"Reproductive Unfreedom and Human Trafficking in the Viking Age"
This talk charts the involuntary mobility of mostly nameless young women, trafficked into the Norse settlements in Iceland, the British Isles, and Rus’ from Eastern Europe, North America, and Central Asia. Looking at the confluence of archaeological, genetic, and documentary evidence, it explores how the forced migration and reproductive labor of these women constituted an essential aspect of the medieval world’s increasing globalization – although their descendants would ultimately obscure their individual and collective roles when writing the nation- and state-building narratives of later centuries.
Jacob Bell is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Illinois.