Because the American history of slavery and emancipation tends to be foremost in Western minds, few realise 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 colonised or came under the domination of European powers in the 19th 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 labour 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 or production, the concerns and perceptions of the colonial state, and the efforts of non-Western elites to modernise their cultures. Martin Klein argues that the Asian and African experience has much in common with the American experience, particularly in efforts to control labour and family life. The struggle to control the labour of former slaves has often been intense and, he suggests, has had a continuing impact on the social order in former slave societies.