Slavery and Bondage in Asia, 1550–1850

Towards a Global History of Coerced Labour

Kate Ekama, Lisa Hellman, Matthias van Rossum, Kate Ekama, Lisa Hellman, Matthias van Rossum

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9783110777246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The study of slavery and coerced labour is increasingly conducted from a global perspective, and yet a dual Eurocentric bias remains: slavery primarily brings to mind the images of Atlantic chattel slavery, and most studies continue to be based – either outright or implicitly – on a model of northern European wage labour. This book constitutes an attempt to re-centre that story to Asia.

With studies spanning the western Indian Ocean and the steppes of Central Asia to the islands of South East Asia and Japan, and ranging from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, this book tracks coercion in diverse forms, tracing both similarities and differences – as well as connections – between systems of coercion, from early sales regulations to post-abolition labour contracts.

Deep empirical case studies, as well as comparisons between the chapters, all show that while coercion was entrenched in a number of societies, it was so in different and shifting ways. This book thus not only shows the history of slavery and coercion in Asia as a connected story, but also lays the groundwork for global studies of a phenomenon as varying, manifold and contested as coercion.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Maps
• Opening Thoughts
• Slavery and Labour Coercion in Asia – Towards a Global History
• Reflections on Comparing and Connecting Regimes of Slavery and Coerced Labour
• Beyond Maritime Asia. Ideology, Historiography, and Prospects for a Global History of Slaving in Early-Modern Asia
• Coerced Mobilities
• Maritime (Im)mobility: Reconstructing the Supply of Enslaved Labour to Batavia, 1624–1801
• A Slave Economy in the East Indies: Seaborne Transportation of Slaves to the Banda Islands
• The ‘Coolie Trade’ via Southeast Asia: Exporting Chinese Indentured Labourers to Cuba through the Spanish Philippines
• Regimes
• Boundaries of Bondage: Slavery and Enslaveability in VOC Ceylon
• Government Slavery in Portuguese Melaka, 1511–1523
• The Eastward Routes: Swedish Prisoners and Overlapping Regimes of Coercion in the Russian, Chinese and Dzungar Empires
• Households, Family Politics, and Slavery in Nepal
• Local Networks of the Slave Trade in Colonial Kerala
• Transformations
• Suspicion and Repression: Ming China, Tokugawa Japan, and the End of the Japanese-European Slave Trade (1614–1635)
• Famine Labour and Coercion in Relief-based Public Works Construction in Colonial India in the Late Nineteenth Century
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index