Slavery, normativity, and muslim-christian relations in early modern Genoa (1600-1800)

Historians of slavery in early modern Italy have primarily taken connected history as their paradigm, studying slavery as a form of forced mobility and labour in a Mediterranean and global context. Uncovering a large number of case studies, they have shown how economic and geopolitical factors such as corsairing and the ransom economy turned the Mediterranean into an interconnected field, whose inhabitants frequently crossed cultural, political, and confessional boundaries. In this thesis, I take a different approach, studying slavery and cross-confessional relations from the perspective of normative regimes. I argue that slaves and slaveholders in the Mediterranean did not act spontaneously, but according to a relatively stabilized, local normative regime which they referred to as “the law”. Taking Genoa as my scale of analysis, I uncover a number of institutions—understood as the constructed forms of social life—which actors reproduced in their specific contexts. Although these institutions often went unspoken, I contend that they governed practices as diverse as concubinage, slaves’ ability to hold and trade goods, and the relationship between manumitted slaves and their former masters. Analysing a wide variety of sources such as deeds, petitions, and court records, I argue that documents were not only the result of these institutions, but the very tools through which they were constructed. It is my contention that these tools were not only used by slaveholders and legal practitioners, but by the enslaved themselves.