Articles

Transferring Land and People

The Muslims of Çenet, Sagra, and Agna and the Military Order of Santiago (1341)

This data story explores the language and structure used in charters related to the establishment of relations between Muslim subjects and Christian lords during the Middle Ages.¹ It does so by analysing a specific charter issued when a village and its Muslim inhabitants changed lordship within the Kingdom of Valencia in 14^th-century Iberia.

Clara Almagro Vidal

Editorial: Coercive Archives

Labour Coercion in the Courtroom and Its Afterlives

The courtroom has long been understood as a space mirroring society’s social hierarchies and power dynamics. Cultural and social historians have developed different approaches to the courtroom that recognize it as a site of negotiation and struggle. Microhistorians especially have called for methodologies attuned to the multiple, entangled voices…

Vilhelm Vilhelmsson, Müge Özbek

Reading the Files of “Bawi Controversy” in the Lushai Hills

Cases of Debt, Runaways and Criminality in Colonial India’s Northeastern Frontier

In the Lushai Hills of Colonial India’s Northeastern frontier, debates ensued between colonial officials and missionaries during the second decade of the twentieth century on abolition of a local customary practice called Bawi, with the latter claiming that the practice evoked structures of “slavery”. The details of bawi appeared mainly or only as a controversy. The several numbers of files that were generated in the archives had in fact the identical titles prefixed or suffixed by the term “Bawi controversy”. More importantly, they were perceived from the lens of…

Nayanjyoti Kalita

Bringing war into everyday life

strange “dialogues” about values from the 1940s

The ongoing war in Ukraine makes many people ask how such devastation is possible in 21st-century Europe. The arguments of the Russian side create misunderstanding and leave us perplexed. The incitement to hatred and destruction by Putin's regime can even be compared to the Stalinist era. In the 1940s when the Baltic states were occupied by the…

Court records about the labour movement and the everyday life of the working poor in interwar Thessaloniki

In this paper I will discuss how court records can act as a portal to social history, the history of everyday life and the history of labour and the labour movement. In my extensive research in inter-war Thessaloniki's judicial archives I classified and studied the entire material of the summaries of the minutes of the Local Criminal Court of…

Analysing the everyday practices of labour coercion through arbitration court records

The case of a runaway maidservant in Iceland in 1820

The following text is a complete transcription of a case that was resolved in the arbitration court in the district of Engihlíð in northern Iceland in 1820:¹

Vilhelm Vilhelmsson

The failed petition of Christopher McPherson, Richmond, Virginia, 1810

In 1810, Christopher McPherson submitted a petition to the Virginia General Assembly, the State’s legislative body. In this petition, he asked to be exempted from a newly enacted ordinance which prohibited people of African descent from riding in a carriage in the city of Richmond, Virginia’s capital.¹ This was a time when the free Black population of Virginia, and in the US South as a whole, was experiencing growing pressure for being Black in a society that justified slavery by skin colour. Slavery came to be abolished in the northern states, yet in the South, it intensified and spread. When the legislative framework around free people of…

Negotiating Coercion at the Court

Barrelmakers and the Ottoman State in the Early Nineteenth Century

Judicial authorities and the courts lay at the heart of the tributary labour mechanisms in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman judge, kadı, played a central role in drafting workers and organising the production and transportation of materials for the military worksites. Nevertheless, the state's use of such judicial mechanisms for coerced labour did not hinder their appropriation by Ottoman subjects to negotiate the terms of the labour draft or to…

Chains, Escapes and Debt Transfers aboard the Venetian Galleys

the case of Marco from Corfu

Trial number 12/23, conserved in the Cariche da Mar Processi fond (CMP, Frari archives, Venice), is a 19-page document written at the end of September 1600 about the escape of two galley convicts in the Venetian maritime colonies, the Stato da Mar. Trials of this kind were held aboard ships by the representatives of the Republic, generally called retto…

Cosimo Pantaleoni

Convict Bodies

An exploratory data analysis of a nineteenth-century language of coercion

Across multiple historical contexts, we encounter a recurring fantasy: using language to conjure an image of a person out of place to enable the apprehension of said person in real life. An especially fantastical version is encountered in the otherwise middling James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only (1981), in which the protagonist, played by Roger Moore, encounters a villain unknown to him. Later, at MI6 headquarters, a clerk suggests to a somewhat baffled Bond that he go into “the identigraph room”. Q, played by Desmond Llewelyn then in his late 70s, leads Bond into a computer lab and places him in front of a monitor, by early eighties’…

Frederik Aastradsen Bagger, Louise Bundgaard, Mie Dodensig, Annesofie Ebbesen, Jonas Foldager, Iben Landbo Gregersen, Thomas Haaber, Jamison Isabeau Helstrup, Malthe Gammelmark Jürgensen, Steffan Klockmann, Sofie Othilia Knudsen, Kamilla Matthiassen, Niklas Lolholm Monhof, Eva Rosalie Buch Nielsen, Tobias Aske Heltborg Nielsen, Albert Mellergaard Olsen, Fiona Gesine Otten, Anne Katrine Holm Pedersen, Patrick Alexander Skov, Tania Sini Vorbeck, Louise Willingsøe and Johan Heinsen

A tale of jailed remunerated weavers in Yvain ou le chevalier au Lion of Chrétien de Troyes (1178/80)

Yvain ou le chevalier au Lion is an Arthurian romance written in verse by Chrétien de Troyes between 1176 and 1181 in French based on Gaelic legends. In the romance, Yvain not only has personal problems with his wife (a woman he conquers by killing her husband and protecting her castle), he also saves various characters just for fun – or for…

The chronicle of hired weavers forced to pull a false ship in the Deeds of the Abbots of Sint Truiden (1135)

The Gesta abbatum Trudonensium records the history of the Benedictine monastery of Sint Truiden in Brabant (Belgium). The abbot Rodolf wrote the first seven books from the foundation of the abbey until 1107. The younger monk Gislebert redacted the first continuation up to 1138. In book 12 of this…

Owing and Serving

Berthold von Regensburg Preaching the Social Order (13th Century, German territories)

This data story is the product of a group of eleven history master students at the University of Vienna. The students have been working on historical semantics as an approach to social and labor history throughout the summer term of 2021. In several workshops on digital tools and online hands-on sessions, they experimented with the…

Michael Gamperl, Anna Günter, Lisa Horak, Gregor Hutter, Natalia Kowalczyk, Marie Letouzé, Benjamin Lindenthal, Karina Müller, Teresa Petrik, Nour Saber, Lisa Schwarzinger, Corinna Peres and Juliane Schiel

Atlantic Slavery and Its Repercussions in German-Speaking Territories, c. 1650–1850

Notions of German exceptionalism long perpetuated the assumption that early modern Germany had no significant connection to Atlantic slavery. According to this view neither did slavery as an institution exist in the various territories of early modern Germany, nor were German states or actors significantly involved in transatlantic and race-based…

Annika Bärwald

Claiming a Runaway Slave in the Holy Roman Empire

The Case of Samuel Johannes (1754)

In the early morning hours of March 26, 1754, a lone man secretly left the Moravian communal settlement Herrnhut in the margraviate of Upper Lusatia. His name was Samuel Johannes (sometimes Samuel Johannes Felix), he was a Moravian, and he originally hailed from Southern India. Samuel Johannes had been living in Herrnhut for a mere two weeks, employed as a servant in the house of Baron…

Josef Köstlbauer

Entangled Dependencies

The Case of the Runaway Domestic Worker Emine in Late Ottoman Istanbul (1910)

From the late eighteenth century on, domestic slavery, until then the most common form of domestic work in the Ottoman Empire, began to decline because of the social and economic changes affecting Ottoman lives and households. In the second half of the nineteenth century, this decline sharpened due to a series of anti-slavery acts and…

Müge Telci Özbek

Duties and Rights of Landowners and Tenants in a Late Roman Law

In the Later Roman Empire (3rd to 6th centuries CE) rural tenancy became much more regulated than previously. During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, this social relationship was understood as a contract between landowner and tenant, an agreement regulated primarily by local practices, customs, and laws that was only rarely the object…

Uiran Gebara da Silva

Searching for a Wet Nurse

The process of entering a work relationship is very complex both on an individual and on a structural level. There are those searching for employment, those looking for someone to employ, and those assisting (or hampering) the search process through information, networking, and mediation (or the refusal of help). All parties involved are…

Corinna Peres and Juliane Schiel

Servants in the early-modern Nordic countries

Early studies of Nordic servants written in the first half of the twentieth century focused on legal…

Hanne Østhus, Carolina Uppenberg

Voluntary Work or Coerced Labour?

Albania between 1945 and the 1990s

Under communism, the mobilisation of voluntary workers played an important role for the Albanian economy as…

Slavery and Resistance in the US South

Slavery in the United States was already the focus of…

Grammars of Coercion

Towards a cross-corpora annotation model

This document describes the first digital steps of Working Group 1 “Grammars of Coercion” (hereafter WG1) towards a common and multilingual cross-corpora annotation model for the semantic analysis of historical sources on coercion in labor. It is the result of four rounds of experiments with Catma (a semantic annotation and analysis tool) held…

Juliane Schiel, Johan Heinsen, Claude Chevaleyre

Prosecution of a murderous female slave, Mukden (Qing China), 1796

The Chinese judiciary was organized along a vertical chain of transmission. Judicial cases were investigated at the local level and, depending on their gravity, transmitted upward to the prefecture, the province, then to the Board of Punishments (or Ministry of Justice) and, ultimately, to the emperor. The higher the punishment corresponding to the proposed incrimination, the higher the trying instance. For instance, a district magistrate could only close minor cases (liable to beating). In cases liable to banishment, the Board of Punishments was the last decision-making body. Crimes punishable by death were always submitted to the emperor for final decision, either…

Claude Chevaleyre

Interrogation of a runaway convict, Copenhagen 1776

From 1741 to about 1860 a prison known in its time as “Slaveriet”, translating simply to The Slavery, existed in Northern Copenhagen. The Slavery was one of many similar extramural convict institutions littering early modern Scandinavia and Northern Germany. During their stays in these institutions, chained men, “slaver” (slaves), performed hard labour for the military states. They helped build and maintain key infrastructure such as ships and fortifications. The Slavery in Northern…