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. 

About Peter Hunt: 
Peter Hunt (M.A. CU Boulder 1988, Ph.D. Stanford 1994), a classical Greek historian, studies warfare and society, slavery, historiography and oratory. His first book, Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians (Cambridge 1998), discerns a conflict between the extent of slave and Helot participation in Greek warfare and the representation of their role in contemporary historians. His second book War, Peace, and Alliance in Demosthenes' Athens (Cambridge 2010), uses the evidence of deliberative oratory as evidence for Athenian thinking and feelings about foreign relations. His third book, a survey on Ancient Greek and Roman Slavery, came out from Wiley Blackwell in 2018.  In addition to various articles and reviews, he has contributed chapters to The Oxford Handbook of Demosthenes, The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides, The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare, The Cambridge World History of Slavery, and The Cambridge History of the World.  Among other current projects, he is beginning work on a commentary on Plutarch’s Phocion.

"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.

About Gabriel Kruell: 
Gabriel Kenrick Kruell is a full-time Associate Researcher (Investigador Asociado C) at the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). In 2015 he earned his Ph.D. in Mesoamerican Studies from the same Mexican university. His research focuses on the historiography and philology of Nahua texts, particularly the Crónica Mexicayotl and the elusive Crónica X. Dr. Kruell has contributed to the understanding of colonial-era Indigenous narratives. Notably, his co-authored article with Sylvie Peperstraete, "Determining the Authorship of the Crónica Mexicayotl: Two Hypotheses," published in The Americas (2014), offers critical insights into the authorship debates surrounding this pivotal text.​ In Mexico his scholarly excellence has been recognized with several honors, including the Alfonso Caso Medal from UNAM (2011), an honorable mention for the Francisco Javier Clavijero Prize for best doctoral thesis (2016), and the Best Review in Cultural History Award from the Comité Mexicano de Ciencias Históricas (2020).

"Women Healers of Tenochtitlan: Mexica Rites and Female Warriors"

Presentation Abstract: 
Medicine women among the Mexica publicly pursued medical knowledge, held offices of liturgical and spiritual authority, and championed women’s ways of knowing in the arena of civic ritual. However, their prospects as women thinkers were obstructed by the paradigm of masculine warriorhood that dominated the Mexica culture during its Postclassic period. Women healers were not only physicians, but also the national defenders of a feminine knowledge base that warriors attempted to appropriate and manipulate toward their own ends. This presentation explores how women articulated their own ways of knowing through a repertoire of state and household-level rituals that transmitted gender-specific knowledge systems and protected feminine medical specialization from encroachment by the warrior paradigm.

About Paloma Martinez-Cruz:
Paloma Martinez-Cruz is an interdisciplinary scholar in the field of Latinx cultural studies. Her work interrogates the consequences of colonization and patriarchal orderings across diverse expressive cultures of the Americas. A professor of Latinx Cultural Studies in the Departments of Spanish and Portuguese and English at The Ohio State University, she is the author of Trust the Circle: The Resistance and Resilience of Rubén Castilla Herrera (2023), Food Fight! Millennial Mestizaje Meets the Culinary Marketplace (2019), Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica: From East L.A. to Anahuac (2011) and the editor of A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Saúl García-López (2021). 

An interdisciplinary scholar-artist, Martinez-Cruz publishes poetry and fiction, and directs and performs with the Taco Reparations Brigade performance project that has recently been featured at the Columbus Museum of Art, Thompson Library Gallery, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Latinx Dance Educator’s Alliance Convivencia and elsewhere. She coordinates Onda Latinx Ohio, a BIPOC arts initiative showcasing Latinx community arts practices that prioritize radical inclusion through primera voz opportunities for artists and performers at all levels and ages.

Abstract: 
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.

About Ceyda Karamursel: 
Ceyda Karamursel is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of History at SOAS, University of London. Her research focuses on slavery and the contested meanings of freedom in the late Ottoman Empire. Her work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and has appeared in the Journal of Women’s History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Gender & History, among others. She is currently completing a book titled The Sack and the Bowstring: A Global History of Ottoman Slavery and Freedom.

Abstract:
In the summer of 874 CE, Vikings burned the halls of Asbjorn Skerryblaze, Jarl of the “Southern Isles,” the Hebrides. The raiders killed the jarl and his companions, but only after they enslaved the women and children of the jarl’s household. One of those enslaved was Asbjorn’s young daughter, Arneid. In a single night, Arneid lost her family, her home, and her nobility, freedom, and honor, but this was not the end of her story. Arneid survived the brutality, isolation, and despair of enslavement to find love, wealth, and honor regained; she would become a central figure in one of the most important families in eastern Iceland during the Viking Age. Yet, we know almost nothing about her. Arneid appears briefly in only two sources, Landnámabók and Droplaugarson Saga, and to date, she has received little scholarly attention. This lecture explores Arneid’s world and considers themes of honor and shame, and of nobility and slavery. It follows her incredible journey across the stormy North Sea from the Southern Isles to the interior of Scandinavia, and then to Reydarfjord in eastern Iceland. Hers is a story of a tragic fall and a dramatic rise.

This panel explores how enslaved individuals in nineteenth-century Central Asia and early modern Korea resisted their bondage and reshaped the trajectories of slavery in their regions.

"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.

About Jeff Eden:
Jeff Eden is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. His books include Slavery and Empire in Central Asia (Cambridge) and God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War (Oxford). 

"Slave Lives Matter: Runaway Slaves, Slave Hunting, and the State in Early Modern Korea"

Abstract:
Slavery was a dominant socioeconomic system in Korea for several centuries until it began to spontaneously decline in the eighteenth century. This paper seeks to understand the two unique features of Korean slavery—its longevity and spontaneous decline—by analyzing the phenomenon of runaway slaves, which has a history as long as slavery itself. Early modern Korean slaves did not openly rebel against their owners or the state, which allowed slavery to persist and thrive. However, they consistently ran away from slavery. Some were successful, some were recaptured and returned to slavery, and some were killed while fleeing. Some scholars argue that the widespread fleeing caused the eventual decline of slavery. Others see it as passive resistance. This paper examines a few cases of runaway slaves, slave hunting, and the state’s efforts to curb the illegal use of violence resulting in the deaths of captured slaves. These cases illustrate how the recognition of slaves’ humanity inadvertently enabled the longevity of slavery while unleashing a slow process of the institution’s decline.

About Sun Joo Kim:
Sun Joo Kim is the Harvard-Yenching Professor of Korean History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She received a bachelor’s degree in history from Yonsei University in Korea and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington.

Her research focuses on the socio-cultural history of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). Both her college experience in 1980s Korea and a broad interest in the world history of revolutions and rebellions influenced her study of popular movements in nineteenth-century Korea, which in turn led her to analyze regional discrimination and the ways in which marginalized groups of people coped with their compromised conditions in history. Her interest in ordinary but forgotten people, including women, led her to study legal records that inadvertently preserved their voices. Other topics she has studied include slavery, kinship and genealogy, and art history. She is also dedicated to making underused yet illuminating primary sources available in English through conventional and digital publishing.

She is the author of several books. Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in disciplinary journals such as Social History, Journal of Social History, and Historische Anthropologie, as well as in regional studies journals such as Journal of Asian Studies, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, and Journal of Korean Studies. She has also published in the Korean-language journals. She is the recipient of various fellowships and grants, most notably the American Council of Learned Societies Collaborative Research Fellowship, the Korea Foundation Advanced Research Grant, and the Social Science Research Council Doctoral Research Fellowship.

Abstract: 
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.

About Don J. Wyatt:
DON J. WYATT is the John M. McCardell, Jr. Distinguished Professor at Middlebury College. He attended Beloit College in Wisconsin, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in Religious Studies in 1975. He entered Harvard University’s Regional Studies-East Asia program in 1976, taking the M.A. in 1978 and thereafter continuing in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations to receive the Ph.D. in 1984. At Middlebury since 1986, he has taught history as well as philosophy until the present. Specializing in the intellectual history of China, with research most currently focused on the intersections between identity and violence and the nexuses between ethnicity and slavery, Wyatt is the author of The Blacks of Premodern China (2010) and Slavery in East Asia (2022), with the latter being a contribution to the Cambridge Elements Global Middle Ages series. Just completed in the same series is Song China and the World (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Abstract:
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.

About Tracy Dennison:
Tracy Dennison is the Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of Social Science History and currently holds the Ronald and Maxine Linde Leadership Chair in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Her research focuses on the way institutions such as property rights and dispute resolution mechanisms affected economic and political development in central and eastern Europe. She has published many articles about household structure, marriage patterns, and serfdom in comparative context, as well as on the relationship between history and the quantitative social sciences. Her first book The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. Dennison is currently working on a book about the political economy of serfdom and origins of the rule of law in Europe.