Navigating Worlds of Coerced Labour

Coerced labour in its various forms is a persisting problem in today’s global economy, These forms are often labelled as Modern Forms of Slavery and exist in both the Global North and South. The historical roots of these modern coerced labour relations can be traced back to the development of capitalism and the emergence of a first global economy roughly 500 years ago. The rise of the first supply-chains of global commodities led to an increase in the procurement of labourers, the development of aggressive forms of “recruitment”, the emergence of new patterns of displacement, and the introduction and adaptation of various coercive forms of labour extraction: from slavery to systems of indentured work to coercive contracted migrant labour. These capitalist developments, in turn, were met by multiscalar forms of resistance at different moments of recruitment, extraction, and exit of labour relations.  

A lot of scholarly attention has been given to different forms of coerced labour relations. Many studies have focused on European indentured labour to North America, or from Asia to various regions such as the Americas and the Mascarenes. The majority of academic attention, however, has focused on enslaved labour and the trade in enslaved Africans in the Atlantic region. Yet, these bodies of literature tend to be self-contained, with limited dialogue across the various streams of scholarship while being influenced by distinct debates and trends in academia and the society at large. The study of the slave trade and slavery has undergone significant transformation in recent decades, largely driven by the advent of the Global and Digital Turns and the demands and expectations of communities, including those descended from enslaved Africans. A similar development is evident in the study of systems of indentured labor relations and coerced contracted migrant workers, which has only recently begun to evolve in a comparable manner.

The two-day workshop Navigating Worlds of Coerced Labour responds to the need to foster a more sustained dialogue among scholars working on various forms of coerced labour. Its objective is to promote the development of a shared research agenda that enables scholars to explore these labour relations in ways that reveal key similarities and differences, as well as shifts and continuities over time.

Practicalities

Date: 16-17 October, 2025
Time: 9:00 - 18:00
Place: IISG, Cruquiusweg 31, Amsterdam
Entrance: Free entrance. Do you want to join online? Please send an e-mail to event@iisg.nl 

For more information about the program, please contact britt.van.duijvenvoorde@iisg.nl
For more information about the projects involved the facilitation of this workshop, see https://voices.iisg.nl