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Honourable Intentions? compares the significance and strategic use of ‘honour’ in two colonial societies, the Cape Colony and the early British settlements in Australia, between 1750 and 1850. The mobile populations of emigrants and sojourners, sailors and soldiers, merchants and traders, slaves and convicts who surged into and through these regions are not usually associated with ideas of honour. But in both societies, competing and contradictory notions of honour proved integral to the ways in which colonisers and colonised, free and unfree, defended their status and insisted on their right to be treated with respect. During these times of flux, concepts of honour and status were radic...
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.
Honour, Violence and Emotions in History is the first book to draw on emerging cross-disciplinary scholarship on the study of emotions to analyse the history of honour and violence across a broad range of cultures and regions. Written by leading cultural and social historians from around the world, the book considers how emotions - particularly shame, anger, disgust, jealousy, despair and fear - have been provoked and expressed through culturally-embedded and historically specific understandings of honour. The collection explores a range of contexts, from 17th-century China to 18th-century South Africa and 20th-century Europe, offering a broad and wide-ranging analysis of the interrelationships between honour, violence and emotions in history. This ground-breaking book will be of interest to all researchers studying the relationship between violence and the emotions.
During global capitalism's long ascent from 1600–1850, workers of all kinds—slaves, indentured servants, convicts, domestic workers, soldiers, and sailors—repeatedly ran away from their masters and bosses, with profound effects. A Global History of Runaways, edited by Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, and Matthias van Rossum, compares and connects runaways in the British, Danish, Dutch, French, Mughal, Portuguese, and American empires. Together these essays show how capitalism required vast numbers of mobile workers who would build the foundations of a new economic order. At the same time, these laborers challenged that order—from the undermining of Danish colonization in the seventeenth century to the igniting of civil war in the United States in the nineteenth.
Lanka, Ceylon, Sarandib: merely three disparate names for a single island? Perhaps. Yet the three diverge in the historical echoes, literary cultures, maps and memories they evoke. Names that have intersected and overlapped - in a treatise, a poem, a document - only to go their own ways. But despite different trajectories, all three are tied to narratives of banishment and exile. Ronit Ricci suggests that the island served as a concrete exilic site as well as a metaphor for imagining exile across religions, languages, space and time: Sarandib, where Adam was banished from Paradise; Lanka, where Sita languished in captivity; and Ceylon, faraway island of exile for Indonesian royalty under colonialism. Utilising Malay manuscripts and documents from Sri Lanka, Javanese chronicles, and Dutch and British sources, Ricci explores histories and imaginings of displacement related to the island through a study of the Sri Lankan Malays and their connections to an exilic past.
Pre-modern long-distance trade was fraught with risks which often created conflicts of interest. The ensuing disputes and the ways the actors involved dealt with them belong to the field of conflict management. How did victims of maritime conflicts claim compensation? How did individual actors and public institutions negotiate disputes which transcended jurisdictional boundaries? What strategies, arrangements and agreements could contribute to achieve the resolution of such conflicts, and to what effect? These and other questions have mainly been studied separately for the Mediterranean and Atlantic regions. Here, the two seascapes are connected, allowing for a comparative long-term perspective. The different contributions enhance our understanding in the complexity of various approaches to conflict management. Thierry Allain, Cátia Antunes, Eduardo Aznar Vallejo, Catarina Cotic Belloube, Kate Ekama, Tiago Viúla de Faria, Ana Belem Fernández Castro, Jessica Goldberg, Roberto J. González Zalacain, Ian Peter Grohse, Thomas K. Heebøll-Holm, Laurence Jean-Marie, Daphne Penna, Pierrick Pourchasse, Pierre Prétou, Ana María Rivera Medina, Carlo Taviani, and Dominique Valérian.
The study of slavery has grown strongly in recent years, as scholars working in several disciplines have cultivated broader perspectives on enslavement in a wide variety of contexts and settings. Critical Readings on Global Slavery offers students and researchers a rich collection of previously published works by some of the most preeminent scholars in the field. With contributions covering various regions and time periods, this anthology encourages readers to view slave systems across time and space as both ubiquitous and interconnected, and introduces those who are interested in the study of human bondage to some of the most important and widely cited works in slavery studies.
The abolition of slavery and similar institutions of servitude was an important global experience of the nineteenth century. Considering how tightly bonded into each local society and economy were these institutions, why and how did people decide to abolish them? This collection of essays examines the ways this globally shared experience appeared and developed. Chapters cover a variety of different settings, from West Africa to East Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, with close consideration of the British, French and Dutch colonial contexts, as well as internal developments in Russia and Japan. What part of the abolition decision was due to international pressure, and what part due t...
The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. They address these matters from their varied disciplinary perspectives and diverse array of sources, critically assessing concepts such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and localisation, and elucidating the subtle ways in which the foreign may be resisted and embraced at the same time. The individual chapters, and the volume as a whole, are a welcome addition to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, as well as studies of the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, and early modernity.
Coffee from East Africa, wine from California, chocolate from the Ivory Coast - all those every day products are based on labour, often produced under appalling conditions, but always involving the combination of various work processes we are often not aware of. What is the day-to-day reality for workers in various parts of the world, and how was it in the past? How do they work today, and how did they work in the past? These and many other questions comprise the field of the global history of work – a young discipline that is introduced with this handbook. In 8 thematic chapters, this book discusses these aspects of work in a global and long term perspective, paying attention to several kinds of work. Convict labour, slave and wage labour, labour migration, and workers of the textile industry, but also workers' organisation, strikes, and motivations for work are part of this first handbook of global labour history, written by the most renowned scholars of the profession.