News and Events

Competing Memories: The Politics of Remembering Enslavement, Emancipation and Indentureship in the Caribbean

This week, Christian Laes is looking forward to a lively discussion of and feedback on his presentation “Writing the histories of slavery in Antiquity. How to go forward?” After a brief overview of the study of slavery in the ancient world, he will point out possible paths for the future: renewed attention to Late Antiquity and the transition period between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the promising topic of agency.

Join us for the book launch of Prof. Dr. Christoph Witzenrath's latest publication "The Russian Empire, Slaving and Liberation, 1480-1725", followed by a discussion with Prof. Dr. Martin Aust regarding the book's content. The De Gruyter book series of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies holds publications that examine different phenomena of slavery and other forms of strong asymmetrical dependencies in societies. The series follows the BCDSS research agenda in going beyond the dichotomy of slavery versus freedom. It proposes a new key concept, strong asymmetrical dependency, which covers all forms of bondage across time and space. This includes debt bondage, convict labor, tributary labor, servitude, serfdom, and domestic work, as well as forms of wage labor and various types of patronage. To register, please send a mail to events@dependency.uni-bonn.de.

On February 13, 2023, Dr. Viola Müller will represent the BCDSS at the Kinderuni, where she will give a lecture on the History of Sugar. Abstract: Sugar is in chocolate, cola, gummy bears, and adults use it to sweeten their coffee. It also hides in yogurt, tomato sauce, and chips. Sugar is everywhere. But has it always been around? Where does it come from? Did it always look the same? Who made it in the past, and who is making it today? Dive into the history of sugar!

Prof. Dr. Julia Hillner's latest book, "Helena Augusta: Mother of the Empire" will be presented, including a reading, followed by a discussion and a reception.

One of the largest libraries on ancient slavery in the world with its rich holdings has moved from the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature to the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies. Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature has a long standing tradition of research on slavery in the ancient Mediterranean. More than forty volumes were published on numerous facets of the subject. In addition, a comprehensive encyclopaedia on ancient slavery was compiled by researchers from all over the world. Over the course of sixty years, the prolific research output at the Mainz Academy had led to the formation of this special and comprehensive library. It can be considered one of the largest libraries on ancient slavery in the world. To celebrate the opening of the library, we are inviting you to join our LIBRARY LAUNCH on Wednesday, 18 January, 2023, from 16:15-19:00 CET at Heussallee 16-19, 53111 Bonn. The event will be held in German. All welcome!

What are the connections between unfree labour and recent changes in Brazilian politics? Our first lecture of the year discusses why it is important to talk about the integration of the Brazilian region into global capitalism and power relations to understand the unfree labour system

When and why did ‘slave societies’ first emerge in Greece? How can we explain the wide variation in types of slavery attested? Could the spread of slavery and its detrimental impact on free hired labour have been the main cause of the social crises that erupted across Greece in the decades around 600 BC? Join our next Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture on "Slave and free labour in early Greece (750-450 BC)" with Prof. Hans Van Wees.

What did a life under the circumstances of enslavement and strong asymmetrical dependency do to children? What were the effects and how are they to be traced and understood? This lecture discusses the interconnectedness of Slavery and Dependency Studies when considered from children’s perspectives, following the approach of Trauma Studies, a branch largely ignored by historians of premodernity

The lecture will discuss the still emerging field of global legal history and provides an approach to legal history that draws on the history of knowledge and summarizes some of the reflections on how to analyze asymmetrical dependencies from a legal historical perspective.

European colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa relied (at least before the end of the Second World War) upon mechanisms of labour exploitation through forced labour. The Portuguese colonial empire was a notorious part of these experiences. African colonial subjects were by no means passive victims of these practices: especially, running away from labour obligations was very common, and sometimes whole groups and villages were fleeing into remote regions or beyond colonial borders. This was a mighty form of response (or resistance), but it also presented many problems: flight destabilised rural societies, and those who stayed were at risk to suffer punishment. Moreover, little has been said on what runaways and refugees encountered in their new environments.

The major question will be how enfranchised slaves, the so called freedmen, could acquire the Roman citizenship. In order to understand the dynamics and different phases of the Roman citizenship an important introduction to the general rules of citizenship will be put at the beginning of the lecture. In this context a major attention must be paid to the status of the Latini and the legal rules regulating their status from the Republic to the Principate. Important legislative measures under Augustus (Lex Aelia Sentia) and Tiberius (Lex Iunia Norbana) created a new category of Latins, the Latini Aeliani and the Latini Iuniani. The lecture will explain their legal position and show in which way and under which circumstances they were able to become Roman citizens.

The movie engages with varying forms of asymmetrical relationships that are forced primarily upon children and women. They are pushed to megacity by various factors but mainly by poverty. Here, the city is not just a place of arrival, it becomes a dreamscape. People initially conceive it as a place of hope; hence the allure of (push towards) the city. However, soon after their arrival, they end up bound in extreme forms of asymmetrical relationships such as in brothels or slums where their lives further unravel. As a social formation, like villages, the city has its underlying logic of patriarchy and casteism which deeply structure people’s lives. The movie clearly portrays how people are forced into extreme forms of asymmetrical dependencies. Money, men, and power are inextricably connected to the lives of the socially destitute and deprivations flourish, while those on the streets become interchangeable. by Jahfar Shareef Pokkanali (PhD researcher at the BCDSS)

The event will include speeches by Prof. Dr. Marion Gymnich, Co-Speaker and Principal Investigator at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), and Prof. Dr. Béla Bodó, BCDSS Investigator and Associate Professor for Eastern European History, Bonn University. Visitors will get a tour of the exhibition by Prof. Dr. Judith Szapor, curator of the exhibition; Associate Professor of the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University, Montreal; as well as talks with Kata Steinberger-Herskó, daughter of Anna Herskó, the first female camera person in Hungary, presented in the exhibition.

Join us on Monday, November 7, 2022, at 18:15 CET for a reading and discussion evening with playwright NATASSA SIDERI. Her award-winning play GEFESSELT ('BOUND') addresses the problem of debt bondage in our present-day society.

The town of Castro Marim in Portugal was a legal haven and later the site of internal exile for several thousand minor sinners and convicts from the Middle Ages until the first decades of the nineteenth century. Later, courts of the Inquisition and the state sent those convicted of minor offences to reside in the town, typically for periods of two to four years. Faced with the punishment of long-term obligatory residence, these newcomers had little choice but to engage in the economic activities around them: chiefly in salt extraction, fishing, boat building, agriculture, and smuggling. As a result, this use of exile to Castro Marim is more than a micro-history of a small town. It is a vivid example of social control as practiced by courts of the Church and state. It is also an example of the limitations of early modern royal authority.

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.