Early Modern Discourses of Slavery

My project explores discourses of slavery in early modern European print culture. It investigates how early modern audiences conceived of serfdom in Central Europe, slavery in North and Sub-Sahara Africa, as well as racialized slavery in the Americas and South-East Asia. Using the periodical press, pamphlet literature, travelogues and juridical texts, it will explore the print culture that both reflected and shaped perceptions of enslavement in Europe in a period in which new systems of colonial slavery emerged. The proliferation of (popular) print in Europe facilitated the spread of ideas about slavery and broader audiences could become acquainted with slavery in different forms. In sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, captivity narratives of North-African slavery became increasingly popular, while the newly established genre of the newspaper brought colonial worlds to European readers. Clear differences in reactions to North African and transatlantic slavery in the periodical press indicate that contemporaries did distinguish between forms of enslavement, and not all were considered equally acceptable. This project aims to embed the emergence and development of racialized slavery in a broader system of thought about slavery and forced labour that existed in early modern Europe.