Punishment, Labour and the Legitimation of Power, edited by Adam S. Fagbore, Nabhojeet Sen, and Katherine Roscoe, is the second volume in the series Social History of Punishment and Labour Coercion, initially published by Amsterdam University Press and now under Routledge. The series intends to be a 'platform for expansive understandings' of both punishment and labour coercion. By 'expansive', the series editors mean the analysis of a broad range of forms of punishment, enforced either by state apparatuses or non-state actors, as well as a wide spectrum of labour regimes, from wage labour and enslavement to indenture, tribute, convict, or unpaid labour.
This collective volume reflects that ambition not only in its thematic range, which includes under the notion of 'punishment' practices such as imprisonment, branding, banishment, convict labour, debt bondage, and penal servitude, but also in its geographical and temporal coverage. Overall, it spans over five millennia across four continents, from ancient Mesopotamia to eighteenth-century Japan, China, and Mongolia, and from Merovingian Gaul to nineteenth-century Portuguese Africa.
A rich introductory essay by the volume's three editors provides the framing for these diverse themes, geographies, and temporalities. They establish theoretical unity via a ‘Trans-cultural and Trans-epochal Perspective on Labour Mobility,’ defining the term not only as the capacity to move but also as the mobilisation into coerced labour.
The essays are organised into three clearly defined analytical axes, each comprising three chapters, which together trace three distinct temporal arcs from antiquity to the contemporary period.
Part I examines the relationship between punishment and the production of labour relations, both in its role of sustaining existing labour regimes and also in generating new ones. It includes contributions that explore punishment as a means of facilitating well-known shifts between labour systems, such as the end of slavery in the Atlantic world, but also as a mechanism for managing the workforce in less familiar contexts of heightened labour demand, such as ancient Egypt.
It is from this latter historical context that the section opens, with Adam Simon Fagbore's study of Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt. This contribution examines the central government's attempts to immobilise personnel within protected royal and temple endowments through a broad range of punitive practices, which targeted not only field labourers but also local officials who failed to […]
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DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2671638
