Celebrate the end of the academic year at our annual International Book Blitz. At this popular event, open to all Weatherhead affiliates, a panel of faculty and alums will each give a seven-minute “speed talk” about their recent book, launching us into compelling issues from around the world.
EREZ MANELA: Welcome, everyone. For those of you I don't know, my name is Erez Manela. I'm the Acting Director of the Weatherhead Center this year. And I am delighted to welcome all of you to the fifth annual International Book Blitz here at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
This is one of our favorite events-- really, it's one of my favorite events-- here at the Weatherhead Center annually. It showcases the depth and breadth of our amazing affiliates, past and present. The work presented here today reflects research projects on topic from around the world, many of which were supported by the Weatherhead Center.
If you haven't been to the Book Blitz before, the format is different-- blessedly different-- from the standard book talk. What we have here are six distinguished authors from across the social sciences whose books were all published in the last year. So this is fresh out of the oven. That's a requirement to be included, the book has to be published in the last year.
Each author has exactly seven minutes to present their book-- yes, let me just repeat that-- exactly seven minutes to present their book. We know this is a tall order, but this is what we promised you, the audience. And it will be strictly enforced by our timekeeper, Michelle, here, who has a bell. When you hear the bell, all six of you, please wrap up. I guess it's five. Taeku will see if he can make it. And so, the bottom line here is, in less than 45 minutes, you get to hear about six books. I don't know where else you get a deal as good as that.
We also, in the interest of time, forego extended introductions. So I won't give you all of the titles and achievements and publications of our speakers here. I will just, very, very briefly, tell you who they are, their names, and the titles of their books. And this will be in the order in which they speak.
So first, to the far left, we have Eram Alam, from history of science, and she is the author of The Care of Foreigners-- How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare.
Second, we have Bruno Carvalho, from romance languages and literatures and African and African-American studies. He is the author of The Invention of the Future-- A History of Cities in the Modern World.
Third, we have, right behind me here, Ian Kumekawa, who is a former graduate student and a Weatherhead affiliate now at MIT, author of Empty Vessel-- The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge.
We are hoping that Taeku Lee will show up. He is delayed, by no fault of his own. If he does show up, he'll be the fourth presenter. If not, we'll see if he can show up before the end and still present. But just in case he shows up, I'll tell you that he is from the department of government, and he is the author of a book called Billionaire Backlash-- or, rather, co-author-- The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy.
We have to my right here Gabrielle Oliveira, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and she's the author of Now We Are Here-- Family Migration, Children's Education, and Dreams for a Better Life.
And finally, we have Dan Smail-- he would like for you not to call him Lord Smail-- from the history department, author of Magdalena Coline-- A Life Beyond Slavery in Mediterranean Europe.
Now, before we get started with Eram, I'd like to take a moment to thank the incredible staff that we have here at the Weatherhead Center for their continued hard work and for making the magic that makes this place run.
Please join us afterwards for a reception to celebrate all of your hard work.
Without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to our first author.
Eram, please.
[APPLAUSE]
ERAM ALAM: Good afternoon, and thank you so much for the invitation, to Erez, to the organizers. I'm very happy to explain a little bit about my book. So I'm going to start post-book to set it up.
So on September 19, 2025, immigrant physicians unexpectedly came under threat. Trump signed an executive order that instituted a $100,000 processing fee for the H-1B visa. And this visa is an employer-sponsored visa that allows US companies to temporarily employ foreign professionals who are considered skilled in specialty occupations. So while this was largely aimed at the tech industry, foreign physicians became collateral in this new arrangement.
Hospitals, it turns out, routinely used this type of visa to fill their staff vacancies. So before this executive order, the cost of this was between $2,000 to $5,000 per visa application. So huge change after this executive order. Within a week, the American Medical Association, the largest medical organization in the country, and more than 60 other medical organizations, warned that this policy would severely endanger care in already under-resourced urban and rural hospitals throughout the country. They stressed that there's a large number of immigrant physicians who staff these areas and care for millions of vulnerable patients.
So in my book, The Care of Foreigners, I ask, how did this come to be? How is it that, for the last 60 years, roughly a quarter of the physicians in the United States have been immigrants, who disproportionately work as primary care providers in America's neglected urban and rural communities? And what have their experiences in this country been like? So to answer these questions, I recreate the journey of the first cohort of practitioners through a legislative, bureaucratic, clinical, political, and public sphere since 1965.
So this migratory regime was initiated in 1965, with the passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act, and it was a response to a geopolitical and a domestic concern. So prior to 1965, the most comprehensive piece of legislation passed in the United States was the 1924 bill, and it had two components-- the Asian Exclusion Act, which is exactly what it sounds like, and a quota for immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.
So by the 1960s, during the height of the Cold War, this kind of nativist, isolationist, very eugenic immigration policy was not going to hold water. As the United States was trying to enter into this new position as a superpower, it couldn't signal to the rest of the world that it was this closed kind of place. So lawmakers really feared that these emergent, post-colonial, Asian and African nations would get seduced by the Communist sphere of influence and they would be persuaded to join and leaned that way, instead of joining the United States. So immigration became this really important foreign policy tool to signal to these countries that the US was welcome, that they wanted these countries to enter into this capitalist orbit.
On the domestic front, civil rights legislation forced desegregation of hospitals. And, additionally, Medicare and Medicaid, which passed only three months prior to this piece of legislation in July, facilitated the entry of over 23 million high-need medical care users into the marketplace overnight. So now this question is, but who's actually going to provide care for all of these new patients? Because, as now, back then, there was this shortage of physicians.
So in response to these two kinds of concerns-- this geopolitical issue and this domestic concern-- legislators included a provision in this Hart-Celler Immigration Act that expedited the entry of skilled labor if there existed a shortage in the United States, which there was, and they recruited physicians from strategic nations, such as India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and later Nigeria, to provide care across the country.
So despite the clear need of these practitioners and their legal entry, organized medicine, which is kind of the medical establishment, was suspicious of their skills and their expertise. They were weary of these non-white professionals, with accented English, who were claiming a status and authority of physician. And I think, really, at the core of this sentiment was an issue of trust. So how do we know who you are, first of all, and how can we be sure that you possess the knowledge that you claim to have?
So there was this deep reliance on bureaucratic procedure and excessive documentation to try to fix these individuals, figure out who they were, what they were about. And organized medicine instituted this elaborate documentary regime that was necessary to translate these practitioners from elsewhere into some kind of standardized US practitioner.
So after successful completion of this bureaucratic process, a foreign physician was able to enter the clinic, and here they ran into additional challenges. So even if their paperwork was in order, often organized medicine was skeptical of these practitioners' ability to actually perform this kind of expertise, often deploying racialized and gendered critiques of these immigrant physicians. But nevertheless, despite these disparaging characterizations, immigrant physicians developed creative strategies and practices in order to yield successful therapeutic encounters.
Finally, fast-forwarding a little bit into the 1980s, they were frustrated by this ambivalence that they experienced. So on the one hand, they're being recruited and invited into the country to provide care where US physicians won't go. And on the other hand, they're being treated with this kind of suspicion once they arrived. And so, they started to organize and demand better treatment.
Their political awakening, I argue, recruited and remixed anti-colonial discourse as well as civil rights demands, and they framed their grievances in terms of employment around justice, this anti-discriminatory treatment that they wanted. And they really started to chart a course of political action. And in this collective effort, South Asian physicians really emerged as the most vocal contingent, spending time and resources to hire lobbyists, campaign for congressional representatives. They financed many campaigns. And they really started to, at every turn, challenge the American Medical Association's dismissive posture towards them.
So I end with a reflection in the present and argue that, in many ways, the care of foreigners really ends where it began. 60 years ago, there was a doctor shortage that was declared during the Cold War as Communist threats loomed, and today new shortages threaten the country while authoritarianism takes hold and xenophobia abounds. For immigrant physicians, and the approximately 80 million patients who rely on them, health care precarity is compounded by these unpredictable immigration policies. And I argue we need bold, coordinated, comprehensive reform of both health and immigration to secure reliable medical care for everybody in this country. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
BRUNO CARVALHO: That was excellent. Thank you, Eram. Thank you to the organizers. Thank you all for being here. I have, at this point, given so many book talks, but this is the first one where I am genuinely nervous.
[LAUGHTER]
Seven minutes?
So The Invention of the Future. So the title here refers to how, in the 1700s, especially in Europe, some began to imagine that the future-- or, at least, to increasingly imagine that the future would be very different from the present and the past. It would no longer be predetermined by divine or supernatural forces, but rather, increasingly, the idea among some was that the future was something to be built by humans on Earth.
The book, then, is a history of cities as a major expression of that idea. And it tries to rethink the history of the modern world as amid a set of competing visions over what the future ought to be like. So the book, in each chapter, sort of moves across these large-scale shifts in technology, politics, culture, at the same time as it then focuses with greater detail on case studies in particular cities in moments of very major transitions in urban planning.
So we open with the reconstruction of Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake as an Enlightenment capital. We then get to the early 1800s, the Commissioners' Plan in New York City-- the Manhattan grid largely as we now know it-- as an even more radically secular plan, or almost a plan without a plan. We then move to mid-19th century Paris, with its very famous reforms under Napoleon III as a city that then becomes a model and an image for urban futures throughout the globe.
We now arrive to the early 1900s, in [INAUDIBLE], Rio, Brazil's capital, so one of the instances where Paris becomes a model, but now in a city on the wake of abolition. We then get to chapter 5, in Buenos Aires, in the '20s and '30s, which is a particularly rich case study through which to think of various crossroads and many different planning paradigms, most of which are now understanding that you really have to think of urban futures at a metropolitan scale.
And then, the last case study is post-World War II-- Lagos, but also suburbia in Brasilia, the very overwhelming victory of the car, car-centric planning, and urbanization, the explosion of self-built neighborhoods, and then, of course, the present of megalopolises and the urban boom now largely outside of the Atlantic world.
Oh, I forgot to put the timer.
So it's a history of cities through the perspectives of planners, but also all kinds of people that lived in and moved to cities in search of dreams, desires. It's a story of their aspirations, their anxieties, as you might imagine.
There's a very wide range of sources that I draw on, from official records and reports to oral histories, music, fiction. There are some 60-plus illustrations. I tried to take account of the role of data and deities, statistics and stories.
There's an arc in these three centuries towards the human confidence in our ability to shape the built environment. And then, more or less around World War I as a pivotal moment, the future becomes increasingly not just something to be pursued, but also something to be prevented. Utopias lose appeal. Dystopias emerge. Of course, climate change will intensify that sentiment closer to the present. So dreams shatter, they foreclose, they fracture, at the same time as the urban boom continues. People are still moving to cities, seeking for better possibilities for themselves.
So there are many arguments folded into these pages. The history of urban planning is full of unintended consequences. It's a history of unimaginable developments. There's a quote from 1848 which somehow captures this. "What was scarcely conceivable yesterday is reality today and history tomorrow." One of the key arguments is that reasonable expectations, including data-centric predictions, tend to underestimate the range of potential outcomes. Neither technical models nor our imagination have quite managed to keep up with developments over the past 300 years or so. History can therefore remind us never to assume any given prospect as inevitable, to stay alert to unknown unknowns, as they lurk into reality.
In the conclusion, we then have an argument around how sometimes yesterday's solutions become tomorrow's or today's problems-- car-centric planning being chief among them-- and how sometimes, conversely, yesterday's problems can become today's solutions. Density in the 19th century, a city produces overcrowding, disease, pollution. Of course, in our present, compact city fabric, transit-rich, can provide us with energy efficiency, dynamic, vibrant environments.
So I tried to make it a good read. I hope some of you will pick it up. And I yield. Was that the beep?
A minute left?
[LAUGHTER]
I will yield it. I'm afraid of-- [LAUGH] --if I open up a new parentheses, I don't think I could close it in a minute. So thank you all.
[APPLAUSE]
IAN KUMEKAWA: Well, thank you to the organizers, and thank you all for coming. It's a real pleasure and an honor to be here.
Empty Vessel is a pandemic project. My wife and I were living in New York in 2020, and my wife is a public defender. She had clients who were in the South Bronx who were incarcerated on what was called "The Boat." And "The Boat" was a jail barge. It was the last remaining prison ship in the United States. And I became fascinated-- shocked, but also fascinated-- by why it could be, how it could be, that there was a jail barge in New York in 2020. My own training is in British imperial history, and it immediately called to mind the hulks that were such a staple of the British carceral system in centuries gone by.
So it's the pandemic, what do you do? You Google. So I did a bunch of googling about this barge, and I realized that it did have a very interesting history, but, actually, there was a barge that it replaced, a barge that was moored off of Lower Manhattan in the '80s and '90s that had an even wilder history. And so, I took my googling to another level, and I started having Zoom conversations, which turned into more structured interviews, with everyone I could find to tell me more about this barge-- people who were incarcerated on it, people who worked on it, people who built it, people who owned it. And the story that transpired took me from what I thought was going to be a simple article to a book, and that's the story of Empty Vessel.
Before I tell you about this story, let me tell you a little bit more about the central character, the barge. The barge is 94 meters long. It's a flat-bottomed, steel hull that basically is painted a very dull gray. It's completely uncharismatic. And on top of this flat-bottomed hull, there are five levels of what are effectively standard shipping containers. And it is in these shipping containers that people were incarcerated, but, also, people lived, in other contexts.
The barge is, as I said, uncharismatic. It was described by an early owner as a big shoebox. Its technical classification is as dumb pontoon. But despite it having this really sort of anti-charisma, it had this really remarkable story. And that story starts in the '70s, when it's built in a Swedish shipyard with tons of government money. It's a product of great industrial subsidy. It's commissioned by a Norwegian shipping magnate, someone who is called the "limited liability king" of Norway, who wants to use this vessel to house offshore oil workers in the booming North Sea offshore sector.
From the North Sea, it goes to the Falklands, where it houses British servicemen and airmen. In the aftermath of the Falklands War, goes to Emden, in West Germany, where Volkswagen leases it to house VW workers who are learning how to run a computerized line. This is in the midst of the "car wars" in the '80s, and VW is both offshoring jobs, but it's also investing very heavily in technology. Then it goes to New York, where it's the prison-- the jail. Goes to UK, where it's a prison. Goes to Nigeria, where it is put, again, in service of the offshore oil industry, in one of these free-trade zones off of Onna.
So that is the physical journey it takes. But what was more captivating for me was that, over the years, as it moved around, it became involved in almost every aspect of the offshore world that I could imagine. So it's a ship. It's a vessel. It's literally apart from land. It's jurisdictionally offshore. The reason that New York City penal authorities want it in the city is basically to sidestep zoning regulations.
It is, of course, involved with offshore oil. It is registered in a series of flags of convenience. These flags account for, today, upwards of 70% of global shipping tonnage. It's owned by companies that are themselves registered in tax havens. And these tax havens-- Emmanuel Saez and others have estimated that those tax havens have upwards of $15 trillion parked in them. And it's haggled over in international arbitration. So it really is this creature of the offshore.
So that's what the book is about. It is a global micro-history of a barge, but it is also a story of these unbelievably transformative, important, economic transformations that have shaped our world over the last 50 years-- globalization itself, but also the rise of the offshore. And these are abstractions. They're hard to deal with. They're hard to pin down. And what Empty Vessel offers is a barge's-eye view. It offers a red thread, by following something that is inescapably concrete, uncharismatic, a thing. Through this journey, both physical and more metaphorical, it allows us to see how these abstract transformations both interplayed, but also were played out, in very material ways in a set of these local contexts. So that's what it is. Thanks very much.
[APPLAUSE]
GABRIELLE OLIVEIRA: Thank you so much. It's such an honor to be here today with all these incredible authors. I agree that seven minutes is scarier than a full book talk.
So my book is Now We Are Here-- Family Migration, Children's Education, and Dreams for a Better Life. So to give you a sense of what the book is about, I'd like to begin with a brief excerpt.
"I think people don't understand how much we want to live," Adriana, a 15-year-old migrant youth from Brazil, explained to me. "When people ask me, why did you come here, I tell them that's the wrong question. The right question is, do I have the right to have a good life, to dream?" As we sat in the cafeteria of her school here in Massachusetts, she continued, "If we were all equal, like we should be, or like we are in the eyes of God, don't you think people would understand when somebody leaves their home?
Sometimes I feel like only the rich get to have a purpose, and me and my family, we have to explain and explain ourselves. Wanting a good school, good education, having a chance, is that a crime? [NON-ENGLISH SPEAKING] I almost have to apologize for being here. Well, here I am now. Now we are here." Adriana and her family made their way from Brazil to the US-Mexico border in 2018. They were detained together and released after almost two weeks, then traveled to Massachusetts, hoping to forge a better life.
Theirs is one of 16 stories at the center of this book-- families from Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras who crossed the border between 2018 and 2019, at the height of restrictive US immigration policies, namely the zero tolerance family separation policy and the migration protection protocols known as the "Remain in Mexico" policy. The zero tolerance policy specifically separated more than 5,000 children and detained more than 60,000 families.
Based on three years' of ethnographic research, this book interweaves stories of parental sacrifice, children's embodied experiences of migration, children's responses to border crossing experiences, and the compounding weight of a global pandemic on families already navigating housing insecurity, interrupted schooling, prejudice, and fear.
What holds these families together, or what they held on to, was the idea of an education. For parents and children alike. US schooling represented something stable in the middle of profound rupture, a place where opportunity lived, where the journey north might finally mean something. The book asks how that promise played out. How did multiple disruptions-- migration, harsh border policies, a pandemic-- shape what children experienced inside and outside of schools? And how did schools respond to the knowledge, the trauma, and the resistance that these families brought with them?
The heart of this book, though, is the children, how they play, laugh, struggle, overcome, tell stories, and resist. We don't have enough research that deeply engages with children as full beings and not just with the assumption of them being the process of becoming. Listening to children and youth is an imperative to understand how migration policy shapes their lives.
Cruz, who was 7 and had migrated with his parents from El Salvador, explained, "Depending on what happens at the border, the people in the government can decide what they do with you." William, an eight-year-old from Guatemala, noticed the different uniforms of police officers when his family arrived at the border. Some of them had brown clothes, some had black clothes, some people had normal jeans and a T-shirt, but they were also police, he said.
While playing with toy cars on his terrace at his home, William, who was separated from his father for several weeks, told me he had ridden in many different vehicles in the last year. This one-- he held the toy-- belongs to the police on this side, and that one is with the one that wears brown clothes. Border Patrol agents usually wear dark green, and ICE agents usually wear black. These encounters at the border remain with children long after separation and detention.
In another instance, during a pair-and-share literacy assignment at a school, William told a friend that his dad had to wear an ankle monitor for months after being released in the US. Andrew, his classmate, replied that a neighbor had cut off his own and threw it in the lake, so the thing would drown. When their teacher, Mrs. Diaz, overheard, she said, "I don't like this kind of talk here. I don't need anyone else feeling scared, OK? It's in the past."
The boys looked at one another, and they felt connected. Andrew whispered again to William, "Tell your dad." Children sharing border experiences inside schools and classrooms happen often. And in one of the chapters in the book, I explain these dynamics I have termed pedagogies of silence, where educators hear children's knowledges about the border, but they decide to skip, reroute, silence, in order to protect them.
So who cares? We should all care, not because one in four children in the US public schools are children of immigrants, not because over 36 million children are on the move worldwide and will eventually sit in a classroom somewhere, not because multilingualism and inclusion are good for everyone, but because we shouldn't need to explain caring for migrant children and youth.
In the book, I argue that American society has conditioned its recognition of immigrant children's dignity on extraordinary performance-- the exceptional student, the inspiring story, the child who earns their place. Now We Are Here challenges this framework at its roots by turning toward the ordinary, the daily rhythms of life, the invisible labor of care, everyday schooling, the remarkable moments that constitute childhood. This book insists that dignity is not a reward for exceptionalism.
Adriana, the 15-year-old I quoted in the beginning, knew this. She was asking whether she had the right to dream and to ask for a better education. She gave us the answer, yes, unconditionally. And this work bears witness to the families who have been living that truth, quietly, daily, powerfully, all along. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
DANIEL LORD SMAIL: Well, thanks to everyone. I feel like I have my summer reading laid out for me already. This is fantastic.
So we're going to go back a bit in time. This book began in 1998. I was working in the archives of the City of Marseille. I was exploring a series of records emanating from courts of law around 1400 or so. And I came across this utterly amazing case where this formerly-enslaved North African woman was suing her former enslaver just for a small debt. It was 300 pages long. Really incredible.
So at the time, I had other things on my mind. Most of us, we have other projects to do. And I just kind of set this aside, and I sort of promised myself I'd come back to it at some point. It took me two decades to come back to this story. And it turned out to be a fortuitous delay because, in the interval, there was a dramatic transformation in the historiography of slavery in later medieval Europe, and it gave me a whole new framework to tell the story that I wanted to tell about this woman.
So in these remarks, I'm going to focus, actually, on the framework. The book itself is a micro-history. It's a lot like Ian's, except it has a person, rather than a boat. And the story is maybe not right for an audience of international historians, but the explanatory framework, this new historiographical turn, is global and it's inter-regional. And these are themes I really spend a lot of time on the first two chapters of the book.
So I'd just like to give some highlights of how this framework is looking. So for centuries, the history of slavery in Europe was told as a story of an institution that had flourished in the ancient world and then it had withered and died during the Middle Ages. So for example, in 16th-century France, the disappearance of slavery was linked to the rise of a nation, a civilization, a people that were committed to the idea of liberty, where slavery was just incompatible with French values. In the 20th century, obviously, it has all got refitted onto a Marxist chronology. And it's what we all learned, this sort of story emerging through Rome, through the Middle Ages, and then beyond.
Now it just seems extraordinarily problematic, when you look back on this literature that we once took at face value. First of all, it had a very narrow geographical horizon. They never talked about what was happening in the transatlantic slave trade. So closer to the home, in the Mediterranean, there was very little attempt to set the Middle Ages in Europe alongside what was going on in the Islamic world.
And along with that, there was a very inconvenient fact, because there was a significant acceleration in slaving practices after 1250 or so. This has been actually known and studied since the mid-19th century, but it fell into a blind spot of the scholarship because the scholarship was pre-committed to a declension narrative, a narrative of disappearance. So it was dismissed as insignificant. And in the course of the research for the book, one of the reasons that came out clearly, which was that, at the time, certainly up to the early 2000s, a lot of European nations were really uncomfortable with the idea that there was a significant degree of slavery on European soil.
So we now know that the scale of the slave trade in the later Middle Ages was anything but insignificant. It's in the greater circum-Mediterranean region. It's in that medieval and early modern period. It's less than what you find in the Atlantic slave trade, maybe a quarter of the size. It's really hard to know how to measure it. But when you normalize the numbers to the size of the region, the size of the population, and the scale of the economy, the numbers actually look much more comparable. It's actually a very significant phenomenon. So the historiographical turn that I mentioned has made late medieval slavery visible in a way it just wasn't before.
So one of the most significant things, that was particularly relevant here, is how the framework of interpretation has become dramatically broader. The old story, that I just kind of described to you as a central axis running from Rome downward in time, it never really looked beyond the European heartland. The new story places Europe in this inter-regional, or even global, context, a kind of legacy of Janet Abu-lughod's amazing work of the 1990s.
So to give you an example, Hannah Barker has very successfully connected the slavery practices in Christendom with those in Islamdom and made the whole thing two aspects of one single phenomenon. That's one of the major expansions of-- geographical expansions of this story. Craig Perry and his colleagues have developed a whole set of insights about slavery practices across the Afro-Eurasian world that has really created, again, a whole new framework.
So for me, one of the most interesting parts of the story was how the story that I wanted to tell in Europe was linked to the rise of the Mongol Empire, which was just not part of the story beforehand. And this has to do with the fact that a lot of the slave people, starting around 1300 and accelerating after that, were coming from the greater Black Sea region.
This mattered hugely to my story because there was a dramatic acceleration in the 1350s. My protagonist is around 1400. And this was directly associated with the Civil War that broke out in the Golden Horde in the 1350s and actually flooded the market with a dramatically increased population of slaves. And it created the context that was navigated by the protagonist in my story.
So let me just close with one finding, just one small snippet that I pulled out of-- in the second chapter. Because while working on slave sales from the later period, I came across a pattern of sales that had been very little discussed in the literature. This was sort of a normal, expected vector of slave traders taking slaves from the Mongol world and bringing them down to ports all over the Western Mediterranean basin. But it turned out there was a massive resale network market that was going on.
It's really hard to illustrate without a map, but you have to imagine interconnections sending-- in this resale trade, sending enslaved people-- almost invariably women-- multiple times, from city to city, all over the Western Mediterranean basin. Most of them, I mentioned, were women because what was going on here was sex slavery. And the women were being separated from the children so the children could be raised as the master's own.
So just in sum, this is just a really exciting time to be working on late medieval Mediterranean slavery. And thank you.
[APPLAUSE]