By Agnes Mathilde Wergeland (Author), Colin Heston (Introduction)

Slavery in Germanic Society sets out to trace the evolution of slavery from the late Roman world through the early and high medieval periods. Wergeland’s analysis begins by distinguishing classical slavery—predicated on the total alienation of the enslaved person from kinship, community, and legal personhood—from the systems of servitude that emerged in Germanic societies. As Germanic tribes moved into former Roman territories, they both absorbed and modified existing practices of unfree labor. Captives taken in war, debtors who had fallen into bondage, and the descendants of slaves formed a stratum of society that was neither fully outside nor fully within the emerging frameworks of medieval law.

Wergeland is especially attentive to the role of law codes in shaping and regulating these relationships. The Salic Law, the Lex Saxonum, and other Germanic legal compilations provide glimpses into a world where freedom and unfreedom were not binary categories but existed along a continuum. The distinction between a servus (slave), a colonus (tenant bound to the land), and a liber homo (freeman) was fluid and often contested. Her work suggests that these categories were not only legal but also deeply embedded in cultural ideas about honor, lineage, and the obligations of lordship.

Wergeland’s historiographical legacy is also tied to the broader cultural currents of her time. Writing in the aftermath of the American Civil War and during the height of European colonial expansion, she was acutely aware of slavery’s moral and political resonance. While she does not draw explicit parallels between medieval and modern forms of servitude, her decision to study the topic reflects a world in which questions of liberty, labor, and human rights were urgently contested.
In returning to Slavery in Germanic Society During the Middle Ages today, readers encounter a work that is both a product of its era and strikingly relevant to our own. It invites us to consider how deeply embedded systems of inequality are in the fabric of society, and how they can endure even as their outward forms change. Wergeland’s careful scholarship provides a foundation for ongoing conversations about freedom, coercion, and the ways in which human societies organize power and labor.
This edition reintroduces Wergeland’s study to a new generation of readers at a moment when the legacies of slavery and unfreedom are once again at the center of global debates. It offers not only an invaluable historical resource but also a reminder of the intellectual courage of a scholar who, against the odds, claimed her place in the academy and in the long conversation about justice and humanity.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. 93p.

By Adam Gurowski (Author), Colin Heston (Preface)

Adam Gurowski’s Slavery in History is a sweeping and impassioned historical treatise that challenges the reader to reconsider the institution of slavery not as a fixed or inevitable component of human civilization, but as a corrosive anomaly that has repeatedly undermined the moral and structural integrity of societies throughout history. Written in the mid-19th century, a time when the question of slavery was at the forefront of political and ethical discourse—particularly in the United States—Gurowski’s work stands as both a scholarly inquiry and a moral indictment. His approach is not merely descriptive; it is analytical and polemical, seeking to dismantle the notion that slavery is a natural or historically justified institution.
From the outset, Gurowski frames slavery as a “general disease” rather than a social norm, arguing that its presence in any civilization is symptomatic of deeper political and moral decay. He rejects the deterministic view that slavery is a universal or necessary stage in societal development, instead positing that it is an aberration that has consistently led to the decline of the cultures that embraced it. This thesis is developed through a methodical examination of a wide array of civilizations—from the Egyptians and Phoenicians to the Greeks, Romans, and beyond. In each case, Gurowski explores how slavery was integrated into the social fabric, how it was justified or resisted, and ultimately, how it contributed to the weakening or collapse of those societies.
Adam Gurowski’s view on modern slavery, particularly as it existed in the 19th century, is deeply critical and morally charged. In Slavery in History, he argues that for the first time in human civilization, slavery had been elevated into a comprehensive ideological system—a “religious, social, and political creed” . This modern form of slavery, especially as practiced in the United States, was not merely a continuation of ancient customs but a deliberate and systemic institution, defended by theology, law, and public discourse. He is especially scathing in his critique of how slavery in the modern era had been rationalized and sanctified by political leaders, religious figures, and intellectuals. He describes this as a “new faith” with its own “temples,” “altars,” and “fanatical devotees,” suggesting that slavery had become a kind of state religion in parts of the American Republic. This metaphor underscores his belief that modern slavery was not just a social or economic system but a deeply entrenched ideology that corrupted every aspect of public life.
Finally, his introduction to Slavery in History serves as both a roadmap and a manifesto. It outlines the historical scope of the book—spanning ancient to modern civilizations—and sets the tone for a critical, morally engaged exploration of one of humanity’s oldest and most pernicious institutions. Gurowski’s work is not merely a catalog of historical facts; it is a call to conscience, urging readers to recognize the enduring consequences of slavery and to commit to the principles of justice and equality. In doing so, he positions his book as a vital contribution to the intellectual and ethical debates of his era—debates that, in many ways, continue to resonate today.
Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. 172p.

By MARIA R. MONTALVO

Explores the relationship between the production of enslaved property and the production of the past in the antebellum United States.It is extraordinarily difficult for historians to reconstruct the lives of individual enslaved people. Records—where they exist—are often fragmentary, biased, or untrue. In Enslaved Archives, Maria R. Montalvo investigates the legal records, including contracts and court records, that American antebellum enslavers produced and preserved to illuminate enslavers' capitalistic motivations for shaping the histories of enslaved people. The documentary archive was not simply a by-product of the business of slavery, but also a necessary tool that enslavers used to exploit the people they enslaved. Building on Montalvo's analysis of more than 18,000 sets of court records, Enslaved Archives is a close study of what we can and cannot learn about enslaved individuals from the written record. By examining five lawsuits in Louisiana, Montalvo deconstructs enslavers' cases—the legal arguments and rhetorical strategies they used to produce information and shape perceptions of enslaved people. Commodifying enslaved people was not simply a matter of effectively exploiting their labor. Enslavers also needed to control information about those people. Enslavers' narratives—carefully manipulated, prone to omissions, and sometimes false—often survive as the only account of an enslaved individual's life. In working to historicize the people at the center of enslavers' manipulations, Montalvo outlines the possibilities and limits of the archive, providing a glimpse of the historical and contemporary consequences of commodification. Enslaved Archives makes a significant intervention in the history of enslaved people, legal history, and the history of slavery and capitalism by adding a qualitative dimension to the analysis of how enslavers created and maintained power.

Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press , 2024. 178p.

Edited by Elke Brüggen and Marion Gymnich

The 15 articles in this interdisciplinary volume examine facets of the history of asymmetrical dependencies via representations of dependency in a wide range of (factual and fictional) text types, including inscriptions from Egyptian tombs, biblical narratives, novels from antiquity, the Middle High German Rolandslied, Ottoman court records, travelogues, the American gift book The Liberty Bell, and oral narratives by Caribbean Hindu women.

Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2024. 375p.

Edited by Marrigje Paijmans and Karwan Fatah-Black

With the rising tide of scholarly and societal interest in the history and legacy of colonialism and slavery, this collection offers a much-needed diachronic analysis of the cultural representations of the lives and afterlives of those subjected to slavery and indenture. It focuses on the history of the ‘neerlandophone’ space, defined as the complex linguistic space spanning former Dutch colonies. This collection gives a longue durée overview, with cases from the early modern period to the present day, revealing the deep roots of the colonial ‘cultural archive’. Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines demonstrate how attention to the layered and polyphonic qualities of narratives can reveal silent and disruptive voices in colonial discourse, as well as collective emotions and imaginations that have hitherto remained unrecorded in historical sources. They discuss different aesthetic, poetic, and storytelling practices, including literature, archival and legal documents, performance, architecture, photography, and philosophy, formed both in the metropolis and by enslaved and indentured peoples in the colonies.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025. 374p.

Edited by Martin Schermaier

Slavery takes many forms. This was also true in Roman antiquity, even though modern scholarship on Roman slavery paints the picture of a very homogenous institution. This volume intends to correct that perception. In it, renowned legal historians analyse juristic writings to showcase the social differences among slaves reflected in these texts. In this way, the papers collected here convey an impression of the complexity of Roman slave law.

Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2023. 319p.

By Jason Douglas Porter

Classical Athenian slavery is often discussed as a single phenomenon and Athens’ enslaved as a unitary group. Yet the single legal status that the enslaved shared often obscures the very different characteristics of slavery evident in our evidence. This book provides a nuanced picture of Athenian slavery and its consequences from the perspective of slaveholding strategies, evidencing the varying ways in which Athenian slave owners employed their enslaved and the different methods of social control they utilised to do so. This approach, drawn from the work of historian Joseph Miller, eschews static definitions of ‘the institution of slavery’, in favour of a more dynamic progression of varied, though interrelated, phenomena. Applying this methodology to classical Athenian evidence sheds light on the complexity of the city state's slave system and explicates the wide variations in the lives of Athenian slaves. Jason Douglas Porter furthers academic understanding of the complex relationships between slavery, Athenian society and economy through recognising the diverse motivations and contexts that drove these varied forms of exploitation.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025. 249p

Edited by Rose Mary Allen, Esther Captain, Matthias van Rossum, Urwin Vyent

It is the paradox at the heart of the Dutch Republic: how could a state emerge from resistance to political slavery and subjugation by a foreign power, only to become a colonial empire that promoted slavery all over the world? 'Slavery & the Dutch State' shows how the modern Dutch state and its predecessors were complicit in colonial slavery. It describes the roles of various actors, such as enslaved people, administrators and merchants in the Netherlands and the colonized societies. More than thirty authors discuss the afterlives of slavery, the systematic nature of slavery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the worldwide scope of slavery, and the various individuals, groups and organizations that had interests in slavery and colonialism starting in the sixteenth century. With chapters covering topics such as the Dutch Reformed Church’s role in slavery, how the history of slavery is taught in schools, and the involvement of the Dutch parliament and royal family in colonial slavery, 'Slavery & the Dutch State' is one of the main publications to appear between July 1, 2023 and July 1, 2024, the year when the Netherlands collectively commemorated the legacy of slavery.

Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2025. 492p.

By Adriane Sanctis de Brito

The treaties to suppress the slave trade were the subject of intense legal battles in the first half of the 19th century. This book explores the legal disputes about the Anglo Brazilian treaty to highlight the political importance of what initially looks like mere argumentative hurdles over the rules and proceedings regarding the search and capture of ships. It reveals the complex legal translations of state inequality, abolition and slavery, as well as war and peace.

Frankfurt am Main: Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, 2024.