Many people in early modern Dutch colonies were enslaved through legal and social mechanisms. This often happened within the context of household labour. Legal powers to command and punish domestic workers could be exploited by household heads to transform contractual labour arrangements into perpetual slavery. This project examines colonial court records from Dutch Brazil, Suriname, and the Moluccas to explore how households served as an ideological, legal, and social framework for imposing and resisting slavery. It will identify how colonial legal ideas and norms sustained different forms of coerced labour and laid ideological foundations for modern forms of domestic slavery.

The birth of philosophy in ancient Greece, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Holocaust: such emblematic historical moments are regarded as the building blocks of a quintessentially European past. But how "European" is this past if many in the non-European world have claimed competing representations of it as their own, and if many in the European world, in turn, have appropriated non-European claims to bolster their own sense of identity? This CRP argues that, far from being Europes exclusive property, the pasts constructed through such emblematic moments were shaped in global circulations of meaning, and that their ongoing significance is the result of situated co-productions in Europe and East Asia. Our aim is to trace how intellectual entanglements across the Eurasian region from 1600 to the present shaped the conceptualization of historical temporalities, or "chronotypes." To substantiate this hypothesis, we examine four such chronotypes, those of "awakening and rebirth, "recurrence and return," "decline and fall, and "timelessness and permanence." Through academic works, exhibitions, teaching modules, public lectures and discussions, produced by an advanced postdoctoral team, the CRP will impact both scholars and non-academic stakeholders by piercing culturalist myths of nationally-owned "pasts" in Europe and East Asia.