Vient de paraître Slavery and Bondage in Asia, 1550–1850. Towards a Global History of Coerced Labour sous la direction de Kate Ekama, Lisa Hellman and Matthias van Rossum chez De Gruyter

Vient de paraître Slavery and Bondage in Asia, 1550–1850. Towards a Global History of Coerced Labour sous la direction de Kate Ekama, Lisa Hellman and Matthias van Rossum chez De Gruyter, coll. "Dependency and Slavery Studies" (vol. 3), 2022, VIII-277 p. ISBN : 9783110776126 Prix : 84,95 €.
La version électronique est gratuitement et librement téléchargeable (open-access).

"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."

Kate Ekama is a postdoctoral fellow in History at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Her research focuses on slavery in Sri Lanka and at the Cape of Good Hope from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Kate’s recent publications include “Precarious Freedom : Manumission in eighteenth-century Ceylon,” Journal of Social History (2020) and “Bondsmen : Slave Collateral in the 19th-Century Cape Colony,” Journal of Southern African Studies (2021). Her current research focuses on the financial underpinnings of slavery in the Cape Colony.
Lisa Hellman is a Research Leader for the group ‘Coerced Circulation of Knowledge’ at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, and a Pro Futura fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. She works at the intersection between social, cultural, maritime and global history in East and Central Asia. Her publications include “Enslaved in Dzungaria : What an eighteenth-century crocheting instructor can teach us about overland globalisation,” Journal of Global History (2021), and the monograph This House is Not a Home : European Everyday Life in Canton and Macao 1730–1830 (Brill : 2018).
Matthias van Rossum is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam. He specializes in global (labour) history, slavery, colonialism and intercultural relations. He is project leader of the digital infrastructure GLOBALISE https://globalise.huygens.knaw.nl/, co-lead of Exploring Slave Trade in Asia (https://iisg.amsterdam/nl/research/projects/slave-trade-asia) and vice-chair of the European Labour History Network.