Adam Fagbore – författare

Contributors to this volume examine the historical role of punishment in the management of labour, looking into the histories of blinded slaves in ancient Mesopotamia, flogged peasant farmers in Pharaonic Egypt, convict officers in the prisons of colonial India, and blacklisted factory workers in the nineteenth-century US, as well as rural workers in the medieval Frankish kingdoms, soldiers and domestic servants in early modern Scandinavia, working children in colonial Bolivia, textile workers in Lombardy, enslaved Africans in Brazil and the US, and household workers in Late Imperial China. The introduction suggests ways to compare the role of punishment in the management of labour across space and time. The editors claim that the effective management of labour required the systematic differentiation of the workforce; to that end, the imposition of diversified forms of punishment did not merely reflect existing labour distinctions but also contributed to their creation.

This volume draws the outlines of a new field of scholarship at the crossroads of the social histories of punishment and labour. It poses key questions: What is “punishment” and how is it legitimized? In particular, how do punitive practices contribute to shape the processes of labour extraction and workers’ mobility? Based on empirically grounded research on a wide range of geographical and temporal contexts, this volume provides important insights on these questions and on the ways through which they can be studied. It highlights the need to pluralize both punishment and labour, moving beyond the standard focus on incarceration and wage labour. It invites to produce contextualized studies of the processes of coercion and the relations between multiple actors, rather than starting from predefined categories of labour and punishment. And it foregrounds the importance of the simultaneous analysis of processes of mobilization and immobilization of the workforce.