Plurality of slavery regimes in the Mediterranean in the Modern era

In the Mediterranean societies of the modern era, enslaved people were able to live, work and move around with relative autonomy. Far from being informal, these situations reveal the plurality of the legal regimes that governed the servile condition. This workshop, organised by Thomas Glesener, maître de conférences at TELEMMe on research leave at Iméra in 2025-2026, explores how these competing normative orders are articulated, clash and contribute to redefining the boundaries of dependence in everyday life.

Extract from the painting “ View of a seaport ” by Abraham Storck, public domain – WikiCommons

The history of slavery in the Mediterranean reveals a host of situations that at first glance fall outside the normative frameworks that defined the slave condition. Access to paid work, freedom of movement, the ability to testify or lodge complaints with the courts, the ability to own, inherit or pass on property: these were all actions in which slaves were frequently engaged despite the legal incapacities associated with their status. These situations, which have been widely documented, have generally been regarded as grey areas of the law. These were areas of deregulation or deviance, given over to informal practices and allowing either the arbitrariness of masters or the agentivity of slaves to manifest itself.

Case law varies from place to place

This workshop proposes to shift the focus by looking for the formal in informal situations. Rather than qualifying these practices a priori as deviant or informal, the idea is to consider them as spaces of normative plurality in which it was possible to mobilise other registers of law. Forged by usage or custom, but also activated by the multiple affiliations of gender, class, race or religion of the slaves, these different regimes of slavery were backed by local or supra-local institutions which were then in a position to intervene in conflicts and thus contribute to redefining the contours of servile dependence. As a result, the presence of semi-freed workers in small urban trades or the claims of enslaved mothers on their newborn babies were less the result of a capacity for negotiation in an area of lawlessness than the product of friction between competing normative orders. These practices contributed to the development of an extremely diverse body of case law, varying from one locality to another and shaping specific legal regimes for servile conditions.

By examining the plurality of forms of slavery in the Mediterranean, their confrontation and interlocking, this workshop invites us to think of the history of enslavement not as that of a unified system, but as an area of friction between competing legal regimes.

Programme

• 9 am: Welcome speeches by Brian Sandberg (Iméra), Thomas Glesener (Aix Marseille Université, TELEMMe, Iméra), and Daniel Hershenzon (University of Connecticut).
• 9:15 am to 10:45 am
  • Teresa Peláez Domínguez (Universidad de Valencia)
    « Forçats du roi » : dépendance et appartenance dans les chiourmes de galères d’Espagne (XVIe siècle)
  • Daniel Hershenzon (University of Connecticut)
    Gender, Reproduction, and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean
• 10:45-11:15 am: coffee break
• 11:15 am to 12:45 pm
  • Guillaume Calafat (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, IUF)
    La caravane capturée : 165 hajji captifs en Sicile (1716-1723)
  • Noga Marmor (Harvard University)
    Black, Enslaved, Artists: Royal Slaves in the Spanish Court
• 2-3:30 pm
  • Achille Marotta (European University Institute, Florence)
    Chains of Credit: Merchant Slaves and Bonded Heirs in Early Modern Genoa.
  • Brian Sandberg (Iméra)
    Title pending
• 3:30-4 pm: Coffee break
• 4-5 pm: General discussion led by Natividad Planas (Université Clermont Auvergne) and Thomas Glesener (Aix Marseille Université, TELEMMe, Iméra)

This event is organised by Thomas Glesener, Daniel Hershenzon and Brian Sandberg, in collaboration with TELEMMe (UMR 7303, amU/CNRS), and with the financial support of the Fonds d’Intervention Recherche (FIR) of Aix Marseille Université.

Practical information

• Date: Tuesday May 12th, 2026 from 9 am to 5:30 pm
• Venue: Maison des Astronomes conference room, Iméra, 2 place Leverrier 13004 Marseille
• This workshop can be followed online via Zoom. To receive the link, contact Thomas Glesener.

Coming to Iméra

• Pedestrian access: come through the gate of the 2 place Leverrier, 13004 Marseille.
• PRM access: come through the gate of the Allée Jean-Louis Pons, 13004 Marseille.