. 10: Historicizing the Yanacona: Methodological Decisions, Implications and Challenges
Categories OPEN ACCESS Reihe: Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series Vol. 9: Dominus and Tyrannos? Narratives of Slavery in the Political Discourse of Late Antiquity
Categories OPEN ACCESS Reihe: Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series Vol. 8: “Performing Freedom: Strategies of Escaping Slavery in Southern Cities, 1810–1860”
Categories OPEN ACCESS Reihe: Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series Vol. 7: Moral Dilemmas in Slave-Owning Societies: Evidence from Early Legal Texts
Categories OPEN ACCESS Reihe: Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series Vol. 6: When Looms Begin to Weave by Themselves:
Categories OPEN ACCESS Reihe: Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series Vol. 5: Clay embodiments:Materializing Asymmetrical Relations in Pre-Hispanic Figurines from Ecuador
Categories OPEN ACCESS Reihe: Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series Vol. 4: From “Little Better than Slaves” to “Cowskin Heroes”: Poor White People in Jamaica, 1655–178
Categories OPEN ACCESS Reihe: Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series Vol. 3: Medieval Women in the Très Ancien Coutumier de Normandie.
Categories OPEN ACCESS Reihe: Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series Vol. 2: At the Intersection of Labour History and Digital Humanities:
Vol. 11: How to Create a Labour Market in Colonial Situations:
Artikel-Nr.: ISBN 978-3-86893-404-5
82 pages, paperback,
14,8 x 21,0 cm, 2021
Hier können Sie die Publikation als
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0-Lizenz herunterladen:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.53179/9783868934045
This study is, at once, a historical critique of neoclassical and Marxist economics of labour market formation, a critical history of the colonization of continental Equatorial Guinea by France, Germany and Spain, and a comparative inquiry of the labour recruiters who forged the gateways to expanding imperial peripheries of colonial production. A recruitment boom for the cacao plantations of the Spanish island of Fernando Po swept into Rio Muni and the Fang areas of southern Cameroon and northern Gabon during the first half of the twentieth century. By documenting the volatile phases as well as the recruitment techniques for this great boom and eventual bust, the author argues that recruiters have usually been empirically conflated or conceptually obviated even though they stood in sharp contrast to the slave trade or state-organized forced labour schemes. They were key informal vectors of commercial conquest across a variety of times and regions, and operated non-violently by way of persuasive and distorted communication and immanently through credit and money creation in the form of gifts and advance payments.
The Author
Enrique Martino is a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellow at the Complutense University of Madrid, and holds a PhD from the Institute of Asian and African Studies of Humboldt University, Berlin. He has been a postdoctoral fellow in Global History at the University of Freiburg (FRIAS) and at the Global Network for Global History project at the University of Göttingen. He has published in Comparativ, HAU, Ayer, Africa, African Economic History, History in Africa and the International Review of Social History and is completing two books, on labour and labour recruiters, and on money and monetary transformations in African and global history respectively.
Vol. 10: Historicizing the Yanacona: Methodological Decisions, Implications and Challenges
Artikel-Nr.: ISBN 978-3-86893-403-8
33 pages, paperback,
14,8 x 21,0 cm, 2021
Hier können Sie die Publikation als
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0-Lizenz herunterladen:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.53179/9783868934038
Based on the critical analysis of historiographic assertions focused on the study of Yanaconazgo as a long-standing labor institution, this text proposes various key factors to broaden the historical perspective. It is supported by concrete data from the context of the jurisdiction of La Plata in Charcas (Bolivia) between the sixteen and eighteenth centuries, which provides a glimpse into the complexity of this labor system, as well as the diversity of situations of both free and unfree servitude in which workers of different origins, genders and ages were immersed. The study encourages a breaking away from methodological attachments or other constraints that may lead to uncritical repetition of certain terms of a proscribing nature. At the same time, it gives an approach to the daily functions that gradually molded this labor institution and that remind us that history is engineered by people’s actions.
The Author
Paola Revilla Orías holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chile and the EHESS in Paris. She is a member of the Bolivian History Society (SBH) and the Latin American Work and Workers Network (RedLatt). She is interested in social, juridical and labor history studies. Her research focuses on analyzing the experience of captive populations in colonial cities, more specifically of African and Chiriguano Indians from the lowlands of Charcas (Bolivia). She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) in 2021 and is currently a lecturer at the Bolivian Catholic University of San Pablo in La Paz, Bolivia.
Vol. 9: Dominus and Tyrannos? Narratives of Slavery in the Political Discourse of Late Antiquity
Artikel-Nr.: ISBN 978-3-86893-402-1
28 pages, paperback,
14,8 x 21,0 cm, 2021
Hier können Sie die Publikation als
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0-Lizenz herunterladen:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.53179/9783868934021
Late Roman authors give us many examples of how firmly images of slavery were anchored in the minds of contemporaries, and how these images were incorporated into literary tradition and political discourse. Images from the world of slavery could be used in a great variety of ways: to criticize an emperor’s behavior, to illustrate his loss of authority, or to characterize the relationship between two emperors. The book will show how the presentation and perception of Late Roman emperors, such as Diocletian and his co-emperors, were influenced by narratives from the world of slavery. These narratives form part of a power discourse, a discourse on power relations. Or to speak with Hayden White, “And this raises the suspicion that narrative in general, from the folktale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realized ʻhistory’, has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority”.
The Author
Andrea Binsfeld has been Associate Professor for Classics at the University of Luxemburg since 2011. From 2003–2011 she was a research associate with the project “Forschungen zur antiken Sklaverei” (“Research on Ancient Slavery”) at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. She studied history, archaeology and classical philology at the University of Trier, where she received her PhD in 2002 (under the supervision of Heinz Heinen) on the topic of “The Graffiti in the early Christian Church of Trier”. Her fields of research are social history, especially ancient slavery; the history and archaeology of Roman Gaul; epigraphy and late antiquity.
Vol. 8: “Performing Freedom: Strategies of Escaping Slavery in Southern Cities, 1810–1860”
Artikel-Nr.: ISBN 978-3-86893-401-4
39 pages, paperback,
14,8 x 21,0 cm, 2021
Hier können Sie die Publikation als
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0-Lizenz herunterladen:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.53179/9783868934014
“Performing Freedom” examines the attempts by enslaved African Americans living in the nineteenth-century US South to escape slavery by fleeing to towns and cities within the slaveholding states and disguising themselves as free blacks. Going to great lengths to “look” and “act” free—often even acquiring forged free papers—thousands of enslaved people “passed for free” in urban areas with large free black communities. Such strategies of escape underscore the importance of visibility to the successful development of slavery as an institution, and reveal how enslaved people attempted to erase visible markers of enslavement to live in freedom.
The Author
Damian Alan Pargas is Professor of North American History & Culture at Leiden University, as well as Director of the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in the Netherlands. Specialized in the history of slavery, he is the author and editor of several books, edited volumes and articles on various themes related to slavery in North America and in global contexts. His forthcoming book, Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America (Cambridge University Press, 2022), examines the experiences and strategies of runaway slaves in various “spaces of freedom” throughout the North American continent, and is based on a prestigious VIDI research grant awarded by the Netherlands Scientific Council (NWO). Pargas is also one of the founding editors of the Journal of Global Slavery, a founding member of the Leiden Slavery Studies Association, co-editor of the book series Studies in Global Slavery (Brill), and an International Advisory Board member of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn.
Vol. 7: Moral Dilemmas in Slave-Owning Societies: Evidence from Early Legal Texts
Artikel-Nr.: ISBN 978-3-86893-400-7
41 pages, paperback,
14,8 x 21,0 cm, 2021
Hier können Sie die Publikation als
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0-Lizenz herunterladen:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.53179/9783868934007
Slavery is not a natural state. It arises when people or classes in a society assume the right to treat others as their property. And yet the status of slaves has rarely been defined by law, even when slavery was an accepted social fact. This publication examines the laws that did deal with slavery, from the earliest written rules in Mesopotamia, India, China, Rome, and the Islamic world, to medieval Europe and Tibet. It is evident that, rather than offering comprehensive definitions, the lawmakers were dealing with the complications that arose from the instability of the state, including issues of manumission, legal capacity, and the status of children. People could become slaves without the need for legal intervention, as a result of warfare or debt, but many slaves acquired freedoms, presenting complications that the lawmakers tried to address. They also, in many cases, hint at moral discomfort, suggesting that the act of lawmaking forced slave-owners to face up to the fact that they were treating other people as property.
The Author
Fernanda Pirie is Professor of the Anthropology of Law at the University of Oxford, where she teaches at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. She works on Tibetan societies, both contemporary and historical, as well as comparative and historic approaches to law and legalism. Her monograph on The Anthropology of Law (OUP) appeared in 2013, along with a series of comparative volumes on law and legalism (Legalism, OUP, 4 vols), published together with colleagues in anthropology and history. A global history of law will be published in November 2021: The Rule of Laws: a 4,000-year quest to order the world (Profile Books and Basic Books).
Vol. 6: When Looms Begin to Weave by Themselves:
Artikel-Nr.: ISBN 978-3-86893-399-4
59 pages, paperback,
14,8 x 21,0 cm, 2021
Hier können Sie die Publikation als
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0-Lizenz herunterladen:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.53179/9783868933994
Aristotle once said that if looms were to weave by themselves masters would not need slaves. The historical trajectory of capitalism seems to place humanity in the exact opposite situation: on the one hand, the accelerated scientific development of the productive forces and the rise of automation processes, on the other hand, a diversification and intensification on a worldwide scale of forms of “unfree labour,” often classified as “modern slavery.” Several studies have approached these phenomena as remnants of “pre-capitalism;” others see them as moments of an “ongoing primitive accumulation;” still others interpret them as extreme cases of “fully functional capitalism” or “neoliberal capitalism.” In this paper the author intends (i) to show the different theoretical problems of these approaches and (ii) to argue that the phenomena of “modern slavery” are more adequately understood through a perspective of global decomposition of capitalism, a process that began with the third industrial revolution of microelectronics and is now accelerating with the emerging automation, intensifying a violent logic of demobilization of labour power and containment of “superfluous” populations.
The Author
Bruno Lamas, an architect by training, worked in the fields of urbanism and urban and regional planning between 2004 and 2017. He is currently a fellow of the F.C.T., the Portuguese national funding agency for science, research and technology, and a Ph.D. student in Economic and Organizational Sociology in UL-ISEG, Lisbon School of Economics and Management, developing the dissertation “The Metamorphoses of Modern Slavery: Labour, Self-ownership and the Problem of Slavery in the History of Capitalism.”
Vol. 5: Clay embodiments:Materializing Asymmetrical Relations in Pre-Hispanic Figurines from Ecuador
Artikel-Nr.: ISBN 978-3-86893-398-7
45 pages, paperback,
14,8 x 21,0 cm, 2021
Hier können Sie die Publikation als
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0-Lizenz herunterladen:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.53179/9783868933987
The longest tradition of figurine production in the Americas is found on the Ecuadorian coast, beginning with the Valdivia culture around 3500 BC and ending with the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, or possibly even later. In this article, figurines from different cultures and time periods in this tradition are analyzed with an emphasis on body politics, presenting the author’s reflections about how these artifacts embody ancient relations between people, especially with regard to gender asymmetries. It also discusses at some length the question of how contemporary perspectives for analyzing ancient materials are often influenced by western, patriarchal, ideology-laden interpretations.
Although the corpus of figurines analyzed in this research is well known, prior to this study it has not been considered from the perspective of gender asymmetries, even though it is an excellent source of data for such analyses, especially in a diachronic perspective. The study argues that the figurine traditions of particular cultures implicitly emphasize some ideals, such as naturalizing the idea of females depending on males. The author argues that the frequent representations of female individuals associated with pregnancy and childcare can be seen as a political agenda designed to idealize the roles of mother and wife for women, and to limit the influence of female individuals in public activities connected to power and authority.
The Author
María Fernanda Ugalde (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador) is an Ecuadorian archaeologist. She holds an M.A. and a PhD from Freie Universität in Berlin, with a specialization on Ancient American Cultures. She has worked on many topics and time periods. In recent years her focus lay, amongst others, on gender archaeology, body politics, and iconographic studies. She is the (co-)author of four books, including her PhD dissertation which was published in Germany in the series Forschungen zur Archäologie Außereuropäischer Kulturen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts. Her papers have been published in several countries.
Vol. 4: From “Little Better than Slaves” to “Cowskin Heroes”: Poor White People in Jamaica, 1655–178
Artikel-Nr.: ISBN 978-3-86893-397-0
33 pages, paperback,
14,8 x 21,0 cm, 2021
Hier können Sie die Publikation als
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0-Lizenz herunterladen:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.53179/9783868933970
The principal axes along which seventeenth and eighteenth-century Jamaica divided were those of colour and of freedom. By the late eighteenth century, it became axiomatic that all Protestant whites were free and that all blacks were either enslaved or marked out for discriminatory action as a result of not being white. But this situation was new: before the Seven Years’ War and the trauma of Tacky’s Revolt in 1760, a considerable proportion of the white population was unfree, including many indentured servants and, before 1718, convicts. This article estimates the numbers of unfree whites before the 1760s, allows as far as sources allow some voice to these poor whites, and examines their status as unfree people in a society increasingly oriented around principles of white supremacy. Over time, the political and economic position of ordinary whites dramatically improved as the principles of white racial superiority took hold in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. It meant that the people somewhat derisively called ʻcowskin heroes’ due to their penchant for lording it over enslaved people were in the ascendant as the principles of white racial superiority took hold as the foundations of social, economic and political order in the island.
The Author
Trevor Burnard is Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull and Director, the Wilberforce Institute. He is the author of 8 monographs, 3 edited books, 4 collections of articles and nearly 100 articles and book chapters on Atlantic history, imperial history and the history of plantations societies in the British Atlantic world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among his major works are Jamaica in the Age of Revolution (2020); The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in British Jamaica and French Saint Domingue (2016); Planters, Merchants and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 (2015); and Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (2004).
Vol. 3: Medieval Women in the Très Ancien Coutumier de Normandie.
Artikel-Nr.: ISBN 978-3-86893-396-3
57 pages, paperback,
14,8 x 21,0 cm, 2020
Hier können Sie die Publikation als
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0-Lizenz herunterladen:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.53179/9783868933963
This paper examines the legal capacity which secular women enjoyed or lacked in late medieval Normandy. The issue is particularly relevant to decoding asymmetrical dependencies, since a lack of legal capacity was the quintessential expression of women’s inferior position and dependency in society and in the eyes of the law. The research discussed in this paper reveals the extent of that legal dependency in real, rhetorical and linguistic terms. It involves examining the textual and semantic representation of women in Norman customary law texts, by using diachronic linguistics and terminological methodologies. The study confirms the assumption that women in thirteenth century Normandy had relatively low legal capacity and found themselves in asymmetrical dependencies on men, especially on their husbands. The narrative told in the Coutumier of men is not only more substantial but also considerably more varied and thus contextually richer. The approach has allowed us to go beyond content analysis and get a better understanding of the actual social experience of women’s legal capacity by compounding information and data from analysis of content, meanings, terminology and discourse and, hence, providing a contextualized understanding of the dependencies in which women existed in their daily lives.
The Author
Caroline Laske holds graduate and post-graduate degrees in law from the University of Cambridge, in linguistics and translation studies from the University of Birmingham and a PhD in legal history from the University of Ghent. She is a Heinz Heinen Fellow at the Bonn Center of Dependency and Slavery Studies, a research fellow at the Ghent Legal History Institute and a lecturer at the UCLouvain. Her interdisciplinary research lies at the intersection of law, history and language, applying linguistic analysis to study legal history & concepts, comparative law and translation.
Vol. 2: At the Intersection of Labour History and Digital Humanities:
Artikel-Nr.: ISBN 978-3-86893-395-6
36 pages, paperback,
14,8 x 21,0 cm, 2020
Hier können Sie die Publikation als
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0-Lizenz herunterladen:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.53179/9783868933956
We can describe work in many ways: as income, prestigious titles, and concrete tasks. We can also describe work vaguely, simply as ‘working’, ‘serving’, ‘helping’ or ‘being’. In the past as today, this was often true for work carried out by people in subordinate positions. However, the work of those in leading positions could also be talked about in unspecific and blank terms. While the vagueness of historical sources with respect to work can be annoying to the historian of labor, the good news is that sources can instead be more vocal about the social and economic relations that people were entangled in because of their work: with and for whom they worked and under what rules. This book uses evidence from early modern Sweden to discuss these patterns, showing that a common way of talking about one’s work was to specify whom it benefitted: an employer, a family member, a relative. The author suggests ways in which historians and computer linguists can join forces efficiently to uncover the many dependencies that work has created over time.
The Author
Maria Ågren is professor of history at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her work focuses on the intersection of economic, social, legal and gender history. Among her monographs are Domestic Secrets: Women and property in Sweden, 1600–1857 (University of North Carolina Press 2009) and The State as Master: Gender, state formation and commercialisation in urban Sweden, 1650–1780 (Manchester University Press 2017). She is the leader of the Gender and Work research project and the GaW infrastructure project; in this context, she has published a number of methodologically oriented articles and has also edited the project publication Making a Living, Making a Difference: gender and work in early modern European society (Oxford University Press 2017).