Escaping your Master: Geographies of illegal civilian mobility 1750-1850

The project investigates how runaway apprentices, servants and tenant farmers navigated the coercive geographies of Denmark in the period 1750 to 1850. During this time, the mobility and identity control practiced by authorities changed radically, and at the end of the period, it was harder to disappear permanently. A central question is how the strategies of runaway civilians changed in relation to that transition. The enquiry is based on newly digitized newspaper material, in addition to legal protocols. The project will utilize computational data science-based methods to analyze said material.