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. From Cape to Batavia, slavery is understood as a diffuse practice. This approach helps unearth 18th and 19th century experiences of being a slave in the Indian Ocean world, but also sheds light on continuities in bondage into the present. Contributors force an often hostile archive to extract traces of the lived experience of slavery in court records, petitions or private letters. They also listen to local voices by prying unexplored primary sources such as oral histories, memories and objects.
- Frontcover
- Table of Contents
- Contributors
- List of Figures
- Preface: Looking at Indian Ocean Multiple Forms of Slavery
- Introduction: Enslaved in the Indian Ocean, 1700–18501
- Alicia Schrikker and Nira Wickramasinghe
- Part I.
Mobility, Emotions, Identities
- 1. Slavery, Ethnicity, and Identity in the Indian Ocean Colonial World
- 2. Small-Scale Slave Trade Between Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope
- 3. Between Markets and Chains
- Alexander Geelen, Bram van den Hout, Merve Tosun and Matthias van Rossum
- 4. Connected Lives
- 5. Boenga van Johor: “My forced journey from Batavia to the Cape of Good Hope”
- Part II. Legacies, Memories, Absences
- 6. At Sea in the Archive
- 7. Acts of Equality
- 8. Rituals of Rule
- 9. “Hoera, dit skip seil uit oos”
- 10. The Materiality of Indian Ocean Slavery and Emancipation
- 11. The Shadows of (Public) Recognition
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Backcover
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