Slavery was a continuous presence in the Pre-Modern Era, roughly 500 ce to 1450 ce, when changes in geopolitical forces, demography, and cultural background contributed to the nature of enslavement. Coercion as a way of life differed across sociocultural and economic realities, ranging from chattel slaves and war captives, to sexual and domestic slaves. This volume destabilizes the deep-seated idea that during the so-called “Middle Ages,” social and cultural relationships remained stagnant. Drawing upon a wealth of textual, visual, and archaeological sources, the authors explore slavery and human trafficking through gender, race and identity, political thought, cultural norms, and religious practice, with a focus on the emergence of systems of bondage, serfdom, dependency, and subordination in distinct domestic, regional, or national settings.

Contributors explore a variety of time periods and polities in detail, from Bantu-speaking Africa, via Europe and the Middle East, to China, to demonstrate a changing and interconnected world. This includes the early pre-Modern era, where the decline of expansive empires, a shift toward smaller kingdoms, and changes in regional markets, land use, and tenure created new dependencies that reshaped concepts of ownership, authority, and dependency. The later Pre-Modern Era was witness to the intensification of coercive identities from birth and inheritance. Local slave systems, discrete serf economies, and long-distance trade, coupled with limited trans-regional slave markets, are key to understanding the great variation in labor coercion modalities.

A Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available as hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a tangible reference for their shelves or as part of a fully-searchable digital library. The digital product is available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access via www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com . Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available in print or digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com.

Thomas J. MacMaster teaches history at Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. His research focuses on the slave trade and human trafficking in the early medieval Mediterranean. He has published on the transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages. He is the co-editor of Italy and the East Roman World in the Medieval Mediterranean: Empire, Cities and Elites, 476-1204 (2021), and The Long Seventh Century: Continuity and Discontinuity in an Age of Transition (2015). He is currently preparing his monograph, entitled, Slavery and the Making of the Medieval World.

Angela Zhang is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, in the Department of History. Her work focuses on slavery and race in the premodern Western European Mediterranean, focusing on Florence, Marseille and Valencia. Her work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Renaissance Society of America.