The study of enslavement has become urgent over the last two decades. Social scientists, legal scholars, human rights activists, and historians, who study forms of enslavement in both modern and historical societies, have sought - and often achieved - common conceptual grounds, thus forging a new perspective that comprises historical and contemporary forms of slavery. What could certainly be termed a turn in the study of slavery has also intensified awareness of enslavement as a global phenomenon, inviting a comparative, trans-regional approach across time-space divides. Though different aspects of enslavement in different societies and eras are discussed, each of the volume's three parts contributes to, and has benefitted from, a global perspective of enslavement. The chapters in Part One propose to structure the global examination of the theoretical, ideological, and methodological aspects of the "global," "local," and "glocal." Part Two, "Regional and Trans-regional Perspectives of the Global," presents, through analyses of historical case studies, the link between connectivity and mobility as a fundamental aspect of the globalization of enslavement. Finally, Part Three deals with personal points of view regarding the global, local, and glocal. Grosso modo, the contributors do not only present their case studies, but attempt to demonstrate what insights and added-value explanations they gain from positioning their work vis-à-vis a broader "big picture."

This open access handbook takes a comparative and global approach to analyse the practice of slavery throughout history. To understand slavery - why it developed, and how it functioned in various societies – is to understand an important and widespread practice in world civilisations. With research traditionally being dominated by the Atlantic world, this collection aims to illuminate slavery that existed in not only the Americas but also ancient, medieval, North and sub-Saharan African, Near Eastern, and Asian societies. Connecting civilisations through migration, warfare, trade routes and economic expansion, the practice of slavery integrated countries and regions through power-based relationships, whilst simultaneously dividing societies by class, race, ethnicity and cultural group. Uncovering slavery as a globalising phenomenon, the authors highlight the slave-trading routes that crisscrossed Africa, helped integrate the Mediterranean world, connected Indian Ocean societies and fused the Atlantic world. Split into five parts, the handbook portrays the evolution of slavery from antiquity to the contemporary era and encourages readers to realise similarities and differences between various manifestations of slavery throughout history. Providing a truly global coverage of slavery, and including thematic injections within each chronological part, this handbook is a comprehensive and transnational resource for all researchers interested in slavery, the history of labour, and anthropology.

Given that strong asymmetrical dependencies have shaped human societies throughout history, this kind of social relation has also left its traces in many types of texts. Using written and oral narratives in attempts to reconstruct the history of asymmetrical dependency comes along with various methodological challenges, as the 15 articles in this interdisciplinary volume illustrate. They focus on a wide range of different (factual and fictional) text types, including inscriptions from Egyptian tombs, biblical stories, novels from antiquity, the Middle High German Rolandslied, Ottoman court records, captivity narratives, travelogues, the American gift book The Liberty Bell, and oral narratives by Caribbean Hindu women. Most of the texts discussed in this volume have so far received comparatively little attention in slavery and dependency studies. The volume thus also seeks to broaden the archive of texts that are deemed relevant in research on the histories of asymmetrical dependencies, bringing together perspectives from disciplines such as Egyptology, theology, literary studies, history, and anthropology

This book explores anthropological and global art collections as a catalyst, a medium, and an expression of relations. Relations—between and among objects and media, people, and material and immaterial contexts—define, configure, and potentially transform collection-related social and professional networks, discourses and practices, and increasingly museums and other collecting institutions themselves. The contributors argue that a focus on the—often contested—making and remaking of relations provides a unique conceptual entrypoint for understanding collections’—and ‘their’ objects’ and media’s—complex histories, contemporary webs of interactions, and potential futures. The chapters examine the local, translocal, and transregional relations of collections with regard to their affective, aesthetic, performative, and socio-moral qualities and situate them in the larger geopolitical constellations of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial settings. Together they investigate ongoing shifts in the relations of collections and collecting institutions by identifying alternative approaches to conceive of, and deal with, anthropological and global art collections, objects, and media in the future. The book is of interest to scholars from anthropology, global art history, museum studies, and heritage studies.

A history of the postal system that once connected the Ottoman Empire Before the advent of steamships or the telegraph, the premier technology for long-distance communication was the horse-run relay system. Every empire had one--including the Ottoman Empire. In The Sublime Post, Choon Hwee Koh examines how the vast Ottoman postal system worked across three centuries by tracking the roles of eight small-scale actors--the Courier, the Tatar, Imperial Decrees, the Bookkeeper, the Postmaster, the Villager, Money, and the Horse. There are stories of price-gouging postmasters; of murdered couriers and their bereaved widows; of moonlighting officials transporting merchandise; of neighboring villages engaged in long-running feuds; of bookkeepers calculating the annual costs of horseshoes, halters, and hay; of Tatar couriers and British travelers sharing drunken nights at post stations; of swimming with horses across rivers; and of hiding from marauding bandits in the desert. By weaving together chronicles, sharia court records, fiscal registers, collective petitions, appointment contracts, and imperial decrees from the Ottoman archive, this study of a large-scale communications infrastructure reveals the interdependence of an empire and its diverse imperial subjects. Koh traces this evolving interdependence between 1500 and 1840 to tell the history of the Ottoman Empire and its changing social order.

The study of enslavement has become urgent over the last two decades. Social scientists, legal scholars, human rights activists, and historians, who study forms of enslavement in both modern and historical societies, have sought – and often achieved – common conceptual grounds, thus forging a new perspective that comprises historical and contemporary forms of slavery. What could certainly be termed a turn in the study of slavery has also intensified awareness of enslavement as a global phenomenon, inviting a comparative, trans-regional approach across time-space divides. Though different aspects of enslavement in different societies and eras are discussed, each of the volume’s three parts contributes to, and has benefitted from, a global perspective of enslavement. The chapters in Part One propose to structure the global examination of the theoretical, ideological, and methodological aspects of the "global," "local," and "glocal." Part Two, "Regional and Trans-regional Perspectives of the Global," presents, through analyses of historical case studies, the link between connectivity and mobility as a fundamental aspect of the globalization of enslavement. Finally, Part Three deals with personal points of view regarding the global, local, and glocal. Grosso modo, the contributors do not only present their case studies, but attempt to demonstrate what insights and added-value explanations they gain from positioning their work vis-à-vis a broader "big picture."

Slavery in the Black Sea Region, c.900–1900 explores the Black Sea region as an encounter zone of cultures, legal regimes, religions, and enslavement practices. The topics discussed in the chapters include Byzantine slavery, late medieval slave trade patterns, slavery in Christian societies, Tatar and cossack raids, the position of Circassians in the slave trade, and comparisons with the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. This volume aims to stimulate a broader discussion on the patterns of unfreedom in the Black Sea area and to draw attention to the importance of this region in the broader debates on global slavery. Contributors are: Viorel Achim, Michel Balard, Hannah Barker, Andrzej Gliwa, Colin Heywood, Sergei Pavlovich Karpov, Mikhail Kizilov, Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, Maryna Kravets, Natalia Królikowska-Jedlińska, Sandra Origone, Victor Ostapchuk, Daphne Penna, Felicia Roșu, and Ehud R. Toledano.