This chapter explores an unusually complicated sixteen-year-long (1928-44) inheritance and paternity dispute that arose originally in the first-instance Sharīʿa Court of Casablanca. The central question in the case was whether the plaintiff’s grandson was entitled to inherit his father and grandfather. The dispute provides numerous lenses into uses of the past as it concerns a Sharīʿa court operating in an ostensible judicial plurality established and enforced by a colonial power (French Protectorate Morocco, 1912-56). Although the judges’ competence was narrowed by the fact of French hegemony, they still enjoyed sufficient independence to use their own legal traditions to adjudicate the cases before them.

Relying on a spectrum of sources tackling sexual practices ranging from the normative and historical to the didactic and entertaining, this chapter approaches sexuality in ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad as an organizing principle in Abbasid society. It focuses on prescriptive sexuality and sexual ethics as they were regulated and delineated in early Islamic religious texts. Sexual practices, depicted mainly in literary texts, are discussed within the context of the institution of the harem. Finally, nonconformist sexuality is addressed through the lens of an eclectic collection of genres ranging from literature and poetry to medical manuals. A comparative appraisal of the sources shows that while in the caliphal harem concubinage eventually replaced marriage, in elite and common urban households marriage appears to remain the dominant institution. Nonconformist heterosexual and homosexual behaviour was generally depicted as part and parcel of the lifestyles of the urban and ruling elite. A main conclusion is that the influx of enslaved women granted the institution of female slavery a prominent historical and discursive role in shaping the contours of normative and nonconformist sexual relations.

This chapter surveys the history of labor in the Edo period. It begins by analyzing how merchant, samurai, and peasant households organized and mobilized working people, including shop clerks, building superintendents, apprentices, maidservants, sumo wrestlers, samurai retainers, wet nurses, and farmhands. It then moves to consider groups that mobilized labor outside the household, such as boardinghouses and gangster organizations. Along the way, it considers gendered divisions of labor, as well as the relationship between productive and reproductive labor, which could be paid or unpaid, pursued inside or outside kinship structures. Overall, the chapter argues that although households continued to be important in consolidating and deploying labor, an older form in which labor was controlled chiefly by samurai overlords working through status groups gradually gave way to a more diverse, specialized, and highly mobile labor market.

During its short publishing life, the Iris Américaine proposed a complement to the enlightened White male American citizen promoted by Saint-Domingue’s other two periodicals, the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue. After summarizing the contributions of the Affiches and the Journal to the island’s cultural life and discussing the importance of “taste” in French cultural life, the chapter documents how the Iris honored the age-old dictum “to instruct and delight” by publishing a mix of diverting poetry, short stories, and nonfiction essays. Yet its content, however light, had the serious intent of tutoring White women in good taste—both for their own good and to civilize their men by transforming unruly passions into refined pleasures. While these objectives were framed in a metropolitan terms, they assumed special urgency in a society infamous for racial brutality and “disordered” sexuality. Thus, the Iris spoke to deep social anxieties and threatening realities: the failure to establish a stable, White population; the ubiquitous concubinage of enslaved Black women and free women of color; the consequent increase in the number of mixed-race people; and the fact that White colonists were vastly outnumbered by enslaved Black people.

This chapter outlines how the travels of Rowe’s Fair Penitent across Kingston, Calcutta and Sydney accumulated meanings related to the theatricality of state and colonial power, the counter-theater of the subaltern, whether women, Indigenous, enslaved or incarcerated, and the need for limits on patriarchal privilege if national reproduction were to be successful in alien settings and on other people’s lands.

Known references to medieval marriage litigation in the kingdom of Castile are very rare, and information about it seems most readily available in the Roman registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary. Based on this testimony, it is possible to conclude that the typology of cases handled in Castilian bishoprics did not depart from what was common experience in church tribunals of the Latin West. At the same time, ecclesiastical control over marriage formation in Castilian society was minimal, and belief in marital consent as the collective concern of families was paramount. In addition, legislation provided support for alternative forms of intimate partnership. Often introduced under the names of barragania and mancebía, they defied sacramental permanence and monogamy by legalizing relations that were temporary and non-exclusive. Local (and Aragonese) notaries also registered service contracts stipulating sexual favors for a period against payment of a dowry. They articulated obligations of cohabitation with clergy in the sacred orders and husbands to a different woman, or they recorded the consensual breakup of couples short of priestly approval. The notarial output is clearly reflective of arrangements that altogether ignored church claims to undiminished jurisdiction over the validity of spousal ties.

This chapter provides an overview of slavery as practiced in the Iberian Peninsula over the course of the medieval period, from the era of the Visigoths up until the era of the Catholic Kings, and in both Muslim and Christian-controlled territories. While traditionally scholars have paid attention to medieval Iberian slavery almost exclusively for the purposes of exploring how it laid the groundwork for the Atlantic-World slave system, this chapter argues that the study of slavery in this particular time and place merits scholarly interest for a wealth of other reasons, in particular, it illuminates how gender and the law had a profound impact on both the experiences and trajectories of the enslaved.

This chapter explores the intersection of gender, sex, and slavery in the medieval dar al-islam (“the lands of Islam). A background survey is provided for sexual ethics, male social reproduction, and female sexual slavery in these societies that illustrates how Islamic sexual ethics, derived from the Quran, and the Islamic legal understanding of legitimacy were very different from those of Roman law, Christianity, late antique Judaism and seventh century Zoroastrianism. Two central questions of the chapter are how was the status of an enslaved woman defined and whether or not the child of an enslaved woman was born with slave-status. In classical Islamic law, the rule of umm al-walad (“mother of child”) meant that an enslaved woman who bore her Muslim owner a child gave birth to a free born person. The status of umm al-walad thus provided enslaved women with limited opportunities to assert their agency.

Much evidence – textual, material and documentary – points to slavery in the early and medieval Islamic Middle East (c. 600-1000 CE) as a social fact, persistent and multivalent. This is especially true for the urban landscape: the presence of enslaved and freed persons would have been impossible to miss. More difficult is the reconstruction of Middle Eastern agrarian slavery. This is a survey essay with particular reference to the early Abbasid Caliphate (c. 750-950) and select questions around which debate in modern scholarship has grown. One must comb medieval Arabic texts (literary and documentary) to reconstruct patterns of early Islamic-era enslavement; the organization and dynamics of slave commerce; the demands on slave and freed labor; and the (relative) social integration of the enslaved. The Arabic/Islamic library illuminates all manner of topics, religious and secular alike. Literary references to slavery and/or enslaved persons therein are plentiful and of a great variety. One has references in works of poetry and adab, an elastic term used for a variety of Arabic prose writings. Equally numerous are references in chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and works of geography and political thought. Medieval Arabic legal and religious writings provide a considerable number of references as well.

This chapter describes the forms of enslavement that existed in the Americas prior to contact with the Old World. Scholars have long avoided the subject due to their concern that indigenous Americans are already too much associated with savagery. However, the time has come to gather together all that we know of the varied forms of coerced labor. The information only helps us to humanize and comprehend ancient Americans. In Mesoamerica and South America, agricultural states did demand contributions from communities of laboring people; but though these people were diempowered dependents, they were not slaves. The vast majority of those who really were enslaved were prisoners of war who were maintained as domestics, most of them women. We even have some sixteenth-century texts that reveal something of these women's lives. Meanwhile, among the semi-sedentary peoples of North America, slavery likewise existed, as an effect of perennial warfare, but not nearly to the same extent as in the agricultural states to the south.

This chapter asks what light the well-known but little understood story of Augustine’s relationship to the mother of his first child can shed on our understanding of marriage as an asymmetrical institution in the Roman period. Reviewing the evidence that both pagans and Christians in late antiquity expected a ‘double standard’ for men and women where marital fidelity was concerned, we suggest that Augustine’s On the Good of Marriage argued for a new marriage ethics based on sexual symmetry, capturing a new spirit of criticism for the double standard in fourth-century preaching, and that Augustine invoked his own experiences (as recounted in the Confessions) in order to drive home his argument.