Haitian poetry experienced a shift, beginning as early as the 1870s, away from nationally inspired themes toward a greater insistence on poetic form and a penchant for contemplative verse. Poets often pondered abstract notions like the passage of time or the mysteries of nature. Other times they chose to write from the anguish of personal experience, mourning the loss of love to death or betrayal. Their melancholic reflections were not necessarily devoid of politics. Poets Virginie Sampeur, Massillon Coicou, and Etzer Vilaire composed their own eclectic poetry years before contributing to the famous journal La Ronde. Theirs is a poetics of ‘disenchantment’, a term that permeates the pages of the journal and characterizes their reactions to Haiti’s distressing domestic and international political situation. I offer an assessment of these three key poets and of the journal, affirming and going beyond the idea of the ‘understated political aspect’ of the movement. I demonstrate that the politics occasioning and emanating from this poetry embody distinctly Haitian calls for literary perseverance, a prescient battle for national preservation to which La Ronde is dedicated.

Migration destabilized family life, gender, and sexuality. Whereas most Turkish guest workers traveled alone during the formal recruitment period (1961–1973), West Germany’s subsequent policy of family reunification sparked the increased migration of spouses and children. This chapter shows that, although migrants developed strategies to maintain connections to home, separation anxieties and fears of abandonment loomed. The departure of able-bodied young workers strained local economies, upended gender roles, and separated loved ones, sparking tensions at home: were guest workers sending enough money home, communicating enough, and remaining faithful to spouses? In Germany, reports about sex between male guest workers and German women fueled Orientalist tropes about “foreigners,” perpetuated stereotypes about Turkish men’s propensity toward violence, and stoked fears about the transgression of national and racial borders. Women left behind worried that their husbands would commit adultery while abroad. Guest workers’ children were viewed simultaneously as victims and threats: some stayed behind in Turkey, others were brought to Germany, and thousands of “suitcase children” (Kofferkinder) repeatedly moved back and forth between the two countries with their bags perpetually packed. As physical estrangement evolved into emotional estrangement, the perceived abandonment of the family came to represent the abandonment of the nation.

This chapter focuses on the hundreds of the so-called criminal lunatics who appeared to slip between the gaps in psychiatric provision over the 1940s and ended up in the lunatic sections of the mandate’s prisons. Their abandonment, this chapter argues, was the product of often- fraught negotiations across state and society: mandate officials in particular worried that the families of the mentally ill were staging minor criminal offences in order to have their relatives bypass long waiting lists and access institutional provision. Through a careful reading of case files from the rich archive of the criminal lunatic section at Acre, this chapter delves into the complex dynamics that surrounded these individuals’ routes into – as well as out of – this institutional site. These stories reveal that neither insanity nor criminality was a stable category in mandate Palestine. But the case files, particularly the ‘delusions’ they record, also hold out the possibility of recovering the experiences and perspectives of those deemed criminally insane, and indeed their capacity to exercise a degree of agency over their lives.

Having addressed exploitation and violence towards elders, the book moves to consider how some enslavers chose the less physical – but no less cruel – route of abandoning, selling, or simply neglecting enslaved people once they had become “old and broken.” Chapter 2 covers manumission laws and the efforts of enslavers to work around these; the significance of age to the dynamics of, and experiences in, the internal slave trade; and the tragic consequences of neglect for elders deemed unproductive by those whom enslaved them. Proslavery claims of “retirement” or of care from cradle-to-grave were no match for the economic self-interest of enslavers, small and large, and the driving force of slavery revolved around taking the “best years and the best strength” from enslaved people. This chapter shows how enslaved people understood this exploitative dynamic, and the horrifying consequences of it for Black elders, all too well

This chapter uses an econometric, stochastic, model to answer questions on Roman Egypt. The questions posed are, how did the number of children impact on the financial position of ordinary families, and is it likely that parents were driven by debt to limit their family size by abandoning new-borns? The model examines the financial stresses and strains faced by typical families in rural Roman Egypt by tracking their net income, savings and debts over a generation to see how many families thrived or fell into financial difficulty. The plausibility of the model and its sensitivity to the key assumptions is assessed. It is concluded that whilst having children could certainly assist a family’s financial well-being over the long term, a large number of small children could act as driver to indebtedness, though the primary driver would still be the quality and variability of the harvest. Turning to the second question of family limitation, the model predicts that, as a minimum, there was a significant and socially visible chance that private and state tenants would have had to abandon a new-born from financial necessity. Some families would have had to resort to it on a number of occasions.

This chapter explores the nature of possession of property and what it means in the different contexts of personal property and land. Although the law characterises property in personal property or goods and in land in distinct ways, possession provides a shared conceptual link a party in possession of land or of personal property will generally have a right to protect that property against interference by any third party (except the true owner).

As the Çatalhöyük West Mound has been the subject of much new research during and after the completion of the Çatalhöyük Research Project, this chapter will provide a summary of the research conducted by the West Mound Project. This interdisciplinary project brought together many specialist scholars to address the variety of data created during the excavation of the West Mound. In this chapter we will review the research into the material culture of the West Mound, with attention to the importance of new architectural forms and painted pottery in the changing social and economic life of the period. In addition, plant and animal remains and the stone tool industries see some general trends that may signal changes the environment and the way domestic activities respond. We will conclude the chapter with a look at current discussions on topics that have been highlighted by this new research.

Chapter 4 examines how the entanglement between care and control transforms aid into a tool that filters marginalisation without directly excluding migrants from basic service provision. By looking at projects providing social assistance to migrants living in the big Moroccan urban centres, I argue that aid rather mediates the marginalisation of migrants through their inclusion in a parallel network of care. Developing in the interstices of a tight border and of an indifferent Moroccan state, this care is volatile: it rests on bureaucratised logics of filtering that normalise the abandonment of migrants. This care is also unaccountable: the actors providing assistance enact mechanisms which allow them not to see themselves as responsible for migrants’ grievances.

This chapter looks at the enslavement of children (below 16 years of age) from the 5th to the 15th centuries, focusing on the Mediterranean and the British Isles. It uses contemporary documents, such as personal narratives, laws, contracts, letters and ecclesiastical sources, to construct case studies illustrating the major ways that children could become slaves. These include capture in war or kidnapping and sale by pirates and unscrupulous slavers; abandonment as a newborn, rescue, and rearing as a slave; pledging into servitude by parents to pay a debt; and birth to an enslaved mother. Domestic slavery was the most usual fate for children, though a few boys were made into eunuchs destined for elite households in the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate, and girls might become concubines or sex slaves. There was little official effort to prevent child enslavement, although the Byzantine emperor Justinian attempted to abolish the use of children as debt-pledges and the enslavement of abandoned newborns, and banned castration within the bounds of his Empire. In general, the enslavement of even very young children and their transport across long distances was common and uncontroversial.

In June 2015, the body of a thirty-four-year-old Syrian woman who had perished at sea was exhumed from her grave in Sicily with the permission of her family, and reburied in Berlin. Part of a political demonstration called ‘The Dead are Coming’, the burial was led by an imam, and was marked by the absence of German politicians, whose names were taped to a row of empty chairs as mourners looked on.2 The reburial was the first in a series organised by a Berlin-based art group called the Centre of Political Beauty, which sought to bring the bodies of those who had drowned in the Mediterranean to ‘the heart of Europe’.3 Describing border deaths as a result of ‘our inaction’ and claiming to give the deceased ‘the dignity that they deserve’, the group stress that it is ‘not just about saving their dignity’ but also that of European populations.4 The Centre of Political Beauty advocates a form of ‘aggressive humanism’ that must ‘hurt provoke and rise in revolt’.5 Just as Antigone refused to be swayed by authorities in marking the death of her ‘dearest brother’ during 442 BC, activists as part of the group seek to ‘do wrong in order to do right’. In a situation whereby border deaths across the Mediterranean are perceived to be met with widespread indifference, the group advances a humanist intervention that ‘assaults’ a form of ‘political apathy’ which is deemed to be deadly. As such, ‘The Dead are Coming’ can be understood as nothing less than an insistent attempt to reaffirm dignity in a situation where it has become lost to both the dead and the living.

Marriage was often a way to contain the poverty of women and children and sometimes men.Men were expected to be the family breadwinners, earning enough to feed, clothe and house their wife and children.In reality, poorer women were always obliged to assist in supplementing or securing the family income, as were children. For many women, the desertion of a husband brought them and their children to destitution and they ended up in the workhouse.Desertion could occur at any point in a marriage, sometimes after a couple of days or even years later. The large number of newspaper notices placed by husbands cautioning the public that they would not pay any bills accumulated by their runaway wives testify to the way in which men and women took matters into their own hands to abandon a difficult marriage, without consulting a lawyer or, in many cases, their spouse.Sometimes spouses agreed to a desertion as a way of separating. The evolution of the law throughout the period saw the removal of legal constraints placed upon women granting them, for instance, greater property rights and economic autonomy.By the end of the nineteenth century, the law provided more substantial support to women who were deserted, or separated, particularly in the area of securing maintenance payments.