Slave Raiding, Allocation, and Economic Regimes. Global Connections and Comparisons

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F Transdisciplinary Approaches

Slave Raiding, Allocation, and Economic Regimes: Global Connections and Comparisons

Event Details

Date

II. Thursday, 11th September, 08:30-10:30
Location
M1051
Theme
F Transdisciplinary Approaches

Convenor

Hans Hägerdal (Linnaeus University)

Chair

Hans Hägerdal (Linnaeus University)

Panelists

Angelina Kalashnikova (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel)
Dick Harrison (Lund University)
Hans Hägerdal (Linnaeus University)
Gwyn Campbell (McGill University)

Papers

Angelina Kalashnikova

What is Slavery and Was it Slavery? Human Trafficking in 17th-Century Siberia

What is Slavery and Was it Slavery? Human Trafficking in 17th-Century Siberia

Slavery represents the most extreme form of human dependency, yet its characteristics vary significantly across different geographical and chronological contexts. This diversity has made it difficult to arrive at a universally accepted definition of slavery. The question “What is slavery?” is central to any scholar studying human dependency. However, in some historiographical traditions, such as in Russia, it has been uncommon to analyze certain social institutions and practices using the terminology of slavery. This presentation explores the forms of dependency among Siberian peoples before Russian colonization in the 17th century, as well as the human trafficking practices in which Russian newcomers were involved. Historical sources reveal that Russian soldiers, trappers, and fur traders purchased local women, sometimes converting them to Orthodoxy in order to marry them. In the Siberian context, human trafficking was closely linked to interethnic marriages, which played a key role in shaping the region’s social structure. By examining these practices, I aim to question whether the term "slavery" is applicable to this context and explore how these local forms of bondedness intersected with global patterns of human exploitation. This analysis will contribute to a broader understanding of the concept of slavery in non-Western contexts and its variability across time and space.
Dick Harrison

Slavery as a Historical and global phenomenon

Slavery as a Historical and global phenomenon

The birth of slavery occurred before the innovation of writing, but the roots are nevertheless easy to discern. The development of economic inequality and poverty, as well as the evolution of warfare, evolved into various forms of bondage, institutionalized forms of contempt and repression that were accepted as natural parts of the social world order. In a later phase, these forms were explained in juridical terms. In many countries and cultural spheres, this chain of development was accomplished already in the Bronze Age, and slavery would remain a significant element in world history until the nineteenth century; in some parts of the world, it is still – although illegal – a fact of life.

There are, however, significant variations within the concept of human unfreedom, which becomes obvious if we view the phenomenon from a global and diachronic perspective. Slavery has been transformed several times, and the spread of slavery has been an important aspect of globalization. Long-distance slave trade – for example along trans-Saharan routes and on the Indian Ocean – was well-known long before the triangular trade. In the first millennia of the history of slavery, the institution often materialized in the form of small-scale household slavery, with women as the main victims. From the sixteenth century until the nineteenth century, this changed, as it became possible to enslave and contain large numbers of working men on plantations and in mines. After the abolition of slavery, many victims have been children, since this kind of slavery is comparatively easy to conceal.
Hans Hägerdal

Southeast Asia in a World of Enslavement. Regional Forms of Coerced Labour in the Context of Global Slaving

Southeast Asia in a World of Enslavement. Regional Forms of Coerced Labour in the Context of Global Slaving

As a historical macro region, Southeast Asia is a crossroads that harbours a huge number of ethnic groups, the major world religions, and all levels of political integration. Still, there are also geographical and economic factors which justify the study of Southeast Asia as an entity. It is therefore interesting to study the forms of heavily bonded and coerced labour, with a generalizing term “slavery”, which have flourished in the region since antiquity. The variety of legal, cultural and economic factors underpinning slave-based production has been discovered by historians and anthropologists since the 1980s. Based on this, the present paper employs a global take on Southeast Asian slavery by discussing the interplay between the variety of regional forms and external notions of unfreedom. That is, Indic, Sinic, Islamic, and Christian/Western cultures have conceived legal and moral ideas of coerced labour which have translated into shifting praxis depending on the geographic and economic circumstances. With religio-cultural and political change, not least the onslaught of European colonialism, regional slaving regimes thus became entwined with new influences, especially as new modes of production emerged, often for the world market (plantations, gathering of sea and forest products, agriculture, etc.). The paper discusses the major trends of this entwinement up to the formal abolishment of Southeast Asian slavery (late 19th-early 20th century).
Gwyn Campbell

Bondage in the Indian Ocean World: A Re-Evaluation of the Changing Nature of Subjects and Slaves

Bondage in the Indian Ocean World: A Re-Evaluation of the Changing Nature of Subjects and Slaves

Slavery studies is dominated by the Atlantic-New World model in which slaves were overwhelmingly sourced in Sub-Saharan and shipped to the Caribbean, Brazil and the southern United. They were a clearly identifiable group, ruled by violence, who possessed no civil rights, and whose chattel status was hereditary. Uniquely, they comprised over 20 per cent of the total population, and their labour was essential to the destination economies. They thus transformed those regions into “slave societies”, in contrast to other regions of the world characterised by societies where slaves comprised less than 20 per cent of the population and where their labour did not underpin the economy. This paper, using precolonial Madagascar, Egypt and other Indian Ocean world regions as comparative case studies, challenges the conventionally dominant view. It argues that in the Indian Ocean world, where slavery and the slave trade commenced by at least 2000 BCE and has continued to the present day, bondage was ubiquitous, tying the vast bulk of the macro-region’s populations in a variety of categories of servile labour in which, at times, the lot of those of slave status was preferable to those of “free” subjects.

Abstract

Slaving, in the sense of acquisition and allocation of coerced labour, is a global phenomenon which has been a factor in most historical economies since the beginning of recorded history. While the slaveries of Graeco-Roman Antiquity and the early modern Atlantic world are widely known and studied in the historical literature, we also find forms of heavily bonded labour regimes in various parts of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Pre-Columbian Americas. The global dimensions have received increasing attention by historians and anthropologists in recent years, as new sources and methodological possibilities have been explored. A steady stream of new research has uncovered patterns of unfree and coerced labour, and its economic significance, through the innovative scrutiny of hitherto underused sources and new theoretical and methodological interventions. All this raises the question how the acquisition, allocation, and economic functions of enslaved people operated in different geographical contexts around the world, and how these different contexts interacted through political, economic and ideological currents. This panel aims to scrutinize how local/regional slaving regimes can be elucidated by comparison with larger global trends, and the opposite around. In other words, we seek to understand how local traditions of bondedness were impacted by increasing global flows, especially after 1500 –a process that included both Western and non-Western actors. A global take will also enable us to problematize the much-discussed ‘slave’ concept and discuss its applicability in non-Western contexts. In sum, the papers will explore voices and traces of the underbelly of historical modes of production and thus contribute to the multivocality in global history.