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.