About: | Juliane Schiel |
Position: | Key Researcher |
Node: | Geographies of Power |
This case study labour coercion in several contexts: Shifting practices of human trafficking and labour exploitation in the dynamic situation between the dissolution of empires in the Black Sea region and the economic and territorial expansion of the Italian sea empires before and after the Black Death; and labour relations at the same time in the Alps Region, which represents a transitional zone between two diverging developments: Southern Europe, where the high death rate and shortage of labour are regarded as a key driver for the import of slave labour from Central Asia to the Italian and Iberian Peninsula (Fynn-Paul 2009); and Western Europe, where the Black Death has supposedly contributed to the silent end of serfdom and the rise of free wage labour (Penn/Dyer, 1990). The Alps and neighbouring regions of Central Europe were embedded between these two separate trading networks, and between two marriage patterns that seem to have contributed to diverging demographic and economic developments (Dennison/Ogilvie, 2014) and distinct distributions of social inequality (Alfani/Thoen, 2020). On the basis of new empirical research, the study will map labour and power relations through the lens of coercion. Building on the COST Action ‘Worlds of Coercions in Work’ (WORCK), this study will conceptualise an analytical framework for transregional and diachronic comparison. Departing from an exploratory publication on semantics of labour coercion from Old Egypt to today’s Italy (Chevaleyre/Schiel 2023), a graph database based on a Label Property Graph (LPG) model that uses a Neo4j DBMS instance to create ontologies of labour coercion for the purpose of comparison between source languages, time periods and geographical regions in premodern Eurasia is currently being developing the together with the Sinologist Claude Chevaleyre (ENS Lyon). This approach may help to link discussions about geographies of power (Node 1) to linguistic and cultural research done on “Entangled Languages and Cultures of Writing” (sub-node 2C).