Alessandro Stanziani. Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants

This short book entitled Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants: Bondage in the Indian Ocean World attempts to complicate the understanding of the “transition” from slavery to wage labor in the “long” nineteenth century, 1750–1914. Importantly, it invites a reconsideration of free labor, slavery, and indenture as distinct labor categories and instead urges us to recognize that these often overlapped to expose the limits in the creation of the notion of “freedom” of labor both on land and at sea. Its focus, ostensibly, is the Indian Ocean. The author “sharply contrasts” (1) this oceanic space with the Atlantic, which has been the overwhelming focus for historians of labor. Although not entirely justified or adequately explained, Alessandro Stanziani sets out to examine the connections between the “Indian Ocean World” (IOW) and Europe, specifically France and England. The IOW, though, is reduced to British India and the Mascarene islands of Mauritius and Reunion, with only occasional reference made to other parts of this oceanic world.

Agriculture · Ancient history · Archaeology · Economic history · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Immigration · Indian ocean · Long nineteenth century · Political science · Space (punctuation) · Wage · Wage labour · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Geology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Oceanography · Philosophy