Colonial Encounters and Slavery in Early Modern Asia
9789087284732
310 pages
Leiden University Press
Overview
What happened when European colonialism coopted or confronted societies in Asia and the Indian Ocean World for the purpose of slaving, and what are the tools to analyse this? These are questions that guide the present volume. For several hundred years after 1498, seafaring European powers were involved in an increasingly fine-tuned network of commercial relations along the coastlands of the Indian Ocean World and Asia, while Russia steadily expanded into North Asia. A sombre but economically significant part of all this was the trade and employment of enslaved people which flourished until relatively modern times and was partly handled through colonial supervision. This edited volume brings together scholarship about regional histories of colonialism, slavery, and slave trade, including related forms of forced labour and relocation in Asia and the wider Indian Ocean region. The ten chapters feature case studies from the Indian Ocean islands, India, Sri Lanka, Siberia, and Southeast Asia, ranging from the 16th to 19th centuries. The chapters highlight the variety of strategies of slaving that evolved when early colonial and commercial organizations met with local or regional slaving regimes. Additionally, the authors highlight cutting-edge methods of database creation and analysis that are revolutionizing our knowledge of the slaving circuits, indicating that numbers of people transported reached almost the level of the infamous Atlantic slave trade.Author Bio
Daniel Domingues da Silva =========================Daniel Domingues da Silva is an Associate Professor of History at Rice University, U.S. He is the host of the website SlaveVoyages.org and studies slave trade in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.
Hans Hägerdal =============Hans Hägerdal is a Professor in History at Linnaeus University, Sweden, and has written about political, social and cultural processes in early modern East and Southeast Asia.
Angelina Kalashnikova =====================Angelina Kalashnikova is a postdoctoral fellow at Kiel University, Germany. Her research interests include source studies, diplomatics, and the incorporation of Siberia in Muscovy.
Filipa Ribeiro da Silva =======================Filipa Ribeiro da Silva is a Senior Researcher at IISG, the Netherlands, specializing on global labour history, slave trade, slavery, colonialism, and business history.
