This volume examines the various abolitionist impulses in the Indian Ocean World during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and assesses their efficacy within a context of a growing demand for labour resulting from an expanding international economy and European colonisation.
"For centuries, East Africa has played a central role within the Indian Ocean world. The Arabs built the first trade networks there; these were laid siege to by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, followed by British colonialists in the nineteenth century. An interregional trade linked different subregions of East Africa to other Indian Ocean economies. For example, Hindu merchants from Gujarat played a leading role in the ivory trade of East Africa during the past four centuries. In the nineteenth century, Zanzibar became a major center of the Asian slave trade. While slave trading, slave raiding, and their consequences provide one thematic focus of this book, the author also demonstrates that Indian Ocean commercial networks were much more complex in the range of products exchanged, including luxury goods and staple food items, as well as enforced labor. Islam provided yet another connective tissue linking East Africa to the Indian Ocean world and served as a cultural matrix through which popular beliefs and practices were transmitted. This book offers an eye-opening perspective on an often neglected area of world history."--Publisher's description.
The abolition of slavery in and around the Western Indian Ocean have been little studied. This collection examines the meaning of slavery and its abolition in relation to specific indigenous societies and to Islam, a religion that embraced the entire region, and draws comparisons between similar developments in the Atlantic system. Case studies include South Africa, Mauritius, Madagascar, the Benadir Coast, Arabia, the Persian Gulf and India. This volume marks an important new development in the study of slavery and its abolition in general, and an original approach to the history of slavery in the Indian Ocean and Asia regions.
First published in 2004. This book - previously published as a special issue of the journal Slavery and Abolition - provides pioneering studies on the nature and structure of resistance to forms of bondage in Africa, Asia and the Indian Ocean world.
First published in 2004. This book - previously published as a special issue of the journal Slavery and Abolition - provides pioneering studies on the nature and structure of resistance to forms of bondage in Africa, Asia and the Indian Ocean world.
For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island in the late eighteenth century and began to gradually abolish slavery. Yet the continued presence of enslaved people in Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century has practically vanished from collective memory in both the Sinhalese and Tamil communities. Nira Wickramasinghe uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory of the Indian Ocean world, exploring moments of revolt in the lives of enslaved people in the wake of abolition. She tells the stories of Wayreven, the slave who traveled in the palanquin of his master; Selestina, accused of killing her child; Rawothan, who sought permission for his son to be circumcised; and others, enslaved or emancipated, who challenged their status. Drawing on legal cases, petitions, and other colonial records to recover individual voices and quotidian moments, Wickramasinghe offers a meditation on the archive of slavery. She examines how color-based racial thinking gave way to more nuanced debates about identity, complicating conceptions of blackness and racialization. A deeply interdisciplinary book with a focus on recovering subaltern resistance, Slave in a Palanquin offers a vital new portrait of the local and transnational worlds of the colonial-era Asian slave trade in the Indian Ocean.
As the meeting point between Europe, colonial America, and Africa, the history of the Atlantic world is a constantly shifting arena, but one which has been a focus of huge and vibrant debate for many years. In over thirty chapters, all written by experts in the field, The Atlantic World takes up these debates and gathers together key, original scholarship to provide an authoritative survey of this increasingly popular area of world history. The book takes a thematic approach to topics including exploration, migration and cultural encounters. In the first chapters, scholars examine the interactions between groups which converged in the Atlantic world, such as slaves, European migrants and Native Americans. The volume then considers questions such as finance, money and commerce in the Atlantic world, as well as warfare, government and religion. The collection closes with chapters examining how ideas circulated across and around the Atlantic and beyond. It presents the Atlantic as a shared space in which commodities and ideas were exchanged and traded, and examines the impact that these exchanges had on both people and places. Including an introductory essay from the editors which defines the field, and lavishly illustrated with paintings, drawings and maps this accessible volume is invaluable reading for all students and scholars of this broad sweep of world history.
Struggling with History compares anthropological and historical approaches to the study of the Indian Ocean by focusing on the conflicted nature of cosmopolitanism. Essays contribute to current debates on the nature of cosmopolitanism, the comparative study of Muslim societies, and the examination of colonial and postcolonial contexts. Few books combine a comparable level of interdisciplinary scholarship and regional ethnographic expertise.
This book addresses historical issues of colonialism and race, which influenced the formation of multicultural society in Mauritius. During the 19th century, Mauritius was Britain’s prime sugar-producing colony, yet, unlike the West Indies, its history has remained significantly under-researched. The modern demographic of multi-ethnic Mauritius is unusual as, in the absence of an indigenous people, descendants of colonists, slaves and indentured labourers constitute the majority of the island’s population today. Thus, it may be said that the Mauritian nation was "assembled" during the period in question. This work draws on an in-depth examination of the two labour systems through which the island came to be populated: slavery and indenture. In studying the relevant laws, four legal events of historical importance within the context of these two labour systems are identified: the abolition of the slave trade, the abolition of slavery, private indentured labour migration and state-regulated indenture. This book is notable in that it presents a legal analysis of core historical events, thus straddling the line between two disciplines, and covers both slavery and indentured labour in Mauritian history. Mauritius, as an originally uninhabited island, presents a rare case study for inquiries into colonial legacies, multiculturalism and race consciousness. The book will be a valuable resource to scholars worldwide in the fields of slavery, indenture and the legal apparatus of forced labour.