070340 KU Free and Unfree Labour (2019S)

In the past twenty years, the foundational narratives of the modern West have been challenged in many ways. One key aspect of the making of the modern West was the rise of the conceptual pair “freedom” vs. “slavery”. French revolutionists and philosophers of the Enlightenment proclaimed “freedom” to be one of the most important universal values of mankind, while using “slavery” as an episteme to condemn all sorts of unjust power relations. Up to today, “slavery” is often associated with pre-modern societies, authoritarian rule, and economic backwardness, while “freedom” is linked to modern democracies and capitalist societies. And for a long period of time, “slavery” used to bring to mind primarily the successful abolition of the transatlantic form of slavery by the modern West, with its conceptual basis in Roman law and the Christian tradition, which was regarded as the “theoretical subject” (D. Chakrabarty), the master narrative of all histories of slavery. As a consequence, the transatlantic slave trade as well as the Greco-Roman idea of slavery as an institution have traditionally been both conceptually and quantitatively predominant within research on asymmetrical dependencies.

In this master class, we will challenge this master model of all histories of slavery by practicing and using working techniques of global history. We will study the diversity of slaveries and slaving practices in a trans-epochal and trans-regional perspective, and discuss methodological approaches (comparative history, entangled histories, histoire croisee) to reconceptualise the history of slavery across history. The participants of this master class will participate in an evening lecture (2 April, 6-8pm), and a one-day workshop (4 April, 10-12am, 2-6pm) with Cláudio Costa Pinheiro and other slavery historians.

The class will be held in English.