Network: Slavery, Bondage, and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World

Should you wish to join the Indian Ocean World Centre’s network on Slavery, Bondage, and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World, please fill out this form here.

About the Network

In 2018, Gwyn Campbell published an edited volume, entitled Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World (Palgrave MacMillan).¹ This volume built on decades of work that emphasised the variety of bonded/slave experiences in the Indian Ocean World (IOW), contrasting it with the Atlantic World, where most of the enslaved were treated as chattels. It also added new dynamics, emphasising how climatic variability and anomalies, and environmental changes and knowledge, affected the experiences of the enslaved, as well as their resistance and susceptibility to enslavement.

While pioneering, slavery/bondage and the environment/climate continue to be important themes in new research in IOW studies and beyond. Heritage studies have come to the fore, assessing the legacies of bondage/slavery and how it is remembered in popular and official memories.² Such work can be considered part of a global movement, which includes Rhodes Must Fall, Black Lives Matter, and more, that seek to redress present-day injustices partly through assessing the legacies of slavery and colonialism.³ At the same time, monsoonal variability is increasingly understood as central to the past, present, and future of the IOW, and scholarship that links the environment to slave trades and enslavement (past and present) continue to proliferate.

It is for this reason that the Indian Ocean World Centre (IOWC) is building a free interdisciplinary network of scholars working on topics related to slavery, bondage, and the environment with a focus on the Indian Ocean World and its constituent parts (eastern Africa to eastern and southeastern Asia). It intends to build a forum for scholars to connect, exchange ideas, build bibliographies, circulate conference calls, and organise panels/conferences, etc. The IOWC will host an e-mail group and share news of relevant works, events, and opportunities, as well as member information on this website.

All scholars with interests in slavery, bondage, and/or the environment in the IOW, past, present, and future, are encouraged to participate. A publication record on the network’s themes is not a precursor to inclusion. Emerging scholars (including (post-)graduate students/candidates), women, indigenous, and scholars from or based in the IOW are particularly encouraged sign up. We hope to use this network as the starting point for important research into the linkages between environmental conditions and slavery/bondage in the future.

Footnotes

1. Gwyn Campbell (ed.), Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World (Cham: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018).
2. See, for example: Shanaaz Mohammed, ‘Reimagining the Aapravasi Ghat: Khal Torabully’s Poetry and the Indentured Diaspora,’ Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies, 4, 2 (2021), 118-143; Philip Gooding, ‘David Livingstone, UNESCO, and Nation-Building in 19^th-21^st Century Scotland and East and Central Africa,’ Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies, 5, 2 (2021), 243-69; Anne Eichmann, ‘The Heritage of Slavery and Nation Building: A Comparsion of South Africa and Mauritius,’ in Slavery, Memory and Identity: National Representations and Global Legacies, eds. Douglas Hamiton, Kate Hodgson, and Joel Quirk (London: Routledge, 2012).
3. Budiman Minasny, ‘The Dark History of Slavery and Racism in Indonesia during the Dutch Colonial Period,’ The Conversation (3 July 2020): https://theconversation.com/the-dark-history-of-slavery-and-racism-in-indonesia-during-the-dutch-colonial-period-141457 [Accessed: 26 Aug. 2022].
4. See, for example: Gwyn Campbell, Africa and the Indian Ocean World from Early Times to Circa 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), esp. Ch. 12; Philip Gooding, ed. Droughts, Floods, and Global Climatic Anomalies in the Indian Ocean World (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), esp. Ch. 4 by Archisman Chaudhuri; Gwyn Campbell and Eva-Maria Knoll, eds. Disease Dispersion and Impact in the Indian Ocean World (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); David Brown, Doreen S. Boyd, Katherine Brickell, Christopher D Ives, Nithya Natarajan, and Laurie Parsons, ‘Modern Slavery, Environmental Degradation and Climate Change: Fisheries, Field, Forests and Factories,’ Environment and Planning, 4, 2 (2019), 191-207;Ben Wong, ‘The Climate Coup: An Examination of Mamluk Ascendancy in the Ayyubid Period in Relation to the Medieval Climate Anomaly,’ Indian Ocean World Centre Working Paper Series, 7 (2019).