Slave in a Palanquin
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For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island in the late eighteenth century and began to gradually abolish slavery. Yet the continued presence of enslaved people in Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century has practically vanished from collective memory in both the Sinhalese and Tamil communities.
Nira Wickramasinghe uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory of the Indian Ocean world, exploring moments of revolt in the lives of enslaved people in the wake of abolition. She tells the stories of Wayreven, the slave who traveled in the palanquin of his master; Selestina, accused of killing her child; Rawothan, who sought permission for his son to be circumcised; and others, enslaved or emancipated, who challenged their status. Drawing on legal cases, petitions, and other colonial records to recover individual voices and quotidian moments, Wickramasinghe offers a meditation on the archive of slavery. She examines how color-based racial thinking gave way to more nuanced debates about identity, complicating conceptions of blackness and racialization. A deeply interdisciplinary book with a focus on recovering subaltern resistance, Slave in a Palanquin offers a vital new portrait of the local and transnational worlds of the colonial-era Asian slave trade in the Indian Ocean.
From the very early days of the Western colonial project, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopping point in the Indian Ocean. For four hundred years, Sri Lanka transferred from the Portuguese, to the Dutch, to the British, serving for all of them as a crossroads in transnational trade in the imperial period. Often overlooked is the extent to which this island became a waystation in colonists’ Indian Ocean slave trade, with enslaved Africans coming to work on island plantations there and Sri Lankans exported to other colonies as forced labor ‘coolies.’ Recovering the individual voices of enslaved people in this unique locale, Slave in a Palanquin explores how slavery in the Indian Ocean world was just as embedded in the fabric of everyday life and in transnational encounters as it was in its far more prominent Atlantic Ocean cousin. Scholars have argued that the fact that there were fewer slaves in places like Sri Lanka than in the Americas, and that the region had a tradition of temporarily bonded labor, means no real slave trade activity of any consequence existed there, but Nira Wickramasinghe draws upon archival sources to dispute these false memories and false equivalencies. Further, the book demonstrates that even though the official end of slavery in Sri Lanka and the surrounding region came early, in 1844, and without devastating revolutions like those in Haiti and the United States, the transition was by no means painless. Instead of leading to real emancipation, she argues, the end of formal slavery led to an ambivalent freedom filled with bonded plantation labor and indentured servitude, with lasting negative consequences. A true subaltern history, this book rethinks not only the local history of colonial Sri Lanka but also the history of the Indian Ocean world–
| Book Author | Nira Wickramasinghe |
|---|---|
| ISBN | 9780231552264 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Columbia University Press |
| Publication Date | 09-15-2020 |
| Format | eBook |
| Pages | 312 |
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