Monographs and Edited Volumes by BCDSS Members

The astonishing transformation of the abolitionist movement during the Civil War proved enormously consequential both for the cause of abolitionism and for the nation at large. Drawing on a cast of famous and obscure figures from Frederick Douglass to Moncure Conway, Frank J. Cirillo’s The Abolitionist Civil War explores how immediate abolitionists contorted their arguments and clashed with each other as they labored over the course of the conflict to create a more perfect Union. Cirillo reveals that immediatists’ efforts to forge a morally transformed nation that enshrined emancipation and Black rights shaped contemporary debates surrounding the abolition of slavery but ultimately did little to achieve racial justice for African Americans beyond formal freedom.

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In a global context in which phenomena of migration play an ever more important role, the ways individual and collective experiences of migration are covered in the media, represented in culture, and interpreted are coming under increasing scrutiny. This book explores the complex relationship between creative engagements with migration on the one hand, and forms of knowledge about migration on the other, inquiring into the ways aesthetic practices are intertwined with knowledge structures. The book responds to three pressing research questions. First, it analyses how fictional texts, plays, images, films, and autobiographical accounts mediate forms of knowledge about migration. Second, it identifies the ways in which specific media approaches and aesthetic practices influence people’s ideas about and awareness of migratory experiences in a globalized world. Finally, it delineates how historical perspectives help us compare epistemological approaches to migration in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries, and how these approaches affect the way critics and the public responded to and thought about different forms of (forced) migration. Bringing together renowned scholars working across disciplines, it investigates the possibilities and limitations that different media present when it comes to reflecting on, communicating, and imagining experiences of migration, and how these representations in turn create ways of knowing and understanding migration.

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Are there many similarities between voluntary confinement in a monastery and forced imprisonment? To what extent were the different detention and punishment practices characteristic of medieval monastic communities adopted by modern penal institutions? What insights can be drawn from a comparison of Western and Eastern  European experiences? The authors of this German-Russian-French publication, which was generously funded by the BCDSS, seek answers to these questions. The first part is devoted to monasteries as multifunctional places of detention, the second to the integration of the prison into urban space, and the third to the discourses and practices of deprivation of liberty in different temporal, national or institutional contexts. The contributions to this anthology do not constitute a history of progress from the Dark Ages to enlightened modernity: rather, the authors analyse individual spaces and modes of behaviour, comparing the Russian experience with the Western European one and finding  unexpected commonalities.

Helena Augusta: Mother of the Empire and the  mother of the first Christian emperor Constantine, is best known for the last two years of her life, when she traveled around the Eastern Mediterranean, and for something that, in all likelihood, she did not do: the discovery of the True Cross relic. Using a vast range of sources, from textual and epigraphical to visual, and an array of archaeological insights from the places Helena lived at or visited, this book instead investigates Helena in the round, taking seriously the ruptures in her life course and her changing positions within the imperial and female networks of her time. Prof. Dr. Julia Hillner's book follows Helena’s life, the majority of which was spent in the third century and during the period of the tetrarchy, and explores the different ways in which she was commemorated after her death, up to the late sixth century. It wrestles Helena’s historical significance back from medieval legends, to demonstrate the development and purpose of her role within Constantinian politics and to chart her meandering impact on the image and behavior of the Christian empress in the late Roman world.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Abolitionist Cosmopolitanism redefines the potential of American antislavery literature as a cultural and political imaginary by situating antislavery literature in specific transnational contexts and highlighting the role of women as producers, subjects, and audiences of antislavery literature. Prof. Dr. Pia Wiegmink draws attention to locales, authors, and webs of entanglement between texts, ideas, and people. Perceived through the lens of gender and transnationalism, American antislavery literature emerges as a body of writing that presents profoundly reconfigured literary imaginations of freedom and equality in the United States prior to the Civil War.

Leiden: Brill, 2022.

In the urban South, they found shelter, work, and other survival networks that enabled them to live in slaveholding territory, shielded and supported by their host communities in an act of collective resistance to slavery. While all fugitives risked their lives to escape slavery, those who fled to southern cities were perhaps the most vulnerable of all. Not dissimilar to modern-day refugees and illegal migrants, runaway slaves that sought refuge in the urban South were antebellum America's undocumented people, forging lives free from bondage but without the legal status of freed people. Spanning from the 1810s to the start of the Civil War, Dr. Viola Franziska Müller's Escape to the City reveals how urbanization, work opportunities, and the interconnectedness of free and enslaved Black people in each city determined how successfully runaways could remain invisible to authorities.

Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022.

One Planet – Many Cultures: Towards Geoanthropology

We live in the Anthropocene: an epoch in which human actions are the driver of planetary change. This is not only climate change, but an irreversible transformation of the entire surface of the earth in a way that is unprecedented in the planet’s history.

The Anthropocene is the focal point of numerous current key debates in the sciences and in global politics. They address fundamental questions about the relationship between societies and material environments, and about the place of humans in nature. What potential does the concept of the Anthropocene hold for anthropological syntheses? What is the significance of questions and knowledge from cultural and social sciences for the discussion of the Anthropocene? Looked at from an ethnological perspective, where are the blind spots in existing theories? What might a transdisciplinary synthesis, a new geoanthropology, look like? This book offers a critical and transdisciplinary overview.

Geoanthropology: the very word caused a conceptual earthquake that put the deep temporal dimension of human life on the agenda. What we require is an anthropology of the whole human being: and of humanity as a whole. Anthropology must include not only cultural and biotic, but also geological dimensions of being human: Geoanthropology.

We must learn to think not just in global, but in planetary terms.

The subject is too important existentially, and too rich anthropologically, to misuse the word as a mere fashionable verbal accessory, or to build terminological sand castles that will soon be washed away by the (rising) tide. The debates about the Anthropocene demonstrate clearly that a truly contemporary anthropology should take not only a global stance, but look at the past and the future from an evolutionary perspective.

 
Darmstadt: WBG 2022.

This special issue explores how enslaved workers of African descent were punished in the Americas. It studies punishment inside and beyond the criminal justice system, investigating its legitimation and implementation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Collectively, the articles address three main themes: the relationship between the enslaved, the slaveholders, and the state; the shifts in modalities of governance across space and time; and the entanglement of modes of punishment across geographies. This perspective illustrates the broader implications of punishment for issues of labor supply and labor control, and helps us understand how slavery was produced and reproduced in different, yet connected, regions of the Americas.

An interview with Sidney Chalhoub is available via open access.

Journal of Global Slavery, Special Issue: Vol. 7/ 1-2 (Mar 2022), Brill.

This book reflects the development of Latin American labour history across broad geographical, chronological and thematic perspectives, which seek to review and revisit key concepts at different levels. The contributions are closely linked to the most recent trends in Global Labour History and in turn, they enrich those trends.　

Here, authors from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Spain take a historical and sociological perspective and analyse a series of problems relating to labour relations. The chapters weave together different periods of Latin American colonial and republican history　from the vice-royalties of New Spain (now Mexico) and Peru, the Royal Audiencia de Charcas (now Bolivia), Argentina and Uruguay (former vice-royalty of Río de La Plata) and Chile (former Capitanía General).

Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2022.

This book investigates the phenomenon of slavery and other forms of servitude experienced by people of African or indigenous origin who were taken captive and then subjected to forced labor in Charcas (Bolivia) in the 16th and 17th centuries.

De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2021.

This is the diary that Humboldt began in Havana in 1804. In Cuba it is called "el diario perdido" (the lost diary) because it only became known with this edition. The book is the first publication of the diary with the Humboldtian title "Isle de Cuba. Antilles en général" in Spanish. Humboldt began writing it in the house of Juan Luis de la Cuesta, the richest slave trader in Havana around 1800. Cuesta was Humboldt's and Bonpland's host in Cuba for months. From him Humboldt obtained hard figures on Cuba's slave trade. Humboldt had observed slave ship landings and the local slave market himself, as well as the lives and work of slaves during visits to sugar plantations of Havana's elite. He also researched the costs of slavery. Humboldt wrote all this and much more, geographical, botanical, geological, biological, sociological, demographic information and judgements about the "culture" (general culture, theatre, architecture) and agriculture of Havana and Cuba in his diary. He later used the diary to compile his world-famous book Essay on the Island of Cuba (1826).
The original of the diary can be found today in the "Berlinka" collection in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków (Poland)".

Alexander von Humboldt’s Havanna travel diary, edited by BCDSS principal investigator Michael Zeuske, is available to download as PDF.

Ediciones Bachiller 2021.

This book investigates transnational processes through the analytic lens of cultural performance.

Structured around key concepts of performance studies––commons, skills, and traces––this edited collection addresses the political, normative, and historical implications of cultural performances beyond the limits of the (US) nation-state. These three central aspects of performance function as entryways to inquiries into transnational processes and allow the authors to shift the discussion away from text-centered approaches to intercultural encounters and to bring into focus the dynamic field that opens up between producer, art work, context, setting, and audience in the moment of performance as well as in its afterlife. The chapters provide fresh, performance-based approaches to notions of transcultural mobility and circulation, transnational cultural experience and knowledge formation, transnational public spheres, and identities’ rootedness in both specific local places and diasporic worlds beyond the written word.

London. Routledge 2021.

The meaning of material artifacts that remain unchanged in their form can change through spatial references and through the change of context. Staged by spatial association, artifacts can become fixed in content or accentuated or acquire new meaning. Artefacts that are fixed in content can interpret a space, sometimes an entire landscape, in a new and specific way through their placement. In this process, various manifestations of contextual change can be found. In this volume, spatial, historical, topographical, and discursive context changes are analyzed in case studies and their meanings and intersections are critically reflected upon. For example, artifacts from antiquity show how pictorial works were deliberately removed from their original contexts of installation and reintegrated, and this could be done according to or contrary to their older use. For the modern era, it can be shown that knowledge systems can be established and stabilized through the collection and arrangement of artifacts. This raises questions about the use of objects created specifically for travel and transfer to other cultural spheres, or about the role of objects brought by migrants as markers of identity.

Leiden. Brill 2021.

The thoroughly original French sculpture of the 18th and 19th centuries has so far too often been discussed only in the context of an illustrated history of mentality, thereby failing to recognize its independence. Certainly, the weighty assessment of Erwin Panofsky, who attested to a lack of innovative spirit in funerary sculpture after Bernini, also contributed to this. This volume, on the other hand, seeks to explore the "spaces of possibility" that contribute to a deeper understanding of memorial culture and its transformations, and in doing so argues for overcoming the rigid division into pre- and post-revolutionary art. In addition to the spaces of the monument, which were subject to change around 1800 due to the change of the place of burial, the contributions ask about the different public spheres of these transformations, about the innovative power of the "enlightened" (funerary) monument and its new as well as resilient functional assignments.

Heidelberg. arthistoricum 2021.

This book analyses how people in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo, relate to their environment in different political and historical contexts.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic studies of Dayak people, the indigenous inhabitants of Borneo, the book examines how human-environment relationships differ and collide. These "conflicting ecologies" are based on people's relation to the "environment", which encompasses the non-human realm in the widest sense, including forests, rivers, land, natural resources, animals and spirits. The author argues that relationality and power are decisive factors for the understanding and analysis of peoples’ ecologies. The book integrates different theoretical approaches, sheds light upon the environmental transformation taking place in Indonesia, as well as the social exclusion it entails, and highlights the conceptual shortcomings of universalistic concepts of human-environment relations.

An exploration of evolving human-nature relations, this book will be of interest to academics studying political ecology, environmental anthropology, sustainability sciences, political sciences, development studies, human geography, human ecology, Southeast Asian studies, and Asian studies.

 
London; New York. Routledge 2021.

Germany's responsibility towards Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia to remember it's NAZI violence continues. This volume sheds light on the developments that led to the crimes, traces the emergence of the culture of remembrance, and gives contemporary witnesses a voice.

Bonn. bpb 2021.

In the early 1930s, the Japanese military established a system of brothels, called "comfort stations", for the use of its soldiers and recruited tens of thousands of women as military prostitutes, called "comfort women". The majority of these women were recruited from the populace of Japan's colonies, in particular Korea, or occupied territories in China and South East Asia. Public discourse about the legality and morality of this system started in 1936 and intensified during the 1990s when Korean and other victims broke their silence.

München. iudicium 2021.

For centuries, archaeologists have excavated the soils of Britain to uncover finds from the early medieval past. These finds have been used to reconstruct the alleged communities, migration patterns, and expressions of identity of coherent groups who can be regarded as ethnic 'Anglo-Saxons'. Even in the modern day, when social constructionism has been largely accepted by scholars, this paradigm still persists.

This book challenges the ethnic paradigm. As the first historiographical study of approaches to ethnic identity in modern 'Anglo-Saxon' archaeology, it reveals these approaches to be incompatible with current scholarly understandings of ethnicity. Drawing upon post-structuralist approaches to self and community, it highlights the empirical difficulties the archaeology of ethnicity in early medieval Britain faces, and proposes steps toward an alternative understanding of the role played by the communities of lowland Britain – both migrants from across the North Sea and those already present – in transforming the Roman world.

Amsterdam. Amsterdam University Press 2021.

Nordic slavery is an elusive phenomenon, with few similarities to the systematic exploitation of slaves in households, mines, and amphitheaters in the ancient Mediterranean or the widespread slavery at American plantations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scandinavians in the early Middle Ages lived in a society foreign to us, characterized by different and shifting social statuses. A person could be at once socially respected and unfree. It was possible to hand oneself over as a slave to someone else in exchange for protection and food. One could be sentenced temporarily to enslavement for some offense but later purchase his manumission. Young men could enter into a kind of "contract" with a king or chieftain to join his retinue, accepting his authority, patronage, and jurisdiction, while at the same time making a quick social elevation.

Slavery was widespread all over Europe during the early Middle Ages and Scandinavians, as Stefan Brink illustrates in this book, became a major player in the northern slave trade. However, the Vikings were not particularly interested in taking slaves to Scandinavia; instead, their "business model" seems to have been to raid, abduct, and then sell captured people at major slave markets. Their goal was not people but silver. Using a wide variety of source materials, including archaeology, runes, Icelandic sagas, early law, place names, personal names, and not least etymological and semantic analyses of the terminology of slaves, Thraldom provides the most thorough survey of slavery in the Viking Age.

New York & Oxford. Oxford Uni Press 2021.

Abstract: This volume is a collection of research essays submitted by fellows of the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg, an Advanced Center of Research in Mamluk Studies. It covers three themes, which correspond to the research agenda of the final three academic years of the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg. These were: environmental history, material culture studies, and im/mobility. The aim of the contributions is to overcome the disciplinary boundaries of the field and to engage in scholarly debates in Ottoman Studies, European history, archae-ology and art history, and even the natural sciences.

Göttingen. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht / Bonn University Press 2021.

Abstract: In this monograph, Caroline Laske traces the advent of consideration in English contract law, by analysing the doctrinal development, in parallel with the corresponding terminological evolution and semantic shifts between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is an innovative, interdisciplinary study, showcasing the value of taking a diachronic corpus linguistics-based approach to the study of legal change and legal development, and the semantic shifts in the corresponding terminology. The seminal application in the legal field of these analytical methodologies borrowed from pragmatic linguistics goes beyond the content approach that legal research usually practices and it has allowed for claims of semantic change to be objectified. This ground-breaking work is pitched at scholars of legal history, law & language, and linguistics.

Leiden. Brill 2021.

The role of the slavery-based plantation economy in the development of capitalism has preoccupied many generations of scholars. This is related to a number of very important questions, the answers to which have a lasting impact on narratives about modernity and the ways it emerged in what is often called the early modern times. Was slavery-based production good for the initial accumulation of vast fortunes that became the precondition of modern capitalism, but ultimately incompatible with a capitalism based on the marketization of labour that is “freely” offered and demanded? Or did the history of slavery and other forms of forced and coerced labour, regardless of the moral scruples that became public for religious reasons (in England and the USA) or out of a predominantly secular-humanist motivation (in France), accompany capitalism until the social counterforces of decolonization were strong enough to shake off this form of particularly crass exploitation (even if not inconsiderable remnants persist to this day)?

Leipzig, Universitätsverlag 2020
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Abstract: Since the beginning of time, human beings have consumed intoxicating drinks and substances. In addition, there are meditative techniques in almost all religions with which one can put oneself in a trance-like or ecstatic state and thus approach the divine. Nevertheless, intoxication, trance and ecstasy are taboo in many societies, unless they are experienced in a limited social space such as nightclubs or declared culturally productive in art, music or literature. The right to intoxication is controversially discussed among lawyers, pedagogues and physicians. Proponents like to point to the religious basis of intoxication, opponents to the moral duty of sobriety. A lecture series at the University of Bonn examined the ambivalence of "intoxication" from an interdisciplinary perspective - as a religious, psychological, social, legal and cultural-historical phenomenon. The results of this sensational lecture series are documented in the present volume. With contributions by Clemens Albrecht, Christoph Antweiler, Andreas Bell, Walter Bruchhausen, Robert Feustel, Dorothee Gall, Albert Gerhards, Tobias Janz, Jörg Kinzig, Wolfram Kinzig, Alexandra Philipsen, Irmgard Rüsenberg, Markus Saur, Jochen Sautermeister, Detlef Siegfried, Christoph Schreier, Birgitta Sträter, Nathalie Thies.

Baden Baden: Ergon 2021.

Germany has long entertained the notion that the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery involved only other European players. Countering this premise, this collection re-charts various routes of German participation in, profiteering from, and resistance to transatlantic slavery and its cultural, political, and intellectual reverberations. Exploring how German financiers, missionaries, and immigrant writers made profit from, morally responded to, and fictionalized their encounters with New World slavery, the contributors demonstrate that these various German entanglements with New World slavery revise preconceived ideas that erase German involvements from the history of slavery and the Black Atlantic. Moreover, the collection brings together these German perspectives on slavery with an investigation of German colonial endeavors in Africa, thereby seeking to interrogate historical processes (or fantasies) of empire-building, colonialism, and slavery which, according to public memory, seem to have taken place in isolation from each other. The collection demonstrates that they should be regarded as part and parcel of a narrative that ingrained colonialism and slavery in the German cultural memory and identity to a much larger extent than has been illustrated and admitted so far in general discourses in contemporary Germany.

London: Routledge 2020.

By drawing on a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary expertise, this study addresses the history of emotions in relation to cross-cultural movement, exchange, contact, and changing connections in the later medieval and early modern periods.

All essays in this volume focus on the performance and negotiation of identity in situations of cultural contact, with particular emphasis on emotional practices. They cover a wide range of thematic and disciplinary areas and are organized around the primary sources on which they are based. The edited volume brings together two major areas in contemporary humanities: the study of how emotions were understood, expressed, and performed in shaping premodern transcultural relations, and the study of premodern cultural movements, contacts, exchanges, and understandings as emotionally charged encounters. In discussing these hitherto separated historiographies together, this study sheds new light on the role of emotions within Europe and amongst non-Europeans and Europeans between 1100 and 1800.

New York: Routledge 2020.

This edited volume represents the research results of two international conferences organized and sponsored by the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg: "Environmental Approaches in Pre-Modern Middle Eastern Studies" and "Material Culture Methods in the Middle Islamic Periods". The following work consists of three parts, which correspond to the themes of the aforementioned conferences (Contributions to Environmental History and Material Culture Studies) and a third which bridges the gap between the two approaches (Practice and Knowledge Transfer). The present contributions cover a wide range of such topics as urban pollution, local perceptions of weather, rural estate economy, Sufi understandings of nature and the body and mind, houses and socialization, text and gardens, local know-how and interdependence in medieval Syrian agriculture, crop selection and the medieval agricultural economy.

Göttingen. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht / Bonn University Press 2020.

Globalized Peripheries examines the commodity flows and financial ties within Central and Eastern Europe in order to situate these regions as important contributors to Atlantic trade networks. The early modern Atlantic world, with its flows of bullion, of free and unfree labourers, of colonial produce and of manufactures from Europe and Asia, with mercantile networks and rent-seeking capital, has to date been describedalmost entirely as the preserve of the Western sea powers. More recent scholarship has rediscovered the dense entanglements with Central and Eastern Europe. Globalized Peripheries goes further by looking beyond slaveryand American plantations. Contributions look at the trading practices and networks of merchants established in Central and Eastern Europe, investigate commodity flows between these regions and the Atlantic world, and explore the production of export commodities, two-way migration as well as financial ties. The volume uncovers new economic and financial connections between Prussia, the Habsburg Empire, Russia, as well as northern and western Germany with the Atlantic world. Its period coverage connects the end of the early modern world with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More Information

Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer 2020.

Slaves and Slave Agency in the Ottoman Empire offers a new contribution to slavery studies relating to the Ottoman Empire. Given the fact that the classical binary of "slavery" and "freedom" derives from the transatlantic experience, this volume presents an alternative approach by examining the strong asymmetric relationships of dependency documented in the Ottoman Empire. A closer look at the Ottoman social order discloses manifold and ambiguous conditions involving enslavement practices, rather than a single universal pattern. The authors examine various forms of enslavement and dependency with a particular focus on agency, i. e. the room for maneuver, which the enslaved could secure for themselves, or else the available options for action in situations of extreme individual or group dependencies. 

Ottoman Studies / Osmanistische Studien, Vol. 7.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht / Bonn University Press 2020.

Norms facilitate and regulate social coexistence. Particular actions are designated and sanctioned as transgressive as the result of a process of negotiation. Transgressions and deviance may both stabilize and undermine established norms. The papers in this collection analyze select case studies from Classical Greece to Imperial Rome with the aim to generate impulses for the debate on norm and deviance in ancient societies. They focus on transgressive acts in, respectively, the cult of Artemis, the tragedian Agathon, and the writings of Cicero, Lucan and Tacitus. More Information

Metzler: Berlin 2020.

This volume brings together the current state of research in the humanities and social sciences in the German-speaking world on the topic of fair trade. Despite an increased need for ethically responsible consumption, it has so far been discussed primarily in consumer research and hardly at all in the humanities and social sciences. Nine contributions, written by authors from very different disciplines, examine fair trade and its alternatives as a cultural phenomenon, analyze its value chains, and discuss its social, economic, and environmental impacts in a controversial way. In addition, there is a special focus on the Global South, which decisively expands previous research. More Information

[Fair Trade: Chances, Limits, Challenges] oekom Verlag: Berlin 2020.

Nowhere on Earth is there an ecological transformation so swift and so extreme as between the snow-line of the high Andes and the tropical rainforest of Amazonia. The different disciplines that research the human past in South America have long tended to treat these two great subzones of the continent as self-contained enough to be taken independently of each other. Objections have repeatedly been raised, however, to warn against imagining too sharp a divide between the people and societies of the Andes and Amazonia, when there are also clear indications of significant connections and transitions between them.

Rethinking the Andes–Amazonia Divide: A Cross-disciplinary Exploration brings together archaeologists, linguists, geneticists, anthropologists, ethnohistorians and historians to explore both correlations and contrasts in how the various disciplines see the relationship between the Andes and Amazonia, from deepest prehistory up to the European colonial period. The volume emerges from an innovative programme of conferences and symposia conceived explicitly to foster awareness, discussion and co-operation across the divides between disciplines. Underway since 2008, this programme has already yielded major publications on the Andean past, including Lenguas y Sociedades en el Antiguo Perú (2010, PUCP), History and Language in the Andes (2011, Palgrave Macmillan) and Archaeology and Language in the Andes (2012, Oxford University Press).  More Information

 UCL Press: London 2020.

The White Terror was a movement of right-wing militias that for two years actively tracked down, tortured, and murdered members of the Jewish community, as well as former supporters of the short-lived Council Republic in the years following World War I. It can be argued that this example of a programme of virulent antisemitism laid the foundations for Hungarian participation in the Holocaust.

Given the rightward shift of Hungarian politics today, this book has a particular resonance in re-examining the social and historical context of the White Terror.

London: Routledge 2021.

The book draws on an extensive archival research on legal doctrine and legal procedures filled before the Court of Appeals of Rio de Janeiro during the last decades of Brazilian slavery. The main argument of the book is that slavery law was not a "law of exception" but was fully in accordance with liberal legal principles and civil law norms. Slavery was not incompatible with liberalism. In order to sustain this argument, the chapters analyze issues such as legal personality and civil incapacity of slaves; the extent of their right of action; the limitations imposed on their capacity to acquire property and make contracts; the issue of slave family; the role of possession in determining people's statuses; the influence of master's will in shaping legal interpretations of civil law; and the existence of legal categories of people in between slavery and freedom.

[Slavery and Law: The Legal Status of Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, 1860–1888].
São Paulo 2019. 

If you would like to know more about the book, a video is available here.

Understanding connectivity is a key to understanding decision-making. Social network analysis offers formalized ways of describing and thus comparing attributes of actors related to each other in networks. Using quantitative spatial data, social network analysis promises deeper insights into how social positions are achieved and developed, as mirrored in the ancient flows of materials.
The volume collects contributions of an international conference on network analysis in archaeology, held in 2015 at the University of Cologne as part of the DFG Research Training Group 1878 ‘Archaeology of Pre-Modern Economies’.

Studien zur Wirtschaftsarchäologie 3. Bonn: Habelt Verlag

Michael Zeuske has completely revised and updated his standard work for the second edition as well as significantly expanded it. The history of slavery is systematically presented in this handbook for the first time in a global historical perspective. The starting point is an understanding of slavery as a capitalization of human bodies. It analyzes the most diverse forms, types and developmental epochs of slavery and human trafficking systems – on all continents, oceans and seas, in their respective names and historical-cultural context. On a broad empirical basis, a history of slavery is thus created, which began around 10,000 BC and continues to this day.  

2 Volumes.
Berlin & Boston 2019 (2nd edition).

The term "slavery" brings to mind African workers on plantations in the Americas. But abduction and forced labor have been part of the human condition virtually from the moment people settled down, occurring all over the globe. In this comprehensive account Michael Zeuske takes us through the entire history of slavery in all parts of the world. He writes about child slaves in China, Ottoman elite slaves, and the so-called "court moors" ("Hofmohren") at the court of Prussian kings. His account includes our own times, where people are still being treated like goods – from forced prostitutes to child soldiers.

Stuttgart 2018.

Reviews on Perlentaucher.de
Review by Tagesspiegel, Berlin

The contributions to this edited volume explore forms of slavery and asymmetric dependencies in non-European pre-modern societies. Covering a wide range of societies, all have in common that their focus is on epochs prior to western influence and intervention which culminated in colonial order. Instead this collected volume wishes to provide access to emic concepts of the respective regions, which have not yet been overlaid by colonial conceptions.

While Anna Kollatz presents a study on Mughal India, Michael Zeuske focuses on China and Veruschka Wagner on the Ottoman Empire. Antje Gunsenheimer examines the phenomenon of slavery in Aztec society and Jeannine Bischoff deals with dependent peasants in Tibet.In a didactic article, Christian Grieshaber emphasizes the potential of the subject of Chinese slavery in history lesson. 

[Slavery in the Premodern Era: Examples from Non-European Societies. Dhau — Yearbook for Non-European History].
Saarbrücken 2017.

After decades of relative neglect, Ottoman slavery in recent years has become a favoured topic among historians. New sources especially on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have become available, due to the progressive cataloguing of the Ottoman archives, especially the newly instituted secular Nizamiye courts providing evidence of the difficult road toward the abolition of slavery.

As in the later centuries of the empire's existence, Ottoman slaves were so often female the topic has also interested historians of Ottoman women. Given the "literary turn" in historiography worldwide and the critical questioning of – mostly but not exclusively – European primary sources, the reports of liberated former slaves have also attracted historians. Rather than studying slavery per se, this group of scholars investigates perceptions of "the other" and the ways in which ex-slaves who had managed to return to their home countries negotiated patrons and publishers in their attempts to get their stories into print.

The result is a bibliography, dating largely from recent years, with divergent directions and discourses. Perhaps the time has come to pull together the different threads and survey the results, emphasizing at every turn how provisional they really are. On this occasion, we will take the opportunity of identifying questions and sources, which, at least in the opinion of the present author, have not received the attention they deserve.

Otto Spies Memory Lecture. Eds.: Stephan Conermann & Gül Şen.
Berlin 2017.