Spirited away: Race, slavery and childhood in early modern England
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This essay explores the insidious but persistent desire to affix whiteness to modes of bondage and to argue for an original ‘white slavery’ located in early modern forms of traffic, indenture and forced transport. This essay aims to recover the genealogy of this belief, beginning with one of its conceptual origins: the practice of ‘spiriting’ in the seventeenth century. Reading accounts of ‘spiriting’, I firstly trace the narrative genealogies of English bondage to argue that consent emerges as a racialised rubric. Secondly, I think in particular about the representation of (very different kinds of) spirits in contemporary literary and cultural texts, including The Tempest , to suggest that even as they engage and anticipate the practice of ‘spiriting’, they also strategically elide their own histories of the traffic and transport of non‐white bodies. As one early modern understanding of ‘spiriting’ specifically comes to associate the practice with the capture and bondage of children, the nexus of slavery, race and children emerges as particularly fraught. If ‘white slavery’ denotes the limit case for the legibility of slavery, the photographs of ‘white’ enslaved children later circulated by white abolitionists in the nineteenth century to invoke sympathy for their cause played on the fundamental irreconcilability of ‘whiteness’ and bondage even as they re‐asserted the imbrication of slavery and sanguinity. This study attends to the trajectory of discourses of slavery written on and in the body to explore the histories of both a contemporary and an insistently current investment in frameworks of ‘white slavery’, as it attempts to discover the early modern frameworks for the legibility of race and slavery as they were co‐articulated ‘before’ the supposed ‘emergence’ of either.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".