Slavery, abolitionism and empire in India, 1772-1843 / / Andrea Major [[electronic resource]]

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910790283003321
• Autore: Major Andrea
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Liverpool : , : Liverpool University Press, , 2012
• ISBN: 9781781388426; 1781388423
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (xx, 361 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)
• Collana: Liverpool studies in international slavery ; ; 6
• Disciplina: 306.3/620954
• Soggetti: Slavery - India - History - 18th century; Slavery - India - History - 19th century; Antislavery movements - Great Britain - History - 18th century; Antislavery movements - Great Britain - History - 19th century; Slavery and the church - Great Britain - History - 18th century; Slavery and the church - Great Britain - History - 19th century; India Social conditions; India Social life and customs
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Oct 2015).
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: pt. I. Other slaveries. Introduction -- 'To call a slave a slave' : recovering Indian slavery -- pt. II. European slaveries. Introduction : slavery and colonial expansion in India -- 'A shameful and ruinous trade' : European slave-trafficking and the East India Company -- Bengalis, Caffrees and Malays : European slave-holding and early colonial society -- pt. III. Indian slaveries. Introduction : locating Indian slaveries -- 'This household servitude' : domestic slavery and immoral commerce -- 'Open and professed stealers of children' : slave-trafficking and the boundaries of the colonial state -- 'Slaves of the soil' : caste and agricultural slavery in south India -- pt. IV. Imagined slaveries. Introduction : evangelical connections -- 'Satan's wretched slaves' : Indian society and the evangelical imagination -- 'The produce of the east by free men' : Indian sugar and Indian slavery in British abolitionist debates, 1793-1833 -- Conclusion : 'do justice to India' : abolitionists and Indian slavery, 1839-1843.
• Sommario/riassunto: ‘There are no two things in the world more different from each other than East-Indian and West Indian-slavery’ (Robert Inglis, House of Commons Debate, 1833). In Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772–1843, Andrea Major asks why, at a time when East India Company expansion in India, British abolitionism and the missionary movement were all at their height, was the existence of slavery in India so often ignored, denied or excused? By exploring Britain's ambivalent relationship with both real and imagined slaveries in India, and the official, evangelical and popular discourses which surrounded them, she seeks to uncover the various political, economic and ideological agendas that allowed East Indian slavery to be represented as qualitatively different from it trans-Atlantic counterpart. In doing so, she uncovers tensions in the relationship between colonial policy and the so-called 'civilising mission', elucidating the intricate interactions between humanitarian movements, colonial ideologies and imperial imperatives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The work draws on a range of sources from Britain and India to provide a trans-national perspective on this little known facet of the story of slavery and abolition in the British Empire, uncovering the complex ways in which Indian slavery was encountered, discussed, utilised, rationalised, and reconciled with the economic, political and moral imperatives of an empire whose focus was shifting to the East.