Penal Slavery in Early Modern Scandinavia

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-368
Author(s):  
Johan Heinsen

Abstract In Scandinavia, a penal institution known as “slavery” existed from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Penal slaves laboured in the creation and maintenance of military infrastructure. They were chained and often stigmatized, sometimes by branding. Their punishment was likened and, on a few occasions, linked to Atlantic slavery. Still, in reality, it was a wholly distinct form of enslavement that produced different experiences of coercion than those of the Atlantic. Such forms of penal slavery sit uneasily in historiographies of punishment but also offers a challenge for the dominant models of global labour history and its attempts to create comparative frameworks for coerced labour. This article argues for the need for contextual approaches to what such coercion meant to both coercers and coerced. Therefore, it offers an analysis of the meaning of early modern penal slavery based on an exceptional set of sources from 1723. In these sources, the status of the punished was negotiated and practiced by guards and slaves themselves. Court appearances by slaves were usually brief—typically revolving around escapes as authorities attempted to identify security breaches. The documents explored in this article are different: They present multiple voices speaking at length, negotiating their very status as voices. From that negotiation and its failures emerge a set of practiced meanings of penal “slavery” in eighteenth-century Copenhagen tied to competing yet intertwined notions of dishonour.

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Wolloch

This article examines the consideration of animals by various eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers, with special attention given to the physician and philosopher John Gregory, who utilized the comparison of human beings with animals as a starting point for a discussion about human moral and social improvement. In so doing Gregory, like most of his contemporary fellow Scottish philosophers, exemplified the basic anthropocentrism of the common early modern consideration of animals.


2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-116
Author(s):  
Priyanka Khanna

This article maps the journey of the intimate companionship between a concubine and a Rajput ruler—Gulabrai and Vijay Singh, respectively—in the late eighteenth-century kingdom of Marwar in western Rajasthan. Based on hitherto unexamined local evidence, the article explores the ways in which a bond of friendship was constituted and unfolded in the everyday spheres of interaction between the concubine and the ruler. By turning attention to their evident emotions, such as of grief, trust, loyalty and love for each other, and shared partnership in spheres of religion and administration, this article suggests that friendship co-existed and overlapped with other forms of attachments in the overtly hierarchical relationship between the concubinage partners in focus. To emphasize the distinct form of this intimate companionship, the article also takes note of other forms of friendships that were centred on the agency of the concubine in the Rajput polity, and, in this way this article advances on the limited historical knowledge on concubinage in Rajput households and opens the possibility of including cross-sex associations in the discourse on friendship in early modern South Asia.


Grotiana ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Weindl

AbstractIn this article Mare liberum is placed within the context of seventeenth-century European politics. It focuses on the development of conventional relations between European States regarding their interests outside of Europe and their importance concerning the status of Asian and African 'actors'. It turns out that in spite of Mare liberum's high-sounding proclamation of equality of non-European sovereigns with European States, Grotius's position as well as Dutch policy was inspired by self-interest and was essentially opportunistic. The Dutch Republic – as well as other European States – used the 'liberal' principles of Freedom of trade and the Universality of the Law of Nations to attack the Portuguese/Spanish claims of monopoly. However, as the Dutch Republic, Great Britain and France developed their own 'Spheres of Interest' in Asia, Africa and the Americas, they effectively excluded would-be competitors. Indeed, in the eighteenth century the 'pacte colonial' constituted a distinctive characteristic of the conventional and customary 'European Law of Nations'. As non-European political actors in the eighteenth century relatively lost military and political power, the European States finally relegated them to an inferior position, beyond the charmed circle of full 'subjects of Public International Law'. The article also is a contribution to the ongoing discussion about the relation between European imperialism and the development of the doctrine of European International Law.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Lina Minou

This article is concerned with the physicality of envy primarily in early –modern, but also in eighteenth-century health contexts. The discussion brings together descriptions of the effects of envy on the body of the envier, mainly from works of physiology and health preservation, but also from literary and spiritual writings. These depictions of envy are studied beyond their symbolism and with a view to establish whether they are meaningful according to the medical theories of the time in which they occur. The discussion begins by acknowledging the status of envy as a ‘disease’ and looks to the specific ways in which the discourse of envy conveys this sense. I find that in the early modern discourse envy is always pathological, that is, it is experienced as disease and signifies disease in general and several diseases in particular. Moreover, envy is uniquely placed to convey pathology on account of its being connected to inherently pathogenic elements of the humoural theory. Specifically, envy is physiologically connected to melancholy, and the way it is presented comes close to attributes assigned to black bile. In addition, envy realizes pathology, the occurrence of disease in the body, by impairing the vital process of digestion and thus depriving the person from proper nourishment and sustenance. The analysis further considers how this impairment of the body fits with the physiological manifestation of envy as ‘corrosion’ and ‘consumption’. Finding commonalities with other maladies mediated by these physiological signs the article concludes by considering the function of pathology in the conception of early modern envy.


Author(s):  
Pedro Damián Cano Borrego

<p>A<strong> </strong>finales del siglo XVIII la Monarquía adolecía de graves problemas económicos, derivados del estado permanente de guerra en el que se hallaba sumido el Reino, que impedía la arribada de remesas de metales preciosos y suponía unos ingentes gastos, lo que llevó a que a finales del reinado de Carlos III se creasen los Vales Reales, a modo de deuda pública. Por sus características, fueron desde el principio títulos de renta, amortizables en plazos más o menos grandes, dependiendo de las cláusulas que regían sus emisiones en un principio y más tarde de la situación del Tesoro Público.</p><p>In the late eighteenth century the Spanish monarchy had serious economic problems arising from the permanent state of war in which they had sunk the Kingdom, which prevented the arrival of remittances of precious metals and assumed a heavy expenses, which led to the end the reign of Carlos III the creation of the <em>Vales Reales</em>, a kind of public debt. By their nature, they were from the beginning income securities, redeemable in larger or smaller periods, depending on the terms governing their emissions at first and later on the status of Treasury</p>


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Lina Minou

This article is concerned with the physicality of envy in early modern- and eighteenth-century health contexts. The discussion brings together descriptions of the effects of envy on the body of the envier, mainly from works of physiology and health preservation, but also from literary and spiritual writings. These depictions of envy are studied beyond their symbolism and with a view to establish whether they are meaningful according to the medical paradigms of the time in which they occur. The discussion begins by acknowledging the status of envy as a ‘disease’ and looks to the specific ways in which the discourse of envy conveys this sense. I find that in the early modern discourse envy is always pathological, that is, it is experienced as disease and signifies disease in general and several diseases in particular. Moreover, envy is uniquely placed to convey pathology on account of its being connected to inherently pathogenic elements of the humoural theory. Specifically, envy is physiologically connected to melancholy, and the way it is presented comes close to attributes assigned to black bile. In addition, envy realizes pathology, the occurrence of disease in the body, by impairing the vital process of digestion and thus depriving the person from proper nourishment and sustenance. This article concludes by looking at envy within an eighteenth-century context. It finds that by the end of the century envy undergoes a significant shift away from its status as disease and considers the reasons for this change.


2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (6) ◽  
pp. 1888-1931 ◽  
Author(s):  
RISHAD CHOUDHURY

AbstractThis article charts several historical paths, hitherto underexplored, through the Hindi or ‘Indian’ Sufi lodges of the Ottoman empire. Focusing on the ‘long eighteenth century (circa1695–1808)’, it tracks their remarkable ascendance as an institutional network for mobile and migrant Indian Sufi pilgrims. From Istanbul to the provinces, the article demonstrates how Naqshbandis and Qadiris on the Hajj circuit drew on local channels of social communications, legal petitioning strategies, and state and inter-state linkages to forge unique identities as ‘trans-imperial subjects’ in an age of decentralization in the Ottoman world. I argue that central to their social success was the creation of new corporate regimes of itinerant piety. But first, I place the little-known lodges at the heart of a specific shift in early modern attitudes to identity, as the story behind ‘Hindi’ beckons wider inquiry into emergent differences among Sufi pilgrims in the Ottoman empire.


2007 ◽  
pp. 5-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Searle

The author claims that an institution is any collectively accepted system of rules (procedures, practices) that enable us to create institutional facts. These rules typically have the form of X counts as Y in C, where an object, person, or state of affairs X is assigned a special status, the Y status, such that the new status enables the person or object to perform functions that it could not perform solely in virtue of its physical structure, but requires as a necessary condition the assignment of the status. The creation of an institutional fact is, thus, the collective assignment of a status function. The typical point of the creation of institutional facts by assigning status functions is to create deontic powers. So typically when we assign a status function Y to some object or person X we have created a situation in which we accept that a person S who stands in the appropriate relation to X is such that (S has power (S does A)). The whole analysis then gives us a systematic set of relationships between collective intentionality, the assignment of function, the assignment of status functions, constitutive rules, institutional facts, and deontic powers.


2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 72-98
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Chrissidis

Abstract The article first surveys Greek interpretations of the creation of the Russian Holy Synod by Peter the Great. It provides a critical assessment of the historiographical paradigm offered by N.F. Kapterev for the analysis of Greek-Russian relations in the early modern period. Finally, it proposes that scholars should focus on a Greek history of Greek-Russian relations as a complement and possibly corrective to the Kapterev paradigm.


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