Top picture: Merchants from the Banda Islands with their slaves. Dutch illustration from c. 1600.
Project information
Project manager
Hans Hägerdal
Timetable
January 2022-December 2024
Subject
History (Department of Cultural Sciences, The Faculty of Arts and Humanities)
More about the project
The project strives to understand, via regional cases, how human societies in history have reduced the individual status of women and men to chattel, and allocated them to coerced labour tasks. In this, I aim to explore the forging of networks, practices, institutions, markets and transportation routes pertaining to slaving (the acquisition and management of coerced labour) in a part-colonial maritime Southeast Asian context, specifically the eastern part of what is today Indonesia, east of Bali.
The dynamics of slaving that took place beyond colonial control in this region up to about 1900 is still only partly understood, while the colonial-driven slaving is also understudied. To address this, I will focus on the parallel and often intersecting trajectories of slaving by European and Asian groups in the vast maritime expanse of eastern Indonesia plus Timor-Leste. This is done through a study of published and unpublished archival sources from c. 1500-1900, often but not solely in Dutch. Through this one may discern circuits or zones of slaving practices.
The study discusses the conceptual problems of defining a “slave” in non-Western contexts, and argues that slavery should be seen as a set of processes arising from historical contexts rather than systems.
The project is part of the research in Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
