Manumission Working Group
The aim of this working group is to bring together researchers with different expertise who are interested in manumission across time and regions. We would like to look for both parallels and differences in manumissions, considering various aspects such as types of manumissions, manumission processes and their documentation.
We would like to address the following questions:
- What forms of manumission can we identify?
- What is documented? Only the result of the manumission process or the process itself?
- How can legal, formal and practical implementations of manumission be traced in our sources?
- What role did the slaves or other dependents play? Were they able to influence the manner, process, or outcome of manumission?
- Was there a gender difference? Were there other options for female or male slaves?
- What about the religious aspect? Did conversion, for instance, influence manumission?
- What happened after the manumission?
- What role did manumission play in social life and the shaping of society?
The working group will meet every other month, starting in November 2023 with short presentations about our own research projects on manumission and to discuss readings together. The group further plans a workshop in November 2024 and invites anyone interested to contact us.
If you are interested in the working group and its activities, please contact Carolina González Undurraga (carogonz@uchile.cl) or Veruschka Wagner (veruschka.wagner@gmx.de)
Members of the Working Group
Carolina Gonzaléz Undurraga, Professor at the Department of Historical Sciences at the University of Chile and former Heinz Heinen Kolleg Fellow at BCDSS. Her current research aims to analyze the forms of manumission (such as by "grace" and self-purchase) of women of African descent in Santiago (Chile) between 1770-1823 through notarial and judicial records.
Veruschka Wagner, BCDSS member with research focus on Ottoman slavery. On the basis of Ottoman court records, Veruschka is primarily concerned with the question of the social and spatial mobility of house slaves in seventeenth-century Istanbul.
Amalia S. Levi, BCDSS member, PhD researcher, with a focus on early modern Caribbean Jewish communities and slavery in the urban household. My research centers record-keeping practices and ‘archival dependencies’ that underpin the life of the enslaved at different moments of entry into or exit from slavery. Under this lens, I’m looking into manumissions in early modern Barbados.
Emma Kalb, postdoctoral researcher at the BCDSS. Her current research focuses on eunuch slavery in Mughal South Asia (1526-1857), considering how eunuchs were central both to the social life of elite households, particularly as mediators of interaction and access, as well as occasionally high-ranking imperial servitors. As a part of this project, she is interested in the lack of reference or records related to the manumission of eunuchs, despite the standard inclusion of model manumission letters in legal formularies of the period.
Eva Lehner, postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the BCDSS. Her research project focuses on the Cape in South Africa during the Dutch Colonial period (1652-1795). She is looking at the manumission of women at the Cape during the 17th Century and the information about these women and their children provided in travelogs, transactions and sale lists.
