Bridging Global Lenses on Servitude & Unfree Labor:
From Ancient Times to the Present
Servitude in its many forms has been foundational to the development of societies, ancient and modern, and to the formation, consolidation, wealth, and decline of empires, including the Roman, British, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Ottoman empires. There have been many forms of servitude that have shaped our world, from ancient times to the present, including serfdom, agrarian servitude, chattel slavery (or African slavery), indentured servitude, debt peonage (or debt bondage), trafficked labor, tributary labor, and state coordinated or unfree carceral labor. Servitude and unfree labor have served as catalysts for widespread transformations and mobilities; it has propelled resistance, revolts, and revolutions and birthed powerful freedom and abolition processes. Servitude and unfree labor bridge our global past, present, and future.
In the ancient world, Aristotle embraced the idea of “natural slavery,” a position that maintained that some individuals were naturally inferior to others in their intellectual capacities and hence were legitimate candidates to serve their betters. The Christian Church justified slavery on the grounds of “original sin” and endorsed forms of unfree labor as suitable for what it characterized as non-believers, infidels, or heretics. Others, particularly with the European colonization of Africa and the Americas, sanctioned the coerced labor of the Indigenous peoples because of their alleged cultural and “racial” inferiority. Tom Brass writes that in chattel slavery “the person of the slave is the subject of an economic transaction (while) in the case of a bonded, convict, contract or indentured laborer it is the latter’s labor power which is bought, sold and controlled without the consent of the owner.”1 Between 1838 and 1917, for example, western European governments allowed their planters in the Caribbean to import an estimated 500,000 Indian indentured servants from India to work on their plantations. The arrival of these indentured laborers was in direct response to a so-called labor shortage emanating from slave emancipation. The numbers of people today who continue to labor as servants, slaves, or held under some form of bondage or condition of unfreedom across the globe remain largely obscured. Servitude and unfreedom continue to anchor present systems of oppression that enable these to thrive in our present.
This program supports new lenses on the global nature of servitude and unfree labor in ways that help bridge narratives, fields, geographies, and timelines on the processes propelled by these labels or conditions. The goal is to encourage a global discourse that helps better define the various meanings and forms of servitude that have shaped the human condition across time and space. This proposal seeks to explore why and in what ways these are (and have been) processes connected through the ages. We argue that these histories are intertwined, but their research, study, and teaching (and presentation) have long been disconnected. These topics merit not only further study but also more intentional discussions to help bridge where they interconnect.