About: 

Since May 2024, Anka Steffen has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna, specializing in global history. Previously, she served as a lecturer at the University of Leipzig, a fellow at Harvard University, and a research assistant at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). In her dissertation, she examined the complex interconnections of the transatlantic trade in Silesian linen to West Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States of America during the “long” Early Modern Period (ca. 1550–1870), as well as the associated structural interdependencies of exploitative labor regimes on both sides of the Atlantic—Atlantic slavery and Silesian serfdom.

Her postdoctoral project focuses on questions of industrial development in “Eastern Europe” against the backdrop of imperial-colonial exploitation processes in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In her more leisurely academic moments, she works on a critical edition of the diary of a Silesian linen merchant, which he wrote during his educational journey through Northwestern Europe in 1774–75.

Publications:

• Am leinenen Faden. Schlesiens Wirtschaft im globalen Kontext der frühen Neuzeit. In: Beiträge zur Globalgeschichte 5, Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, 2025.
• Silesia, Serfdom and Slavery – A Relationship History from the Late Seventeenth to the Early Twentieth Century. In: Journal of Global Slavery 8/2-3 (2023), pp. 237–268.
• A Cloth that Binds: New perspectives on the Eighteenth-century Prussian Economy. In: Slavery & Abolition 42/1 (2021), pp. 105–129.