Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. Introduction: Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World

   • Gwyn Campbell

   Pages 1-32

3. Abolition in the Midst of Turmoil: The Case of the Tang Emperor Wu Zong (814–846 CE)

   • Ronald Kydd

   Pages 33-47

4. Environment and Enslavement in Highland Madagascar, 1500–1750: The Case for the Swahili Slave Export Trade Reassessed

   • Gwyn Campbell

   Pages 49-78

5. Volcanoes, Refugees, and Raiders: The 1765 Macaturin Eruption and the Rise of the Iranun

   • James Francis Warren

   Pages 79-100

6. The Environment and Slave Resistance in the Cape Colony

   • Nigel Worden

   Pages 101-121

7. 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

8. The Impact of Cyclones on Nineteenth-Century Réunion

   • Alessandro Stanziani

   Pages 143-161

9. 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

10. Environmental Knowledge and Resistance by Slave Transporters in the Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean

    • Hideaki Suzuki

    Pages 187-204

11. Environmental Disaster in Eastern Bengal: Colonial Capitalism and Rural Labour Force Formation in the Late Nineteenth Century

    • Sravani Biswas, Subho Basu

    Pages 205-226

12. Famine and Slavery in Africa’s Red Sea World, 1887–1914

    • Steven Serels

    Pages 227-244

13. Back Matter

    Pages 245-304

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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.

• Indian Ocean Environment
• Slavery and the environment
• Abolition in Indian Ocean
• Enslavement
• History of slave trade
• Indian ocean slave trade
• Tan Emperor Wu Zong
• Swahili Slave Export Trade
• Slave resistance
• Global climate
• Cyclones
• slave transporters
• environmental disaster
• slavery in Africa
• Indian Ocean slave traffickers
• Indian Ocean environmental history

“The long-term climate cycles of the rather expansive “Indian Ocean World” covered here, citing an impressive array of technical climate studies, attempts to distinguish debt-bondage from slavery … . World historians of many persuasions will accordingly find useful reminders of the climate component … in which they work and of the essential historicity of slaving.” (Joseph C. Miller,Journal of World History, Vol. 29 (4), December, 2018)

“This is a fascinating and important volume that challenges us to see how environmental conditions, along with systems of rule, helped shape practices of servitude in the Indian Ocean world. Brought together under the expert guidance of Gwyn Campbell, these rich chapters bring to life the specific effects of the relationship between political-economic policies and human struggles with climate, production, and debt.” (Mandana Limbert, Associate Professor of Anthropology, The Graduate Center at CUNY, USA)

• Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

  Gwyn Campbell

Gwyn Campbell is Canada Research Chair and Founding Director of the Indian Ocean World Centre at McGill University, Canada. He is also the editor of the Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies, and a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award (2017-2019).

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