Early Modern Child Slavery: Trafficking and Transcultural Space

This poster presents a de-centered approach to the history of child slavery in early modern societies (1500-1800). By juxtaposing global case studies, we redress the Atlantic experience as a standard measure of childhood slavery. Child slavery across the early modern globe had various experiences and articulations. These experiences were complex and sometimes interconnected. Children were trafficked between households, across cultural boundaries, and over land and sea. We develop this poster from a two-year bilateral project (2023-2024) on Child Slaveries in the Early Modern World organized by early-career researchers from Germany and Australia. Our global collaboration, which harnesses expertise on multiple world regions, reworks the dominant paradigms of slavery research by foregrounding children's representations and experiences in archival and visual narratives. Given the way children are usually silenced in historiography and absent from the archive, a visual medium enables us to decolonize our research methodology by going beyond language.

Visually, we interrogate the complicated scales of child trafficking and global history in the production of transcultural space. The poster highlights our respective research on missionary schools in Siam and inheritance claims in Barbados. The former examines the crossings between slavery, education and displacement experienced by catholic schoolboys trafficked across Asia, into and out of the Siamese capital of Ayutthaya in the 18th century. From the case of early Barbados, we ask whether chattel-bondage captures the full range of experience for enslaved children as they were trafficked through very different physical and emotional settings throughout the island and beyond. Visual material derived from these studies, as well as other contributions arising from this collaborative project, are focal elements of the poster. We use this material to examine space in macro and micro perspectives. Maps and the natural environment, for instance, critically investigate themes of coloniality, travel, the global and the regional. In a micro perspective, we excavate child slavery and dependency through lived spaces, evinced, for example, in portraiture and the built environment. Our spatial methodology follows Marisa Fuentes’ (2016) attention to the unlikely ‘traces’ of slave experience in the backdrop of a historiographical insistence on their silences. Through this mobilization of global narratives, we establish children as seminal agents in early modern history. We critically evaluate the need for a center or core in slavery studies, and how this relates to broader debates in global history.