The aim of this essay is to see how various texts, both Swedish and foreign, have described the former Swedish colony of St. Bartholomew. The focus has been on the slaves on the colony, and here how they were treated and how the analyzed authors portray the slaves lives. The literature has been divided up into two different categories, based on when they were published. The distinction has been made by dividing them up into a contemporary cluster, that were published before the 1900’s, as opposed to the more recent literature, from after the 1900’s. This division also enables us to see a difference not only between authors, but also between time periods. The research shows a difference within the focus of the contemporary and the recent literature, where the contemporary focused more on the slave trade per se whereas the slaves lives are discussed more in the recent literature. This can be ascribed to the differing discourses, where the actuality of abolishing the slave trade was prominent when the contemporary authors were active. The recent authors have all had access to the same resources in the different archives, but most of them differ in their usage of said resources. By looking at these texts with the theory of historiography in mind we can ascribe these differences to many different reasons, some of being the differing discourses as well as the aim of the text.  Whereas there has been research conducted about St. Bartholomew as a Swedish colony, the subject has not caused a great stir within the academic world of history.

The purpose of this thesis is to address key questions concerning the status and roles of enslaved groups (thralls) in Viking-Age Scandinavia. The thesis focuses on the lives of thralls at two levels; first within the local context of the household and farm (described here as the ‘microenvironment’), and second within the wider ‘macroenvironment’ of Scandinavian society. In particular, the study seeks to uncover the different practical and economic roles that were fulfilled by thralls within these contexts, and in doing so to explore how slaveholding communities benefitted from the exploitation of these people. In order to address these issues, the thesis critically examines the archeological material associated with thralls and discusses the various issues associated with the interpretation of this evidence. Given the inherent difficulty of identifying thralls in the archaeological record, this study also utilizes a range of contemporaneous and later medieval textual sources, including the Icelandic sagas and the earliest surviving Scandinavian law codes, as a means of contextualizing the discussion of material evidence. In exploring the diverse range of archaeological evidence and textual sources available to us, the author concludes that thralls played a significant role among Scandinavian communities as a source of both domestic and economic labor. Through this, they also involuntarily helped Scandinavian communities to mount and sustain trading, raiding and settlement activity in Europe and beyond. In reaching this conclusion, the author draws upon a number of sources pointing to a significant need for (unfree?) labor, for example in tasks such as textile production. When combined with a high-level of access to slaves through raiding and trading activity, it seems logical that Viking-Age communities would have exploited thralls in this way. Given the regular appearance of thralls in both the early Scandinavian law codes and sagas, furthermore, it is likely that these people represented a prominent social group within both social and labor-related contexts.

Research on Roman slavery has mainly been focued on questions of market economy since the beginning of the twentieth century. With the interest in the treatment of slaves and their experience of slavery, the master-slave relationship has been the object of increased interests, until recent exploration of the influence of freed slaves' culture on traditional practices. this thesis tries to assess the construction of parallel value systems among slaves and freedmen, which not only contrasted worldviews in free society but often reshaped them. Instrumentalization of the emotional concepts of honour and dishonour in the context of the family and in funerary commemoration are central to such assessment. / Forskningen om romerskt slaveri har främst varit fokuserad på frågor om marknadsekonomi sedan 1900-talets början. Genom intresset för behandlingen av slavar och deras upplevelse, har relationen mellan ägare och slavar varit objekt av växande intresse, fram till nutida forskning rörande frigivna slavars kulturella influens på traditionell praxis. Denna uppsats försöker förklara konstruktionen av parallela värdesystem bland slavar och frigivna, som inte bara kontrasterade med det fria samhällets världsbilder, utan reformerade dem. Instrumentaliseringen av de emotionella koncepten ära och vanära, kontextualiserad inom familjen och begravsningminnen är centrala för en sådan slutsats.