Preliminary Programme

Governing powers have long had the ambition to control the movement of individuals for various reasons. Above all, the ambition can be linked to, firstly opportunity to allocate financial resources within certain regions, (access to work or responsibility for poverty relief), and secondly to check opportunities to draft soldiers for the country's defence. To succeed from a national perspective, however, requires certain administrative structures that were largely missing before the 1800s.
Around the turn of the century 1800, Europe was ravaged by the Napoleonic Wars, which increased the countries' need to identify foreigners with malicious intent and to identify their own citizens. This led to the introduction of foreign and domestic passports in many countries. The domestic passports also served as a way to limit beggars and vagrants mobility. Lower classes were required to obtain permits and certificates to move within the country. This was based on the idea of the poor as potentially criminals and therefore in need of special control and surveillance. The attitude towards lower classes, labourer and criminals were very similar.
The Swedish system of controlling beggars and vagabonds was unique compared to other European countries. Anyone who lacked what was called legal protection – the ability to show how they supported themselves – were considered unprotected and could be taken by the authorities and put into forced labour.
With examples from Sweden, I discuss how the authorities' control affected criminals and how they tried to navigate around the rules that were imposed on them from above. (Show less)

When we think about prisoners of war or armed conflicts as a source of labour and other forms of exploitation, we usually think of them as adults and males. But what about children? The wars between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy and its allies produced prisoners of war on all sides during the early modern period. Every person in the conquered territories could be declared prey. Among them were also children. The history of these children must be situated in historiography between two separate research inquiries. The first is the history of children and childhood during early modern wars. The second is the recently growing research on displaced and enslaved children. Children as war captives are the missing link between these two lines of historical research on children and childhood. Therefore, this paper aims to look closely at these children, their captivity, displacement, experiences, inclusion, and adoption to the new social and cultural surroundings. The paper will focus on Muslim children from the Ottoman Empire who were abducted by Christian soldiers and armies and deported to German-speaking territories at the end of the 17th Century. The aim is to draw attention to the role of gender, age, and religion in the processes of abduction, transfer, coercion, labour, and assimilation. (Show less)

This paper revisits the period of the 1860s and contends that the system of indentured labour that characterized the tea plantations in northeastern India was most decisively forged in this decade. This emerging labour regime, as the paper sketches, was informed by the nature of the colonial capitalist political economy, the ecology of the region and the presence of other coercive labour regimes, both locally and globally, which gave shape to a specific punitive labour system. Employing an analytical lens that pays closer attention to the period (the 1860s) and region (Assam) while simultaneously acknowledging global influences the attempt here is to track the making of a coercive labour regime in a historical and spatial setting. (Show less)