Negotiating Abolition

"Shawna Herzog explores the ways sex and gender complicated the enforcement of colonial anti-slavery policies, the challenges local officials faced in identifying slave populations, and how European reclassification of slave labor to systems of indenture, or 'free,' labor created a new illicit trade for women and girls to the Strait Settlements of Southeast Asia. This book provides an important new perspective for scholars of slavery interested in Southeast Asia, British imperialism in the Indian Ocean world and Asia, the East India Company in the Straits, and gender and sexuality in the context of empire"--