While the economic involvement of early modern Germany in slavery and the slave trade is increasingly receiving attention, the direct participation of Germans in human trafficking remains a blind spot in historiography. This edited volume focuses on practices of enslavement taking place within German territories in the early modern period as well as on the people of African, Asian, and Native American descent caught up in them.

The European Experience in Slavery assembles experts on the repercussions of the transatlantic as well as Mediterranean slave trade in different countries of early modern Europe for the first time, demonstrating that human trafficking was indeed a pan-European phenomenon. Focusing on entanglements between slavery and other forms of dependency, this collection shows how the former was woven into the fabric of early modern European society.