Events - Other

Prof. Dr. Julia Hillner's latest book, "Helena Augusta: Mother of the Empire" will be presented, including a reading, followed by a discussion and a reception.

One of the largest libraries on ancient slavery in the world with its rich holdings has moved from the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature to the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies. Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature has a long standing tradition of research on slavery in the ancient Mediterranean. More than forty volumes were published on numerous facets of the subject. In addition, a comprehensive encyclopaedia on ancient slavery was compiled by researchers from all over the world. Over the course of sixty years, the prolific research output at the Mainz Academy had led to the formation of this special and comprehensive library. It can be considered one of the largest libraries on ancient slavery in the world. To celebrate the opening of the library, we are inviting you to join our LIBRARY LAUNCH on Wednesday, 18 January, 2023, from 16:15-19:00 CET at Heussallee 16-19, 53111 Bonn. The event will be held in German. All welcome!

On February 13, 2023, Dr. Viola Müller will represent the BCDSS at the Kinderuni, where she will give a lecture on the History of Sugar. Abstract: Sugar is in chocolate, cola, gummy bears, and adults use it to sweeten their coffee. It also hides in yogurt, tomato sauce, and chips. Sugar is everywhere. But has it always been around? Where does it come from? Did it always look the same? Who made it in the past, and who is making it today? Dive into the history of sugar!

This week, Cristina Mocanu will present her project “Productive and Reproductive Labor of Roma Slaves in Moldavia (before 1830s)”. She will explain how these types of labor influenced the slave condition and the owner-slave relationship, as well as how all this differed according to the categories into which the Roma slaves were divided: slaves of the crown, monasteries, and nobles. Using documents from the 18th and early 19th centuries, in which words were different or had a different meaning, Cristina raises the question of how current scholars should relate to the language of the era. To register, please drop an email entitled "Friday Fellows Seminar" with your name and the date of the seminar to Laura Hartmann.

This week, Özden Mercan is looking forward to a lively discussion of and feedback on her project on premodern Mediterranean forms of unfree labor and its spatial dimensions through the case study of Tuscan free port Livorno. Housing a significant number of slaves, mainly of Turkish and Moorish origin, Livorno’s bagno was the first such construction in Europe, enabling slaves to perform various sorts of labors within its walls as well as outside it. Özden will focus on these slaves as laborers and trace their role in transferring certain skills and practices by focusing on the spaces that generated a dense network of knowledge transfer and circulation of information in which slaves also took active part. To register, please drop an email entitled "Friday Fellows Seminar" with your name and the date of the seminar to Laura Hartmann.

This week, Christian Laes is looking forward to a lively discussion of and feedback on his presentation “Writing the histories of slavery in Antiquity. How to go forward?” After a brief overview of the study of slavery in the ancient world, he will point out possible paths for the future: renewed attention to Late Antiquity and the transition period between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the promising topic of agency.

This time, PhD Guest Researcher (University of California, Berkeley) Sara Eriksson will present her research project "The Average Person – Looking for Enslaved Labor at Hellenistic Kalaureia".

For this week's Friday Seminar, Heinrich Heinen Kolleg Fellow Hillary Taylor discusses her project “Violence at Work in Early Modern Britain and its Overseas Territories”. This presentation will consider violence and labour discipline in Britain and the British Atlantic, c. 1550-1800. Among other topics, it will examine ‘employers’ commentaries on the relative utility of using violence to manage and discipline workers; how various categories of workers responded to such violence; and how the legal system mediated these aspects of labour relations.

In this Friday Seminar, Heinz Heinen Kolleg Fellow John Agbonifo will speak on his research project “Neither Slave nor Free Labour? Understanding Labour Relations between Monarchy and the Bronze Guild in Ancient Benin Empire”. More information tba.

This week, Julie Miller is looking forward to a lively discussion of and feedback on her presentation, “A History of the Person in America.” Her book-in-progress explores expressions of the idea of a "person" in American politics from the drafting of the U.S. Constitution to the Civil War. This presentation will offer a brief introduction to the project while lingering a bit on the questions, historiographies, and sources that inspired it. Event registration via email (s. below)

This week, Carolina González is looking forward to a lively discussion of and feedback on her presentation, "’With her personal service’: Domestic work, manumission and judicial records. Enslaved and freed women in colonial Chile". This presentation describes the uses of justice by enslaved people in colonial Chile and focuses on the relationship between the so-called “domestic work- affective labor” and the forms of self manumission of enslaved-freed women, especially in Santiago city between 1770-1823.

In this week’s seminar, Stephan Conermann will throw some light on the question “How and Where to Apply for Funding?” and talk about the German funding systems and opportunities.

This week, Raquel R. Sirotti, BCDSS research group leader and postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, Germany, discusses her project "Mutual Dependencies and Normative Production in Africa." The presentation will approach the concept of mutual dependencies and argue that it can be a useful tool for understanding the production of law in colonial contexts. Using as examples the case studies developed in the junior research group Mutual Dependencies and Normative Production in Africa, I will suggest that the interaction, recognition, and even creation of local intermediaries by colonial agents implied mutual transformations of traditional and state authorities. The actions of these individuals not only contributed to the construction of hybrid models of colonial rule in Africa, but also shaped the regulation of indigenous labour exploitation and the mechanisms of punishment and social control of local populations.

In our panel discussion “Diversity in German Academia - A Reflective Look at the Current State”, scholars and activists will take stock of how German universities and research institutions currently attend to the matter of equal opportunities and diversity. The panel discussion is designed to provide a space for the exchange of experience and knowledge: panelists will critically consider measures and processes of change within institutions and reflect on how to further strengthen diversity awareness. The discussion will also be opened up to address questions from the audience. The panel is organized by the Equal Opportunity and Diversity Unit and the BCDSS; it is part of this year’s Germany-wide Diversity Days (23-24 May 2023) at Bonn University, organized for the second time by the Pro-Rectorate for Equal Opportunities and Diversity.

Join us for the book launch of Prof. Dr. Christoph Witzenrath's latest publication "The Russian Empire, Slaving and Liberation, 1480-1725", followed by a discussion with Prof. Dr. Martin Aust regarding the book's content. The De Gruyter book series of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies holds publications that examine different phenomena of slavery and other forms of strong asymmetrical dependencies in societies. The series follows the BCDSS research agenda in going beyond the dichotomy of slavery versus freedom. It proposes a new key concept, strong asymmetrical dependency, which covers all forms of bondage across time and space. This includes debt bondage, convict labor, tributary labor, servitude, serfdom, and domestic work, as well as forms of wage labor and various types of patronage. To register, please send a mail to events@dependency.uni-bonn.de.

This week, Stephan Conermann is looking forward to a lively general discussion of labor-related asymmetrical dependencies and mobility. Research Area D explores workers’ practices for coping with dependency, for reducing the degree of coercion and for expanding their own autonomy. By looking at (a) individual and collective everyday practices, (b) organizations, (c) relationships with institutions (e.g. the use of laws and norms), and (d) anti-systemic practices, Research Area D will make it possible to map dependency on an alternative scale, between autonomy and coercion, and to increase the awareness of the dependents’ scope of action and their options for social mobility. Against this backdrop, the two attached texts will be discussed.

In this Friday Seminar session, Marçal de Menezes Paredes, Associate Professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Brazil, is looking forward to a lively discussion of and feedback on his project “From Supporters to Cooperants: regarding the Canadian Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa (TCLSAC) in its relationship with FRELIMO in Mozambique in the 1970s.” The presentation will present a historical overview of this transnational activity that connected the Global North and South and fostered commitment among comrades and cooperants. For a more detailed description, please see the abstract attached. To register, please drop an email entitled "Friday Fellows Seminar" with your name and the date of the seminar to Laura Hartmann.

This week, Mònica Ginés-Blasi, Marie Sklodowska Curie Action Fellow at the Institut d’Asie Orientale of the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon (2022-24) and former BCDSS Fellow, will discuss her project “Trading Chinese Migrants: Networks of Human Trafficking in Treaty Port China (1830-1930s).” This presentation will suggest a comprehensive view of the so-called “coolie trade”, which was an international imperial enterprise central to the Western incursion in China, and it involved strong and peripheral Western nations alike, becoming the single most transversal item of interest of Western imperial colonialism in the nineteenth century. To support this wide understanding of the coolie trade, Mònica will focus on four case studies to challenge the established views in the historiography which situate the trade mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean, within a defined chronology – from 1847 to 1874 – and which portray “coolies” as mostly male and adult, as well as generically Chinese.

This week, Roberto Hofmeister Pich (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Brazil) is looking forward to a lively discussion of and feedback on his talk “Restitution of What? Characterizing Discourses on Abolition of Black Slavery, Guilt, and Reparation in Latin American History”. The lecture focuses on philosophical and theological literature, by Iberian and Latin American authors, from the 17th to the 19th century, that provide normative evaluations of transatlantic slave trade and slavery in colonial societies. The main idea is to characterize the initial perception of guilt and the need of reparation towards enslaved Africans in 17th-century literature on the subject and how in 19th-century discourses on abolition, especially in Brazil, an articulated account of "restitution" is basically a missing item.

This week, our guests Emma Christopher (University of New South Wales, Australia) and Bryce Beemer (Duke Kunshan University, China) are looking forward to a lively discussion of and feedback on their respective projects. (1) Emma Christopher, “’The Territory is Life’: Slavery, Freedom and the Fight for Survival in the Río Yurumanguí, Colombia”: This paper explores a community that has fought for its territory for 400 years through slavery and into legal freedom, eventually gaining collective land rights in May 2000, but remains in an often deadly fight over it. (2) Bryce Beemer, “Creolization Theory and Southeast Asia: Slavery and Cultural Exchange in Precolonial Burma, c. 1750-1850”: Creolization theory beneficially illuminates the agentive power of the enslaved in processes of culture building and community reinvention. This discussion will engage the potential benefits and pitfalls of adapting creolization theory to the Southeast Asian context.