The course offers a critical overview of slavery and slave trade on a global level, surveying the research trends of the last decades. Historical as well as literary perspectives are applied. While slavery has been a fact of life as long as human records exist, an analytic and comparative approach to the phenomenon is relatively late. A great deal of attention has been devoted to the Trans-Atlantic trafficking in humans, and slave labour in the Americas. More recently, slave-based economies in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean World have come into the limelight. Hitherto neglected groups with a slave-like status, in places like India, China, and Korea, are now being explored. Moreover, the plight of humans in the contemporary world with a bonded and permanently subservient status has called for attention. The course aims to address the “curse of the particular” which has long haunted research on slavery and failed to address connectivities and comparisons between different regions. It also wishes to challenge the Atlantic paradigm that has tended to see slavery from a matrix of European-led employment of slave labour. Attention is put on the great methodological strides in recent decades, where new and innovative uses of the source material has yielded a wealth of information about slavery as a condition and a process, not least illuminating its gendered aspects. During the course the great structural variety of enslavement and degrees of unfree status over the world will be discussed. Economic-historical theories about the rationale of slavery, from early scholars such as Marx and Nieboer to modern ones such as James Warren and Peter Boomgaard, are surveyed. Moreover, the memories and narratives of slavery in literary texts are analyzed.
- Kursansvarig: Hans Hägerdal