In the early modern period, forced labour went hand in hand with imprisonment and had an inherent punitive logic: the publicly performed labour of prisoners was supposed to have a deterrent effect and act preventively, similar to rituals of corporal punishment. In the context of the centralisation of absolutist power for the "state of common good", a complementary view of the work of imprisoned delinquents emerged: it had to be increasingly conveyed as a means of human improvement. The police objectives were combined with the reformatory purposes. Work became the antithesis of idleness, and in the penitentiaries of Europe the convicts not only had to be made to work for fiscal purposes, but the poor also had to be (re)educated to work.
This new moral-theological conception of work developed into a transconfessional and transcultural phenomenon. This work for self-improvement existed in work-houses in the Catholic lands of the Habsburg Crown, in tucht-huizen in the Reformed Netherlands, in Protestant penitentiaries of Prussia and Brandenburg, in English work-houses and in Russian Orthodox rabotnye doma. The discursive change in the concept of labour is closely linked with the change in the logic of punishment: it is no longer about punishment, but about educating, improving and re-integrating of the offenders.
The planned workshop brings together case studies from different cultural contexts: Austrian Lombardy, Prussia, the Russian Empire, Denmark, the center part of the Habsburg Empire (Vienna), England and France. It will ask about the genealogy of the discourse of labour and the possible transfers and retransfers of the concept of penal labour as a means of correction. How much humanism and how much rationalism underlay this change?
The workshop is also intended as a contribution to a global history of confinement.
The programm can be found underneath.