2025-2026 Schedule

This panel will contextualize slavery and unfreedom before the age of explorations highlighting various early geographies and communities from the classical world to the Americas. It will cover key aspects that shaped servitude and link to how these materialized through class, gender, culture and law lenses.

“How is the water for running away? The gender of fugitive slaves in the classical world” 

Abstract: Modern studies suggest that enslaved men were more likely to try to escape slavery than women. Evidence from papyri and “slave collars” confirms that this was also the case in the classical world.  This talk will examine the reasons for this disparity in the ancient world and will focus on the gendering of space and work.    

"Tlacoyotl: Pre-hispanic slavery among the Mexica"

Presentation Abstract: This presentation explores the institution of tlacoyotl, a form of slavery practiced among the Mexica (Aztecs) and other Nahua-speaking peoples prior to the Spanish conquest. Far from resembling the racialized and hereditary slavery systems imposed during the colonial period, tlacoyotl was a socially and legally regulated status that could result from debt, punishment, warfare, or poverty-induced voluntary servitude. Drawing on primary sources such as the colonial codices and Indigenous annals, the work examines the multiple pathways into and out of slavery, the various forms of tlacoyotl practiced by the Mexica, the rights and obligations of enslaved individuals and theirs owners, and the broader sociopolitical functions of the tlacotin (slaves) within Mexica society. The analysis further highlights the nuanced role of slavery in daily life, ritual practice, tribute systems, and economic exchange. By situating tlacoyotl within its cultural and legal context, the presentation aims to challenge modern assumptions about slavery and to contribute to a more complex understanding of pre-Hispanic history and Mesoamerican social structures.

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Shaped by successive military and diplomatic conflicts, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed large-scale forced displacement across the Ottoman Middle East. With it came a protracted crisis that unsettled established legal and ethical frameworks, producing a volatile environment in which the slave trade persisted and adapted, even as formal efforts to suppress it were put in place. This paper focuses on a key moment in this prolonged crisis—the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78 and its aftermath—to examine the practices of Ottoman slaveholders and traders, many of them women, operating at various scales, from elite mistresses to small intermediaries. In doing so, it sheds light on how local structures and practices—social, economic, and legal—collided with the emerging global moral order that reframed legal distinctions of race, ethnicity, religion, and state-belonging, with long-term implications for the decades that followed.

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Writing in his influential Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, in identifying what he considered foremost to be the three foundational constituent elements of any slave society, the prominent classicist, Moses Finley posited that they were “the slave’s property status, the totality of the power over him, and his kinlessness.” The chief paradigm for Finley’s postulations was of course slave society as it had become articulated in the ancient civilizations of Greece and especially Rome. However, much of the potency of Finley’s thesis has rested in its applicability to the later iterations of slave society as it transpired in the West. Nevertheless, let it be noted that, in East Asia of medieval times, we witness noteworthy conformance to but also deviation from Finley’s theorization. Consequently, the slave societies of medieval East Asia serve well in illustrating how, between cultures and across time, the criteria for what constitutes a true slave society can oftentimes vary and deviate even quite profoundly from the assumed Western norm.

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"How Persian Slaves Freed Themselves in Nineteenth-Century Central Asia: Two Case-Studies of Emancipation"

Presentation Abstract: When the Russian Empire conquered Central Asia in the 1860s-1870s, the conquest was hailed across Europe as the event that ended Central Asia’s vast slave trade and liberated its slaves– a claim that has rarely, if ever, been challenged by historians. In this presentation, Jeff Eden challenges that claim through two dramatic case studies. The first case study shows how, on the eve of Russia’s conquest of the capital city of Khiva in 1873, the city’s slaves fomented the largest slave uprising in the region’s history, which prompted the abolition of slavery throughout Central Asia. The second case study reveals what happened to former slaves who escaped their Central Asian owners, fled to the Russian border, and sought protection from the purportedly “abolitionist” Tsar--only to find a surprising fate awaiting them.

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Serfdom is often viewed as a system of unfree labor where nobles and the state colluded to exploit the peasantry. On this view, the coercive powers of the state, especially state enforcement of mobility restrictions, are what made the system so oppressive. In this talk, the example of Russia is used to show that, in contrast to the conventional portrayal, serfdom existed where central states were weak. Serfdom was a concession to nobles by rulers, and serfdom waned as rulers grew stronger and centralized states emerged. Comparing the Russian case to western and central Europe (especially Prussia), we observe the importance of property rights and centrally controlled mechanisms for enforcement (such as royal courts) to state formation and, consequently, to emancipation and long-term economic and political development. The absence of these institutions in Russia – and the lack of “state capacity” – meant that emancipation was a less transformative event in that country than in other parts of Europe.