William O’Reilly: Soul Sellers and Transatlantic Migration from Central Europe: 1700-1800

William O’Reilly, senior lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge and full-time fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University, discusses his research for his forthcoming book, Selling Souls, with Jonathan Singerton.  Early human traffickers, soul-sellers (Seelenverkäufer) were in the business of enlisting and conveying German-speaking migrants to North America and Central and Eastern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.