Global Perspectives on Confinement, c.1500-1800

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F Transdisciplinary Approaches

Global Perspectives on Confinement, c.1500-1800

Event Details

Date

III. Thursday, 11th September, 11:00-13:00
Location
M1049
Theme
F Transdisciplinary Approaches

Convenor

Emma Kalb (University of Bonn)
Nabhojeet Sen (University of Bonn)

Chair

Hillary Taylor (University of Padua)

Panelists

Teresa Peláez-Domínguez (Universitat de València)
Hillary Taylor (University of Padua)
Emma Kalb (University of Bonn)
Nabhojeet Sen (University of Bonn)

Papers

Teresa Peláez-Domínguez

Slavery, forced labour and coercion in the galleys (Hispanic Monarchy, 16th century)

Slavery, forced labour and coercion in the galleys (Hispanic Monarchy, 16th century)

During the early modern period the galleys became spaces of confinement for the purpose of punishment and coercion. Since the early decades of the 16th century, monarchies began to develop mechanisms to fill their armies with forced labourers to row, including convicts and slaves. Wage labour never disappeared, but it was largely avoided. This shift was not solely due to economic reasons –where wage labour had costs to the monarchy that forced labour did not–but also to delivered political decisions with effects on king’s political power and Mediterranean Warfare. In analyzing how the introduction of slave and convict rowers intersected with the development of the new dynastic monarchies in Western Europe, this paper will consider the concurrent emergence of new forms of punishment, ideas about poverty and confinement, and the evolution of slave systems in the early modern Mediterranean that set the basis for the politics of coercion in the Spanish galleys. Furthermore, slavery and convict labour coexisted and mutually influence each other, leading to blurred distinctions among the various forms of dependent statuses and forced labour conditions. This complexity raises the question of how the servile statuses –including convicts, slaves, and wage-dependent individuals– were defined in confinement and how the monarchy’s coercive policies over the galley rowers were developed, adapted, and renegotiated.
Hillary Taylor

Confining a Global Workforce: Asian Sailors in the East India Company London Barracks, C.1800

Confining a Global Workforce: Asian Sailors in the East India Company London Barracks, C.1800

From the 18th century, the East India Company became increasingly reliant on the labor of lascars — a broad term that was used to describe sailors of Asian origin. Upon arrival in London, lascars were confined in a dual sense: they were obliged to remain in Britain until they could secure return passage and were housed in a barracks. This privately operated institution was run at a profit, and the EIC paid money to its managers to house the lascars. In the early 19th century, conditions in the barracks proved sufficiently bad that a commission was created to investigate its operation. This paper analyzes a unique source that recently made its way into an archival collection in the United States: a memorandum produced in the run-up to the investigation, which collected informal testimony from lascars and British observers. It reconstructs the spatial conditions of lascars’ confinement; their dietary provisions and mortality rates; and tensions among the lascar population. It examines how Asian sailors collectively agitated to improve their living conditions, as well as the forms of repression that were used to suppress their efforts and the role that intermediary authority figures played in such repression. While this memorandum provides valuable insights into lascars’ experiences, their statements were heavily mediated — and, at times, subjected to editorial commentaries — by the memorandum’s writers. This paper illustrates the degree to which British “humanitarian” concerns for the confined were shaped by, and ultimately expressions of, prejudices about certain segments of an increasingly globalizing workforce.
Emma Kalb

Political Prisoners and Enslaved Guards in Mughal South Asia

Political Prisoners and Enslaved Guards in Mughal South Asia

Imprisonment served multiple purposes during the Mughal period, from administrative or preventative detention to punishment and reform; it was further implemented in specific ways and in specific locations according to the social status of the individual in question. This paper will examine the practices around the imprisonment and surveillance of members of the Mughal elite, with a particular focus on the best-documented royal princes and their female allies in seventeenth century Persian-language sources. It will in particular highlight the significance of confinement as a negotiated, processual status serving to both discipline and constrain possible political competitors through bringing into focus the crucial and sometimes-vulnerable intermediary roles of enslaved eunuch guards. Anxieties and concerns around maintaining due honor and respect for elite inmates existed in tension with the need to reduce the political threat they might pose. Within this context, eunuch guards could become caught in the middle of tense contestations, reconsiderations, and adjustments of the terms of imprisonment. While the eighteenth century would see the emergence of a “cage” system of princely confinement, similar to that practiced in the Ottoman and Safavid cases, this earlier period saw the use of imprisonment as not only a preventative but also a disciplinary tool to manage and reform unruly members of the elite and in particular royal princes, with an eye to their potential eventual release. Thus confinement, in this context, was practiced and experienced in complex and layered ways.
Nabhojeet Sen

Coercion and Confinement: Early Modern Western India, 1670-1818

Coercion and Confinement: Early Modern Western India, 1670-1818

The paper locates the various practices of confinement that were used in Western India between the latter half of the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. Practices such as confinement on the forts, in royal establishments, and in houses showed remarkable flexibility in the way it was used- with or without fetters, and with varying degrees of im/mobility prescribed in spaces such as Turunga, Bandikhana, Adabkhana, Chawki through the regimes of Bijapur, Ahmednagar and lastly the Marathas in early modern Western India. These variations were helpful as penal confinement was summoned by these regimes to enable state formation, extending political control into the borderlands from major urban centres, coerce political rivals, punishing rebellion and mobilising coerced labour such as those in the forts in the manufacture of gunpowder. Places such as these were used to confine slaves, coerce military chiefs, political elites among others. Confinement was particularly useful throughout this period of vexed, negotiated, continuously shifting political loyalties and an unprecedented competition for resources and labour as it could be used for further coercion such as being a secondary punishment of labour to the already penally enslaved or it could be used to secure monetary resources, by being commuted to fines. Through such as analysis, the paper challenges the binary evident in the studies of punishment and global labour history which posits the development of penal modernity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century as replacing the multiple systems of confinement in the premodern world by hard imprisonment and immobilisation.

Abstract

Recent conversations on global labour history have tended to propose a teleological movement of penal modernity towards imprisonment, and imprisonment as its main form of immobilisation. The panel seeks to critically intervene in this by decoupling penal modernity from imprisonment, by foregrounding the role of ‘’confinement’’ as a key strategy of penal immobilisation from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Contributions examine the multiple and shifting meanings, strategies, and experiences of confinement, including but not limited to imprisonment, penal enslavement, and forced labour, across diverse spatial contexts and in a multitude of sites such as barracks, galleys, elite households, and forts during the early modern era. The panel highlights diverse forms of confinement within this period, practised in relation to a similarly diverse range of actors including convicts, enslaved people, political elites, and sailors, as a part of various processes of punishing, immobilising, disciplining, and ensuring loyalty to the political sovereign. At the same time, however, the panel also underlines an enduring feature of confinement in the early modern world, across multiple contexts: that it did not exclude space for negotiation and mediation, such as coerced intermediation or calibration of penal sentences. This focus on the assertion, navigation, contestation, and experience of confinement will illuminate its mediation by highly contextual factors, such as embodied relations, ritual, and social hierarchies. In bringing into conversation distinct local and regional contexts, this panel will reflect on both the possibilities and limitations of a “global” perspective and the situatedness of practices and experiences of confinement. As such, it will contribute to moving beyond the modern “birth of the prison,” and moving towards a more variegated and representative global history of confinement.