Being a Slave
Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean
9789087283445
332 pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
This multidisciplinary volume brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean. The volume discusses a variety of qualitative data on the experience of being a slave in order to recover ordinary lives and, crucially, to place this experience in its Asian local context. Building on the rich scholarship on the slave trade, this volume offers a unique perspective that embraces the origin and afterlife of enslavement as well as the imaginaries and representations of slaves rather than the trade in slaves itself.
Author Bio
Alicia Schrikker is Senior Lecturer in colonial and global history at Leiden University. She works on everyday colonialism in the Indian Ocean throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through a focus on sites and moments of exchange and interaction.Nira Wickramasinghe is Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University. She has published on a range of topics, including identity politics, colonial society and slavery in Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean world. Her most recent publication is Slave in a Palanquin. Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
