GLC@Lunch with Chris Halsted: “Systems of Slave-Taking and Slavic Ethnogenesis in Early Medieval Rus’”

Chris Halsted (GLC Visiting Scholar)

The spread of Slavic identity within early medieval Rus’ remains poorly understood, with most models privileging some manner of explicit colonization. This talk proposes the hypothesis that the uptake of Slavic ethnic identity can be connected to the Viking Age slave trade, which dominated long-distance economic activity in this region during the ninth and tenth centuries. In this period, predominately Scandinavian slave traders trafficked captives from across north-central Eurasia (mainly Slavs, Balts, and Finns) south to the Islamic world. But Arabic-language accounts refer to these enslaved people solely as Ṣaqāliba — Slavs. Research to be done at Yale in May investigates whether this collapsing of ethnic terminology affected the spread of Slavic identity, especially as the Scandinavian slavers settled down as the earliest kings of Kievan Rus’.