5 - There Are No Slaves in Prussia?

Summary

In 1996 Sue Peabody published her research on slavery in France in the Early Modern Period. The title of her study – ‘There Are No Slaves in France’ – reflected the contemporary belief that slaves were automatically emancipated upon reaching French soil, a belief whose roots went back as far as the sixteenth century. It also suggested the implications that this and related beliefs had for research up until the present day: slavery was long seen as a phenomenon unique to colonies outside of Europe. It was possible to maintain this viewpoint because most European countries only passed laws on the status of slaves on the European continent and in the British Isles in the late eighteenth century; operating in a legal grey area benefited European owners (but also unsettled them), and helped to conceal the contradiction between slavery and contemporary notions of freedom. Hence in Great Britain ‘black servants’ were advertised for sale in eighteenth-century newspaper announcements, yet the term ‘slave’ did not appear. Similarly, French and Dutch sources often deliberately avoided the term ‘slavery’. Research on enslavement practices on the European continent has thus always confronted the problem that contemporaries preferred not to speak explicitly about slavery, even in situations that from an analytical-historiographical perspective clearly involved slavery.

Since the publication of Peabody's book, research on the phenomenon of slavery on the European continent has grown significantly, though with clear areas of concentration and equally visible gaps. While numerous publications have appeared in and about Western Europe and the Mediterranean, research on the less-affected areas of Northern and Central Europe – and in particular, those German-speaking countries without ‘successful’ colonial policy – is still in the early stages, although these countries too are now receiving increasing attention (starting with the exploration of their economic involvement). In recent years we thus find a growing number of essays and books on trafficked people in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (HRE), individuals abducted either from the Ottoman Empire or the Mediterranean region, or in the context of the transatlantic slave trade. Even so, researchers are noticeably reluctant to speak explicitly of slaves. This is due in part to the situation itself, as complex as it is diffuse: neither skin colour nor (often indeterminate) place of origin gives a clear indication of legal status.