Labnet: CFP: Unfree Labor and the Atlantic Empires: a book and a conference, Amsterdam 2010

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From: Labourhistory.net

CFP: Unfree Labor and the Atlantic Empires: a book and a conference,
Amsterdam 2010
http://labourhistory.net/news/i0903_30.php 

Call for Papers

Unfree Labor and the Atlantic Empires
Essay submissions are requested for a conference and potential
publication in an edited volume on unfree labor and the Atlantic
Empires. The conference is tentatively scheduled for late May or early
June of 2010 at the International Institute of Social History in
Amsterdam. The volume is under contract with Brill Academic Publishers
(Leiden and Boston) in their Atlantic Series under the working title:
Building the Atlantic Empires: Unfree Labor, the State, and the Rise of
Global Capitalism, 1500-1945.

The conference organizers and volume editors are soliciting original
essays on unfree labor in global settings influenced by or directly
administered by the Atlantic empires of Spain, Portugal, England,
France, and Holland (work on other imperial states will be considered).
The purpose of the conference and edited volume is to explore the
states' roles as critical agents in mobilizing, deploying, and
disciplining unfree labor in the pursuit of empire in such venues as the
construction of public and defense works, military and naval service,
the exploitation of state-owned resources, and the recruitment of
coerced laborers for private enterprise.

A second purpose of the conference and edited volume is to examine the
intersections of various historiographic fields. Atlantic history, in
particular, has reached a moment of introspection and reassessment as
scholars probe its range and limits as a conceptual framework. Some have
begun to question when, if ever, the Atlantic was a coherent whole,
whether its history is old imperial history in a new guise, or whether
its practitioners have achieved the intregrative vision of Atlantic
processes and connections that they claim. Thus, the geographical and
chronological sweep of the conference and edited volume is purposely
broad in an effort to encourage the interrogation of the many boundaries
that have shaped the fields of Atlantic, imperial, colonial, and
national histories. The organizers also see the conference as an
opportunity to increase interaction and bridge some of the
methodological and conceptual divides among scholars of Atlantic empires
who focus on economic and labor history and those who focus on cultural
studies of empire through such themes as race, ethnicity, gender,
representation, and identity. We see both the conference and the edited
volume as spaces for dialogue and collaboration that can situate the
resort to unfree labor by the Atlantic empires in a global context and
move the studies of labor, empire, and the Atlantic world in new and
fruitful directions.

Possible topics might include but are not limited to the following:

* the historical relationship between early modern and modern empires in
their mobilization and deployment of unfree labor
* economic, political, social, and cultural rationales for state
reliance on unfree labor in specific historical moments i.e. before and
after the abolition of slavery
* the effects of the enslavement of Africans in the Atlantic world on
other forms of coerced labor
* the collaboration and/or interpenetration of state and private
interests in recruiting and deploying unfree labor
* definitions and representations of free and unfree labor in specific
settings and over time by states, employers, and workers themselves
* the material experiences of coerced workers in state employ
* state-building through the use of unfree labor
* the role of laws, codes, treaties etc. in shaping states' access to
and deployment of unfree labor
* critical assessments of the intersections of the fields suggested
above
Prospective participants are invited to send a 500-word abstract and
brief cv with their current contact information by May 10, 2009,
preferably by email, to the organizers/editors:

Dr. John Donoghue, Department of History, Loyola University, Chicago,
Illinois, jdonoghue at luc.edu

Dr. Evelyn Powell Jennings, Department of History, St. Lawrence
University, Canton, New York, ejennings at stlawu.edu

More detailed information on the conference and edited volume will be
forthcoming.