Comment: Early Modern Social Struggles, Participation, and Rights: A Non-linear Story

This short concluding essay will reflect on the four contributions that focus on the early modern period (generously conceived): Jorun Poettering details some of the social and cultural practices of enslaved Africans in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, Rachel Renault analyses bread riots in the German town of Erfurt in 1771, Erica Heinsen-Roach looks into seventeenth-century efforts to redeem Dutch sailors enslaved in the Mediterranean, and Hannes Ziegler explores the socio-legal practice of ‘common informing’ in (mainly) eighteenth-century England.