Resisting Bondage in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia

Resisting Bondage in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia is the companion volume to Slavery and Resistance in Africa and Asia which was published by Routledge in 2005. This second volume, as implied by the title, recognizes the complexity of forms of bondage in the Indian Ocean world - incorporating regions running from East Africa to the Middle East, to South and Southeast Asia to the Far East - and of resistance to them. Slavery, in the conventional sense of the word, was in the region covered one of many, often overlapping, forms of unfree labor that included, in addition, various types of forced or corvee labor, debt bondage and indentured or contract labor. This volume examines resistance to forms of bondage in a variety of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial regimes, from revolt against slavery in South Africa, to resistance to colonial forced labor schemes in Somalia, the Indian Ocean islands of Mayotte and Madagascar, India, Indonesia and Indochina, and the fight of Aborigines for human rights on the cattle ranches of Northern Australia. Just as the companion volume Slavery and Resistance in Africa and Asia revealed that reactions to slavery in Africa and Asia were far more complex than the conventional historical emphasis on forms of 'revolt' implies, this collection of essays reveals an unexpectedly wide range of often very subtle forms of resistance to a variety of repressive labor regimes in the Indian Ocean world. In so doing, it will appeal to all those interested in exploring the wider debate over the structure of unfree labor regimes and resistance to them.