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.

Edited by Ulrich Pallua, Adrian Knapp and Andreas Exenberger

"The publications of the interdisciplinary and internationally networked Research Platform “World Order – Religion – Violence” seek to improve our understanding of the relationship between religion, politics and violence. It therefore deals especially with the return of religious themes and symbols into politics, with the analysis of the link between political theory and religion, and finally with the critical discussion of the secularization thesis. At the centre of the research are questions concerning the causes of violent conflict, the possibilities for a just world order and the conditions for peaceful coexistence on a local, regional, national and international/worldwide scale between communities in the face of divergent religious and ideological convictions. Its task is to initiate and coordinate thematically related research-efforts from various disciplinary backgrounds at the University of Innsbruck. It creates a network between departments, research-teams and single researchers working on topics of religion, politics and violence. The overall aim of the research platform World Order-Religion-Violence is to promote excellence in social and human science research on religion and politics at the University of Innsbruck and to guarantee the diffusion of this particular competence on a national and international level."

Innsbruck: innsbruck university press, 2009. 256p.

By Alessandro Stanziani

For the first time, this book provides the global history of labor in Central Eurasia, Russia, Europe, and the Indian Ocean between the 16th and 20th centuries. It contests common views on free and unfree labor, comparing the latter to many Western countries where wage conditions resembled those of domestic servants. This gave rise to extreme forms of dependency in the colonies, not only under slavery, but also afterwards via indentured labor in the Indian Ocean and obligatory labor in Africa. Stanziani shows that unfree labor and forms of economic coercion were perfectly compatible with market development and capitalism, proven by the consistent economic growth that took place all over Eurasia between the 17th and the 19th centuries. This growth was labor intensive: commercial expansion, transformations in agriculture, and the first industrial revolution required more labor, not less.

New York; Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books , 2014. 270p.

Edited by Raphael Hörmann,  Gesa Mackenthun

Slavery – the subjection of some human beings to a state of bondage by other, more powerful, people – has been an accepted social institution since ancient times. It is less well known that slavery has also produced cultural contact zones in forcing members of different cultures into sharing the same places – whether in private households, on plantations, in mines and quarries, or indeed the same imaginative sites in works of art and public memory. The recent commemorations of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade by Britain (1807) and the United States (1808), as well as the rise of Black Atlantic Studies as a new academic field, have drawn new attention to this topic. In spite of these recent trends and the prominent position of slavery studies in British and American historiography, slavery’s implications for the study of cultural encounters remain a scholarly desideratum. This volume seeks to contribute to a better understanding of different forms of human bondage in cultural contact zones.

The essays in this collection represent a wide spectrum of the scholarship on slavery, as well as illustrating the vast range of conceptual approaches to the topic. They bring together research from several different disciplines and critical angles addressing, for example, archaeological reconstructions of labor camps in an cient Palestine, the moral significance of early Christian slavery, the ambivalent aestheticization of black bodies within the colonial culture of taste, Enlightenment discourses about black revolution, the significance of mythical narratives in African-American slave culture, the musical mourning for lynching victims, and the blindness toward the presence of slave laborers in Nazi Germany.
Most essays collected here are concerned with the cultural and human aspects of slavery as well as with establishing an understanding for the stark differences between various forms of slavery throughout history, stretching from antiquity into the twentieth century.

Münster, Germany: Waxmann Verlag, 2010. 296p.