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Whose knowledge is recognized, and what voices are heard within Caribbean studies? This conference focuses on how knowledge is produced, shared, and received, and on what changes are needed to ensure that power is shared, while epistemic differences are included and valued.

In the next Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture on October 24, João Fragoso and Thiago Krause will do a comparative analysis of the two largest slaving ports in the Americas, Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, discussing their roles in the history of the Atlantic slave trade, and the similarities and the differences in their historical trajectories.

This talk derives from Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy’s award-winning book, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (University of Illinois Press, 2020), which explores the historical relationship between disability, antiblack racism, and slavery in the British Caribbean and the Atlantic World from the 16th to the abolition of the slave trade in the early 19th century. This talk will illustrate the integral role of Caribbean enslaved laborers to our understandings of labor, disability, and modernity and that Caribbean plantation slavery should be considered among one of history’s most disabling systems of exploitation. Lastly, it demonstrates that the study of disability in the context of Atlantic slavery engenders possibilities to read disability among the enslaved in multiple ways, not only as a sign of victimization and ‘lack,’ but of power and possibility.

The International Social History Association (ISHA), the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), and the Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script” convene the International Conference “Social History of Capitalism”. If you wish to participate in the conference, please send an email by 5 October 2022 to cdevito@uni-bonn.de and indicate if you wish to participate online or in person. The conference will be held on zoom.

Everyone is welcome to join this public lecture online via zoom! The abstract is due any time soon.

We regret to say that this lecture was cancelled. It will be re-scheduled in due course. Sorry for any inconvenience! The lecture traces public international law’s response to the international slave trade and modern slavery from the early seventeenth century to the present day. It will be shown that each step of the formal outlawing of these practices was met by new forms of forced labour. It will be argued that collective enforcement was an effective approach to suppress the slave trade. However, the same cannot be said about the creation of state obligations to suppress slavery and forced labour or for a human rights-based approach to these practices.

This conference focuses on the bodies and embodiments of spirits, their (im-)materialities, and the bodily transformations, which they may be subject to in different socio-cultural contexts. It draws attention to the embodied experiences of asymmetrical dependencies among humans and spirits and to how the sensory experiences of interdependence are negotiated in their interactions.

Since 2018, the Bonn Center of Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) unites internationally renowned scholars researching historic forms of strong asymmetrical dependencies. The current academic year at the BCDSS (2021/22) is dedicated to “Norms, Institutions, and Practices of Dependency”. The end of this period will be marked by an international conference which aims at evaluating the role of institutional regulations and normative concepts in forming and perpetuating relations of asymmetrical dependencies. To this end, a variety of legal texts, sacred codes, or case studies will be examined for normative conceptions of servitude, dependency, and unfreedom, and for resulting practices of enforcing, subverting, or interpreting them. The conference will consist of an opening lecture on the theory of asymmetrical dependency and altogether three panels which focus on different aspects of the topic.

Archaeological views onto the later pre-Columbian past of southern Central America –roughly defined as including Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, but also merging into Colombia – have struggled to connect with more generalized understandings of early leadership, including prevalent models from neighbouring Mesoamerica. Various studies argue for chiefly authority in the area, while others emphasize more heterarchical, collective forms of leadership. A central tenet across these debates often is the role of gifting and the movement of prestige items. Regarding asymmetrical dependency, case material resides in the presence of large public works, prominently including the creation and maintenance of ceremonial centres across the area and various other expressions of group effort, for example, the sculpting of stone statuary. A significant portion of sculptures also alludes to practices of raiding, head-hunting, & bodily submission.

Extreme weather events, changing precipitation, and sea-level rise have made thosecliving in the global north more mindful of the vulnerability of lives and livelihoodscdue to climate change. For centuries, people living on Caribbean islands, particularly those who are most economically and politically vulnerable, have been at the forefront of solving climate problems, including agricultural precarity, water resource management, and forced migration. Eighteenth-century sugar cultivation made everyday life more precarious for enslaved laborers, Kalinago, and smallholders, especially with regard to issues of subsistence, land, and its resources. Sugar cane had a detrimental effect on soil and water availability. Plantation economies led to forced migration and conscription of people to and from Dominica as planters attempted to meet labor needs and cut costs when markets faltered.

In the late seventeenth century, Virginia colonist Edmund Scarburgh and his mistress Ann Toft owned and sold many Native laborers as indentured servants and slaves. A man of great ambition, Scarburgh engaged in economic activities throughout the Chesapeake, New England, New York, the Netherlands, and England. His occupations included county burgess, surveyor-general (1655-1670), amateur physician, maritime shipping and trade, the production of goods, namely tobacco and salt, and the brokering of Native laborers. All told, Scarburgh held 75,000 total acres of land and innumerable tithable English, African, and Native servants and slaves. By understanding the types of labor and the economic activities of the Scarburgh and Toft plantations, this lecture will address the importance of Native labor to the early Virginia plantation economy and examine the personal and professional relationship of Toft and Scarburgh, power brokers of the Eastern Shore.

Public servants are not ordinary employees. Their relationship to the modern state is special. According to prevailing opinion, this special relation influences rights and duties in the public employment relationship. On an analytical level, it is interesting to see what answers the questions about legal asymmetries and interdependencies reveal about this problem, and conversely, whether the object of investigation can broaden and change the perspectives of the questions associated with the concept. For this purpose, we will attempt a stroll through the history of civil service in the context of state-building, which will examine the particular problems of different epochs more closely. The lecture will show that the narrative of a development from unfree labour to free wage labour can also be refuted in the European context, at least for the public service sector.

This lecture explores to what extent one can discern a concept of personal freedom as a basic right in the first century CE. Philo's tractate "On the Freedom of the Righteous" is of particular importance in this context, as it discusses specific cases of slavery and freedom, sometimes in a metaphorical and sometimes in a literal sense. Moreover, Philo reports that the Essenes, a group of Jewish philosophers in Roman-era Palestine, rejected the idea of slavery on principal grounds and refused to be served. Philo's testimony will be analyzed in detail and compared to the views of other first-century authors.

One of the most celebrated extant medieval Arabic manuscripts is an illustrated copy of the Maqāmāt (Assemblies) of Abu Muhmmad al-Qasim ibn ‘Ali al-Hariri (d.516H/1122 CE), a popular text subject to frequent copying. The manuscript in question was produced in 634H/1237 CE, probably in Baghdad. It is often considered the cynosure of a tradition of book painting that flourished in Iraq and Syria during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is also the most frequently discussed in modern scholarship, for the aesthetic virtue and emotional complexity of its images, the insights they provide into contemporary social life, and for its illustrious afterlifeas a source of inspiration for modernists in the Arab lands.

This presentation explains how the archives created a wall of silence regarding issues of slavery and race. The archival silence created an intentional gap in the production of history. My previous book 'Black Morocco' was an attempt to place slavery and black Moroccans in the national narrative. It highlighted the black Moroccan heritage in the collective cultural memories. My current project focuses on the agency and resistance of black Moroccans and the insistence of their freedom. I focus on retrieving the archives for historical reparative justice. I intend to bring to light the forces that created maroonage and maintained social and legal identities in Morocco. I will thus examine the historical roots of this marginalized group that led to the present dilemma of racial identity and discrimination in Morocco.

One of the hallmarks of research is to reflect and inquire into the characteristics of society and broaden the scope of its development. As a result, research cannot be distanced from society’s past; it wears it like a cloak. Colonial history and heritage have had their impacts on research endeavors, and they seem not to have been washed away by time. The systems and remnants of identifiable colonial heritages still seen in African research are many. In this lecture, the most important ones will be discussed & criticized with recommendations provided. Since research must extend the scope of development & inspire it in society, it must be used to redefine how the global world & Africans see Africa. It must be harnessed to show that those who study Africa are capable of era-changing innovations & bringing certain innovative ideas, systems, and inventions from Africa to bear. Research must be used to prove that Africa is not a land of nothingness or of barbarians who beckon for sympathy.

This lecture examines the ways in which Christianity came to define the debate over slavery and freedom – and the nature of the free black subject – in the early nineteenth-century Anglo-Caribbean world. Responding to the movement for the abolition of the slave trade, and the question of slavery’s future, the role of Christianity in the sugar colonies was rethought by both the established church and nonconformist (Baptist and Methodist) missionaries in ways which made religion central to the definition of a shared humanity and to any reconfiguration of rights.

Conference on July 6–8, 2022 at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies organized by Claudia Jarzebowski, BCDSS, and Pia Wiegmink, BCDSS, Susanne Lettow (FU Berlin) and Heike Raphael-Hernandez (University of Würzburg). Check out Jennifer Morgan's Keynote Speech "The Measure of their Sadness: Slavery, Kinship and the Marketplace in the Early Black Atlantic" on YouTube. https://youtu.be/ct_z1bd-lrg

The talk will reflect about the relationships between criminal law & policing, on the one hand, & property law, on the other, focusing on the historical case of Jack Robbins, something of a confidence man as well as a master of advertising. He also focused public attention on “the boy problem,” which was a pervasive and real concern in early twentieth century America. His story offers an interesting counter-narrative to the histories that have been written about Progressive reform & the development of the juvenile court & other carceral reforms of the early twentieth century. In 1914 & 1915, he created “The Boys’ Brotherhood Republic“ in Chicago as an alternative to the reform schools and other juvenile court related institutions of the city. For the next thirty plus years, the BBR would be an institution run by the boys, from which adult control was rejected. Robbins’s critiques & writings offer an early twentieth century preview of arguments of today’s police & prison abolitionists.

In nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba, the island of Cuba's radical cradle, Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom and devised their own formative path to emancipation. Drawing on understudied archives, this talk explores a new history of Black rural geography and popular legalism, and offers a new framework for thinking about nineteenth-century Black freedom. Santiago de Cuba's Afro-descendant peasantries did not rely on liberal-abolitionist ideologies as a primary reference point in their struggle for rights. Instead, they negotiated their freedom and land piecemeal, through colonial legal frameworks that allowed for local custom and manumission. They gradually wore down the institution of slavery through litigation and self-purchase. Long before residents of Cuba protested for national independence and island-wide emancipation in 1868, it was Santiago's Afro-descendant peasants who, gradually and invisibly, laid the groundwork for emancipation.

The lecture investigates the history of coffee in the longue durée, from its first emergence in the commercial networks of the Ottoman Empire to the world crisis of Atlantic slavery at the end of the 19th century. Within this vast time frame the global circuits of the coffee commodity chain underwent substantive changes. The project explores the multiple combinations of land, labor, capital, and political power involved in the production, circulation, and consumption of coffee. The focus is on the relations between different forms of free and dependent labor mobilized for coffee production in the capitalist world-economy: peasant family organization, slavery, debt bondage, indentured labor, compulsory labor regimes imposed by colonial and national states, sharecropping, and seasonal wage labor. Based on a systematic study of a specific commodity chain, it directly addresses the problem of the structures of asymmetric dependence that evolved in different social orders over time.

The conference is intended to contribute to this assessment of knowledge about slavery in Africa and to take stock of the most recent significant scientific advances. Eight years after the conference "Slavery in Africa: Past, Legacies and Present," (SLAFCO) held at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (Nairobi, 2014), this initiative benefits from the work developed in the European project, "Slavery in Africa: A Dialogue Between Europe and Africa," (SLAFNET, H2020 RISE, 2017-2022), as well as from a scientific ecosystem enriched by several collective initiatives. With an approach promoting interdisciplinary scientific dialogue (history, anthropology, sociology, museology) and dialogue with civil society (through the attendance of anti-slavery associations), the ambition here is to continue efforts to break down barriers between the various regions of the African continent, their historiographies and their stakeholders.

The lecture will discuss how the construction of open-source relational databases has altered the scholarly study of slavery. Once it was thought that there was a relatively limited number of primary sources for the reconstruction of African history and the formation of the African diaspora outside of Africa. The digital turn has enabled the introduction of vast quantities of primary source material into scholarly discourse, far beyond what was once thought possible. An examination of the websites associated with Walk With Web Inc. demonstrates what is being done, and the possibilities are for further development of digital tools that can organize large quantities of data for purposes of historical reconstruction.

We invite you to join our international conference on "Freedom and Liberation in Mediterranean Antiquity", which aims to contribute to a closer analysis and understanding of terminology, narratives, and concepts of freedom and liberation in their respective discursive, cultural, and institutional contexts. Thus it should contribute to a more nuanced understanding of what is called in the Cluster nomenclatura “strong asymmetrical dependencies”, their complements and opposites.

Giving the order to send out European ships to transport Africans to the Americas was a rather discreet operation that was strongly connected to the perception of the slave trade by its traders via account books and sheets. The effects of bookkeeping on entrepreneurial activities has lately been discussed more intensely: Due to the abstraction and organizational performance of bookkeeping, heterogeneous objects and services were homogenized and transactions got evaluated in monetary terms. Accounting thus contributed to a perception of the economy as a set of components that interacted with each other only via money flows. The resulting detachment of the slave traders from the practical realities of the slave trade was – as shall be argued here – a pillar of the asymmetrical power relation in the transatlantic slave trade. To exemplify this, accounting files of the Belgian slave trade of the 1780s will be presented in detail alongside public writings of the same slave traders.

In this lecture I will analyse whether Jesus of Nazareth, his family, and close friends and disciples were slave owners. Most scholars now agree that the emergence and expansion of Christianity did not mean a substantial improvement in the condition of slaves, even if the accommodation of the early Christian churches with the institution of slavery itself is often seen as a contradiction, a dilemma, or a paradox. The emphasis in scholarship, however, is always on Jesus’ followers, rather than on the man himself. In order to reveal whether Jesus may have owned slaves, I will first try to identify which historical Jesus I am talking about. I will then move to whether we can pin down Jesus’ views on slavery from his teachings and parables. Finally, I will discuss Jesus’ social and economic standing and his relationship with real slaves and servants.