Emerging from a desire in the Program in Medieval Studies to make the University of Illinois a focal point in emerging conversations about the medieval globe and the role of unfreedom within it, a conference entitled “Premodern Unfreedoms: Global Approaches to Exploitation, Enslavement, and Trafficking” was organized by three graduate students, Chloe Parrella, Heather Duncan, and Jacob Bell. It was made possible by the support of the Center for Global Studies, who not only provided funding for the event but lent the expertise of one of its own, Tim Pollack, to participate in the proceedings.
The conference was truly global in scope, bringing together an international coalition of scholars to discuss unfreedom and trafficking throughout the premodern world. It grappled with important questions of the long-term constructions of unfreedom the world over and how the aftershocks of these social and cultural constructions continue to be felt in the world today.
The conference consisted of four panels featuring a temporally and geographically diverse array of papers. These topics ranged from Late Antiquity to the nineteenth century and covered multiple regions, including Central America, the Atlantic world, Europe, Africa, and East and South Asia.
This interdisciplinary conference interrogated the state of the field for slavery, and broader practices of unfreedom and trafficking, in the global premodern world. This field has flourished in recent years, yet remains relatively understudied despite offering fertile ground to discuss the history of slavery, servitude, and exploitation. Premodern Unfreedoms sought to elucidate not only the larger historical issues of globalizing the practice of unfreedom in the premodern period but also forefront the human stories at its core.
The first session examined the oversight of as well as the resistance to captivity. The panel opened with “Frontier, Criminality, and Slavery in the Early Qing Empire” by Dr. Xiao Chen of Grinnell College. Dr. Chen discussed unfreedom in the context of the geopolitical struggles between the Qing and Russia in the Sahaliyan-Amur-Heilong Jiang frontiers, a struggle that ultimately expanded slavery. Zekun Zhang of Yale University looked further back in time with “Enslaved Captives from the Korean Peninsula and the Tang State, 600-750.” This innovative study examined the lives of enslaved Koreans and their interactions with not only the Tang state and other ethnic groups, but also with horses. The session closed with “Nocturnal Unfreedoms: Captivity and Slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World” by Adrian van der Velde of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Van der Velde focused on the oft-overlooked aspect of the role of time itself in unfreedom, with the act of capture as well as resistance to enslavers taking place during the night.
The gendered aspects of unfreedom formed the theme of the second panel. Xinyi Wei of Princeton University began the discussion with “Spectrums of Unfreedom: Marriage and Slavery Practices in the Early Mongol Empire.” Wei centered her argument on the positions of women in the 13th-century Mongol Empire, questioning the freedom-slavery binary approach that is often taken in scholarship. Dr. Emily Kalb of the University of Bonn next examined the status of “elite” slaves in “The Eunuch and the Emperor: Reading Elite Slavery in Islamicate South Asia.” Dr. Kalb explored both the writings and silences of the eunuch and historian Bakhtāwar Khān, assessing the complex navigations faced by those concurrently occupying enslaved and elite positions. Turning from text to the material, Holley Ledbetter of the University of Michigan presented “Serving in Stone: Aestheticizing Unfreedom at Khirbat al-Mafjar.” Through an examination of stone sculpture at the early Umayyad palatial complex Khirbat al-Mafjar, Ledbetter argued that the representation of the unfree female body in statues served as a visual symbol of concepts of power and supremacy in medieval Islam. Caroline Schmidt Patricio of Lehigh University finished the panel with a discussion of the politics of bodily autonomy among indigenous populations of the Americas through the gaze of Spanish imperialism. The first day of the conference concluded with a thought-provoking address by keynote speaker Dr. Don Wyatt of Middlebury College.
Day two opened with a panel on the notion of freedom and the process of manumission. Dr. Martina Saltamacchia of the University of Nebraska, Omaha began the discussion with “Marco Carelli and the Tartar Girls: Freeing Slaves in Medieval Milan.” Dr. Saltamacchia explored the unique case of Marco Carelli and enslaved Tartar girls, arguing that he purchased the women not for profit but instead intending to better their lives. The nineteenth-century freedom of Korean slaves was addressed in “Freeing Slaves in a Neo-Confucian World: The Exodus of the Enslaved in Nineteenth-Century Korea” by Dr. Jaeyoon Song of McMaster University. Dr. Song examined the conflicting views of slavery and the caste system held by Chosŏn Neo-Confucian scholars and the effect these opinions had upon the social status of formerly enslaved people. Dr. Elizabeth D. Urban of West Chester University concluded the panel with “What Does it Mean to Be Freed?: A Comparison of Enslaved and Freed Women in Early Islamic History.” While many scholars have focused on male freedmen (mawālī) and “elite” enslaved women, Dr. Urban looked at the position and material changes experienced by freedwomen (mawlayāt) through early Arabic-Islamic texts.
The conference's final session explored the intersections of unfreedom with ideas of community and belonging. Dr. Timur Pollack-Lagushenko of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign presented the first paper, “Antoni Simon, the Moor: Debate over Race, Slavery, and Freedom in Pamiers (1446).” Using a microhistorical approach, Dr. Pollack-Lagushenko presented the case of Antoni Simon, a man (variously described as a Moor, Ethiopian, and slave) who arrived in 15th-century Pamiers and requested personal freedom as granted by the town’s charter. The final paper of the conference, “Enslaved Infants, New Christians: Clerical Authority and the Raising of Abandoned Children in Late Antiquity,” was given by Brittany Joyce of the University of Michigan. Joyce analyzed the role of Christian authority in the lives of exposed and enslaved infants, particularly in light of the laws of the Theodosian code.
Each session featured a lively Q&A session and many fruitful conversations between participants. The conference proceedings are expected to be published as a special edition of Illinois’ own The Medieval Globe, the foremost journal exploring connections between communities, ideas, and individuals in the Middle Ages.
This conference was made possible not only by the generosity of the Center for Global Studies but myriad departments and units on campus that recognized the importance of such research in our interconnected world. These include the Center for Advanced Study, the Department of English, the Department of History, Women and Gender in Global Perspectives, the University Library, the Department of Sociology, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the School of Information Sciences, the Humanities Research Institute, the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the School of Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics, the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center, and the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies.
