Paolella, Christopher. Human Trafficking in Medieval Europe: Slavery, Sexual Exploitation, and Prostitution (Social Worlds of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, 7). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020.

Christopher Paolella is a Professor of History at Valencia College (Florida, USA). “Human Trafficking in Medieval Europe” is his first monograph, based on his dissertation, and a convincing longue durée narrative on the history of the slave trade in the medieval West. At its core, the book espouses an understanding of the concept of slavery taken from Orlando Patterson and Jennifer Glancy, which not only sees the relationship between master and slave as one of total domination of the latter by the former, but also considers the status and experience of a person of unfree status as fundamentally influenced by their gender. The book’s main thesis is that a pivot took place in the medieval systems of human trafficking, which saw their networks change around the 12th and 13th centuries, from the procuring of unfree labour for the fields and households of early and high medieval masters to the procuring of unfree sex “workers” for the booming high and late medieval sex industry. Through an analysis of the networks created and used for this trade, Paolella shows that this transformation did not happen abruptly, but through an adaptation of the existing networks to the evolving socio-economic and political transformations occurring throughout Europe.

Paolella’s five chapters chronologically lead the book’s narrative from late Antiquity to the 16th century. He portrays human trafficking and slavery as adaptive social systems, which were able to survive any political climate; for example, the fall of the Western Roman Empire. In this case he sees a clear continuation of Mediterranean and long-distance trading routes into the medieval period, a position inspired by Michael McCormick’s work on slavery and early medieval exchange, and in contrast with Alice Rio’s theory of a regionalisation of the slave trade before the Carolingian period. Equally, the chapters portray the medieval systems of human trafficking as strongly adaptive to changes in the economic make-up of the Euro-Mediterranean world; in Paolella’s narrative, this can be seen in the movement of the core networks of human trafficking to the Mediterranean as a result of the rise of the Italian cities and the growth of the trading routes on Muslim land, or in the establishment of networks for the provision of unfree prostitutes in brothels in high and late medieval cities. The networks were also deeply influenced and often supported by both local and larger politically relevant authorities.

Among this work’s many merits is its wide range, both chronological as well as territorial. Not only does it examine human trafficking through a truly longue durée-view, but its geographical scope is equally broad, studying several parts of Europe in detail, and in connection to the rest of the Mediterranean world. Such an approach is very rare in the study of premodern slavery, and it is helpful in recognising socio-economic patterns in the period. Moreover, the monograph shows a unique aptitude in portraying the violence permeating the processes and networks of enslavement. Particularly in regard to the earlier Middle Ages, many historians tend to eliminate slavery from the recounts of political and personal violence; Alice Rio has rightfully pointed to the difficulty of reconstructing the relationship between violence, conflict, and unfreedom in the period. Still, much is lost in estranging violence from unfreedom. Paolella on the contrary combines the information in medieval narrative sources with legal acts, inserting several microhistorical reconstructions in his book, truly showcasing the hardships encountered by enslaved people, and their potential for agency (or lack thereof). He provides a more emotional, if slightly ahistorical dimension to these stories, by adding fitting descriptions in ego-documents by modern women, enslaved in several ways in the US. These recounts emphasise the atemporal importance of the stories told by the book, and make the medieval sources feel more alive next to them.

I believe the book’s treatment of the medieval, and particularly the early medieval source material, requires further complexity. Much more so than for his study of high and late medieval Europe, Paolella tends to rely on historiographical and hagiographical sources for his analysis of the Early Middle Ages. While this is without a doubt a choice dictated by the scarcity of sources describing enslaving mechanisms and trading in the period, a stronger contextualisation of the source material and a more critical analysis of its social-historical content would have been desirable. Although the book rightfully discusses the place of hagiography in Merovingian Gaul for a sizeable portion of the first two chapters, the author does not take into account some of the important studies on this subject, for example those by Jamie Kreiner and Wolfert van Egmond. Another methodological decision that would require clearer outlining lays in the choice of territorial units for Paolella’s analysis. In its study of the Early Middle Ages, the book attempts to consider large portions of Europe, whereas the chapters on high and late medieval Europe focus solely on England and France, a choice which is not explained. One last point that should be mentioned is that Paolella’s narrative does not consider the Church a serious participant in the slave trade, which, in light of recent scholarship – for example by Stefan Esders, Mary Sommar, and Julia Winnebeck – is a position that is difficult to maintain.

All in all, this is a work of great value for scholars studying premodern unfreedom, may they be undergraduates or seasoned researchers. Its discussion of long-term socio-economic and political factors is without a doubt its primary asset, and provides an important stimulus to a field of study consisting for the most part of regional analyses. Its attention to reconstructing the conditions of premodern slaves is equally rare and noteworthy, both on a scholarly, as well as on an emotional level.