Colonial Encounters and Slavery in Early Modern Asia

Abstract

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.