The European Experience in Slavery, 1650–1850

Rebekka Mallinckrodt

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9783110749397
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110749960
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

This volume documents the practice of bringing enslaved people to early modern Europe not only as a side effect of overseas colonial regimes but as a pan-European experience that even developed its own dynamics on the continent. Drawing on examples from France, Scotland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the Holy Roman Empire, the contributors show how slavery affected both the enslaved and the enslavers' societies, changing European notions of freedom, dependence, and subjugation. At the same time, Afro-European families and cultural productions challenge the view of the Black diaspora as Europe's "other." The volume thus reveals not only the roots of present-day racism extending far back into the past, but also a common heritage yet to be discovered.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• 1 The European Experience in Slavery 1650–1850: Parallels and Entanglements
• 2 Barriers to Accessing France’s Sol Libre in Early Modern France
• 3 Escaping Enslavement in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
• 4 Variations of African Life in the Eighteenth-Century Netherlands: Between a Boy Servant at the Court of Orange-Nassau and a Lord of the Manor in the Province of Groningen
• 5 Race, Slavery, and the Market: African Lives in Eighteenth-Century Copenhagen
• 6 Free Through Membership in the Imperial Trumpeters’ Guild? On the Legal and Social Position of Black Court Trumpeters in the Holy Roman Empire
• 7 Iconography and the Law: Slaves at the Dresden Court
• 8 On Intimate Terms – An Afterword