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Mobile Prisoners and Immobile Colonisers: Prisoners of War in the Eighteenth-Century Russian Borderlands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2026

Lisa Hellman Open the ORCID record for Lisa Hellman [Opens in a new window]
Lisa Hellman*
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Lund University, Sweden
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Abstract

This study uses the experiences of Swedish prisoners of war in the Great Northern War (1700–1721), to nuance the connection between coercion and imperial expansion. It examines the discursive and practical applications of coercion, coerced actors in settlements, and religious missions. Based on ego-documents as well as administrative material, it shows how the 25,000 Swedish prisoners presented themselves as, and were perceived as, prisoners, slaves, serfs, settlers, and missionaries—all in parallel. With examples of various male and female actors, this study shows how their experiences were classed and gendered. With its focus on prisoners of war in Russia’s eastward expansion, this study thereby broadens our view of early modern imperial ambition, and the diverse roles of coerced actors in it.

Keywords

Prisoners of WarRussiaCentral AsiaEmpireSweden

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Itinerario , First View , pp. 1 - 17
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0), which permits re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that no alterations are made and the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Leiden Institute for History.

Introduction

Has it not been enough that [fate] took from us

our sweet freedom, and put us in shackles?

That she wrenched us from our dear motherland

to the Kalmyk border and empty deserts? Footnote 1

This lamentation was probably written by the Swedish officer Georg Henrik von Borneman (1685–1711) during his time as a prisoner of war in Russia. He was one of tens of thousands of Swedish men and women taken captive in the first decades of the eighteenth century and moved to prison camps across Siberia. This article uses the experiences of Swedish prisoners in Russia as slaves, as settlers, and as missionaries to argue that imperial expansion depended structurally on coerced actors.

The Swedish prisoners of war described their own forced mobility, which took them to, and sometimes beyond, the borders of the Russian Empire. Another line of von Borneman states: “Perchance we get to see Astrakhan still/and once arrived, we might soon have to leave/never will our fate provide a stable quarter.”Footnote 2 These experiences placed the prisoners within colonial and expansionist endeavours by empires far from home. The very combination of education and expendability that characterised these prisoners made them useful agents of colonisation—their mobility, typically read as a sign of agency, was itself a product of asymmetric power relations.

Not only does this offer a much-needed perspective on the Russian borderlands and Central AsianFootnote 3 roles in early modern expansionism; it also helps us unpack supposed connections between notions of mobility and “freedom” within global history. The first section of this article examines the experience of imprisonment, showing how the diversity of coercive conditions — from mine labour to court life — reflected the ways imperial systems channelled unfree people into different roles based on their perceived utility. The second section turns to terminology, revealing how prisoners strategically deployed terms such as “slave,” “serf,” and “prisoner” to position themselves within competing power structures. Having established both the lived and discursive dimensions of coercion, the article then examines processes of imperial expansion: a third section on settler colonialism shows how captives were absorbed into frontier economies regardless of their own intentions, while a fourth section on mission demonstrates that even activities typically associated with voluntary initiative were structured by captivity and served imperial purposes. Together, these sections argue that coercion and colonial agency were mutually constitutive, aligning the study with recent calls to write a global history mindful of power relations and frictions.Footnote 4

Studies of the Swedish prisoners in Russia tend to focus either on their hardships and the supposed cruelty of their imprisonment or present them as “free” and “exceptional.”Footnote 5 Hence, these prisoners have been seen as examples of coercion, or as agents of imperial expansion — but never as a combination thereof. Alf Åberg not only placed the Swedes firmly in the midst of Russian colonisation, he saw their behaviour as an act of benevolence, lauding how the prisoners “contributed to civilise Siberia and bring people closer to the Western lands.”Footnote 6 Instead of writing this off as an outdated, even imperialist view, we might integrate prisoners into histories of bondage, and take seriously the effects of both their forced mobility and immobility, as well as their ties to internal colonisation and imperial expansion.

Long explored within military history, prisoners of war are now receiving increased attention within slavery studies for the diverse types of bondage they toiled under, and the systems they helped form. As shown by Renaud Morieux and Elodie Duché, early modern examples are particularly exciting as they bring into question the term “prisoner” itself: systems of enslavement and captivity existed in parallel with systems of camps and formal exchanges.Footnote 7 Prisoners of war provide fertile ground for uncovering the diversity of practices, experiences, and descriptions of captivity: indeed, scholars of prisoners of war stress such experiences as a coerced form of mobility.Footnote 8 This is in line with a growing will to properly theorise coerced mobility as part of a “punitive” or “carceral” geography that highlights spaces of incarceration and the movement between them.Footnote 9 Jansen and McKenzie argue that wars and revolutions were not merely destructive but generative, producing mobile populations — prisoners, refugees, deportees — whose forced movement became a resource for the states that captured them.Footnote 10 Ward traces a parallel logic in the maritime world: within the VOC, convicts and political exiles circulated between the Cape, Batavia, and Ceylon not merely as labour but as the human material through which the Company constituted its sovereignty — a logic not unlike the Russian deployment of Swedish prisoners across Siberia.Footnote 11 In each case, the coerced population was not merely displaced by empire but absorbed into its functioning — captivity converted into settlement and infrastructure.

Reading the Swedish prisoners against this comparative literature unsettles three common working assumptions. First, that mobility is a mark of agency: the prisoners moved across thousands of kilometres without ever choosing, and their mobility was the form their coercion took. Second, that settler colonialism requires colonisers — actors to whom intentionality can be ascribed. Third, that a captive who speaks — petitions, narrates, or fashions a self — is pushing back against coercion rather than being shaped by it. As this article will show, the prisoners’ tactical use of terms like “slave,” “serf,” and “prisoner” might stem from coercion, not subvert it. These three corrections converge on a fourth: that the unit through which captives became settlers was the household, and the household was the intimate infrastructure through which transient capture became rooted settlement.

Both the Russian and Qing Empires have been considered as processes of “internal colonisation” within their respective fields.Footnote 12 Kołodziejczyk’s study of what he calls “captive colonizers” — Polish, Lithuanian, and Crimean Tatar prisoners in seventeenth-century eastern Siberia — traces the mechanism most directly: the empire turned literate captives into bookkeepers and interpreters, converting cultural capital into colonial infrastructure.Footnote 13 Breyfogle’s work on religious sectarians exiled to the South Caucasus from 1830 reveals a comparable mechanism within Russia itself: Dukhobors, Molokans, and Subbotniks, marginal enough to be expendable but sufficiently organised to be useful, were pushed to the empire’s southern frontier where they performed military, economic, and administrative functions essential to empire-building — colonisers despite themselves.Footnote 14 In these works, just as in this article, colonial refers to a particular analytical frame and historiographical context. Most debates connecting colonialism and bondage, however, whether empirical or theoretical, draw on examples from West and South European colonial ventures. Recent studies of prisoners of war provide a from-below angle to such ventures, but the focus on large European powers, and the Atlantic, remains.Footnote 15 However, the second largest source of slaves in the seventeenth century was Eastern Europe, Russia in particular, as indeed the very word “slave” reminds us. Central Asia and Russia in particular offer a golden opportunity to tie together the historiographical fields and past systems of coercion in Europe and Asia.Footnote 16 This inclusion of understudied actors, regions, and arenas follows the approach argued by, among others, Marcel van der Linden; that it is necessary to map coercion in all its variety, not to establish likeness or a master category but rather to explain why the coercion looked the way it did.Footnote 17

A common problem for the study of coercion and colonial endeavours alike is the predominance of official top-down sources. An added appeal of these prisoners is the wealth of sources they produced — a fact that illustrates a certain room for manoeuvre. Apart from official reports to the Russian and Swedish imperial administrations, this article makes use of the prisoners’ diaries, personal letters, autobiographies, poems, and scholarly works. Such ego-sources are rife with source critical problems and should be considered not as an objective description, but as self-expression — at times even strategy. In addition to showing views from below on forced mobility, Swedish prisoners of war might thus serve to integrate regions such as Central Asia and Northern Europe into narratives of early modern expansion.

Prisoners of War and Experiences of Coercion

In 1700, a coalition of Denmark-Norway, Saxony-Poland, and Russia launched a coordinated attack on the Swedish Empire, initiating the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Over the course of the war, between 25,000 and 30,000 Swedes entered the Russian system, but the catastrophic Swedish defeat at Poltava in June 1709 changed the order of magnitude. There, around 16,000 prisoners capitulated, among them at least 1,600 wives, camp followers, and children. The prisoner group thus included officers, soldiers, and servants, along with wives and children, and prostitutes. Both class and gender played greatly into the forms this coercion took, as well as the variety in how it was articulated by the actors.

The prisoner group was then dispersed to camps across the empire from Kazan and Ufa to Tobolsk, Tomsk, and as far as Yakutsk.Footnote 18 These camps were not walled enclosures but designated quarters within existing Russian towns, where prisoners were billeted with civilian householders and confined by distance, poverty, and linguistic isolation rather than physical barriers. Capitulation terms were negotiated at the point of capture — but the terms were neither stable nor consistently respected. Prison exchanges were negotiated, but few were carried out. In short, there was no codified legal framework defining what a prisoner of war was or what rights a capitulation conferred.Footnote 19

Peace was declared in August 1721, but only some five thousand returned to Sweden, and officers and skilled craftsmen were vastly overrepresented among the survivors. Hundreds had entered Russian service, married Russian women, or integrated into local communities. More than a decade of captivity led to death by overwork for the great majority. For the rest, however, it was not a temporary interruption of life, but a coerced process of settlement, carried out through the intimate infrastructure of household, marriage, and labour.Footnote 20

The prisoners of war in this study tie together the history of Northern Europe with that of Russia, Central Asia, and the Qing Empire. Over the course of the sixteenth and into the beginning of the eighteenth century, Russia was steadily increasing its control over Siberia and the lands beyond. At the same time, the Qing dynasty was an expansionist empire, rapidly increasing the territories under its control.Footnote 21 As an effect, the Central Asian lands became a bone of contention. Some polities, like the Kazaks, were large khanates, or even — like the Dzungars — conglomerate empires. Others were part of city states.

This article opened with a quote from von Borneman. In his collection of verses, he presents himself alternately as a “prisoner” and a “serf” and underlines the harsh suffering of himself and his peers. “O hard Russian bondage!” he writes, “O cruel yoke of serfdom that has no end.” Employing various terms for bondage, von Borneman leaves the reader in no doubt that he considered himself unfree. The Swedish prisoners embody the dramatic dialectic between forced mobility and immobility: they could be stationary for months and then be shifted across vast distances. The final poem in von Borneman’s collection, written in July 1711, laments how his group of prisoners had been ordered to leave Simbirsk (modern-day Ulyanovsk) and to head further east. Instead of embarking on another march, von Borneman and four other officers chose to escape, but were soon found and killed by Russian peasants. Von Borneman’s literacy, his movement, and the activities his verses mention, serve as a useful reminder of the class aspect of this bondage.Footnote 22

From around 1704, prisoners were dispatched to different locations, including prisoner-of-war camps, and most faced forced labour and hard conditions. In 1707, the strain on the prisoners eased somewhat, and Swedish officers were permitted to travel around and dispense relief funds. The outlook was still grim in the sulphur mine in Samara or in Serotinskaya, which, alluding to Dante’s Inferno, prisoners called a città dolente (city of woe). The lieutenant Anders Pihlström (d. 1730) vividly described the march of his column of prisoners towards a camp in the spring of 1710: “Here we passed two thousands of our men, officers and common soldiers, heading towards work in Kazan.”Footnote 23 Pihlström knew that these men would not be seen again. In 1711, there was a prison revolt in Kazan. The subsequent move of Swedish prisoners further from the Volga region and into Siberia was meant to avoid such revolts, to remove them from the western front of the war, but also to make use of prisoners in the Russian push eastwards.Footnote 24

Some prisoners joined the Russian army as a strategy to escape the prison camps, yet others were forced into Russian employ. While most prisoners laboured in mines and shipyards — a practice not uncommon for prisoners of war throughout Europe — others were sent on official expeditions into neighbouring states, such as to the Volga Kalmyks or the Qing Empire. Some even, as von Borneman suggests in the epigraph, ended up in distant deserts and the Dzungar Empire. It is far from clear to what degree the prisoners were recruited or drafted by the Russian army, or whether they were forced to join different expeditions. Crucially, how their lives played out does not necessarily coincide with how they described their coercion, or how they were described — terms such as “prisoner,” “serf,” and “slave” were all used in parallel and for the most diverse of circumstances, and while some prisoners pursued successful careers in Russia, the majority died in obscurity. To activate different parts of this terminology could, in practice, be a tactical choice for the prisoners themselves, depending on their position and audience. Self-fashioning here operated not by borrowing the empire’s categories but by reaching for terms — slave, serf, prisoner — that carried weight in legal, cultural, and political discourse, and deploying them to make their suffering legible.

The use of prisoners as coerced labour was common within various colonial regimes.Footnote 25 The Swedes exemplify how such migration led to both dramatic forced mobility and extreme confinement. However, this was not unique to prisoners of war. Enserfed Russian peasantry was forcibly relocated as well, and after 1700 a portion was drafted into the armed forces. Nor was such imprisonment unique to the Swedes: “harvests of military captive slaves,” including Poles, Lithuanians, and Latvians, were dispatched to Siberia. Prisoners of war, serfs, exiles, and convicts were crucial to Russian expansion.Footnote 26 Not all prisoners were treated the same. Baltic Germans, for example, enjoyed great privileges within the Russian Empire, in contrast to the peasants under their control.Footnote 27 This inequality is reflected in their later treatment: Livonian prisoners taken as slaves ended up in large estates in Ukraine. They often lived out their lives in slavery, and few returned to their homes.

Imprisoned women were in a particularly vulnerable position. In 1718, the German diplomat Friedrich Christian Weber (d. 1739) met an emissary from Bukhara at the Russian court. This emissary “asked the tsar to give him a number of Swedish girls or allow him to buy them.” Weber called this request “laughable,” but although he rejected it, the emissary “did instead receive two Swedish servants, who he carried away with him.”Footnote 28 There was a great difference between kinds of captives from different social strata—and the way they could be forced into other systems of coercion.

Another example is Birgitta Scherzenfeldt (1684–1736). She had accompanied her soldier husband to the Russian front when the Great Northern War began in 1700. Over the next decade, she was captured by the Russian army, remarried two times, and lost three husbands. In 1716, a Russian expedition of nearly two thousand, including a contingent of Swedish mining engineers (and their wives), was dispatched by the Russians to search for gold in Dzungaria.Footnote 29 Scherzenfeldt’s third husband was killed in this raid, and she herself was taken prisoner anew. This time, by the Dzungars. In the capital of Dzungaria, she described how she was sold “as a slave” to the khan’s Tibetan wife and taken into “hard and woeful slavery.”Footnote 30 Some did, however, assume the status of slave for sustenance or security: local traditions did not always conflate slave status with a loss of social identity — the label slave was not strictly negative.Footnote 31 Over the following decade and a half, Scherzenfeldt built a new life for herself at court in Ghulja, even taking part in commercial expeditions to Yarkand — all while nominally a slave. Eventually, she could return to Sweden and account for her own experience in Central Asia.Footnote 32 This serves as a marked contrast to the two women sent to Bukhara, and their lack of choice and voice. We cannot even find their names. Scherzenfeldt was far from the only coerced actor in this state formation.Footnote 33 In Ghulja, foreign captives were being put to work by the Dzungar khan to develop state infrastructure and cultivate land. Captives arrived in significant numbers: Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and other Slavs were seized by Tatars and others on the southern frontier of Russia and dispatched to Central Asian markets at Bukhara, Samarkand, Khiva, or in the southern borderlands, such as in the Crimea.

Consequently, not only did the experience of coercion depend on your gender, and class, but the Swedish prisoners of war also tied into various flows of unfree actors. The diversity of these experiences reflected the multiple ways in which imperial systems channelled unfree people into different roles based on their perceived utility.

The Terminology of Coercion

The experiences of the prisoners of war are just one side of the coin; equally important for the tie between coercion and imperial expansion is to consider how their experiences were phrased and framed by others. In this section, therefore, I turn to the terminology of coercion. Will Smiley’s recent scholarship on the concept of prisoner of war points to the phenomenon of ransom slavery developing into a full-blown system along the Ottoman borders. He argues that the difference between slave and prisoner is largely one of chronology, and space, seeing the system of war prisoners as an effect of the Russian-Ottoman wars.Footnote 34 The Swedish prisoners of war, from an empire allied with the Ottomans and captured in Russia, landed in the middle of this shift, and their use of the term prisoner in parallel with others helps show the difficulty of finding stable definitions for a system in the midst of a change.

This change is reflected in the use of the word “slave.” In Russian early eighteenth-century modernisation debate, the words slave, serf, and servant were used both to criticise supposed old-fashioned arguments, and as a mode of self-orientalising to create a conceptual space for Russian political culture within Europe.Footnote 35 To add to the complexity, an older Muscovite tradition used Old Testament imagery of slavery to justify its expansion.Footnote 36 In the eastern polities, high-ranking military leaders within Mongol and Turkic groups could describe themselves as “slaves to their khan,” as an expression of loyalty. In several eighteenth-century letters from the Kazak khan to the Qing emperor, the khan declares himself the albatu of the emperor. This word had multiple meanings, including “commoner” and “slave,” but within these nomadic societies it signified a highly formalised master-servant relationship.Footnote 37 To understand the terminology of coercion, in parallel with the practices thereof, we must be aware of the clashes, overlaps, and fusions between different systems and cosmologies that they stem from.

In eighteenth-century Europe, the issue of human bondage was a hotbed of political debate, and the emergence of the “white slavery” discourse bore a complex relationship to societal reform and the anti-slavery movement.Footnote 38 During this time, a market of “survival literature” flourished. In these, prisoners could orientalise their captors, such as British captives in the French Empire who likened themselves to Christian slaves in the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 39 When Scherzenfeldt presented herself as a slave in her autobiography, that positioned her in Sweden, where the text was penned, more than it described her room for manoeuvre in Ghulja. Many such stories from Swedish prisoners circulated both in print and manuscript, but those by women had a particular appeal. Another example is that of Lovisa von Burghausen, who was abducted from a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia at the age of seven, and in the coming years forcibly married and remarried. Her story stresses the pressure she was under to convert, as well as the exoticism of her Turkic and Armenian husbands.Footnote 40 Tales of manumission and ego-documents of coercion became part of a broad epistemology of freedom and slavery that was being renegotiated over the course of the century.

The polysemy of slavery — both as a system and a metaphor — highlights the potency of terms of coercion for observers, writers, and readers in the eighteenth century.Footnote 41 In von Borneman’s verses, he recurrently uses imagery such as “shackles,” “serfdom,” “captivity,” and says that “under the yoke of captivity we stay in Russian fetters/and it may not be soon that we see our beloved freedom.”Footnote 42 Scholarly pursuits such as mapping, or serving in diplomatic missions, were a way to leave the camps, but it was not the same as being set free, nor was it an opportunity extended to all. Another prisoner, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg (1676–1747) published a map on which the Swedish mapmakers (such as himself) are drawn in shackles (see Figure 1).Footnote 43 The prisoners positioned themselves as unfree and in shackles, a view that was reproduced in works using them as informants — despite the room for manoeuvre that information gathering would have necessitated.Footnote 44 Such stories of coercion had a vast impact, not least for the development of international law, particularly regarding prisoners and captives of war. That debate on “freedom” had close ties with processes of colonialism.Footnote 45 For the purpose of this article, we must thus recognise how prisoners were simultaneously contributors to a colonial epistemology of coercion, assigned a particular symbolic position, and how they placed themselves as representatives of an experience of bondage.

Figure 1.

Central Asia through the eyes of a Swedish prisoner with Europe in the upper left corner. ca. 1730, Strahlenberg, Nova descriptio geographica Tattariæ magnæ [Image credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France].

Historical map of northern and central Asia by Strahlenberg, a Swedish prisoner of war in Siberia, published ca. 1730. In the lower right cartouche, the Swedish mapmakers are depicted in shackles. See long description.
Figure 1 Long description

A Engraved map titled Nova descriptio geographica Tattariæ magnæ, covering the territory from eastern Europe (upper left) to the Pacific coast, with Siberia, Central Asia, and the Qing Empire’s western borderlands prominently featured. River systems, settlements, and regional boundaries are labelled in dense hand-lettered script in latin. A decorative cartouche in the lower left contains the map title. In the lower right cartouche, two European figures are shown wearing shackles — the mapmaker’s Strahlenberg’s self-representation as a prisoner of war. A Swedish coat of arms appears in the upper left corner. The map reflects the geographical knowledge Swedish prisoners accumulated during their captivity in Siberia.

Source: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53039520z.

As seen in the texts by von Borneman and Scherzenfeldt, the discursive use of terms such as “serf” and “slave” is more easily mapped than the experiences behind the texts. Some of the prisoners-turned-slaves were subject to forced mobility across the far-flung reaches of the steppe, others to incarceration in mines. At the same time, those self-representing as slaves travelled vast distances to take part in commercial activities. This shows the spatial dimension of the daily experiences of coercion, a dimension that the prisoners verbalised and on which they capitalised. This leads to the idea of mobility itself. While analyses already in the 1970s examined the concept of space vis-à-vis asymmetric power relations, the focus on the social construction of space led to an unintended detachment of social mobility from its geographic counterpart. It took geographers to show that power relations are tied to global and local mobility, creating both racial and gendered dynamics, an insight global history has yet to fully incorporate.Footnote 46 In short, the relationship between personal mobility, coercion and what is perceived as “freedom” is not clear-cut, and prisoners of war help blur that line. The following sections turn to how these unfree actors were absorbed into two classic processes of imperial expansion: settlement and religious mission.

Prisoners of War as Settlers

Modern research on imperial expansion is not limited to conquest and distant colonial ventures. Rather, we see ever more studies of internal colonisation and settler colonialism. To study those aspects of expansion allows for a natural inclusion of gender, and household. Amid verses of the hardships of war, and the toils of imprisonment, von Borneman rhymes about the mead brewing of the Swedish Mrs Brinck and, eventually, about her giving birth to a little daughter—after a somewhat suspicious length of fifteen months’ pregnancy.Footnote 47 Everyday life, even family life, was part of the prisoner-of-war experience in Siberia.

Following their capture, the Swedish prisoners were marched eastwards to camps founded for this purpose. Prisoner-of-war camps were already an established practice in Russia; what changed with the sudden influx of the tens of thousands during the Great Northern War was the scale of the system. The largest camps were in Tobolsk, Tyumen, and Tomsk, but large groups of prisoners also lived in Surgut, Yeniseysk, and Yakutsk. The prisoner Leonard Kagg (1682–1760) states during the march to Ufa in the Urals, that it was “the final city that the Russians own.”Footnote 48 As new camps were established, the prisoners — and Russian control — gradually moved further and further east.

In the Russian imperial expansion eastwards, blockhouses and fortifications were constructed as strategic points from which officials and merchants fanned out into the surrounding countryside. Prisoner-of-war camps supported this same quasi-military organisation, and, in it, prisoners of war were used side by side with Russian exiles and prisoners. To be sure, not all who were made part of an imperial and colonial expansion reaped any personal benefits thereof: the soldiers sent to mines, shipyards, and other major building projects were unlikely to survive. Conditions were significantly better for those working at the tsar’s shipyards in St. Petersburg.Footnote 49 Generally speaking, officers and skilled craftsmen were more likely to survive.

Although imprisoned Swedish officers were supposed to receive a small allowance from the Swedish war administration, this payment was small, erratic, and not enough to subsist on: in the years 1711 and 1712, for example, the prisoners only received between four- and five-months’ worth of allowance in total.Footnote 50 The prisoners had to invent ways to make money within the local society. Carl Piper (1647–1716), a captured nobleman who was responsible for the Swedish administration of their own prisoners, described how the officers turned to manual labour. Their efforts notwithstanding, Piper stated that: “they can only with great difficulty earn two kopeks a day, which is just enough for food but does not cover clothes.”Footnote 51 This enforced entrepreneurship contrasts with organised punitive labour, even though the practices could be similar. Out of necessity, they worked directly for and with the Russian local community, economically supporting the newly established communities, despite rules prohibiting that very economic integration.

An ongoing dual theme in von Borneman’s verses is the lack of money, and the joy of drinking. As he says, “the only thing that can cut our misery short […] lovely mead and noble strong beer.”Footnote 52 While both common and popular, however, beer-brewing was banned for the Swedes; all alcohol production was under Russian state monopoly. For the effects of this ban, we can turn to Hans Henrik Sylvius (c. 1682–1768), whose marriage would be preceded by a very long engagement. After a decisive Swedish defeat in 1709, he followed the king to his exile in the Ottoman Empire. There, he was dispatched on a hopeless reconnaissance mission and was captured before even crossing into Russia. Sylvius was sent to Tobolsk, which in 1712 housed 1,165 Swedish prisoners, of whom eight hundred were officers and the rest women and children. This illustrates the difference between the circumstances for the officers and the rank and file. In Kazan, the prisoners had difficulty finding paid work. In Tobolsk, they walked around freely, and riots were unusual. It might also have played a role in that most of the population of Tobolsk was constituted either of exiled Russians and their children, with whom the Swedish prisoners had ongoing and close interaction.Footnote 53

In Tobolsk, Sylvius met Anna Elisabeth Knoop (c. 1703–1777), daughter of a captured artillery officer. The common practice in the camps was to marry quickly, but that would not be the case this time — because Anna and her parents were brewing beer and distilling spirits. When discovered by the authorities, the whole Knoop family was convicted to exile from the exile, and sent to another prison camp even further northeast, in the Samarov yam (close to Demyanskoye). The family returned after two years, destitute, and it took them some time to make enough money anew for the couple to marry. After three and a half years, in 1716, Hans Henrik and Anna were married in the Swedish church in Tobolsk.Footnote 54

The prisoners were thus forced into a state of industriousness. While this was on the one hand seen as benefitting the Russian settlements, the local administration on the other hand saw the need to impose limits on the Swedish commercial ventures to protect the Russian counterparts and state monopolies. Small businesses like that of the Knoop family were perfectly common, and perfectly illegal: side by side with constructing looms and taking part in other proto-industries, the prisoners established breweries and distilleries. The Swedish sources are filled with tales of arrests, police raids of their cottages, and prisoners convicted for conducting illegal business.Footnote 55 There is a gender aspect here: it was commonly women who worked in these industries, and sold the alcohol. When von Borneman complained about the alcohol production ban, he wrote farewell verses to “Mrs Berendrick, and Mrs Brinck.”Footnote 56

After a year in the prison camp of Simbirsk, von Borneman connects the interaction with women and beer brewing in another way, writing “if we were allowed to brew/we would not care much for the Russian women.” The verse then goes into great detail of just how ugly he finds the Russian women, likening them to cucumbers, pumpkins, and barrels. This is followed by verses celebrating chastity as the highest of all virtues for men; von Borneman writes “I die without a stain/a chaste virgin and unspoiled maiden.”Footnote 57 This stress on chastity is highly contextual: as the sources show, ties with Russian women could lead not only to illegitimate children, but also to marriage. The Swedish administration saw several marriages of noblemen at this time as a direct effect of the poor financial situation and said that they “married old Finnish women and their daughters just to get bread.”Footnote 58

As a key element in the colonial expansion, the Russian administration encouraged —or forced — settlers to move eastwards. Marriages in the camps could strengthen the frontier communities, but such liaisons were perceived as a potential threat on both sides: while prisoners were allowed to practice their religion, Russian and Swedish authorities vigilantly ensured that their subjects did not convert. As enshrined in a Synod decree in 1721, “On the unhindered marriage to foreigners,” a married Russian woman as well as children from such a marriage were considered Orthodox. That meant that upon the peace agreement in 1721, male prisoners had to choose between returning to Sweden, leaving their wives and children behind — or converting.Footnote 59 The reason why von Borneman colourfully described his disdain for Russian women, and stressed his own virginity, was to claim his unshaken Protestant faith.

The Swedish prison camps thus helped the Russian expansion militarily, economically, and intellectually. They functioned as rest stops between larger trading hubs and helped connect the Russian market to that of Persia and Central Asia city states such as Bukhara. What is more, the camps worked as information hubs for Russian diplomats, traders, and explorers going east, northeast, and southeast into China and the Inner Asian border states.Footnote 60 While much research on settler colonialism has focused on West European colonial powers, recent research has highlighted the need to critically examine also Russian and Chinese settlements and consider them within a colonial framework.Footnote 61 As Bartlett has shown, the Russian state would formalise the recruitment of foreign settlers under Catherine II’s Manifestos of 1762 and 1763, dispatching German cultivators to the Volga and writing into law the figure of the foreign labourer whose presence was supposed to make Russia’s borderlands productive.Footnote 62 Swedish prisoners were already doing this work a generation earlier. The system controlling the Swedish prisoners was an ad-hoc reshaping of Russian practices of exile, preceding the policy found by Bartlett.Footnote 63

The prisoners demonstrate that settler colonialism could operate through coerced actors who had no colonial intention. Their role in these frontier communities did not originate from a conscious choice, and does not reflect a colonial intention, but stems from a dramatic asymmetric power relation. Displaced actors such as Sylvius and his beer-brewing fiancée Knoop were primarily trying to make ends meet in a volatile situation, but it resulted in their integration into the local settler economy, which in turn had far-reaching consequences for Siberia. As Benton and McGregor have shown for the inter-imperial Caribbean, the household was the mechanism through which captive-taking became colonial settlement: the unit that turned transient soldiers and captives into rooted subjects through marriage, the accumulation of property, and the command of dependents. Their argument moves the conversation about colonial ordering away from military design and away from the legal-territorial framework of sovereignty, into the household practices that held populations in place.Footnote 64 In the Tobolsk household of Sylvius and Knoop the same logic was at work, several decades earlier and several thousand kilometres east.

Kołodziejczyk’s “captive colonizers,” discussed above, put a name to the pattern. His study of Kazimierz Krzyżanowski — taken at the Basia in 1660, sent deep into eastern Siberia, and eventually commanding the Okhotsk fort — is the seventeenth-century Polish-Lithuanian analogue to the Tobolsk household of Sylvius and Knoop. Kołodziejczyk shows how captives converted European literacy and military skills into positions within the Russian colonial apparatus. The Tobolsk household shows how the coerced intimacies — marriage, conversion, bonded labour — bound captives to the places where such cultural capital could be put to work.Footnote 65

Prisoners of War as Missionaries

In this final section, we turn to a classic theme within the history, namely that of religious mission. Von Borneman’s verses are initially playful. As time passes, they become ever more devout, and he writes how he intends to make it to the end of their bondage with the help of God and the Bible.Footnote 66 This piety can illuminate the final aspect of the Swedish prisoners’ captivity, and how it played into Russian expansion. Eventually, Swedish priests were active in dozens of Russian cities, camps, towns, and villages. The prayer meetings show the varying conditions of the camps: in Solikamsk, the congregation met in a stable but in Tobolsk enough money was raised to build a church. For the Swedish administration, the Protestant religion was key to form unity within the linguistically and ethnically diverse army. During this time, the Pietist movement took hold, and organised evangelisation in Siberia.Footnote 67 As the religious practices went beyond centralised control, administrators worried that the prisoners had become “pious beyond the reach of the church.”Footnote 68

In preserved prayer books, the prisoners commonly talk of the people of Israel and their Babylonian captivity — even seeing the time in Siberia as a heavenly punishment.Footnote 69 In his poems, von Borneman refers to Egypt, and likens them to the prisoners of Zion.Footnote 70 This evocation of religious imagery can be found elsewhere but, for the Swedes, there was a particular reason for it: those who did convert to the Orthodox faith were not welcome back to Sweden, and much energy was spent after the war trying to separate those who had been baptised against their will from those who had renounced their faith.Footnote 71

While Swedish letters to the central administration stressed their zeal in keeping to the Protestant faith, their practices displayed considerable variety. Prisoner diaries mention several converts to the Orthodox faith.Footnote 72 Some went even further: the prisoner Johann Müller joined an expedition to “the Ostyaks” in 1720 to convert them to the Russian Orthodox faith. We do not know to what degree this was a result of Müller’s own choice: a contemporary prisoner in Tobolsk just writes that he “journeyed away to the steppe or wasteland with the archpriest of Tyumen.”Footnote 73 In his book about the mission, Müller is presented as a “learned Swedish officer,” and nothing is said of the reason for his being in Tobolsk. Müller’s book demonstrates several characteristics typical for how early modern ethno-geography, colonialism and religious mission were coupled: he stresses the misery and heathendom of the “poor Ostyaks,” but also notes the landscape, as well as local religious practices, clothes and culture.Footnote 74 Just as in colonial knowledge projects elsewhere, the circulation of geographic, linguistic, religious, and ethnographic knowledge was intertwined.Footnote 75

Müller’s journey took place amid a shift in the Russian colonial expansion. In the sixteenth century, minority groups were considered subjects in a reciprocal relationship with the ruler. In the eighteenth century, the discourse of “savages” gained traction. In the place of an established conceptualisation of racial difference, Alexander Etkind has suggested that the differences in social standing used in Russia created an “internal colonisation.” However, as Michael Khodarkovsky points out, while Russia in some senses was an unusual colonial power, the attitude, objectives, and strategies of its leading officials were fundamentally no different from those of their Western European counterparts.Footnote 76 In 1719, the economist Ivan Pososhkov argued for more aggressive religious missions in the empire and its borderlands, contrasting the Russian endeavours to those of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1734, this comparative idea had taken hold, and a Russian administrator compared Russia’s colonial policy to that of Spain in South America.Footnote 77 Parallel with discursive and military practices of expansion, missions played a key role for the colonial state — whether far, or nearby: in 1744, a state-sponsored mission was sent to the Ossetians in the Caucasus.Footnote 78 The mission in which Müller took part preceded this by decades, and shows not only that religious and political expansion had long been intertwined, but also the diversity of actors in them.

The Russian idea of an imperial manifest destiny had effects on the views of coercion: as Khodarkovsky argues, to free enslaved Russians abroad became a religious imperative over the course of the eighteenth century. This obsession with freeing slaves was not considered as contradictory to the domestic system of serfdom but was rather connected to the opposition to Islam. Just as elsewhere, captivity and coercion took place as part of, and in relation to, religious, economic, and political ambitions and conflicts; more than mere context, these constituted entangled developments. Another illustration of the entanglement of mission and coercion is Scherzenfeldt, who brought home her “Kalmyk slaves” for the purpose of conversion. She started out from Dzungaria with a group of twenty, but most died on the way or were “taken by the Russians to be converted into Orthodoxy,” and only three arrived in Stockholm. In December 1735, Altan, Jamankiz, and Zara were baptised as Anna Catarina, Maria Stina, and Sara Greta in the church Artillerikyrkan.Footnote 79 Such an argument is not intended to undermine the reality of bondage, but to show that an experience of coercion could be transformed into a narrative of religious mission and how complex the issue of coercion is in imperial expansion.

A further example of the prisoner-of-war camps intertwining colonial and religious practices is the Swedish school in Tobolsk. This school was founded in 1711, and it combined missionary activity with other forms of learning.Footnote 80 The majority of the thirty-four students were children of Swedish prisoners, in equal parts boys and girls, but four were of local Russian families, and the teaching was carried out in German. This school and its Protestant and Pietistic orientation were endeavours common to an international network and several imperial ambitions: first, the children were taught “devoutness,” and it was funded by Pietist groups in Germany, tying it to the far-reaching ambitions of that movement.Footnote 81 Moreover, during as well as after the war, it was seen as preserving the culture of the Swedish Baltic Empire. At the same time, the school received support from the tsar, who believed it could help “civilise” Siberia and support the eastern expansion. When some prisoners were moved to Tomsk, the Russian governor Matvey Petrovich Gagarin (c. 1659–1721) argued strongly for keeping the school, stressing the importance that Russian children learn Latin, especially those in the internal colonisation of the Eastern regions.Footnote 82 This school complemented the economic role of the prison camps in the imperial move eastwards. Rather than a sign of the Swedes’ impact, the prisoners’ mission can be construed as the governor’s pragmatic use of the prisoners for his own purposes. The mission section reveals the same structural logic as the settlers’ experience: even activities typically associated with voluntary initiative — teaching, converting, exploring — were shaped by captivity and harnessed to serve imperial purposes. Whether the prisoners chose these roles or were pressed into them mattered less than the fact that the imperial system made use of their labour either way.

Expansion and Coercion

In their diverse roles, Swedish prisoners of war simultaneously underpinned colonial expansions, and were victims of the coercion that process entailed. They could live and work in camps as settlers or be dispatched on a religious mission that would trade, and circulate geographic, political, and linguistic information along the way. The prisoners’ combination of education and expendability rendered them ideal instruments of colonisation. In a global history inclusive of friction and power asymmetries, slaves and prisoners did not just experience, or suffer from, the effects of larger geopolitical processes: they took part in them.

The Swedish case unsettles any assumptions that mobility would mark agency. Prisoners moved across thousands of kilometres without ever choosing to, and what looked like circulation was an effect of capture. The framework Jansen and McKenzie propose for the long age of revolutions — with wars and political ruptures as generators of mobile populations whose forced movement became a resource for the states that captured them — here applies a century earlier: forced mobility was not the exception to early modern empire but one of its standard mechanisms.

Studies of the oscillation between mobility and immobility, such as that of the prisoners, and the asymmetric power relation it reflects, are often connected to discussions about agency, a term as flawed as it is common. Jessica Millward points to how a strong assumption persists that for coerced actors, “freedom” equals subversion, and mobility is key. She underlines how even subtle scholars, such as Damien Alan Pargas, while stressing that agency should not be confused with success, still notes that the existence of families “worked against agency as [the slave’s families] kept people in place.” This observation evokes the classic caution by Walter Johnson: while there is a well-meaning will among scholars to show historical actors doing active — preferably subversive — and traceable things, gladly things demonstrating mobility, we need to be wary of seeing such actions as the only possible proof of agency.Footnote 83 The prisoners’ room for manoeuvre must be taken seriously, as must the fact that they could choose to stay within their confines. This article thus aligns itself with those who seek to expand the notion of coercion beyond the binary of free and unfree.Footnote 84 The resulting fluid notion of coercion does not only better fit the historical reality, it makes it possible to tie together the local immobility of actors, such as that in the camps, with the mobile process of imperial expansion at large.

A related point is that the captive’s voice — the petition, the verse, the slave narrative — would be evidence of agency set against coercion. However, the prisoners who positioned themselves alternately as “slaves,” “serfs,” and “prisoners” were not stepping outside the vocabulary of bondage to claim a free position within it. As Ward argues, legal identities in early modern empires were assigned and unstable: a convict could become a soldier, a soldier a slave, depending on what the empire needed. Self-fashioning, on this reading, is not the opposite of coercion.Footnote 85 When the captive is literate, even self-description becomes one of the means by which empire writes its subjects into place.

Rather, the case of the Swedish prisoners of war lets us consider whether settler colonialism requires settlers — here read as actors who set out to colonise and to whom intentionality can be ascribed. The foreign cultivators of the 1760s, recruited under Catherine II’s manifestos and dispatched to the Volga, were prefigured in Tobolsk, Tomsk, and Kazan by Swedish prisoners doing the same work half a century earlier, but without any policy to authorise it. Read in that way, Breyfogle’s nineteenth-century religious sectarians, made into colonisers by the same logic that had marginalised them, were the next chapter in a long Russian habit of weaponising the expendable against frontier vacancies. In short, I align myself with Kołodziejczyk, arguing that coerced settlement was not a Russian peculiarity or a wartime expedient but a structural mechanism of early modern Eurasian empires.Footnote 86

In addition, all coerced actors did not take part on equal terms. The Swedes called themselves, and were seen as, prisoners, captives, serfs, and slaves. While some, such as Scherzenfeldt, managed to thrive and climb in rank, the majority, like von Borneman, did not survive. The mortality rate of the prisoners is significant: part of what made them useful as colonial agents and brokers might have been their combination of education and expendability from an imperial point of view. Their mobility, as well as their impact, can be considered effects of how little they were thought to matter. Furthermore, not all had the same vulnerability. The understanding of the early modern spectrum of coercion and its ties to imperial expansion requires attention to the actors’ social standing and gender.Footnote 87 Because the unit through which captives became settlers was the household. As argued for other regions, the household is not the exception to imperial coercion. Marriage, labour, and conversion produced the kind of rooted population that frontier orders require.

The conclusion is thus twofold: first, when discussing imperial expansion within global history, we should include expansions by empires outside of Western Europe, so as not to assume what colonisation looked like. Second, the Swedish prisoners in Russia show that coercion and colonial participation were two faces of the same imperial process. Rather than downplaying the power relations inherent in these expansions, recognising the role of coerced actors makes them more visible, and shows the layers of power within imperial expansion.

Funding statement

This article was produced with support from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, project RJP24-0105.

References

1 Georg Henrik von Borneman, “Sånger af en svensk fånge i Simbirsk,” 1711, 40, Lund University Library. This and all subsequent quotes translated by the author.

2 von Borneman, “Sånger af en svensk fånge i Simbirsk,” 14.

3 This article uses an inclusive definition of Central Asia, including both former Soviet states, and the Romanov Empire’s eastern (and shifting) borderlands. Much of the arguments put forward for the lack of attention to Central Asia holds equally true for Inner Asia.

4 Roland Wenzlhuemer et al., “Forum Global Dis:Connections,” Journal of Modern European History 21:1 (February 2023): 2–33; this goes back to Margot Finn, “« Frictions » d’empire : les réseaux de circulation des successions et des patrimoines dans la Bombay coloniale des années 1780,” trans. Cécile d’Albis, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 65:5 (2010): 1175–204.

5 Typical examples include Alf Åberg, Fångars elände: karolinerna i Ryssland 1700–1723 (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1991); Gunnar Jarring, “Skånskan som blev kalmuckernas fånge,” in Starka kvinnor: ett urval märkliga kvinnoöden från radioserien Värt att veta, ed. Gunvor Blomqvist (Stockholm: Sveriges radio, 1986), 110–8; Ervin Petrovic Zinner, “Ervin Petrovitj Zinner om de Karolinska krigsfångarnas insatser för utforskandet av Sibirien,” Karolinska förbundets årsbok 1979–1980 (1980): 48–119; Ulla Ehrensvärd, “Die Sibirienkarte des Philipp Johann von Strahlenberg (1730) und ihre Bedeutung für das moderne Kartenbild vom nördlichen Asien,” Cartographica Helvetica 44 (2011): 3–19; a more nuanced view can be found in Lena Jonson and Tamara Alekseevna Torstendahl Salytjeva, Poltava: krigsfångar och kulturutbyte (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2009).

6 Åberg, Fångars elände, 42–4.

7 Renaud Morieux, Society of Prisoners: Anglo-French Wars and Incarceration in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Alan Forrest, Peter Hicks, and Elodie Duché, eds., “Prisoners of War,” in The Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 93–114.

8 This goes back at least to Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002); but is nuanced in Elodie Duché, “Captives in Plantations: British Prisoners of War and Visions of Slavery in Napoleonic France and Mauritius,” French History and Civilization 7 (2017): 108–24.

9 Dominique Moran, Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Jennifer Turner and Kimberley Peters, “Rethinking Mobility in Criminology: Beyond Horizontal Mobilities of Prisoner Transportation,” Punishment & Society 19:1 (January 2017): 96–114.

10 Jan C. Jansen and Kirsten McKenzie, eds., Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions: A Global History, c. 1750–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).

11 Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

12 See discussion of how Asian expansions have been labelled in Geoff Wade, ed., Asian Expansions : The Historical Experiences of Polity Expansion in Asia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015); Jin Noda, Ro-Shin teikoku to Kazafu hankoku (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 2011); Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multi-Ethnic History (Harlow: Routledge, 2001), 193–200.

13 Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, “Captive Colonizers: The Role of the Prisoners of War from Poland-Lithuania and the Crimean Khanate in the Russian Subjugation of Eastern Siberia,” Journal of World History 33:1 (2022): 73–102.

14 Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 128–72.

15 For works that discuss these maritime systems see Alessandro Stanziani, Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants – Bondage in the Indian Ocean World, 1750–1914 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Karwan Fatah-Black and Matthias van Rossum, “A Profitable Debate?,” Slavery & Abolition 37:4 (October 2016): 736–43; see Clare Anderson, Convicts: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

16 For the slave market, see Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier, 22; for Central Asia and Russia, see Christoph Witzenrath, “Rachat (« rédemption »), fortification et diplomatie dans la steppe: La place de l’Empire de Moscou dans la traite des esclaves en Eurasie,” in Les esclavages en Méditerranée : Espaces et dynamiques économiques, ed. Fabienne P. Guillén and Salah Trabelsi (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2017), 181–93; Alessandro Stanziani, “Esclaves et captifs en Russie et en Asie Centrale (xvie-xixe siècles),” in Les esclavages en Méditerranée: Espaces et dynamiques économiques, ed. Fabienne P. Guillén and Salah Trabelsi (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2017), 195–211; Kate Ekama, Lisa Hellman, and Matthias van Rossum, eds., Slavery and Bondage in Asia, 1550–1850: Towards a Global History of Coerced Labour (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022).

17 Marcel Van der Linden, “Dissecting Coerced Labour,” in On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery, ed. Marcel Van der Linden and Magaly Rodríguez García (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 294, 322.

18 Åberg, Fångars elände, 8–12; Galina Shebaldina, Shvedskie voennoplennye v Sibiri: pervaia chetvert’ XVIII veka (Moscow: RGGU, 2005), 23–40; for more on the war itself, see Robert I. Frost, The Northern Wars: War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558–1721 (Harlow: Longman, 2000).

19 Will Smiley, From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3–5, 36–7; Shebaldina, Shvedskie voennoplennye v Sibiri, 45–8, 60–72, 115–6; Åberg, Fångars elände, 30–8; for examples of negotiations of terms and exchange, see Carl Piper, Grefve Carl Pipers dagbok : hållen under hans fångenskap i Ryssland 1709–1714, ed. Ernst Carlson (Stockholm: Nord. bokh., 1906), 35–8, 77–84, 96–7.

20 Åberg, Fångars elände, 18–21, 40–8; Alf Åberg, Karolinska kvinnoöden (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1999), 105.

21 For Russian expansion, see A. V. Lukin, ed., Rossiia i Kitai: Chetyre veka vzaimodeistviia. Istoriia, sovremennoe sostoianie i perspektivy razvitiia rossiisko-kitaiskikh otnoshenii (Moscow: Vesʹ Mir, 2013); for Chinese expansion, see Perdue, China Marches West; Peter C. Perdue, “Crossing Borders in Imperial China,” in Asia Inside Out: Connected Places, ed. Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Perdue (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015), 205–7.

22 Examples from Barthold Anders Ennes, Biografiska Minnen Af Carl XII:S Krigare (Stockholm: Sohm, 1818); for the prisoner estimate, see Åberg, Karolinska kvinnoöden, 104.

23 For città dolente, see August Quennerstedt, Karolinska Krigares Dagböcker Jämte Andra Samtida Skrifter (Lund: Gleerup, 1912), 7:xix; Anders Pihlström, Anders Pihlströms dagbok 1708–1723 (Stockholm: Nord. bokh., 1903), 41; see Åberg, Fångars elände, 11.

24 Åberg, Fångars elände, 63–7.

25 See Paul E. Lovejoy and Nicholas Rogers, eds., Unfree Labour in the Development of the Atlantic World (London: Routledge, 2012).

26 Richard Hellie, “Migration in Early Modern Russia, 1480s–1780s,” in Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives, ed. David Eltis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 292–323; Kołodziejczyk, “Captive Colonizers”; see also Andrew Gentes, Exile to Siberia : 1590–1822 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

27 John A. Armstrong, “Acculturation to the Russian Bureaucratic Elite: The Case of the Baltic Germans,” Journal of Baltic Studies 15:2/3 (1984): 119–29.

28 Friedrich Christian Weber, Das veränderte Russland (Frankfurt, 1721), 254.

29 Gunnar Jarring, “Brigitta Scherzenfeldt och hennes fångenskap hos kalmuckerna,” Karolinska förbundets årsbok, 1983, 88–118; Åberg, Karolinska kvinnoöden, 8; Perdue, China Marches West, 210–23.

30 Brigita Scherzenfeldt, “Personalier öfwer lieutnantens herr Johan Gustaf Renats maka, fru Brigitta Schersenfeldt,” 1736, C.R. Berch’s Collection, p. 7, The Library of the Swedish Royal Academy of Letters.

31 Perdue, “Crossing Borders in Imperial China,” 205–7; for an idea about the numbers of slaves in Dzungaria, see Takahiro Onuma, “The Development of the Junghars and the Role of Bukharan Merchants,” Journal of Central Eurasian Studies 2 (2011): 94, 99; Hellie, “Migration in Early Modern Russia,” 307–10; for their status, see Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Slavery in Early Modern China,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, ed. David Eltis and Stanley Engerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 186–214.

32 Jarring, “Skånskan som blev kalmuckernas fånge,” 110, 116; Lisa Hellman, “Enslaved in Dzungaria: What an Eighteenth-Century Crocheting Instructor Can Teach Us about Overland Globalisation,” Journal of Global History 17:3 (2022): 374–93.

33 Leonhard Kagg, Leonhard Kaggs dagbok 1698–1722, ed. Adam Lewenhaupt (Stockholm: Nord. bokh., 1912), 236.

34 Smiley, From Slaves to Prisoners of War, 61–5; Cf. Geza David, Ransom Slavery along the Ottoman Borders: (Early Fifteenth – Early Eighteenth Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

35 Jan Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 154–9.

36 Christoph Witzenrath, “Sklavenbefreiung, Loskauf und Religion im Moskauer Reich,” in Gefangenenloskauf im Mittelmeerraum: Ein interreligiöser Vergleich. Akten der Tagung vom 19. bis 21. September 2013 an der Universität Paderborn, ed. Heike Grieser and Nicole Priesching (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2015), 287–310.

37 Jin Noda and Takahiro Onuma, eds., A Collection of Documents from the Kazakh Sultans to the Qing Dynasty (Tokyo: Department of Islamic Area Studies, Center for Evolving Humanities, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo, 2010), 12–13, 39–40.

38 See Hilary Beckles, “The Concept of ‘White Slavery’ in the English Caribbean during the Early Seventeenth Century,” in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London; New York: Routledge, 1995), 572–83; for long-term discursive use, see Ana Stevenson, The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

39 Duché, “Captives in Plantations.”

40 Lovisa von Burghausen, “Rättelig Berättelse,” 1733, Biografica, Riksarkivet; Brigitta Scherzenfeldt’s story was spread in Mrs William Vigor, Letters from a Lady, Who Resided Some Years in Russia, to Her Friend in England (London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1777), 107–10.

41 Elena Smolarz, “Speaking about Freedom and Dependency: Representations and Experiences of Russian Enslaved Captives in Central Asia in the First Half of the 19th Century,” Journal of Global Slavery 2 (2017): 44–71; Colley, Captives; Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

42 von Borneman, “Sånger af en svensk fånge i Simbirsk,” 66.

43 Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, Das nord- und ostliche Theil von Europa und Asia (Stockholm, 1730), 150; see Alf Åberg, “Karolinska Forskningsfärder,” Svensk Tidskrift, December 1970, 257–61.

44 See Peter Simon Pallas, Reise durch verschiedene provinzen des Russischen Reichs (St. Petersburg, 1773), 488.

45 Robert Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, The Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Srividhya Swaminathan and Adam R. Beach, Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Frédéric Mégret, “From ‘Savages’ to ‘Unlawful Combatants’: A Postcolonial Look at International Humanitarian Law’s ‘Other,’“in International Law and Its “Others”, ed. Anne Orford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 265–317.

46 This goes back to Henri Lefebvre, La Production de l’espace (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1974); Mimi Sheller, “From Spatial Turn to Mobilities Turn,” Current Sociology 65:4 (July 2017): 623–39; Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006); for the gendering, see Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Oxford: Polity Press, 1994).

47 von Borneman, “Sånger af en svensk fånge i Simbirsk,” 8–10, 19.

48 Kagg, Leonhard Kaggs dagbok 1698–1722, 155; see also Åberg, Fångars elände, 103–15.

49 Carl Piper and Carl Gustaf Rehnschiöld, Carl Pipers och Carl Gustaf Rehnschiölds mottagna brev 1709–1713, ed. Lars Otto Berg (Stockholm: Kungl. Samf. för utgivande av handskrifter rörande Skandinaviens historia, 1997); Åberg, Fångars elände, 41–8.

50 Åberg, Karolinska kvinnoöden, 9–18, 90; Åberg, Fångars elände, 76–80.

51 Carl Piper and Carl Gustaf Rehnschiöld, Carl Pipers och Carl Gustaf Rehnschiölds koncept till utgående skrifvelser under deras fångenskap i Ryssland 1709–1715, ed. Per Sörensson (Stockholm: Nord. bokh., 1911), 176–7; Piper, Grefve Carl Pipers dagbok; for examples of their labour, see Pihlström, Anders Pihlströms dagbok 1708–1723; Vladimir Stepanovitch Miasnikov, ed., Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniia v XVIII veke. Dokumenty i materialy. 1700–1725, vol. 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 1978).

52 von Borneman, “Sånger af en svensk fånge i Simbirsk,” 41, see also 20–24.

53 Shebaldina, Shvedskie voennoplennye v Sibiri, 57; Åberg, Fångars elände, 76; see also Mark Mancall, Russia and China: Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 78; see Kagg, Leonhard Kaggs dagbok 1698–1722, 260.

54 Kagg, Leonhard Kaggs dagbok 1698–1722, 202, 236; Åberg, Karolinska kvinnoöden, 49.

55 Gunnar Jarring, “Karolinerna i nyutkommen sovjetisk aktpublikation,” Karolinska förbundets årsbok, 1978, 24–49; Åberg, Fångars elände, 96–100; examples in Kagg, Leonhard Kaggs dagbok 1698–1722.

56 von Borneman, “Sånger af en svensk fånge i Simbirsk,” 29–30.

57 von Borneman, “Sånger af en svensk fånge i Simbirsk,” 40–4, 49–56, 68–70, 87–89. Quotes on 40 and 89 respectively.

58 Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents (RGADA), fond. 96. Opis 2.1714 g. No 39. p.10.

59 Shebaldina, Shvedskie voennoplennye v Sibiri, 54.

60 John F. Baddeley, Russia, Mongolia, China: Being Some Record of the Relations between Them from the Beginning of the XVIIth Century to the Death of the Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich A. D. 1602–1676 Rendered Mainly in the Form of Narratives … by Envoys Sent by the Russian Tsars… (London: Macmillan, 1919), iv–vii; see examples in Vladimir Stepanovich Miasnikov, ed., Russko-kitaiskie otnosheniia v XVIII veke. Dokumenty i materialy. 1729–1733., V (Moscow: Pamjatniki istoricheskoe mysli, 2016).

61 Julia C. Schneider, “A Non-Western Colonial Power? The Qing Empire in Postcolonial Discourse,” Journal of Asian History 54:2 (2020): 311–42; Krishan Kumar, “Colony and Empire, Colonialism and Imperialism: A Meaningful Distinction?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63:2 (April 2021): 280–309; Cf. Leigh K. Jenco and Jonathan Chappell, “Overlapping Histories, Co-Produced Concepts: Imperialism in Chinese Eyes,” The Journal of Asian Studies 79:3 (August 2020): 685–706.

62 Roger P. Bartlett, Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1762–1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

63 Shebaldina, Shvedskie voennoplennye v Sibiri, 30–5.

64 Lauren Benton and Timo McGregor, “A Sea of Households: Ordering Violence and Mobility in the Inter-Imperial Caribbean,” Past & Present 265: Supplement 17 (November 2024): 22–6.

65 Kołodziejczyk, “Captive Colonizers,” 97–102.

66 von Borneman, “Sånger af en svensk fånge i Simbirsk,” 68.

67 Shebaldina, Shvedskie voennoplennye v Sibiri, 52–4; Åberg, Fångars elände, 110.

68 Quote in Åberg, Karolinska kvinnoöden, 72.

69 For an example, see the prayer book copied by Georg Planting Gyllenbåga, “Praxis pietatis,” n.d., W64, Uppsala University Library.

70 von Borneman, “Sånger af en svensk fånge i Simbirsk,” 69, 85; see Elena Glavatskaya and Gunnar Thorvaldsen, “Sibirskii Vavilon: Shvedskie Uzniki v Nachale XVIII v,” Quaestio Rossica 4 (2015): 215–40.

71 Åberg, Karolinska kvinnoöden, 54–6, 72; Åberg, Fångars elände, 103–15; for examples of the use of this imagery elsewhere, see Colley, Captives; Duché, “Captives in Plantations.”

72 Kagg, Leonhard Kaggs dagbok 1698–1722, 172, 176, 226.

73 Kagg, Leonhard Kaggs dagbok 1698–1722, 213–4. “Ostyak” was at this time used for various local groups.

74 Johann Bernhard Müller, Leben und Gewohnheiten der Ostjacken, eines Volcks, dass bis unter dem Polo Arctico wohnet, wie selbiges aus dem Heydenthum in diesen Zeiten zur christl. griechischen Religion gebracht […] (Christ. Gottlieb Nicolai, 1720), vii; this was first published in Weber, Das veränderte Russland.

75 See for example a prisoner’s book from a Russian expedition to the Volga Kalmyks: Johan Christian Schnitscher, Berättelse, om ajuckiniska Calmuckiet (Stockholm, 1744).

76 Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2011); Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier, 3, 225–9.

77 Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier, 156; Ivan Pososhkov, Zaveshchanie otecheskoe k synu svoemu, so nravoucheniem, za podtverzhdeniem Bozhestvennykh Pisaniĭ (St. Petersburg, 1893), 323.

78 Michael Khodarkovsky, “The Conversion of Non-Christians in Early Modern Russia,” in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, ed. Robert Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 135.

79 Scherzenfeldt, “Personalier,” 21; Jarring, “Skånskan som blev kalmuckernas fånge,” 117.

80 Curt Friedrich von Wreech, Wahrhaffte und umstandliche Historie von denen Schwedischen Gefangenen in Russland und Siberien (Sorau, 1725), 335, 459, 496–7, 525.

81 See Ulrike Gleixner, “Globalizing the Protestant Reformation through Millenarian Practices,” in Protestant Empires: Globalizing the Reformations, ed. Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 254–74.

82 Shebaldina, Shvedskie voennoplennye v Sibiri, 103, 156–8; Åberg, “Karolinska Forskningsfärder”; Åberg, Karolinska kvinnoöden, 78–80; Åberg, Fångars elände, 67, 115, 133–49.

83 For discussion of Pargas, see Jessica Millward, “On Agency, Freedom and the Boundaries of Slavery Studies,” Labour /Le Travail 71 (2013): 193–201; Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37:1 (2003): 113–24.

84 See Noel Emmanuel Lenski and Catherine M. Cameron, What Is a Slave Society?: The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Jutta Wimmler and Pia Wiegmink, “Beyond Slavery and Freedom?: An Introduction,” Journal of Global Slavery 9:1–2 (2024): 1–16.

85 Ward, Networks of Empire.

86 Bartlett, Human Capital; Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers; Kołodziejczyk, “Captive Colonizers.”

87 In contrast, prisoner of war studies is paying more and more attention to gendered aspects of that experience; see J. Pattinson, L. Noakes, and W. Ugolini, “Introduction: Incarcerated Masculinities: Male POWs and the Second World War,” Journal of War and Culture Studies 7 (2014): 179–90.

Figure 0

Figure 1. Central Asia through the eyes of a Swedish prisoner with Europe in the upper left corner. ca. 1730, Strahlenberg, Nova descriptio geographica Tattariæ magnæ [Image credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France].Figure 1 long description.

Source:https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53039520z.