Books by Johan Heinsen
Articles by Johan Heinsen
Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, 2022
This article presents a micro-spatial study of the trajectories of two prison breakers in 18 th-c... more This article presents a micro-spatial study of the trajectories of two prison breakers in 18 th-century Denmark-Norway reconstructed from court documents and interrogations. Both men escaped multiple times from institutions known as slaveries ('slaverier')-convict labour institutions run by the army. Their repeated ights tie their stories to multiple circuits of labour and the practices of immobilization and coercion on which they rested. Thus, the article argues that the runaway can serve a contextualizing social history of coercion as a heuristic tool because the runaway moves both within, against and between regimes of immobilization, and in doing so shows us workable (and sometimes unworkable) pathways at speci c historical junctures. The article proposes the concept of runaway heuristics to capture how following the itineraries of runaways can help us trace entangled processes of labour coercion, but can also serve in a less systematic, but no less useful, way to reveal highly situated dynamics, sometimes singular and often unexpectedly contradictory. The latter dimension highlights the need to think through a variety of disparate elements that shaped the individual trajectory, including the physical surroundings through which escapees moved, and their accumulated knowledge of those surroundings.
International Review of Social History, 2020
New global histories of punishment are steadily decentring the history of punishment and convict ... more New global histories of punishment are steadily decentring the history of punishment and convict labour, challenging traditional conceptions of a linear path towards a single penal modernity and the penitentiary as the telos of its history. Through an exploration of three strands of extramural convict labour emerging in Copenhagen (1558), Ulm (1561), and Almadén (1566), this interpretative essay argues that this challenge can be furthered by taking a view of Europe's own penal history from which the focus is less on origins and more on how the landscape of punishment evolved through a continuous and largely contingent process of assemblage. In this process, a few key elements – labour, displacement, pain, and confinement – were combined and mixed to different effects in specific contexts. Along with that approach comes the need to historicize the process by relating it to other practices of labour coercion, both within the penal field and outside it.
Tilsløret af nattens mørke forfulgte et sørøverskib i begyndelsen af september 1680 et spansk ski... more Tilsløret af nattens mørke forfulgte et sørøverskib i begyndelsen af september 1680 et spansk skib ud for Paita på den peruvianske kyst. Sørøverne havde set lys blinke i horisonten, og i de følgende timer spejdede de fra deres mørklagte daek ud i den sorte nat. I det tidligste kolde morgenlys så de et sejl netop der, hvor glimt havde afgivet løfte om bytte. Spanske fanger fra en tidligere kapring fortalte dem om den prise, som endnu blot kunne skimtes i det fjerne: et handelsfartøj, der havde forladt Guayaquil elleve dage forinden. 1 Det udsete offer blev forfulgt på stor afstand i løbet af dagen, imens maendene på daekket talte om dets last. De hentede langsomt ind på spanierne, der tilsyneladende endnu ikke havde opdaget, at de blev skygget. Men med aftenens mørke kom også tåge, og sørøverne mistede byttet af syne. Det lignede endnu en skuffelse i et togt, der ikke havde indfriet forventningerne. I løbet af natten klarede det fugtige vejr dog op, og sørøverne så atter lysglimt. Endnu en lang dag i forfølgelse fulgte, og den nat halede de for alvor ind. Om morgenen var afstanden så lille, at sørøverne begyndte at forberede sig på kapringen, men først ved middagstid var de to skibe så taet på hinanden, at spanierne kunne se, hvem deres forfølgere var. Pistolskud ik dem til øjeblikkeligt at saenke sejlene i overgivelse, og på sørøverskibets daek rulledes terninger for at afgøre, hvem der skulle vaere først til at gå ombord hos jenden. Men byttets last kunne langtfra indfri forventningerne om sølv; i stedet fandt sørøverne kakaonødder, råsilke, indiske tekstiler og tømmer, foruden lidt braendevin og en anelse sølv. Tømmeret udgjorde hovedparten af lasten. Det var en skuffelse, der føles i et anonymt besaetningsmedlems beretning, hvor det tørt konstateres: "[...] and very little plate". 2
A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, 2018
A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility and Capitalism, 2019
Radical History Review, Jan 1, 2015
On early modern ships on the Atlantic Ocean, the sounds that the maritime lower classes produced ... more On early modern ships on the Atlantic Ocean, the sounds that the maritime lower classes produced with their tongues led the captains and officers to consider members of these classes as savage as the colonial others. The ar- gument presented here explores the ship as a world of sound and its lower classes' place within larger colonial soundscapes. This demonstrates how the sailor inhabited an ambivalent place between self and other. He lived within ships, which signified both the triumph of empire and potentially threatening aural spaces in themselves. The article then turns to English voyage narratives from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in order to show how sailors were conceived as making “noise.” Such descrip- tions worked anxiously toward silencing sailors by delineating what they had the ability to articulate on the basis of their social position. Hence, the sailor was thought by his superiors as unable to speak politically because such language was outside of what experience had taught him.
Journal of Global Slavery, 2021
In Scandinavia, a penal institution known as “slavery” existed from the sixteenth to the nineteen... more In Scandinavia, a penal institution known as “slavery” existed from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Penal slaves laboured in the creation and maintenance of military infrastructure. They were chained and often stigmatized, sometimes by branding. Their punishment was likened and, on a few occasions, linked to Atlantic slavery. Still, in reality, it was a wholly distinct form of enslavement that produced different experiences of coercion than those of the Atlantic. Such forms of penal slavery sit uneasily in historiographies of punishment but also offers a challenge for the dominant models of global labour history and its attempts to create comparative frameworks for coerced labour. This article argues for the need for contextual approaches to what such coercion meant to both coercers and coerced. Therefore, it offers an analysis of the meaning of early modern penal slavery based on an exceptional set of sources from 1723. In these sources, the status of the punished was ne...
Reports by Johan Heinsen
many different historical periods (from the Middle Ages onwards) participated. While scholars wor... more many different historical periods (from the Middle Ages onwards) participated. While scholars working on European history were heavily represented, there were also participants working on other settings such as the Dutch East Indian colonies, South America and the Soviet Union. This diversity helped bring the discussions into a comparative frame in which differences and commonalities emerged.
Papers by Johan Heinsen
Moving Workers
A key aspect of Denmark's early modern penal system was the continuous use of extramural convict ... more A key aspect of Denmark's early modern penal system was the continuous use of extramural convict labour in the service of the military state. 1 For more than two centuries, the punishment of hard labour in chains existed alongside the more well-known institution of the prison workhouse, forming a bifurcated prison system. Whereas both genders could be employed in prison workhouses to produce textiles, only men were sent to labour at naval and army facilities. 2 The latter punishment was known to contemporaries as "slavery", and the prisons housing the respective convicts at night as "slaveries". 3 Inmates worked on fortifications, shipyards, and docks, contributing to the construction and maintenance of the state's military infrastructure. They often laboured side by side with navy sailors and mercenary soldiers, though they were always recognisable as a distinct part of the workforce, identified by their chains andin later periodstheir prison uniforms. The system was linked to the larger Northern European military labour market and its state-driven trajectories of labour mobility and coercion. 4 Former soldiers from Denmark's mercenary army were disproportionately overrepresented among the inmates, with a large share of them being migrants from all over the Northern European market for military labour. This special form of punishment thus served the demands of the military state in multiple overlapping This chapter builds on my monograph Det Første Faengsel (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2018). I would like to thank Emilie Luther Valentin for providing feedback on the text.
International Review of Social History
This article examines the entangled logics of corporal and carceral punishments of mercenary sold... more This article examines the entangled logics of corporal and carceral punishments of mercenary soldiers in eighteenth-century Denmark. Beginning with the story of a single man and his unfortunate trajectory through a sequence of punitive measures before his death as a prison workhouse inmate, the article looks at how punishments of soldiers communicated in multiple ways and were used to a variety of ends that were both typical and atypical within eighteenth-century society. It argues that soldiers experienced a breadth of both corporal and carceral punishments that were, in many cases, designed to limit otherness while communicating exemplarity along a fine-tuned spectrum of pain. The clearest example of this was running the gauntlet; a harrowing physical ordeal meted out by the offender's fellow soldiers. Turning to the carceral experiences often initiated by this ritual, it then examines how former mercenaries experienced convict labour differently from other occupational groups...
Scandinavian Journal of History
This introduction discusses the constitutive role played by various practices of coercion within ... more This introduction discusses the constitutive role played by various practices of coercion within a range of labour relations across the Nordic region in the early modern period. In recent years a growing body of international literature has worked to re-conceptualize histories of labour coercion. Current trends in global labour history have emphasized the interrelational nature of labour regimes, eschewing traditional boundaries of free and unfree labour, productive and unproductive labour, wage labour and unpaid labour, and focused rather on the entangled history of labour and coercion in its various guises. Based on a critical discussion of the teleological frameworks and essentialized analytical categories that have largely characterized the historiography of labour in many of the Nordic countries, we argue for shifting the focus of attention to study the actual practices of labour and coercion in order to establish a more inclusive, contextual and historicized historiography of Nordic labour.
A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, 2018
Atlantic Studies, 2015
In 1683 the fragile Danish Atlantic was shaken by a mutiny orchestrated by a coalition of common ... more In 1683 the fragile Danish Atlantic was shaken by a mutiny orchestrated by a coalition of common sailors and convicts. On the way to St. Thomas in the Caribbean, they seized the ship, Havmanden, and killed their superiors. Among the dead was the newly appointed governor of St. Thomas, Jørgen Iversen. He was a veteran of Atlantic colonization and had been the governor of the Caribbean colony from its foundation in 1672 to 1680. In his absence the colony had devolved into a pirate's nest, and the Danish West India and Guinea Company hoped that his experience and authority could once again bring their small empire back on track. Instead, the mutiny further weakened their grasp on their Caribbean colony. In the night before the mutiny, the governor had attempted to quell the simmering disgruntlements on the ship by promising the convicts that he would treat them well when they reached the colony. However, they heard his promise as a threat. This article explores this discrepancy and places it in the context of circulating stories and rumours of violence, exploitation and death in the Caribbean. In exploring the contours of such storytelling felt only indirectly in the fragmented archival trail, this genealogy of a single speech act, in turn, raises questions about the role of speech in the making and unmaking of seventeenth-century Atlantic empires.
Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis/ The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History
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Books by Johan Heinsen
Articles by Johan Heinsen
Reports by Johan Heinsen
Papers by Johan Heinsen
From 15-18 August 2017, the 29th Congress of Nordic Historians will take place at Aalborg Congress & Culture Centre, Denmark. The main organisers are the Centre for History at the Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University, the Danish Historical Society, and the Nordic Committee for Historians. The congress theme is:
REFORMATIONS:
RESHAPING CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT
A reformation refers to the act or process of changing a condition - usually with reference to a state or way of thinking, perceived to be better or more pristine. The concept is commonly associated with the historical processes emerging from Martin Luther’s actions half a millennium ago, when in 1517, his 95 theses were nailed onto the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. But demands for reform are on-going, and the subsequent transformation processes are classical subjects of study for historians. In 2017, it is also the 30th anniversary of the UN report, ‘Our Common Future’, which introduced the need to reform humanity’s co-existence with nature. This and other of today's global challenges are increasingly addressed by Nordic historians. Reformations, in all their diversity, are the main theme of the Congress of Nordic Historians in 2017.
The Congress of Nordic Historians is, however, much more than celebrating two significant anniversaries. We therefore welcome submissions reflecting the state of all strands of historical research in and around the Nordic countries.
The programme will consist of thematic sessions, round table discussions and sessions of free presentations. The keynote speakers are:
PROFESSOR DAVID ARMITAGE,
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
PROFESSOR LYNDAL ROPER,
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS 1. SEPTEMBER 2016