What kind of weapon is sex? Scholarship on the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90) has broadened the “war story” by foregrounding women’s perspectives as fighters and by adding complexity to militiamen’s narratives. Yet, while gendering the analysis, scholarship has not examined the role that sexual relations and sexual practices played in the war. Meanwhile, Lebanese Civil War–era cultural production, including films, novels and popular magazines, display sexual transactions and sexual violence as if they were common instances in the war. In this article, I engage an intertextual ethnographic reading of sex and sexual violence, combining the civil war’s cultural archive with oral histories that I conducted with former militiamen and militia women across Lebanon’s political spectrum, and with cis- and trans-women who had transactional sex with militia members, as well as urban participatory mapping and interviews with other participants in the war. Mapping the sex economy and sexual relations in the war reveals the central roles that sex played both as a traffic in and of itself, and as a tool of political governance of civilians, through a traffic in women. I argue that militias used sex and the threat of it for multiple purposes: as a form of mobility that enabled other goods to circulate more smoothly; as a tool of intra-sectarian extraction and coercion and as a weapon of patriarchal governance that kept civilians in their designated neighborhoods. While sex enabled cross-sectarian connections, the violent use of sex thus also reinforced sectarian social boundaries. My findings build on scholarship that has foregrounded the political economy of the war and on intersectional feminist analyses of political governance in Lebanon. The article is indebted to this scholarship as well as to ongoing civil society efforts to document sexual violence in the war.

Between 1847 and 1876, the textile factory Todos os Santos operated in Bahia. During these almost three decades, it was the largest textile factory in Brazil and came to employ more than four hundred workers. Until recently, many aspects of the factory’s labour force were hidden. There was a hegemonic narrative that all of these workers were free and waged individuals and that their living and working conditions were extremely progressive for the period. Meanwhile, there was a silence about the employment of enslaved people in the institution as well as a lack of in-depth analysis concerning the legally free workers. This article analyses labour at the Todos os Santos factory. On the one hand, it provides evidence on why the myth about the exclusive use of free and waged workers in the factory was formulated and the interests behind this narrative. On the other, through analysis of data from newspapers, philanthropic institutions, and legal and government documents, it reveals the profiles of the supposedly different classes of free and enslaved workers employed at Todos os Santos—men, women, and children of different colours—showing how complex, and often how similar, their living and working conditions were.

Between the mid-seventeenth and the late-eighteenth centuries thousands of enslaved people were brought to the British Isles. Many were enslaved, and they were publicly bought and sold, marked by brands, collars and manacles, and some were sent from Britain into plantation slavery. Slavery did not, hoverer, flourish in Britain. By the time of Somerset v Stewart (1772) and Knight v Wedderburn (1778) the large majority of people of color in Britain were free, many of them self-liberated. Despite the best efforts of enslavers to maintain their property rights in people, the enslaved regularly escaped. Newspaper “runaway advertisements” were invented in London during the second half of the seventeenth century, and between the 1650s and 1770s they reveal the development of the freedom seeker in the public sphere. The Somerset and Knight decisions did little to change slavery in the British Isles but rather confirmed a change that was all but complete. The most significant impact of the decisions was in the colonies, where planters interpreted the courts’ actions as evidence of a growing imperial threat to the institution of slavery

This special issue addresses the concealment of slavery and other forms of coerced labour. It brings together contributions from scholars working on different regions and time periods between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. The starting point is the observation that in the wake of abolitionism and imperial anti-slavery rhetoric, persisting areas of slavery and coerced labour became increasingly hidden. The term “hidden economies” helps to identify those areas that have been (and often still are) less visible for a variety of reasons, be it the development of shadow economies around them, the opacity of increasingly complex global supply chains, the remoteness of the region concerned, or the marginalisation of the economic sectors involved.

El presente ensayo examina los modos en que la novela Cadáver exquisito (2017), de la escritora argentina Agustina Bazterrica, habita y desafía la lógica capitalista de la cadena de montaje a través de estrategias literarias que a la vez encarnan y cuestionan el neoliberalismo exacerbado. El trabajo inicia con el rastreo de una propuesta teórico-crítica sobre trayectos literarios de la carne (Giorgi 2014) para luego analizar cómo el texto de Bazterrica dialoga con los conceptos de necroescritura (Rivera Garza 2013), mal de archivo (Derrida 1997) y montaje literario (Benjamin 2004a, 2004b). Este abordaje revela el modo en que diversas estrategias literarias —incluyendo el ensamblaje de escenas desmembradas, el uso del collage verbal, la función performativa del lenguaje, el desplazamiento metafórico-metonímico de las palabras y la tensión generada por eufemismos— socavan la práctica mecanicista y mercantilizante de la producción en serie de cuerpos y lenguajes. El artículo cuestiona, así, la interpretación de Cadáver exquisito como alegoría necropolítica, explorándola, en cambio, como dispositivo estético-político que tensiona las relaciones entre carne y palabra, interrumpiendo los principios rectores de acumulación y violencia que sustentan al sistema capitalista.

Dubbed ‘the Impaler’ by his contemporaries, Vlad III Dracula (c. 1431–76), was accused of the slaughter of between 40,000 and 100,000 individuals, 20,000 of them allegedly impaled at the Wallachian capital Targovişte. Although historians have often considered these figures inflated, none of the numerous studies dedicated to the voivode of Wallachia have undertaken a methodical evaluation of the extent of this exaggeration. This article takes up this historiographical challenge by examining all available documentation. In so doing, it provides a full reassessment of the practice of impalement in fifteenth-century south-eastern Europe. Contrary to assumptions of previous scholarship, Vlad’s use of impalement was influenced simultaneously by pre-existing Hungarian and Ottoman practices. Quantitative analysis shows that only 7–10 per cent of the impalements claimed by sources can be considered plausible and proposes a new data-driven estimation of Vlad’s impaled victims. Finally, a comparison with other rulers shows that, while Vlad ordered collective impalements more frequently, the average number of victims per impalement was similar to that elsewhere in south-eastern Europe.