Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World

Description

Monsoon rains, winds, and currents have shaped patterns of production and exchange in the Indian Ocean world (IOW) for centuries. Consequently, as this volume demonstrates, the environment has also played a central role in determining the region’s systems of bondage and human trafficking. Contributors trace intricate links between environmental forces, human suffering, and political conditions, examining how they have driven people into servile labour and shaped the IOW economy. They illuminate the complexities of IOW bondage with case studies, drawn chiefly from the mid-eighteenth century, on Sudan, Cape Colony, Réunion, China, and beyond, where chattel slavery (as seen in the Atlantic world) represented only one extreme of a wide spectrum of systems of unfree labour. The array of factors examined here, including climate change, environmental disaster, disease, and market forces, are central to IOW history—and to modern-day forms of human bondage. Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii Introduction: Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World (Gwyn Campbell)....Pages 1-32 Abolition in the Midst of Turmoil: The Case of the Tang Emperor Wu Zong (814–846 CE) (Ronald Kydd)....Pages 33-47 Environment and Enslavement in Highland Madagascar, 1500–1750: The Case for the Swahili Slave Export Trade Reassessed (Gwyn Campbell)....Pages 49-78 Volcanoes, Refugees, and Raiders: The 1765 Macaturin Eruption and the Rise of the Iranun (James Francis Warren)....Pages 79-100 The Environment and Slave Resistance in the Cape Colony (Nigel Worden)....Pages 101-121 A Local View on Global Climate and Migration Patterns: The Impact of Cyclones and Drought on the Routier Family and Their Slaves in Île Bourbon (Réunion), 1770–1820 (Sue Peabody)....Pages 123-142 The Impact of Cyclones on Nineteenth-Century Réunion (Alessandro Stanziani)....Pages 143-161 Egypt’s Slaving Frontier: Environment, Enslavement, Social Transformations, and the Local Use of Slaves in the Sudan, 1780–1880 (George Michael La Rue)....Pages 163-185 Environmental Knowledge and Resistance by Slave Transporters in the Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean (Hideaki Suzuki)....Pages 187-204 Environmental Disaster in Eastern Bengal: Colonial Capitalism and Rural Labour Force Formation in the Late Nineteenth Century (Sravani Biswas, Subho Basu)....Pages 205-226 Famine and Slavery in Africa’s Red Sea World, 1887–1914 (Steven Serels)....Pages 227-244 Back Matter ....Pages 245-304