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Intro -- Introduction Slavery, Slave Trading, and Bonded Labor Studiesin Asia -- Part 1 Conceptualizing Slave Status -- Chapter 1 Slavery and Forced Labour in Asia: Status Quaestionis -- Chapter 2 Between Slave and Disciple in South Asia -- Chapter 3 Gender and Slavery in Asia -- Part 2 Slavery, the State, and Society in East Asia -- Chapter 4 Slavery and the Mongol Empire -- Chapter 5 Economic, Social, and Legal Aspects of Slavery and Indentured Labor in Late Ming China (1550-1645): What the Huizhou Documents Tell Us -- Chapter 6 Human Trafficking in Late Imperial China -- Chapter 7 Korea: A Slave Society -- Chapter 8 The Abolition of Slavery, Constitutional Reforms, and Modernity in Late Qing China -- Part 3 Slavery, Servitude, and European Colonialism -- Chapter 9 Slaves, Weavers, and the Peopling of East India Company Colonies, 1660-1730 -- Chapter 10 Slavery, Conflict, and Empire in the Seventeenth-Century Philippines -- Chapter 11 Pearling and Slavery in the Sulu Zone, 1882-1884: The Letters and Diary of Thomas Henry Haynes -- Chapter 12 Slavery through Missionary Lenses: Timor in the Nineteenth Century -- Chapter 13 Indebtedness, Socio-cultural Hierarchies, and Unfree Labor on Nineteenth-Century Ceylonese Plantations -- Part 4 Reflections -- Chapter 14 Slavery in Asia and Global Slavery -- Bibliography -- Index.

Between 1500 and 1850, European traders shipped hundreds of thousands of African, Indian, Malagasy, and Southeast Asian slaves to ports throughout the Indian Ocean world. The activities of the British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese traders who operated in the Indian Ocean demonstrate that European slave trading was not confined largely to the Atlantic but must now be viewed as a truly global phenomenon. European slave trading and abolitionism in the Indian Ocean also led to the development of an increasingly integrated movement of slave, convict, and indentured labor during the late eighteent

Recent scholarship on British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese slave trading in the Indian Ocean highlights the need to explore structural connections between pre- and post-emancipation migrant labour systems in the colonial world. Europeans purchased and transported a minimum of 431,000-547,000 slaves of African, Indian, Malagasy, and Southeast Asian origin to destinations in the Indian Ocean world between 1500 and 1850. These data, coupled with recent research on European abolitionist activity in the region and the movement of convict and indentured labourers throughout and beyond this oceanic basin, point to the development of an increasingly integrated global movement of migrant labour during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

A review of published scholarship on British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese slave trading in the Indian Ocean indicates that between 1500 and 1850, Europeans shipped a minimum of 431,000 to 547,000 slaves of African, Indian, and Southeast Asian origin to destinations within this oceanic basin. These data and available information about the nature and dynamics of European slave trading in the Indian Ocean region point to the development of an increasingly integrated global movement of chattel and other kinds of forced labor from the sixteenth through mid nineteenth centuries.

Even before the abolition of slavery on 1 February 1835, planters on Mauritius had begun to look for free agricultural labourers to work their estates. By the early 1830s, it had become apparent that the local slave population was inadequate to meet the labour needs of the colony's rapidly expanding sugar industry, and the long-term availability of this soon-to-be emancipated work force was also increasingly open to question as the decade progressed. The Act of Abolition promised owners the services of their former slaves, now transformed into 'apprentices', as agricultural labourers, but only for a period of six years. Some planters no doubt suspected that the apprenticeship system might come to an end earlier than scheduled, as indeed was to happen in 1839. Others had good reason to suspect that many, if not most, of their apprentices would leave the plantations upon their final emancipation, as indeed they subsequently did. Faced with these realities, Mauritian planters dispatched their agents as far afield as China, Singapore, Ethiopia and Madagascar to search out supplies of inexpensive labour. Their gaze returned continually, however, to the relative close and seemingly inexhaustible manpower of India.

While the British were able to accomplish abolition in the trans-Atlantic world by the end of the nineteenth century, their efforts paradoxically caused a great increase in legal and illegal slave trading in the western Indian Ocean. Bringing together essays from leading authorities in the field of slavery studies, this comprehensive work offers an original and creative study of slavery and abolition in the Indian Ocean world during this period. Among the topics discussed are the relationship between British imperialism and slavery; Islamic law and slavery; and the bureaucracy of slave trading