Bøger udgivet af EB-Verlag

English settler colonies introduced a new market structure to the Native peoples of the Chesapeake watershed. Alongside trade in goods, traders and merchants exchanged peoples for labor. The Eastern Shore of the Virginia colony provides an interesting case study that provides a clear picture of the importance of Native laborers alongside African and English laborers in the early plantation economy. Power dynamics in colonial Virginia were characterized by social hierarchies, economic interests, and the exercise of authority by influential individuals. By examining cases of illegal indenture and enslavement of Native peoples by Colonel Edmund Scarburgh in the 17th century, one can see that Scarburgh emerges as an unstoppable vigilante both at the time and in historical memory, because of his accumulation of wealth and power through the Indigenous slave trade as well as his transatlantic trade interests. Physically, and in many ways legally, isolated from the rest of the Virginia colony, the case study presented herein serves as a window into the power machinations and ambitions of one man and his desire to build his plantation empire unchecked by any conventions or rules of law.

Quarries are an interdisciplinary research topic for scholars who are interested in technical organization, economy, work processes and supply chains. In antiquity, the quarrying and trade of stone were highly dependent on persons from a variety of legal status groups and their cooperation in networks and institutions. Research shows that during the high Roman Empire, some quarries both belonged to the Roman emperor and were operated by an administrative structure that was highly dependent on him. Although the administrations were organized in a strict hierarchy, they depended much more on the emperor and the officials he employed than on the legal statuses of individuals. Slaves and freedmen gained importance due to their specialization in business. Characteristic is the cooperation of these actors within different fields of work in the economy, but in many cases it cannot be determined in detail merely from the sources, and requires research models. By using the chaîne opératoire and analyzing the quarry at Simitthus as an example, the paper shows to what extent this methodology is suitable for identifying dependency relationships between individuals. In addition, interagency and spatial relations can serve as indicators of dependencies among the actors, and network analysis offers insights into administrations in imperial quarries.

The history of captivity in the early modern Mediterranean has been studied exclusively through European and Ottoman/Turkish sources. But from Aghadir to Alexandretta, the language of piety, travel, religious disputation, and chronicle was Arabic (sometimes written as Garshuni). An extensive archive has survived in Arabic describing the experiences of Muslims, Eastern Christians, and Jews in European captivity. After all, from the middle of the seventeenth century on, British and French fleets, with their advanced naval capabilities, seized large numbers of captives from the 'other shore' (to cite Braudel) - captives who have been ignored in scholarship but survive in numerous sculptures from Spain and Germany to Malta and Hungary. This study continues the research into the Arabic archive by introducing further accounts about captivity by European pirates and privateers, showing how the Mediterranean became the scene of Christian masters and Arabic-speaking slaves. Not surprising, by the nineteenth century, a Moroccan traveler prayed that the Mediterranean become a barrier/hajiz against European depredations.

Castro Marim, in SE Portugal, was a site of internal exile for several thousand minor sinners and convicts from the 1400s until the 1830s. The punishment was revived by the Estado Novo dictatorship a century later. During early modern times, the guilty could flee to several border towns for sanctuary. The state's courts and later courts of the Inquisition directed minor offenders to this town, typically for two to three years. These newcomers were forced to either enter the local work force or flee. Here we see a detailed example of social control and coordination between the early modern Church and state. Crime, sin, punishment, redemption, sanctuary, the Enlightenment, monopolies, and smuggling interact with this system of forced labor. Sanctuary, internal exile, and town of free people created a unique legal and social space. This labor force was long-lasting, flexible, and useful. Tax evasion and smuggling forced Lisbon to create neighboring Vila Real de Santo António, with tighter fiscal control and free labor which would eventually supersede this forced labor system in Castro Marim. Internal exile was a semi-independent judicial component linked to manpower needs overseas, ending as those demands increased.

Hichem Djaït (1935-2021) is a key name that stands out among the contemporaneous Arab historians and intellectuals. The Tunisian historian advocated for the necessity of subjecting especially the early period of Islamic history to a process of rigorous scientific re-examination and published several studies of the foundational period of Islamic history through which he sought to offer a critical and unsanctimonious reading of the early period of Islamic history.His intellectual endeavour begins at the Sorbonne in Paris with an investigation of the emergence of the city of Kufa during the first century after the Hijra. He also broached a topic considered taboo, namely the Islamic civil strife (al-fitna). His three-volume work Fi s-sira an-nabawiyya is the outcome of a scholarly endeavour that lasted for more than a decade, in which he took on the task of excising from the biography of the Prophet Muhammad all the myths and falsehoods that it had accumulated over the years, thus freeing it of the prevailing notions which had gradually de­veloped in people's minds into certain facts that could be neither challenged nor questioned. Further, Djaït's work on early Islamic history did not only deal with the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East. He also wrote on the beginnings of Islam in the region now referred to as the Maghreb.The present volume is a collection of readings and critical reviews of Djaït's various works on early Islamic history, both regarding their content and the methodologies which underpin them.

The present-day patterns of coffee production and consumption are rooted in the legacies of colonialism and slavery, but surprisingly the global history of the relationships between this commodity and slavery and other forms of asymmetrical dependencies has not been written yet. In this short monograph, Rafael de Bivar Marquese presents a proposal on how to do so. In its first part, it argues that historically specific forms of asymmetrically dependent labor that were mobilized for coffee production from the mid-sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century can be better understood from how they were situated in three different, global coffee economies that overlapped in this longue durée. The monograph presents an overview of each, highlighting their main characteristics and in particular the relationships between different labor regimes within each one of them. In its second part, it discusses the three main theoretical and methodological axes that guide the proposal.