Breaking
the Chains
Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia
Edited by Martin A. Klein
"Breaking the Chains will be an important part of the
relatively sparse literature on emancipation in comparative and
global context."
—Richard Roberts, Stanford University
"Martin Klein has brought together
recent work on the abolition of slavery, from Ottoman Turkey
to Thailand and from South India to West Africa. This anthology
builds on the recent scholarship on both slavery in Asia and
Africa and the end of slavery as a world-wide historical phenomenon.
Whereas other anthologies have tended to focus on either Africa
or Asia, this project brings together in one volume case studies
and methodological approaches concerning both regions. Breaking
the Chains will be an important part of the relatively sparse
literature on emancipation in comparative and global context." —Richard
Roberts, Stanford University
Because the American history of slavery
and emancipation tends to be foremost in Western minds, few realize
that traditional forms of servitude still exist in a variety
of places around the world: children are sold on the streets
of Bangkok, bondage persists in India despite official efforts
to abolish it, and until 1980 slavery was legal in Mauritania.
Breaking the Chains deals with emancipation in African
and Asian societies which were either colonized or came under
the domination of European powers in the nineteenth century.
In these societies, emancipation involved the imposition on non-European
societies of an explicitly European discourse on slavery, and,
in most cases, a free labor ideology. Most of the slave masters
described in these essays were not European and found European
ideas on emancipation difficult to accept.
Against this backdrop, the essayists (many of whom contribute
their own non-Western perspective) focus on the transition from
slavery (or other forms of bondage) to emancipation. They show
that in each case the process involved pressure from European
abolition movements, the extension of capitalist relations of
production, the concerns and perceptions of the colonial state,
and the efforts of non-Western elites to modernize their cultures.
Martin A. Klein argues that the Asian and African experience
has much in common with the American experience, particularly
in efforts to control labor and family life. The struggle to
control the labor of former slaves has often been intense and,
he suggests, has had a continuing impact on the social order
in former slave societies.
Martin A. Klein is professor of history at the University
of Toronto. He is the author of Islam and Imperialism in Senegal:
Sine-Saloum 1847–1914 and has previously published with
the University of Wisconsin Press, editing Women and Slavery
in Africa with Claire Robertson.
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October 1993
LC: 93-015043 HT
256 pp. 6 x 9
5 maps
The cloth edition, ISBN-10: 0-299-13750-3, is out of print. |
