Chloe Bramwell

About Chloe’s Research:

This PhD project is an investigation into the global economies and regional markets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, their effects on labourers’ lives, and the long legacy of the “Commercial Revolution”. It places medieval history into its global context, with reference to the work of Janet Abu Lughod and World Systems Theory.

It will particularly seek to explore the economic function of the medieval slave trade, pervasive across Afro-Eurasia c.1250-1400, alongside commercial commodity production. This project will use the case study of wool production in Europe to argue for the existence of a medieval “triangle trade”, using English and Scottish raw wool, Italian woven textiles, and enslaved people from the Black Sea, using notary documents, chronicles and letters to demonstrate the interdependence of production and slavery.

By looking at European trade in its deep integration with a wider Afro-Eurasian world market, my project refutes Eurocentric perspectives that explicitly argue for Europe’s self-driven economic development, and Orientalist arguments that argue for stagnant Afro-Asian economies prior to European colonisation after the fifteenth century. Most crucially, my work will demonstrate how the macro-development of the Afro-Eurasian world market was dependent upon enslaved women’s labour in a period where the commercial and industrial importance of slavery has either been overlooked or explicitly denied. My project provides a new model for the gendered evolution of slavery, commerce and industry from the medieval to early modern periods.