SlaveCit - From slaves to citizens in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of people were the victims of mutual captive-taking between Islamic and Christian societies in the Mediterranean Sea. Many Mediterranean slaves were freed within their lifetimes, and some even gained local citizenship within the localities which had enslaved them. SlaveCit will investigate this phenomenon by reconstructing the patronate—an understudied institution through which freed slaves were forcibly incorporated into the kin groups of their former enslavers. In order to recover this cross-Mediterranean practice, the project will gather notary acts and court records held in archives in Genoa and in Algiers.