The two-year project (2023-2024), Child Slaveries in the Early Modern World: Gender, Trauma, and Trafficking in Transcultural Perspective (1500-1800), is a German-Australian collaboration with BCDSS Professor Claudia Jarzebowski, doctoral candidates Joseph Biggerstaff and Lisa Phongsavath, together with Professor Susan Broomhall and fellow historians Dr. Jessica O'Leary and Dr. Kristie Flannery of the Australian Catholic University (ACU) Melbourne.
The project explores practices of child slavery and knowledge about children, slavery, gender, and trauma in the early modern world, illuminating historical shifts and global convergences in Asia, South America, West Africa and the Atlantic. It aims to contribute new research into the global history of slavery and its legacies.
“Our explorations into the various guises of child slavery and the dependencies of childhood will redirect slavery scholarship into the often neglected, although omnipresent, realm of family life. I especially consider the rich experiences of children and families from mainland Southeast Asia and the unique ways they became entwined in processes of early-modern globalisation.” (Lisa Phongsavath)
"Historians still don't know enough about child slavery and trafficking in the Atlantic world. Children remain highly marginalized actors, and childhood an underexplored category of experience, in this swollen historiography. My contribution to the project Child Slaveries in the Early Modern World, is a great opportunity to reframe new knowledge of child slavery in the Americas and West Africa in a global context. With our combined expertise in early modern history, we hope to contribute to this collaborative project on the history of child slavery in a global and transcultural perspective. The BCDSS is an ideal launch pad for this endeavor." (Joseph Biggerstaff)