Slavery and South Asian History

"[W]ill be welcomed by students of comparative slavery.... [It] makes us reconsider the significance of slavery in the subcontinent." -Edward A. Alpers, UCLA Despite its pervasive presence in the South Asian past, slavery is largely overlooked in the region's historiography, in part because the forms of bondage in question did not always fit models based on plantation slavery in the Atlantic world. This important volume will contribute to a rethinking of slavery in world history, and even the category of slavery itself. Most slaves in South Asia were not agricultural laborers, but military or domestic workers, and the latter were overwhelmingly women and children. Individuals might become slaves at birth or through capture, sale by relatives, indenture, or as a result of accusations of criminality or inappropriate sexual behavior. For centuries, trade in slaves linked South Asia with Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The contributors to this collection of original essays describe a wide range of sites and contexts covering more than a thousand years, foregrounding the life stories of individual slaves wherever possible. Contributors are Daud Ali, Indrani Chatterjee, Richard M. Eaton, Michael H. Fisher, Sumit Guha, Peter Jackson, Sunil Kumar, Avril A. Powell, Ramya Sreenivasan, Sylvia Vatuk, and Timothy Walker.

Table of Contents:
List of Maps Preface and Acknowledgments Note on Translation and Transliteration IntroductionRichard M. Eaton 1. Renewed and Connected Histories: Slavery and the Historiography of South AsiaIndrani Chatterjee 2. War, Servitude, and the Imperial Household: A Study of Palace Women in the Chola EmpireDaud Ali 3. Turkish Slaves on Islam's Indian FrontierPeter Jackson 4. Service, Status, and Military Slavery in the Delhi Sultanate: Thirteenth and Fourteenth CenturiesSunil Kumar 5. The Rise and Fall of Military Slavery in the Deccan, 1450–1650Richard M. Eaton 6. Drudges, Dancing Girls, Concubines: Female Slaves in Rajput Polity, 1500–1850Ramya Sreenivasan 7. Slavery, Society, and the State in Western India, 1700–1800Sumit Guha 8. Bound for Britain: Changing Conditions of Servitude, 1600–1857Michael H. Fisher 9. Bharattee's Death: Domestic Slave-Women in Nineteenth-Century MadrasSylvia Vatuk 10. Slaves or Soldiers? African Conscripts in Portuguese India, 1857–1860Timothy Walker 11. Indian Muslim Modernists and the Issue of Slavery in IslamAvril A. Powell 12. Slavery, Semantics, and the Sound of SilenceIndrani Chatterjee List of Contributors Index

About the Author :
Indrani Chatterjee is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Richard M. Eaton is Professor of History at the University of Arizona.

Review :
"[W]ill be welcomed by students of comparative slavery... [It] makes us reconsider the significance of slavery in the subcontinent." --Edward A. Alpers, UCLA