Social History of Punishment and Labour Coercion
Left: Johann Moritz Rugendas in Brazil, ca. 1827-35 (detail), Itaú Cultural Collection, Wikimedia Commons. Top right to bottom: Austen Henry Layard, Captives impaled from the Ninevah expedition - line drawing, Wellcome Collection; Paul Renouard, Working Convict Invalid Prison: women prisoners working the fire pump, 1889, Wellcome Collection; Unknown photographer, Unidentified Congolese prisoners demolishing a termite hill. Congo Free State, 1903, Collection of the Royal Africa Museum (Belgium). Visual representations of violent pasts remind us that the people in our books were human beings of flesh and blood. The images chosen here convey the power dynamics the book series unearths. They originate in notions of abolitionism (Rugendas), historical curiosity (Layard), aesthetic and social sensitivity (Renouard), and ideas of racial superiority (Congo Free State).
Series editors

Christian G. De Vito, University of Bonn, Germany
Margo De Koster, University of Ghent, Belgium
Johan Heinsen, Aalborg University, Denmark
Katherine Roscoe, University of Liverpool, UK
Paulo Terra, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, Brazil

Geographical Scope
Any world region
Chronological Scope
Antiquity to the Present
Advisory Board

Clare Anderson (University of Leicester)
Sidney Chalhoub (Harvard University)
Chris Eyre (University of Liverpool)
Tyge Krogh (Rigsarkiver, Copenhagen)
Alex Lichtenstein (Indiana University Bloomington, US)
Marcel van der Linden (IISG, Amsterdam)
Chiara Lucrezio Monticelli (University of Rome-Tor Vergata)
Hamish Maxwell-Stewart (University of New England)
Paola Revilla (University of La Paz)
Juliane Schiel (University of Vienna)
Arjan Zuiderhoek (University of Ghent)

Keywords
Punishment; Labour Coercion; Social History
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Series

Social History of Punishment and Labour Coercion

This book series is a platform for expansive understandings of practices of punishment and labour coercion. The books published in this series concern all forms of punishment which were meted out by any type of State apparatus, by individuals such as slave holders, fathers and husbands, and by social institutions such as kin and elderly councils. At the same time, labour is understood here as comprising not only wage labourers, but also enslaved, indentured, tributary and convicted workers, together with unemployed and unpaid individuals.

The series addresses the ways in which workers were punished; it deals with the role of punishment in mobilizing and immobilizing workers; and it highlights the punitive aspects of key dynamics of labour coercion, such as debt, tribute, war and anti-vagrancy laws. Punishment and labour coercion are seen here as open-ended processes: the focus lies on their practices, and how they are entangled in distinctive ways in relation to different social groups, vis-à-vis gender, age and ethnicity/race/citizenship, and across time and space.

Actively Seeking Proposals

The series welcomes scholarly monographs and edited volumes in English, by both established and early-career researchers.

Commissioning editor
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