In early modern Denmark-Norway, male convicts were often sentenced to hard labour in institutions known as 'slaveries'. The labour they performed benefitted the army and the navy. The largest of these penal labour institutions were the prisons Trunken (1620-1741), located at Copenhagen's naval dockyard, and Stokhuset (1741-1860) located in northern Copenhagen. At night, convicts were locked up inside these prisons. During the day, they worked in gangs at the docks or around the city. Their primary function was to assist in the building and maintenance of the state's military infrastructure-ships and fortifications. This article uses prison registers from the period 1690 to 1790 (a total of 4300 convicts) to identify the many different paths that led men in and out of this type of penal labour institution. Using an approach inspired by Marcel van der Linden's work on the global history of coerced labour, life as a convict labourer is analysed at three different moments: entry, extraction of labour, exit. Each of these moments is shown to hold many possible variations. Sometimes the lives of convicts even came to form loops in which exit from one type of coerced labour only meant entry into another. Two individual life stories are explored in order to show the complexity this could entail in practice. © 2018 Forlaget Aktuell AS. All rights reserved.

prison Forced labour Global labour history Military state

[No Keywords available]