Early Modern Literature and the Mediterranean Slave Trade

This volume explores representations of and attitudes to the Mediterranean slave trade in the literature and culture of early modernity.

Dear Colleagues,

During The Merchant of Venice’s central court scene, Venice’s Duke invites Jewish Shylock to take ‘pity’ on his adversary, stating that the Venetian merchant Antonio’s recent financial losses would solicit commiseration from ‘stubborn Turks, and Tartars never trained / To offices of tender courtesy’. Shylock’s stinging retort to his Christian audience calls attention to a signal activity in the Mediterranean littoral (and beyond) in the early modern period:

You have among you many a purchased slave,

Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules,

You use in abject and in slavish parts

Because you bought them.

Of course, Venice’s Mediterranean neighbours also purchased and put to abject work human beings. Slavery was well established throughout the Ottoman world and the Maghrib. In Shakespeare’s other Venetian play, Othello speaks of having been ‘taken by the insolent foe / And sold to slavery’, most likely a reference to Venice’s Ottoman enemy. Slave markets flourished across the Mediterranean, from Islamic Istanbul, Rabat, Tripoli and Tunis to Christian Naples, Valencia and Venice. If The Merchant of Venice represents Venice as a cultural and economic contact zone, then it also represents this maritime city and, indeed, the wider Mediterranean as, to borrow a phrase from Linda Colley, ‘a zone of captivity’.

This volume explores early modern literature’s and culture’s various representations of and attitudes to the Mediterranean slave trade.

This Special Issue seeks contributions that address any aspect of this topic, including but not limited to the following:

• Representations of the Mediterranean slave trade in literature and other media;
• Captivity narratives: reimaginings of self in terms of confessional identity, nationhood and/or ethnic or racial identity;
• The fluidity of borders and ethnicities;
• Renegades and risk;
• Differences between the Mediterranean and the transatlantic slave trade;
• Historical connections between the Mediterranean slave trade and (north) Africa;
• Various cultures' justification/condemnation of enslavement;
• European vilification of the Ottoman slave trade and simultaneous justification of transatlantic slaving;
• Paradoxical articulations of liberty and sovereignty by those engaged in the slave trade;
• Cross-cultural encounters;
• The decline of the Mediterranean slave trade in the eighteenth-century.

Dr. Christopher Ivic
Guest Editor

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