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 that are sometimes found in court records and the conflictual perspectives they represent. The courtroom has figured both as a portal through which subaltern cultures could be studied and as a room full of meaning in and of itself. Building on these historiographical traditions, this collection of data stories focuses on how processes of labour coercion and social asymmetries have been entangled with judicial practices throughout history.
The stories are based on papers presented at a workshop organized by WORCK titled ‘Coercive Archives: Labour Coercion in the Courtroom and Its Afterlives’ in Istanbul in September 2022. The workshop was imagined as part of a broader effort aimed at exploring the many ways in which labour coercion and social asymmetries are practiced, written about, and archived in different historical contexts.
The workshop centered on the examination of ‘coercive archives’ stemming from judicial proceedings across different historical periods and regions. The contributors were invited to conduct a granular examination of documents generated in courtrooms, holding cells, interrogation chambers, and other related judicial and carceral environments. The objective was to examine questions like: What insights do these documents provide about the practice of labor coercion? How did the courtroom and its paper trail contribute to or generate labor coercion? What implications does this hold for how historians approach and interact with these archival traces? How do we narrate coercion and how is labour coercion narrated in court documents? The exploration also contemplated the temporal entanglement surrounding labor coercion and its archives. We recognize that the past, present, and future of labor coercion and its narratives are interconnected rather than being discrete and cut off from one another.
The data stories resulting from the Coercive Archives workshop feature contributions that examine traces of coercion within judicial documents from various geographical locations and historical epochs. Below, you can find a map displaying the locations of the events described in the data stories within this collection. WORCK aims to explore the practices and processes that generate and often perpetuate social asymmetry. It argues for the need for a renewed social history based on empirical studies of coercion. As part of this collaborative exploration, WORCK is establishing an archive (data.worck.eu) to facilitate more expansive engagement with historical sources originating from coercive processes, both in the past and the present. We firmly believe that this compilation of data stories, with their thorough examination of coercion in judicial archives across diverse locations and periods, constitutes a significant contribution to this effort.
The contents:
Vilhelm Vilhelmsson. Analysing the everyday practices of labour coercion through arbitration court records
Aigi Rahi-Tamm. Bringing war into everyday life: strange “dialogues” about values from the 1940s
Viola Müller. The failed petition of Christopher McPherson, Richmond, Virgina, 1810
Akin Sefer. Negotiating Coercion at the Court: Barrelmakers and the Ottoman State in the Early Nineteenth Century
Kostas Tziaras. Court records about the labour movement and the everyday life of the working poor in interwar Thessaloniki
Nayanjyoti Kalita. Reading the Files of “Bawi Controversy” in the Lushai Hills: Cases of Debt, Runaways and Criminality in Colonial India’s Northeastern Frontier