Slave Research Articles

Naming and dividing: the production of residual labour in the region of Doñana

AbstractThrough a case study of the production of agricultural wage labour in southwestern Spain, in the region of Doñana, this articles analyses the process of constructing agricultural wage labour as a residual social relation. Through analysis of the deployment of labour in agro-industrial berry production, I trace the ways in which the notions of “temporariness” and “slave work” obscure the centrality of labour in the agricultural production process and conceal the reconfiguration of relations of exploitation.

Binding the Heart

This article proposes a combined analysis of late ancient magical and rabbinic texts that deal with control and subordination of renegade enslaved persons. These texts reveal some of the ways in which slaveholders utilized physical coercion, whether real or imagined, to transform or overpower enslaved persons’ will and interior dispositions. The first part of the article examines two spells used for returning runaway slaves (or otherwise, for preventing slaves from running away), with emphasis on these spells’ resonance with erotic magic that is meant to transform the beloved’s feelings toward the lover. The second part of the article argues that talmudic discussions of enslaved persons’ transition into slavery display similar tensions between autonomy and coercion, between the fantasy that slaves would form a genuine commitment to their enslaver and the fear that acknowledging a slave’s independent will would undo the enslaver’s power altogether. Taken together, these texts offer a series of powerful images through which we may begin to explore some of the discursive and performative tools that late ancient Jewish enslavers used to negotiate their anxieties regarding those they enslaved.

Jurisdiction and Afro-Brazilian Legal Politics from Colonialism to Early Independence

Abstract Every empire in the Americas developed a law of slavery that connected the forced transoceanic migration of enslaved people with land-based economic production and social life. Competing conceptions of jurisdiction over land and sea emerged from legal processes regarding slavery in the transition from colonial Portuguese rule to early independence in Brazil. Both the Portuguese monarch and post-independence Brazilian ministers sought to assert jurisdiction over residents inside the territory, including enslaved people. Their attempts to do so created social conflicts in which enslaved people put forth their own visions of jurisdiction and justice. Afro-Brazilian people developed a legal politics that drew upon diasporic maritime connections to overturn enslavement. The legal politics of cases regarding uprisings and contraband slave-trading animated concerns among judges and imperial administrators about effective legal order. A revolutionary movement in 1798 contested Portuguese colonial sovereignty with a vision of free-trade popular sovereignty. The monarch’s transfer from Portugal to Brazil in 1808 opened a small route for enslaved people to petition the crown for freedom based on innovative readings of free soil. A major case of capture in 1851 illuminated how the naval court judge adjudicated the case as the capture of an enemy. Captive African people testified in court to gain collective freedom in a liminal space. These claims to freedom raised important questions about legal equality and freedom from illegal trafficking for all people held in slavery in Brazil.

A Sea of Households: Ordering Violence and Mobility in the 
Inter-Imperial Caribbean

Abstract Historians have paid more attention to the inner life of households than to their legal and political significance in early European overseas empires. This article analyses the legal role of households in the seventeenth century Caribbean, with an emphasis on Jamaica and Suriname. It argues that households were key to organising maritime violence and composing regional order. Imperial agents in the Caribbean—soldiers, sojourners, servants, and officials—drew selectively from European political and legal discourses about dominium to define households as essential to the constitution of colonial communities and governance. In imperial and colonial legal imagination, households were necessary for the constitution of political communities and their presence fortified arguments for interpolitical violence, especially maritime raiding. Affirming the rights of household heads to hold and command captives, imperial policies to foment household formation and regulate conflicts within households underpinned a regional regime of raiding, captive taking, and enslavement. The regional regime centred on legalities of violence. Demand for coerced labour in early plantation households fuelled a 
circum-Caribbean economy of captive taking and plunder, while settlers invoked the defence of households to authorise privateering and local warfare. As the primary legal framework for absorbing and commanding coerced labour, households became the object of inter-imperial competition and a vehicle for constructing enslavement as an institution. Contests over the rights of settlers to relocate to competing colonies at times pitted expansive understandings of the dominium of household heads—the exercise of private power over household subordinates—against the public authorities they nominally sustained. Such conflicts worked to reinforce the centrality of households to the expansion of plantation slavery. The politics of households made them an unstable underpinning for colonial governance and a site of resistance to the emerging plantocracy. Officials in Jamaica struggled to manage the volatile relation between raiding and planter household formation. In Suriname, Indigenous and African captives struggled to escape and subvert forms of slavery and coercion imposed under cover of household dominium. Examining the significance of households in colonial thought illuminates important and often overlooked continuities in the legal politics of nascent Caribbean colonies and the rise of a regional slave regime. Viewed from the colonial household, legal change across the Caribbean did not follow discrete stages of conquest, privateering, and plantation slavery. Instead, it evolved in relation to shifting accommodations between public and private claims to authority and legitimate violence. Authorising warfare and converting captives into property, households formed a legal fulcrum for balancing interdependent networks of raiding, slaving, and planting in emergent slave societies. This constellation of private rights and public authority, organised around captive taking ventures and slave-holding households, spanned the seventeenth-century Caribbean and produced an inter-imperial legal regime in which the rights of slave owners came to occupy the very centre of visions of regional order.

Slaves as Gifts to Accompany Letters: A Critical Study of the Bo’ Abdul Kadim

This study discusses the tradition of letters in the kingdom of Bima, especially concerning giving enslaved people as gifts to accompany letters. The data for this study were taken from the manuscript bundle of bo’ (official royal records) during the reign of Sultan Abdul Kadim Muhammad Shah (1751–1773). Now, the manuscript is part of the collection of the Samparaja Cultural Museum, Bima, West Nusa Tenggara and is coded C.011 Bo. Within the manuscript bundle, we found 117 (out of a total of 548) letters discussing slaves and slavery in the Bima kingdom. We first used philological research methods, then these texts were analysed with historical records to obtain a complete understanding of slaves and slavery in the 18th century AD societal traditions. The results showed that slaves giving as a gift accompanying the letter was a symbol of respect for the recipient of the letter, which was following the Malay correspondence tradition. For local rulers, slaves were the most valuable treasure. Slaves were also a determinant of social status among the nobility in the past. This practice applies not only in Bima but throughout the Malay land and even Southeast Asia.

Quilombola women from Jequitinhonha (Minas Gerais, Brazil) and access to water and sanitation in the context of COVID-19: a matter of human rights

IntroductionIn Brazil there are currently 3,475 certified quilombo communities, reminiscent of Black communities founded by African enslaved people. In the Jequitinhonha Valley, a semi-arid region located in northeastern Minas Gerais State, Brazil, there are approximately 80 established communities, mostly in hard-to-reach areas with lack of access to water and sanitation services.MethodsUsing the analytical framework of Human Rights to Water and Sanitation (HRWS) and with a gender perspective, this research aimed to analyze how access to water and sanitation occurs in two remaining communities of quilombos (Córrego do Narciso and Córrego do Rocha) located in the Jequitinhonha Valley and how lack of access to these services impacts the health and lifestyle of the population, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study used qualitative methods. Data was collected using individual interviews and focus groups. The data was analyzed using content analyses technique.ResultsThe results showed that access to water and sanitation in both communities did not respect the HRWS normative content and the lack of access impacted the lifestyle—the economic, cultural and social traditional activities-and the health of the population, especially for women. During COVID-9 pandemic access to water became even more difficult because the supply by water truck was discontinued producing more insecurity as people in the communities, especially women, needed to go to the city to buy water and food and could not keep isolation.DiscussionPublic policies on access to water for rural populations, especially quilombolas, if guided by the HRWS framework and interwoven with the gender perspective, could ensure guaranteed quality of life for women and can strength their entitlements within their territories.

Debating Slavery After the Southampton Insurrection: A Crisis among North Carolina Slave Owners, 1831–1832

ABSTRACT This article examines the varied and unexpected responses among slave owners in North Carolina after Nat Turner's Insurrection in Virginia in 1831. It argues that their response was not political and economic as was the case in the famous debates carried out in the Virginia legislature at the same time. Instead, North Carolina slave owners engaged in a wide-ranging public and private debate over the morality of slavery that had its roots in a statewide discussion of abolition that began in 1829. The 1831–1832 debate in North Carolina debate focused on how slavery had failed in the recent slave conspiracies turned up in North Carolina, and how slavery could be made to function and survive by creating a stable and just society rooted in both inequality and morality. That, North Carolina slave owners hoped, would bring an end to the continuous war between white enslavers and enslaved African Americans that had been publicly exposed by Turner's revolt and subsequent conspiracies discovered in North Carolina.

Archaeology and a case of genocide: the ‘indigenous prisons’ of Minas Gerais, Brazil

ABSTRACT A 2021 sentence condemned a retired Major of the Military Police of Minas Gerais on charges of genocide against the Krenak people. Between 1969 and 1979, that state’s Military Police established two prisons of exception. The sentence is crucial on the grounds of the enormous human and cultural damage endured by the indigenous peoples of Brazil during the Military Dictatorship of 1964–1985, as established by the Brazilian Truth Commission. This paper discusses an archaeological and anthropological approach to the conditions prevailing at these prisons and attested by some of its survivors. By addressing their form of internment, the slave labour and torture committed at them, this paper will discuss the extent to which such prisons can be considered concentration camps. This article on their archaeological study hopes to make a useful contribution to the archaeology of repression and resistance to that dictatorship.

Slavery, Mobility, and Identity on the Western Coast of India, Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries

AbstractIn the wake of the establishment of the Portuguese in the region, slavery was fundamentally constitutive of early modern society on the west coast of India. While indigenous hierarchies and existing systems of slavery shaped Portuguese slavery, over time, indigenous society too was transformed by the extensive reliance on enslaved labor facilitated by European trafficking networks. Centering slavery in the study of South Asian history underscores the importance of considering the difference between elite projects of enforcing boundaries, both spatial and social, and the ways in which enslaved people negotiated these projects. Thus, instead of taking for granted the classificatory labels of race, caste, and blackness imposed upon enslaved peoples by elite institutions, a social history of slavery elucidates instead the evolution of these mechanisms for policing identity, and the centrality of the expropriation of labor in identity formation.

Dźwiękowe emanacje oporu i strategie przetrwania w Litzmannstadt Ghetto

The history of the creation and activities of the Lodz Ghetto is a tale of escalating terror techniques. The structure of repression included isolation, starvation, slave labor, persecution on personal, cultural and religious grounds, as well as measures that reinforced social and material stratification. Against this background, practices of resistance of an acoustic nature – one of the few forms of resistance that could slip through the dense web of oppression – take on particular significance. Acoustic strategies of survival include, on the one hand, artistic creation or singing during work, strikes and opposition gatherings, and on the other, practices that ensured survival: deliberate silence, listening to the radio, or secret communication systems between those in hiding. The article illustrates the multifaceted nature of the resistance undertaken by those imprisoned in the ghetto, emphasizing the importance of sound strategies – hitherto overlooked in Holocaust studies. Key-words: Holocaust audiosphere, sound history, holocaust, Lodz ghetto, sound studies

No Emancipation without Compensation

This article analyses how Dutch slave owners and shareholders used petitions to influence how slavery was abolished in Suriname, Curaçao and the Antilles. They have been characterised as defenders of slavery. Throughout this article it will become clear that slave owners and shareholders did not aim for the continuation of slavery in the Dutch Atlantic after the 1840s. Instead, they successfully lobbied to postpone abolition until the most favourable conditions for them – rather than the enslaved people – had been agreed in Parliament. British legislation and colonial practices inspired their advocacy for financial compensation and labour immigration, showing the transnational nature of this approach. Referring to legislation adopted by the States General also proved an effective tactic to legitimise their claims. The resulting Emancipation Act became part of the Dutch State’s transformation into an anti-slavery empire, because the Act expanded the state’s power over the formerly enslaved people in Suriname and the use of coerced labour under the guise of abolition.

Anthropologie argentine

Argentine Anthropology is a discipline of disciplines—sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, ethnohistory, folklore and ethnology, biological anthropology and forensic anthropology—whose first academic exponents date back to the end of the 19th century. It accompanied studies in the United States and Western and Central Europe and developed in close relationship with the institutions of the Argentine State, particularly educational, military and those dedicated to population policies and territorial definition. It was characterized by applying to a country that exported temperate products, with little need for intensive and slave labour, with repeated state intervention to the University system, and with an extensive overseas immigrant population. After a relatively conservative period, anthropology became one of the most innovative and reference disciplines in the Argentine social sciences.

Diskursus Penafsiran Milkul Yamin di Kalangan Ulama Klasik dan Kontemporer: Teks dan Konteks

The institutionalised ownership of slaves (milkul yamin) is one of the focuses of the Quranic critique of the culture of exploitation and domination in Arabia. The Quran views that it must be eliminated immediately even though it is done gradually, including through expiation in the form of freeing slaves and allowing masters to have sex with their personal slaves as stated in several verses of the Quran. The concept of milkul yamin is interpreted with various views by classical and contemporary scholars, even with interpretations that go beyond previous scholars towards non-marital sexual relations. This research will reveal how classical and contemporary scholars interpret the concept of milkul yamin found in the Quran and hadith both in text and context. This research is a qualitative type of library research with data derived from sources related to the concept of milkul yamin in the form of books, books, articles and various writings in online media then analysed using descriptive methods. The results showed that the majority of classical and contemporary scholars viewed the verses on slavery as Islam's attempt to raise the status of slaves from religious prisoners of war at that time. As well as a way for Islam to gradually abolish the practice of slavery that has been entrenched and rooted in jahiliyyah Arab society. Meanwhile, according to Muhammad Syahrur's reinterpretation, it is more subjective, influenced by modern culture and civilisation, and does not carefully consider the historical meaning of the verse and the main message contained in the verse.

Problematizing socially sustainable global supply chains: Theoretical insights, contextual challenges, and the issue of modern slavery

This study critically examines the literature on enablers of socially sustainable global supply chains, with a particular focus on the theoretical underpinnings that contribute to their establishment and maintenance. It also explores the contextual factors that perpetuate modern slavery within supply chains, evaluating the measures taken to address these issues. A comprehensive review of 265 publications from 2012 to 2024, identified through a keyword search in the Scopus database, forms the basis of this analysis. Key factors that enable labor abuse in global supply chains are identified, including business models that prioritize profit over ethics, socio-economic vulnerabilities of workers, commercial pressures, and insufficient regulatory oversight. By bridging gaps in the current literature, this study contributes to developing best practices for managing socially sustainable supply chains, with significant implications for theory, context, and policy.

Mahogany: a historical geography of a lasting commodity of 18th-century enslavement

ABSTRACT It might be assumed that the commodities produced by enslaved labour in the British colonies in the 18th century were consumed long ago. Mahogany wood, however, endures and challenges this assumption. Slave labour was used to cut mahogany trees and prepare the timber for transporting to European and North American markets. When made into fine furniture and fittings this same mahogany has been admired and preserved through to the present day. We explore how mahogany was part of the geography of colonial trade and wealth-making by drawing on research focused on Lancaster in north-west England, the UK’s fourth largest slave trading port. We trace the extended geographies and lines of connection that were produced by the interlinked trades in enslaved African people and mahogany wood, and, through this focus on Lancaster, we provide an example of how colonialism shaped the economy and narrative of places in Britain. Contemporary responses within heritage settings and the implications for the continuing trade in antique mahogany furniture are also considered.

What to Do after the Emancipation Proclamation? A Princeton Seminary Alumnus’s Views on Racial Issues and Slavery in Brazil and the United States (1852–1867)

Abstract This article reflects on how the concept of race and views on African Americans and Afro-Brazilians permeated the American Presbyterian missions that operated in the Brazilian empire in the nineteenth century. This analysis considers the writing and reading of Ashbel Green Simonton (1833–1867), a Princeton Seminary alum sent to Brazil as a missionary by the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA). In his missionary activity, Simonton founded the first Presbyterian Church and the first evangelical periodical in Brazil. Considering the intercessions between the racial theories stemming from natural history and nineteenth-century theological anthropologies, as well as the missionary’s interactions with the racial and slavery issues that permeated the American Civil War (1861–1865), this article analyzes Simonton’s journal (1852–1867), the books requested by Simonton at Princeton Theological Seminary (1856–1858), and the periodical Imprensa Evangélica (Evangelical Press, 1864–1867).

Inscribed in Liberalism: racism in International Relations and abolition of slavery in Brazil

The beginning of 20th Century was a moment of great transformations, amongst which the first impulse in institutionalize a field of knowledge of International Relations. A structural change that happened 30 years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil. Despite the fact of being unrelated historical phenomena in objective terms, I argue that the possibility of analyzing them in tandem widens the critique to the racist premises of liberalism, a powerful ideological motivator in both events. The vitality of critical studies in IR has helped denounce the premises upon which the discipline is grounded and the definition of what is within the scope of its interest. The disciplinary critique is reconstructed in the first section and, in the second, I present the marginalization inscribed in legal norms of late 19th and early 20th Century Brazil. The technique of developing conditions for the segregation of a sector of the population disguising it from full-citizens by granting conditional-citizenship to former enslaved people is a sophisticated use of liberalism. Such use not only presents in full the critique of structural racism developed by the critique to this political project, already advanced by IR scholars, it also presents another discussion that has yet ground to cover in the field: the unchallenged premise of homogeneity within political communities.

Fertility responses to short-term economic stress: Price volatility and wealth shocks in a pre-transitional settler colony

This paper examines the effects of short-term economic stress, captured by general price volatility and a negative wealth shock on short-run fertility behavior in the rural pre-transitional society of the Cape Colony. First, we link complete birth histories of settler women from the South African Families database to consumer price index data to examine the effect of price volatility on conceptions. Next, we link the same birth histories to slave owner and slave emancipation data to examine the effect of a negative wealth shock on conception. Upon slave emancipation in 1834, former slave owners received on average only between 40 and 50 % of the market value of their slaves as compensation, resulting in a substantial reduction in their wealth. Relying on event history models that look simultaneously at stopping and spacing, we do not find strong evidence in support of fertility control in response to general price volatility. We do find greater variance in birth interval lengths for former slaveholding households during and immediately after emancipation, suggesting that a negative wealth shock is associated with increased fertility limitation through postponement in this context.

The Philosophical Implications and Contemporary Value Insights of “Labor Creates Humanity” from Hegel's "Master-Slave Dialectic"

In Hegel's "Master-Slave Dialectic," labor is not only a means to achieve freedom but also a process of self-creation. Through labor, the slave negates their own nature, gradually surpassing their mere slave status to gain self-awareness and freedom. Meanwhile, the master, often reliant on the slave's labor is compelled to accept material provisions from the slave, creating a material dependency that forces the master to negate their own essence and be disciplined into a new form by the slave. This dependency of the master is not only material but also involves recognition of the slave's social status and their own value. Hegel's "Master-Slave Dialectic" provides a profound philosophical framework for contemplating the philosophical implications and contemporary value insights of "Labor Creates People." It offers a deeper understanding of issues facing contemporary society, particularly in rethinking the relationships between freedom, labor, and environment. This philosophical framework is crucial for seeking inclusive and sustainable solutions to contemporary challenges.

Exploring the drivers of modern slavery reporting quality in Indonesia

AbstractVulnerability to modern slavery in Indonesia, particularly driven by poverty and discrimination against minority groups, has become a primary concern in the context of information transparency. This study aims to investigate the factors that can support the reporting quality of modern slavery in Indonesia, namely the industry sector, profitability, social responsibility commitment, and gender diversity as the moderating variable. The research utilized a sample of 225 companies listed on the Indonesia stock exchange (IDX) from 2020 to 2022. Data were collected from financial reports and sustainability reports as well as the Refinitiv Eikon database. Panel data regression analysis was conducted to analyze the determinants of the disclosure quality. The research findings indicate that high‐risk industry sectors tend to disclose less information regarding modern slavery, with this outcome having a partially negative impact. However, profitability is not associated with the quality of voluntary modern slavery disclosure. In contrast, corporate responsibility commitment is positively associated. Additionally, this study reveals that gender diversity does not moderate the association between the industry sector, profitability, and corporate responsibility commitment with the disclosure quality of modern slavery. This research contributes to the growing literature on the accountability of modern slavery in an emerging country context through institutional theory and gender socialization theory lenses by identifying the firm‐level factors to enhance corporate disclosure in this area. This study also contributes to corporate understanding of modern slavery issues within supply chains. With growing attention to this problem, the awareness of labor exploitation within corporate supply chains is also increasing. The findings of this research can assist companies in recognizing the importance of transparency and voluntary disclosure regarding modern slavery in their supply chains.