together with Juliane Schiel

This research addresses resource accumulation and labour coercion in imperial societies of premodern Eurasia through the lens of urban and rural household economies. It seeks to understand the social power dynamics of androcentric societies in the Mediterranean world and Asia from the Bronze Age to the early modern period (Crone 1989, Horden/Purcell 2000) by following the traces left by those who worked and served the heads of households as non-kin household members. This includes all forms of slavery and indentured or convict labour as well as household servants and in-house agricultural workers.

The intended research entails three dimensions of study: First, we will collect commensurable sources (i.e. foremost descriptive archival data, in particular litigation and court records etc.) that tend towards standardization and contain basic elements common to almost all Eurasian societies with a written culture. We will read these hegemonic sources against the grain by applying a micro-historic approach and by making use of historical semantics and computational text mining tools. Here, we will explore the action profiles of non-kin household members within the shifting legal and socio-economic framework of their time.

Second, we will be testing the hypothesis that imperial expansion and contraction is a major vector for changes over time in household economies and labour relations. Expanding empires tend to supply their imperial centres with a labour force from the borderlands, while the ups and downs of imperial fortunes impact the domestic labour market and contribute substantially to shaping the labour and social relations within the household economies – in the metropoles as well as on the countryside. In short, we explore in which ways the imperial geographies of power are effective co-determinants for the agency of non-kin household members.

Third, we will turn the challenges implied by this research’s emphatically comparative and diachronic set-up into a methodological investigandum in their own right and explore new ways of historical comparison across time and space. Relying on conceptual and methodological groundwork done by the COST Action CA18205 “Worlds of Related Coercions in Work” (Chevaleyre/Schiel 2023, https://worck.quarto.pub), and in close cooperation with the Sinologist Claude Chevaleyre (CNRS, ENS Lyon) and his team, this project will help to set up a graph database and develop a prototype of cross-corpora comparison based on a computational historical semantics approach and neo4j graph modelling. 

The CoE key researchers Michael Jursa and Juliane Schiel, together with their teams, will both bring in empirical data on urban and rural household economies and related court records from their respective fields of expertise. Michael Jursa focuses on archival data from Southern Mesopotamia, studying (a) non-family based household labour in the Mesopotamian longue durée from a socio-economic viewpoint through the lens of court records (2100-400 BCE), (b) the household economy in rural Babylonia in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Juliane Schiel will study (a) summaries of criminal court cases from the city of Venice (c. 1324–1791 CE) and (b) collect testimonies of rural workers of Venetian Crete (1211–1669 CE). Other members of the CoE are warmly invited to contribute cases from their respective fields of expertise to the database. This research is closely linked to the transversal working group 4 on “Decentering Eurasian Empires and Geographies”.