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The study of captivity in the early modern Mediterranean has largely relied on European and Ottoman sources. The Arabic archive furnishes further information about captives from the perspective of the multi-religious peoples in regions extending from Morocco to Syria. This paper examines the Arabic accounts of captivity of a Christian from Mount Lebanon, a Jew from Izmir, and numerous Muslims who fell victim to attacks by European and North African pirates.
In this talk, Christine Walker discusses her book, Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire. Jamaica Ladies is the first systematic study of the free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent who perpetuated chattel slavery and reaped its profits. Their actions helped transform Jamaica into the wealthiest slaveholding colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Starting in the 1670s, a surprisingly large and diverse group of women helped secure English control of Jamaica and, crucially, aided its developing and expanding slave labour regime by acquiring enslaved men, women, and children to protect their own tenuous claims to status and independence.
The discourse on social relationships in the context of status, prestige and belonging is a key aspect of Pharaonic elite culture. Social relations and hierarchies are not only addressed in texts, but also extensively displayed in visual sources and find ample archaeological representation in tombs, cemeteries, and settlements as well as in the design and layout of these built structures. The talk will explore the major relevant evidence of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC (such as tomb imagery, necropoleis, stelae, and settlements) as cultural media from a sociological perspective. The presentation will not only illustrate the different modes and forms in which social relationships and dependencies are encoded iconographically and archaeologically, but also address how Pharaonic society understood, modelled, and constructed itself by those means.
What has education to do with dependency? In a famous letter, Jerome (d. 419) narrates that, in a dream vision, he was called before Christ and accused of still using ”pagan“ education: ”You are not a Christian but a Ciceronian!“ Why hadn’t Jerome got rid of this heritage? The lecture approaches Christianity and classical (grammatical, rhetorical, philosophical) education from a praxeological point of view: while theologians claimed that Christianity should not use such education, Christian life depended on practices of reading, writing, and speaking. Was such dependency on previous tradition and practice of tradition really inevitable? Did Christianity not get rid of paideia, or did it consciously put it to good use? Struggling with such dependency contributed to a thorough transformation of classical education and enabled Christianity to survive the dramatic changes of its surrounding world.
The so-called servi poenae were slaves subjugated to their legal status as a consequence of a sentence that deprived convicts of their freedom and, at times, their lives (due to capital punishment). Servitus poenae (called “slavery of punishment” by W.W. Buckland, 1908), was not a punishment in itself, but rather a legal situation that led to a state of civil and juridical death, following the physical destruction of the sentenced person in a number of cases. Similarly, those already in slavery could become servi poenae after being sentenced to death.
The conference "Humboldt-Kolleg: Slavery, Freedom, Sustainability, and Pandemicis" is organized by Roberto Hofmeister Pich and supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Three of our Cluster members Michael Zeuske, Stephan Conermann, and Karoline Noack, will be giving a presentation.
The aim of this talk is to reflect on the consequences of fluctuating levels of asymmetrical dependencies on the symbolic productions of the political and religious elites of early Mesopotamian states (Neo- Assyrian, neo-Babylonian period). Thousands of clay tablets have allowed Assyriologists to examine economic phenomena in Ancient Mesopotamia: the social structures of the economy, the details of agricultural production and animal husbandry, short- and long-distance trade routes, and the dynamics of debts and credits have now been very meticulously studied.
Animals played a central role in the history of transatlantic slavery that has only recently attracted scholarly interest. Of vital importance to plantation agriculture, animals were also key to other aspects of slavery and the process of enslavement. Horses played a crucial part in the African warfare that supplied slaves and sharks were a useful instrument of terror for the captains of slavers to overawe their crew and human cargo. A small but significant trade in exotic animals, especially birds, was conducted by slave traders in parallel with their main business, and pets were important companions in Britain’s slaveholding colonies for both black and white. Dogs were a source of pleasure as well as workers in their own right: notoriously bred and used to hunt runaway slaves, they also served to combat vermin infestation on cane fields and offered protection from intruders and thieves.
Karen Woods Weierman’s recent book, The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston, restores the complicated history of antislavery Boston’s greatest legal victory and most devastating failure. Following a successful freedom suit on her behalf, little Med became a trope, discarded after her test case and forgotten when her death disrupted the triumphalist antislavery narrative. Dr. Weierman’s presentation will discuss the challenge of finding a child in the archives, the power and danger of weaponized white motherhood, and the historical lessons for our fraught cultural moment.
The vogue for "ethnicity" in many fields of historical study has reified a concept for which there is little direct evidence in the historical record before the twentieth century. The original meanings of "ethnicity" and the terms derived from it encompassed political and social dynamics that have been obscured in many contemporary uses of "ethnicity" in the social sciences. More importantly, the historical phenomena hidden behind ethnicity discourses in historiography appear to be connected to forms of dependency and the affiliation of individuals with them. Using examples mainly but not exclusively from Chinese history, this talk traces the growth of ascriptive power of states from the medieval to modern periods, suggesting that the derivative and synthetic aspects of "ethnicity" discourses might reveal the power and state issues that have generated them.
This talk reflects upon the contested definitions of ‘rightful’ dependency in early nineteenth-century Panjab, focusing specifically upon the overlapping bonds of service, patronage, and kinship that underpinned states in the region. Using a combination of colonial reports, judicial archives, and Indo-Persian accounts, it contrasts the perspectives of three groups of actors—that of the British colonial state, that of local elites in positions of dominance, and that of their clients and tributaries. Building on research from elsewhere in South Asia, it argues that the colonial state’s juridical and administrative practices suggest that its conceptions of what constituted ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ dependency were inconsistent, and guided in no small part by the aim of consolidating their hold over the region.
The main reason for the existence of military orders was to protect Christendom and contribute to its growth. In the context of the ongoing conflict between Islamic Al-Andalus and the Christian kingdoms in the medieval Iberian Peninsula, they concentrated their efforts on the defence against military aggressions from Muslim armies and on contributing to the territorial expansion of the Christian kingdoms. Military orders were therefore often involved in warfare against Muslims. Beyond these military activities, however, Muslims and military orders often interacted and, while doing so, created asymmetrical bonds of dependence. The aim of this paper is to explore that unevenness, with a special focus on the Muslims who were nominally free. Doing so will shed light on the complexity of the dependency relationships they established with the military orders, and on the interests, limitations, and other factors that shaped them.
In seinem Brief an Philemon setzt sich der Apostel Paulus dafür ein, dass ein Sklave bekommt, was die christliche Taufformel ihm verspricht: „… da ist nicht mehr Sklave noch Freier …“ (Gal 3,28; vgl. 1 Kor 12,13). Die Argumentation und die Metaphern des Briefes sollen daraufhin durchleuchtet werden, wie Paulus Abhängigkeitsstrukturen auf verschiedenen Ebenen gegeneinander ausspielt, um die Beziehung des getauften Sklaven Onesimus zu seinem Herrn Philemon, der ebenfalls Christ ist, entsprechend der christlichen „Ideologie“ zu regulieren. Dabei wird der scheinbar souveräne Sklavenhalter in ein größeres Beziehungsnetz versetzt, das ihn als durchaus nicht unabhängigen „Mitspieler“ zeigt. Besonders großer Druck auf ihn entsteht durch die paradoxe Situation, dass er gerade auf die Beziehung, in der er eine einseitig abhängige Position einnimmt, auf keinen Fall verzichten will.
The legacy of slavery is a crucial social issue in some, if not all, Malagasy societies. To understand why this is the case, I argue that we need to analyze the nature and impact of the 1896 colonial abolition in Madagascar. Using as an example the case of the Betsileo, a Malagasy group inhabiting the southern central highlands, I suggest that colonial abolition has had unintended and often overlooked consequences. For most Betsileo, the abolition decree did not have the power of precolonial cleansing rituals, which were performed at the time of manumission and used to reintegrate former slaves into a network of kinsmen or, at the very least, into the wider society of ‘free’ and ‘clean’ men and women. Since these powerful rituals did not take place, the slaves who were liberated by the French could not be cleansed and reintegrated into free society.
In theological and historical research, Christian talk of the "slave of God" has so far been understood as a metaphor. Although it was oriented towards the Greco-Roman environment of early Christianity, it seemed to have no further significance for real slavery. Starting from the asymmetrical relationship between God and man in monotheistic religions, I would like to use the supposed interdependence between discourse and reality for my historical research. I wish to pursue the problem of how far dependency relationships like slavery were further entrenched in ancient Christianity, especially in the Christian family.
My work addresses a persistent problem in African history: the deep history of slavery in the Lower Congo region. While historians acknowledge the importance of Lower Congo societies in shaping Atlantic slavery, they rarely consider what slaverymeant and how indigenous communities in the region practiced it. This state of affairs has fueled a long-standing debate among historians and anthropologists around two topics: (1) whether ‘slavery’ emerged in the Lower Congo prior to the arrival of Europeans and (2) whether the very ‘institution’ of slavery is Eurocentric. In this talk, I show how heuristic categories that historians use to understand slavery—such as thresholds between clientship and slavery, the dichotomy between free and slave, or the distinction between chattel and lineage slavery—misrecognize the original pathway of slavery in this region.
My work addresses a persistent problem in African history: the deep history of slavery in the Lower Congo region. While historians acknowledge the importance of Lower Congo societies in shaping Atlantic slavery, they rarely consider what slaverymeant and how indigenous communities in the region practiced it. This state of affairs has fueled a long-standing debate among historians and anthropologists around two topics: (1) whether ‘slavery’ emerged in the Lower Congo prior to the arrival of Europeans and (2) whether the very ‘institution’ of slavery is Eurocentric. In this talk, I show how heuristic categories that historians use to understand slavery—such as thresholds between clientship and slavery, the dichotomy between free and slave, or the distinction between chattel and lineage slavery—misrecognize the original pathway of slavery in this region.
Johannes Auenmüller (Museo Egizio, Turin) talks about "The Display of Social Relations and Dependencies: Case Studies from Pharaonic Egypt". -- The discourse on social relationships in the context of status, prestige and belonging is a key aspect of Pharaonic elite culture. Social relations and hierarchies are not only addressed in texts, but also extensively displayed in visual sources and find ample archaeological representation in tombs, cemeteries, and settlements as well as in the design and layout of these built structures. The talk will explore the major relevant evidence of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC (such as tomb imagery, necropoleis, stelae, and settlements) as cultural media from a sociological perspective. The presentation will not only illustrate the different modes and forms in which social relationships and dependencies are encoded iconographically and archaeologically, but also address how Pharaonic society understood, modelled, and constructed itself by those means.
The next Joseph C. Miller Lecture Series on September 6, 2021, by David Wheat, Michigan State University.
The Conference is looking to explore the connection between the phenomenon of dependency and the realm of the supernatural (God, angels, demons) in late antique and early medieval Christianity.
The conference “Embodied Dependencies” of Research Area B intends to approach the material evidence of asymmetrical dependencies by examining “embodied dependencies” in human societies from archaeological, art-historical and anthropological perspectives, exploring their historical breadth and variety. The conference will help to establish an inventory of material evidence of asymmetrical dependencies and its range of expression and information as an important site of asymmetrical dependencies next to the written word. Taking into consideration the “material turn” as well as recent debates on environmental history and bio-history, the conference also aims to relativize the modern/Western focus on written culture from a pre-colonial perspective. Hence the conference will be organized along four thematic panels: Bodies, Representations, Resources, and Spaces. Please note: The full program will be available shortly.
