Claiming a Runaway Slave in the Holy Roman Empire: The Case of Samuel Johannes (1754)

This working paper presents research on the practices of coercion faced by enslaved or formerly enslaved individuals in Moravian church settlements in early modern Europe. It analyzes one of the few known cases of a runaway slave in premodern Germany and one of a very small number in which Moravians explicitly claimed authority over a person as a slave within a German principality. It is essentially an experiment asking what a semantic analysis of sources may reveal about forms of coercion at the intersections of Central European German estate-based society, Indian Ocean slavery, and Moravian missionary endeavors—intersections that produced liquid and overlapping forms of coercion and dependency, and therefore present quite daunting challenges to historical analysis.