Events Archive
Geliebte Sklavinnen. Deutsche Kaufleute und ihre versklavten Frauen in der Second Slavery Noch bis um 1860 spielte sich die breite globale Wirtschaftsdynamik des globalen Kapitalismus vor allem in Kolonien oder ehemaligen Kolonien ab. Viele deutschsprachige Männer drängten damals in diese "Erste Welt" des Wirtschaftswachstums, der Modernität und des Profits. Diese jungen Männer konnten, falls sie nicht durch Sklavenhandel reich geworden waren, nicht in die traditionelle Land- und Sklavenbesitzerelite einheiraten, weil sie dort als Emporkömmlinge galten. So lebten sie meist mit "Sklavinnen-Geliebten" zusammen. Diese Sklavinnen waren fast immer sehr jung und überlebten ihre "geliebten Eigentümer". Die meisten dieser Sklavinnen wurden von ihrem Eigentümer nach dessen Tod testamentarisch frei gelassen und bekamen einen Teil des Erbes - mit dem sie selbst wiedeurm SklavInnen kauften und zu SklavenhalterInnen sowie zu Führungsfiguren einer jeweils lokalen farbigen Sklavenhalterelite wurden.
What happens when the end of the slave trade doesn't lead to freedom, but to a new form of bondage? In our next lecture with Jake Subryan Richards, he will explore the findings of The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2025). Based on a decade of research across four continents, this study uncovers the "forgotten" history of individuals intercepted by maritime patrols and “liberated”, only to be coerced into years of forced labor to "repay" the costs of their own rescue. By examining archival records from Sierra Leone to Brazil and the United States, he analyzes the tension between imperial authoritarianism and the lived experiences of the African diaspora. A challenge to our understanding of emancipation that will examine how empires redefined "freedom" to suit their own economic and political needs.
Throughout the day, participants will be invited to share their reflections on their own research practices, whether based on collaborative projects, individual research experiences or ongoing questions. These contributions will form the basis of a joint discussion on the chosen challenges, opportunities and limitations associated with collaborative and/or intercultural approaches. The workshop opens with a lecture on "Anti-Colonial Praxis: Intercultural Alliances and Indigenous Forest Knowledge" by Juliana Salles Machado of Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil.
How did the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms reshape slavery across the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and Middle East? This talk by Behnaz Mirzai, Professor of Middle Eastern History at Brock University, examines the shared origins of Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire—neighboring states with parallel political and cultural structures, including similar slavery systems. It shows how enslaved Africans faced capture, transport, and major identity shifts, and how Ottoman Tanzimat reforms inspired Qajar officials and revolutionaries to pursue abolitionist policies. Through the story of Mahboob Qirvanian, an enslaved African later freed by Constitutional Revolution leaders, the talk highlights both the human experience of Africa–Asia slavery and the political changes that reshaped it. The event ends with a screening of Prof. Mirzai’s award-winning documentary Afro-Iranian Lives.
Hybrid Workshop: What can we learn by rethinking plantations beyond the Atlantic world? From the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, plantations in the Caribbean, South America, and the U.S. South shaped the Atlantic economy and influenced extractive systems worldwide. While the fall of Caribbean slave-based regimes and their links to modern commodity frontiers are well known, this workshop revisits the origins, structures, and global implications of plantation systems. In this coming hybrid workshop, early-career scholars will join established researchers in moderated panel discussions designed to spark productive, in-depth dialogue.
How did Black symbolism become central to European apothecary culture? This lecture with Temitope Fagunwa, argues that this imagery resulted from three interconnected factors: the medieval Mediterranean spice trade, the transmission of Arabic and Greek pharmaceutical knowledge, and the cosmopolitan court of Frederick II in Sicily. By linking the material flow of goods like pepper and myrrh to the translation of scholarly texts and Hohenstaufen heraldry, this study identifies a medieval origin for symbols often misattributed to later eras. Ultimately, it fills a historiographical gap by connecting the history of science with the material and symbolic traditions of European commerce.
This interdisciplinary workshop on body history and experiences explores strong asymmetrical dependencies from the perspective of the body and experience. The workshop will build upon the agenda and insights generated by the existing Working Group "Body History," which was established in March 2024. Through cross-disciplinary perspectives and discussions, during the workshop meetings, we deepened our understanding of how embodied experiences have been shaped by various dependencies throughout history. The aim of the workshop is to build on the established insights and questions in order to expand and deepen the conversation on interdisciplinary approaches to body history and experiences by historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and other disciplines. Find the program below. Please note: Registration required as there is only limited seating!
Gemeinsam mit renommierten Expert*innen aus Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft gehen wir im Semester wöchentlich auf eine DenkReise zu wünschenswerten Zukünften unterschiedlicher Lebensbereiche. Unsere Gäste stellen ihre Forschung vor und diskutieren mit Studierenden, Nachwuchswissenschaftler*innen und der interessierten Öffentlichkeit. Am Ende des Semesters folgt nach den Reisen im Denken eine gemeinsame Reise als Exkursion zu einem thematisch einschlägigen Ort.
How did late-nineteenth-century Brazilian thinkers, working within a “Naturalistic Scientism” shaped by positivist and evolutionist theories, represent race and slavery in ways that ranged from claims of Black inferiority to calls for moral reparation, and how did the paternalistic normalization of slavery obscure racial hierarchies and sustain asymmetrical dependencies compared to the more overt racialization seen in the United States?
The BCDSS invites to a screening of Aisha Can't Fly Away (dir. Morad Mostafa, 2025), followed by a panel discussion on migration-related labour exploitation and intersectional dependency. The film follows Aisha, a Sudanese care worker in Cairo, as she navigates racism, extortion, and precarious work conditions after fleeing war in Somalia. The panel will feature BCDSS Research Group Leader Benjamin Etzold and Postdoctoral Researcher Ayesha Hussain.
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.
Competing Memories: The Politics of Remembering Enslavement, Emancipation and Indentureship in the Caribbean
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.
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.
New perspectives on the past slave trade activities and its impacts in Mozambique: Understanding this process through archaeological (terrestrial and maritime), historical and anthropological research that is bringing to light a complex body of knowledge about slavery in this section of southern East Africa
Forced migration and compulsory foreign labour in the rise of Egypt as a regional great power and cultural powerhouse? Connecting with research on contemporary uneven geographical development, this talk problematizes ancient Egyptian foreign policy and labour policies about their neighbouring societies.
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)
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
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.
What kind of agency did women inmates have in the forced labor camps in the Soviet Union, and how did they experience it? Based on lesser-known memoirs of women inmates, our upcoming Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture will examine the constrained agency that they still retained.
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.
The institution of slavery lasted more than three centuries in Brazil, the last country to abolish black slavery in the Americas in 1888. This event aims to bring together some of the central debates on the cultural heritage of Afro-descendant slavery in Brazil, and a critical novelty is to propose the analysis of the intersections with the cultural heritage of indigenous slavery. The Brazilian academy is just beginning to explore these possible connections, and the event can be an essential contribution to the debate on the cultural heritage of slavery at the international level by bringing new perspectives. In this sense, the Conference brings together researchers and activists to debate topics on the intersections in the cultural heritage of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian slavery at parties, in the discussion of the last Constitution, in teaching, in filmic narratives, in museums and the politics of Repair.
What was the gender structure of war and violence during the Napatan and Meroitic periods? Our upcoming Lecture focuses on the gender background of war, including the lists of spoils of war, the representation of women and children as prisoners of war, the feminization of enemies in royal texts, and the participation of royal women in conflicts.
A comparative conference, organized by Heinz Heinen Fellow Christian Laes, that will enable the audience to pay attention to voices often unheard, in language traditions often unknown, and therefore underexplored. Drawing on the expertise of scholars in ‘less studied languages’ (Armenian, Coptic, Ge’ez, Georgian, Turkish, Syriac) for the period concerned.
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.
What are the challenges of accurately measuring import and export prices in West and Central Africa from the 15th century to the First World War? Our next Lecture will discuss what must be considered to address larger questions about economic exchanges in Africa and the important role of Gulf of Guinea.
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.
What was the role of the intersections of race, class/ethnicity and gender in different lawsuits initiated by women who worked in retail stores against their employers in different legal contexts throughout the nineteenth century in Rio de Janeiro?
"Global Voyages, Local Sites: The Long Shadow of Atlantic Slavery in the Anglo-American and German Pacific" workshop brings together renowned scholars working in the fields of Slavery Studies, Labor Studies, Colonialism and Museum Studies. It explores the legacies of Atlantic slavery through the British Empire’s movement of people, money, and expertise from the Caribbean to Queensland, the American movement west to the islands of Samoa, and how these processes interacted with German colonial endeavors in the Pacific. It intends to form a framework with which to expand the disciplinary boundaries of slavery studies and rethink the legacies and impacts of U.S. and Caribbean practices of slaving and processes of racialization that emerged in the context of imperial endeavors in the Pacific. In addition to historians’ approaches, we would also like to address how the topics and discourses outlined above impact contemporary attempts of decolonizing museums and collections.
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.
Throughout modern history, Black writers and activists – George Padmore, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and May Ayim – have pursued radical projects pointing out the lack of basic human rights of marginalized communities. In this talk, Tiffany N. Florvil argues that these individuals and others have drawn upon their cross-cultural experiences to highlight how the intersecting oppressions of racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism have persisted throughout the twentieth century. Traversing geographical and aesthetic boundaries, these activists and intellectuals advocated for civil, social, and political change in their respective countries and beyond, advancing a cosmopolitan ethos that allowed them to offer new forms of knowledge and instigate change.
The Roma's enslavement in Romania for over 500 years has often been overlooked in discussions about the legacies of slavery and racial discrimination. The Orthodox Church and the Ottoman Empire played significant roles in this form of enslavement and racialization. By studying these lesser-known actors and adopting a global perspective, we can connect the histories of various European enslavements and understand their ongoing effects. Unfortunately, Europe's recognition of racism and slavery tends to be limited to the Holocaust and the transatlantic slave trade, disregarding the Roma's experiences. This omission can be attributed to an Occidentalist mindset that associates Europeanness with whiteness and marginalizes non-white populations and their histories.