HUMSS - Giorgia Alù

Slavery, humanitarian rhetoric and global network: The case of the sulphur miners in Sicily

How do global concerns about slavery and attitudes to labour enter a public discourse in a specific historical period? What does shape diverse narrations? What effect do they produce? And what do they overlook? 

This paper aims to discuss how, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of twentieth centuries, the labour conditions of the sulphur miners in Sicily were recurrently understood and described through a problematic adaptation to and adoption of a humanitarian language that often employed a miner–slave analogy. By identifying some lines of convergence between diverse narrations this paper will explore how imaginaries about slavery shaped forms of understanding of labour and human subjugation in Southern Italy. It will suggest that foreign and Italian debates and representations placed Sicilian labour, directly or indirectly, in a pre-modern world and contributed to distancing the miners from the global network and modernity to which (paradoxically) they already belonged.