As he traveled across Germany and the Netherlands and sailed on Dutch and Brandenburg slave ships to the Caribbean and Africa from 1682 to 1696, the young German barber-surgeon Johann Peter Oettinger (1666–1746) recorded his experiences in a detailed journal, discovered by Roberto Zaugg and Craig Koslofsky in a Berlin archive. Oettinger’s journal describes shipboard life, trade in Africa, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and the sale of enslaved captives in the Caribbean. Translated here for the first time, A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade documents Oettinger’s journeys across the Atlantic, his work as a surgeon, his role in the purchase and branding of enslaved Africans, and his experiences in France and the Netherlands. His descriptions of Amsterdam, Curaçao, St. Thomas, and Suriname, as well as his account of societies along the coast of West Africa, from Mauritania to Gabon, contain rare insights into all aspects of Europeans’ burgeoning trade in African captives in the late seventeenth century. This journeyman’s eyewitness account of all three routes of the triangle trade will be invaluable to scholars of the early modern world on both sides of the Atlantic.

While the economic involvement of early modern Germany in slavery and the slave trade is increasingly receiving attention, the direct participation of Germans in human trafficking remains a blind spot in historiography. This edited volume focuses on practices of enslavement taking place within German territories in the early modern period as well as on the people of African, Asian, and Native American descent caught up in them.

Reveals how gifts of prestige shaped interactions between Africans and Europeans during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism.

This volume offers a comprehensive array of readings of 'skin' in Shakespeare's works, a term that embraces the human and animal, noun and verb. Shakespeare / Skin departs from previous studies as it deliberately and often explicitly engages with issues of social and racial justice. Each of the chapters interrogates and centres 'skin' in relation to areas of expertise that include performance studies, aesthetics, animal studies, religious studies, queer theory, Indigenous studies, history, food studies, border studies, postcolonial studies, Black feminism, disease studies and pedagogy. By considering contemporary understandings of skin, this volume examines how the literature of the early modern past creates paths to constructing racial hierarchies. With contributors from the USA, UK, South Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Australia, chapters are informed by an array of histories, shedding light on how skin was understood in Shakespeare's time and at key moments during the past 400 years in different media and cultures. Chapters include considerations of plays such as Titus Andronicus, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and work by Borderlands Theater, Los Colochos and Satyajit Ray, among many others. For researchers and instructors, this book will help to shape teaching and inform research through its modelling of antiracist critical practice. Collectively, the chapters in this collection allow us to consider how sustained attention to skin via cross-historical and innovative approaches can reveal to us the various uses of Shakespeare that shed light on the fraught nature of our interrelatedness. They set a path for readers to consider how much skin they have in the game when it comes to challenging structures of racism.

Contributors from the US, Britain and Europe explore a neglected aspect of transatlantic slavery: the implication of a continental European hinterland.

A sweeping narrative history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas. During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhumane conditions. Many of them died on the way, and those who survived had to endure further suffering in the violent conditions that met them onshore. Covering more than three hundred years, Humans in Shackles grapples with this history by foregrounding the lived experience of enslaved people in tracing the long, complex history of slavery in the Americas. Based on twenty years of research, this book not only serves as a comprehensive history; it also expands that history by providing a truly transnational account that emphasizes the central role of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade. Additionally, it is deeply informed by African history and shows how African practices and traditions survived and persisted in the Americas among communities of enslaved people. Drawing on primary sources including travel accounts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, slave narratives, and visual sources such as artworks and artifacts, Araujo illuminates the social, cultural, and religious lives of enslaved people working in plantations and urban areas, building families and cultivating affective ties, congregating and re-creating their cultures, and organizing rebellions. Humans in Shackles puts the lived experiences of enslaved peoples at the center of the story and investigates the heavy impact these atrocities have had on the current wealth disparity of the Americas and rampant anti-Black racism.

This book uses amputation and prostheses to tell a new story about medicine and embodied knowledge-making in early modern Europe. It draws on the writings of craft surgeons and learned physicians to follow the heated debates that arose from changing practices of removing limbs, uncovering tense moments in which decisions to operate were made. Importantly, it teases out surgeons’ ideas about the body embedded in their technical instructions. This unique study also explores the material culture of mechanical hands that amputees commissioned locksmiths, clockmakers, and other artisans to create, revealing their roles in developing a new prosthetic technology. Over two centuries of surgical and artisanal interventions emerged a growing perception, fundamental to biomedicine today, that humans could alter the body — that it was malleable.

Looking back over the centuries, migration has always formed an important part of human existence. Spatial mobility emerges as a key driver of urban evolution, characterized by situation-specific combinations of opportunities, restrictions, and fears. This collection of essays investigates interactions between European cities and migration between the early modern period and the present. Building on conceptual approaches from history, sociology, and cultural studies, twelve contributions focus on policies, representations, and the impact on local communities more generally. Combining case-studies and theoretical reflections, the volume’s contributions engage with a variety of topics and disciplinary perspectives yet also with several common themes. One revolves around problems of definition, both in terms of demarcating cities from their surroundings and of distinguishing migration in a narrower sense from other forms of short- and long-distance mobility. Further shared concerns include the integration of multiple analytical scales, contextual factors, and diachronic variables (such as urbanization, industrialization, and the digital revolution).

The early modern period opened a new era in the history of dermal marking. Intensifying global travel and trade, especially the slave trade, bought diverse skin-marking practices into contact as never before. Stigma examines the distinctive skin cultures and marking methods of Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas as they began to circulate and reshape one another in the early modern world. By highlighting the interwoven histories of tattooing, branding, stigmata, baptismal and beauty marks, wounds and scars, this volume shows that early modern markers of skin and readers of marked skin did not think about different kinds of cutaneous signs as separate from each other. On the contrary, Europeans described Indigenous tattooing in North America, Thailand, and the Philippines by referring their readers to the tattoos Christian pilgrims received in Jerusalem or Bethlehem. When explaining the devil’s mark on witches, theologians claimed it was an inversion of holy marks such as those of baptism or divine stigmata. Stigma investigates how early modern people used permanent marks on skin to affirm traditional roles and beliefs, and how they hybridized and transformed skin marking to meet new economic and political demands. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Xiao Chen, Ana Fonseca Conboy, Peter Erickson, Claire Goldstein, Matthew S. Hopper, Katrina H. B. Keefer, Mordechay Lewy, Nicole Nyffenegger, Mairin Odle, and Allison Stedman.

Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany offers a new narrative of Baroque music, accessible to non-music specialists, in which Tanya Kevorkian defines the era in terms of social dynamics rather than style and genre development. Towns were crucial sites of music-making. Kevorkian explores how performance was integrated into and indispensable to everyday routines, celebrations such as weddings, and political culture. Training and funding likewise emerged from and were integrated into urban life. Ordinary artisans, students, and musical tower guards as well as powerful city councilors contributed to the production and reception of music. This book illuminates the processes at play in fascinating ways. Challenging ideas of "elite" and "popular" culture, Kevorkian examines five central and southern German towns—Augsburg, Munich, Erfurt, Gotha, and Leipzig—to reconstruct a vibrant urban musical culture held in common by townspeople of all ranks. Outdoor acoustic communication, often hovering between musical and nonmusical sound, was essential to the functioning of these towns. As Kevorkian shows, that sonic communication was linked to the music and musicians heard in homes, taverns, and churches. Early modern urban environments and dynamics produced both the giants of the Baroque era, such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann, and the music that townspeople heard daily. This book offers a significant rediscovery of a rich, unique, and understudied musical culture. Received a subvention award from the Margarita M. Hanson Fund and the Donna Cardamone Jackson Fund of the American Musicological Society.