TraIL: Tracing Labour in Islamicate Legal Traditions

In this poster presentation we introduced the SNSF Starting Grant Project TraIL: Tracing Labour in Islamicate Legal Traditions.
TraIL is the first longue durée investigation of labour in Islamicate societies, spanning from the tenth to the twentieth century. While Global Labour History has increasingly embraced non-European contexts, the Middle East remains underrepresented. Similarly, Middle Eastern Studies have often neglected labour history, particularly in the pre-industrial period. TraIL addresses this dual gap by integrating three fields of scholarship: Global Labour History, to contextualize labour within broader economic and social dynamics; Gender Studies, to uncover the often-invisible roles and agency of women; and Islamic Legal Studies, to explore how Islamic law conceptualized and contested labour relations.
Methodologically, the project employs textual analysis, historical discourse analysis, and digital humanities tools. These include data mining, text reuse analysis, and tagging systems to trace the evolution of labour-related terminology across centuries. A key outcome is the development of a relational database, aligned with FAIR principles, to systematically map labour vocabulary in historical texts. This digital resource will support both diachronic and synchronic analysis and provide open access to researchers and the broader academic community.