Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This Forum examines varieties of commodified labour and personhood in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The authors consider a range of ways in which human life and labour were commodified, from prostitution and pawnship to debt bondage, indentured servitude, enslavement, and onomastics. These foci offer numerous ways to think beyond current paradigms of labour, political authority, and the theorization of capital in our understanding of commodification. First, they allow us to think around the freedom/unfreedom binary normally invoked in Atlantic histories of labour by locating human commodification within a broader matrix of economic features and sociocultural ensembles. Second, they provide new approaches to the fluidity between personhood and objecthood–or more concretely, bodies and things–normally pursued from material culture perspectives. Third, the articles reveal previously veiled aspects of the relationship between markets, labour, and political authority. Finally, by bringing British and West African case studies into historical dialogue, the forum engages human commodification within the systematic theorization of capital. The contributors offer new historical perspectives on the transformation of human bodies and labour into commodities, but they also help historicize Marx’s understanding of commodities as shaped by the Afro-European encounters that gave rise to Atlantic slavery.
Source: Slavery and Abolition
Authors: Tawny Paul, Andrew Apter, Craig Koslofsky
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7130511117
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