Events - JCMML

On this occasion, our aim is to discuss three main points. The first is the conceptual distinction between indigenous slavery and servitude, since while the former was prohibited or limited by the Catholic King from the early days of the conquest, the latter was consolidated and persisted until the twentieth century. Our second point is precisely the conformation of indigenous servitude in Spanish households and farms. We will discuss the institution of the encomienda (a Spanish labor system that awarded to the conquerors the labor of non-Christian indigenous peoples) proposed by the Crown of Castile, and the problems it entailed. Finally, we will try to relate this lecture to others given in this same lectures series in memory of Joseph C. Miller, in order to see the similarities and differences with the process of constructing dependency in Asia and Africa, as well as to relate it to the other lectures on Latin America.

The town of Castro Marim in Portugal was a legal haven and later the site of internal exile for several thousand minor sinners and convicts from the Middle Ages until the first decades of the nineteenth century. Later, courts of the Inquisition and the state sent those convicted of minor offences to reside in the town, typically for periods of two to four years. Faced with the punishment of long-term obligatory residence, these newcomers had little choice but to engage in the economic activities around them: chiefly in salt extraction, fishing, boat building, agriculture, and smuggling. As a result, this use of exile to Castro Marim is more than a micro-history of a small town. It is a vivid example of social control as practiced by courts of the Church and state. It is also an example of the limitations of early modern royal authority.

This talk derives from Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy’s award-winning book, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (University of Illinois Press, 2020), which explores the historical relationship between disability, antiblack racism, and slavery in the British Caribbean and the Atlantic World from the 16th to the abolition of the slave trade in the early 19th century. This talk will illustrate the integral role of Caribbean enslaved laborers to our understandings of labor, disability, and modernity and that Caribbean plantation slavery should be considered among one of history’s most disabling systems of exploitation. Lastly, it demonstrates that the study of disability in the context of Atlantic slavery engenders possibilities to read disability among the enslaved in multiple ways, not only as a sign of victimization and ‘lack,’ but of power and possibility.

In the next Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture on October 24, João Fragoso and Thiago Krause will do a comparative analysis of the two largest slaving ports in the Americas, Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, discussing their roles in the history of the Atlantic slave trade, and the similarities and the differences in their historical trajectories.

The major question will be how enfranchised slaves, the so called freedmen, could acquire the Roman citizenship. In order to understand the dynamics and different phases of the Roman citizenship an important introduction to the general rules of citizenship will be put at the beginning of the lecture. In this context a major attention must be paid to the status of the Latini and the legal rules regulating their status from the Republic to the Principate. Important legislative measures under Augustus (Lex Aelia Sentia) and Tiberius (Lex Iunia Norbana) created a new category of Latins, the Latini Aeliani and the Latini Iuniani. The lecture will explain their legal position and show in which way and under which circumstances they were able to become Roman citizens.

European colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa relied (at least before the end of the Second World War) upon mechanisms of labour exploitation through forced labour. The Portuguese colonial empire was a notorious part of these experiences. African colonial subjects were by no means passive victims of these practices: especially, running away from labour obligations was very common, and sometimes whole groups and villages were fleeing into remote regions or beyond colonial borders. This was a mighty form of response (or resistance), but it also presented many problems: flight destabilised rural societies, and those who stayed were at risk to suffer punishment. Moreover, little has been said on what runaways and refugees encountered in their new environments.

The lecture will discuss the still emerging field of global legal history and provides an approach to legal history that draws on the history of knowledge and summarizes some of the reflections on how to analyze asymmetrical dependencies from a legal historical perspective.

What did a life under the circumstances of enslavement and strong asymmetrical dependency do to children? What were the effects and how are they to be traced and understood? This lecture discusses the interconnectedness of Slavery and Dependency Studies when considered from children’s perspectives, following the approach of Trauma Studies, a branch largely ignored by historians of premodernity

When and why did ‘slave societies’ first emerge in Greece? How can we explain the wide variation in types of slavery attested? Could the spread of slavery and its detrimental impact on free hired labour have been the main cause of the social crises that erupted across Greece in the decades around 600 BC? Join our next Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture on "Slave and free labour in early Greece (750-450 BC)" with Prof. Hans Van Wees.

What are the connections between unfree labour and recent changes in Brazilian politics? Our first lecture of the year discusses why it is important to talk about the integration of the Brazilian region into global capitalism and power relations to understand the unfree labour system

How did slavery and forced labor coexist in Tahoua? In our next JCMML, Benedetta Rossi will discuss the labor regimes and their implications in this West African region.

How did enslaved Black people in Sevilla imagine freedom and what strategies did they deploy to obtain it? The talk explores the collective and fractured memories in Sevilla and the urban geography interaction based on rare first-hand accounts penned by an enslaved Black woman in the early seventeenth century.

Were strategies of ancient Greek slavery contradictory? The lecture will discuss this topic with a small number of Greek funerary epigrams from the Roman period, which offer insights into the agency of slaves and freedmen that in on the one hand, the Roman population comprised very high numbers of slaves, subjected to unprecedented levels of institutionalized controls by which their previous identity was completely erased. On the other hand, the slave system was ‘open’. Slaves working in urban households had a real chance to be manumitted

Old Goa developed as one of the major port cities of the Indian Ocean during the sixteenth century, as the Portuguese attempted to control maritime trade routes by occupying the region’s major coastal settlements and blockading others. How was its urban development during the Early Modern period shaped by slavery, caste and religion?

Deprived of basic rights and sometimes even their proper names, female domestic workers fell victim of sexual abuse and had to fear unwanted pregnancies. Dr. Elisa-Maria Hiemer will shed light on the perception of maids and present some court records from abortion trials to show how the unfavorable image of women from precarious backgrounds and of female sexuality in general impacted the process of reunification of three different parts of Poland after After World War I

What impact did the First Plague Pandemic have on mobilizations of military and civil labor? At our next JCMM Lecture, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, will examine this interplay in mid-eighth century CE western Afroeurasia.

Prof. Larissa Rosa Corrêa, of Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro, examines the development of labor laws in Brazil from the 1930s. When the Brazilian labor code was established in 1941. it did not include rural and domestic workers. They were left vulnerable to human rights violations and various forms of precarious work and serfdom. Prof. Corrêa will look into how these two groups learned to use the language of labor rights and developed repertoires of action that allowed them to strive for their rights and equal conditions compared to urban and industrial workers. These struggles were fundamental for citizenship and the formation of social classes in Brazil.

Dr. Nitin Varma will unwrap biographies of servitude, drawing upon a range of legal and ego documents from nineteenth-century northern India. Based on a “microhistorical” methodological approach, he will reconstruct the life trajectories of individuals who worked as domestic servants in Anglo-Indian households.

This talk seeks to advance critical dialogue about historians’ choices of topic, sources, and methods, asking what kinds of silences become systematic in our accounts of post-emancipation labor migration, and why. As an evidentiary base for raising these questions, the paper draws on judicial records from late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Greater Caribbean migratory destinations including Venezuela, Panama, and Costa Rica.

Latin American dictatorships in the mid-twentieth century: How connected were they with the economic, social and labor struggle? This lecture will mainly analyze the case of Argentina, and the repression carried out by military forces in conjunction with business sectors against labor in the last dictatorship, from 1976 to 1983.