Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking in the Pre-Modern Era

Slavery was a continuous presence in the Pre-Modern Era, roughly 500 ce to 1450 ce, when changes in geopolitical forces, demography, and cultural background contributed to the nature of enslavement. Coercion as a way of life differed across sociocultural and economic realities, ranging from chattel slaves and war captives, to sexual and domestic slaves. This volume destabilizes the deep-seated idea that during the so-called “Middle Ages,” social and cultural relationships remained stagnant. Drawing upon a wealth of textual, visual, and archaeological sources, the authors explore slavery and human trafficking through gender, race and identity, political thought, cultural norms, and religious practice, with a focus on the emergence of systems of bondage, serfdom, dependency, and subordination in distinct domestic, regional, or national settings.

Contributors explore a variety of time periods and polities in detail, from Bantu-speaking Africa, via Europe and the Middle East, to China, to demonstrate a changing and interconnected world. This includes the early pre-Modern era, where the decline of expansive empires, a shift toward smaller kingdoms, and changes in regional markets, land use, and tenure created new dependencies that reshaped concepts of ownership, authority, and dependency. The later Pre-Modern Era was witness to the intensification of coercive identities from birth and inheritance. Local slave systems, discrete serf economies, and long-distance trade, coupled with limited trans-regional slave markets, are key to understanding the great variation in labor coercion modalities.

A Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available as hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a tangible reference for their shelves or as part of a fully-searchable digital library. The digital product is available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access via www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com . Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available in print or digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com.