Testimonies of Enslavement

Rossum, Matthias van; Geelen, Alexander; Hout, Bram van den; Tosun, Merve

doi:10.5040/9781350140318

Cited by 11 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The connections between regimes of slavery and, most visibly, the external slave trade, influenced not only the spread of commodified and other slavery regimes, but also the wider set of internal and external political, economic, and social factors that shaped the trajectories and characters of those regimes. 98 The slave trade could, for example, lead to shifting restrictions on the transferability of enslaved subjects, as it did in Nias, 99 and the methods of controlling and binding enslaved subjects, as in Malabar, 100 but also to increasing enslavement through poverty, as in Coromandel, 101 or enslavement as legal punishment, as in Bali. 102 The impact such slave exports had on the commodification of local regimes has been extensively explored for West Africa and for the Western Indian Ocean.…”

Section: T O Wa R D S a G L O B A L C O M P A R At I V E A N D C O N N E C T I N G M O D E Lmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…106 An example is court records and their rich investigations and testimonies, which can be used to explore dynamics within, for example, the realm of the Dutch Asian and Atlantic empire, 107 and even those beyond the borders of colonial societies, for example the control of enslaved people's mobility as indicative of the characteristics of different forms of slavery. 108 Unfortunately, for many societies outside of or on the fringe of European empires, like in the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian Archipelago, few quotidian written records have been preserved. 109 Many valuable local written sources from non-European societies are of course available, ranging from legal texts and contracts to chronicles and histories, but most do not record practices at this crucial level of everyday life.…”

Section: P R a C T I C A L Wa Y S F O R Wa R D -O N M E T H O D S A N D S O U R C E Smentioning

confidence: 99%

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Slavery and Its Transformations: Prolegomena for a Global and Comparative Research Agenda

Rossum

2021

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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This article argues that we need to move beyond the “Atlantic” and “formal” bias in our understanding of the history of slavery. It explores ways forward toward developing a better understanding of the long-term global transformations of slavery. Firstly, it claims we should revisit the historical and contemporary development of slavery by adopting a wider scope that accounts for the adaptable and persistent character of different forms of slavery. Secondly, it stresses the importance of substantially expanding the body of empirical observations on trajectories of slavery regimes, especially outside the Atlantic, and most notable in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, where different slavery regimes existed and developed in interaction. Thirdly, it proposes an integrated analytical framework that will overcome the current fragmentation of research perspectives and allow for a more comparative analysis of the trajectories of slavery regimes in their highly diverse formal and especially informal manifestations. Fourth, the article shows how an integrated framework will enable a collaborative research agenda that focuses not only on comparisons, but also on connections and interactions. It calls for a closer integration of the histories of informal slavery regimes into the wider body of existing scholarship on slavery and its transformations in the Atlantic and other more intensely studied formal slavery regimes. In this way, we can renew and extend our understandings of slavery's long-term, global transformations.

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Section: T O Wa R D S a G L O B A L C O M P A R At I V E A N D C O N N E C T I N G M O D E Lmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: P R a C T I C A L Wa Y S F O R Wa R D -O N M E T H O D S A N D S O U R C E Smentioning

confidence: 99%