100 books like The Embarrassment of Slavery

This book explains how a powerful sultanate located on an archipel in the South China Sea maintained its independence until the very end of the nineteenth century. Being the centre of a ferocious slave-raiding network, it played a pivotal role in supplying the slave labour for commodity production both for China and the West. Warren’s book links an upsurge of slave raiding in Southeast Asia at the end of the eighteenth century with imperial expansion of the West and the economic resurrection of China. It questions the dominant perception that piracy and slavery in Asia were antithetical to economic growth.

I find Warren’s thesis tremendously valuable to understand processes of globalisation and a source of inspiration for my own research and teaching on slavery in the Indonesian archipelago in the nineteenth century. It also opened my eyes to the fact that the upsurge of slave-raiding was fed by illicit arms… show more.

Nieboer did groundbreaking research on slavery outside the Atlantic world, and not the least on Southeast Asia. He was the first to propose a universal economic theory for the occurrence of slavery, namely that its existence was the result of a scarcity of labour in relation to the availability of land. After Evsey Domar expanded this argument to serfdom, it became known as the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis and has been widely cited both by historians and economic historians. In any talk about slavery and bondage in Southeast Asia I refer to this thesis to explain why slavery had practically disappeared in densely populated Java in the eighteenth century whereas it probably increased almost everywhere else in the Indonesian archipelago.

This book became the starting point for many publications on slavery in Southeast Asia. It is a collection of essays that not only provides us with an overview of the entire region over the past 700 years but also suggests how we can study the multifarious forms of slavery and bondage in the region in a comparative manner. Although almost forty years old it is still indispensable reading for any course on slavery in Southeast Asia, including my own course.

Although broaching many more themes than slavery, this book gives us a unique insight into how local patterns of enslavement linked up with the growing colonial presence of the Dutch and Portuguese in Timor (East Indonesia). The book has been thoroughly researched by the world’s most knowledgeable scholar on this subject. For me, it is a source of inspiration for how local forms of enslavement can be studied in interaction with European colonial expansion.  

Tagore (1861-1941) is generally known as a Nobel Prize-winning poet, but he was also a frequent commentator on contemporary political affairs and the crises of his age. Nationalism, which was composed over the years 1916-17, features long ruminations on imperialism, modernity, and the question of Indian independence, among other subjects of pressing interest to Tagore and his contemporaries. Each chapter affords the reader with an opportunity to experience in full the author’s talents as he strives to put into words his vision for a future shaped neither by "the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship." Instructors may find the work to be an especially valuable resource for stimulating class discussions.

Borders are far more than mere demarcations of territory, argues Canadian academic and activist Harsha Walia in a book I greatly appreciated for connecting seemingly disparate phenomena into a cohesive takedown of the modern state and its service of corporate power.

The conventional wisdom that corporate globalization eliminates national boundaries is only true, Walia explains, for an increasingly mobile global ruling class. For a global underclass of migrant labourers and asylum seekers, borders are increasingly entrenched, segregating newcomers as a source of cheap labour from the working class and fuelling the exploitation of both.

Walia describes how this segmentation undermines labour standards for all and fuels a xenophobic backlash against the depredations of global capitalism. 

I have selected a non-academic title which has gained a lot of attention over the past year or so. Its author is a journalist (for titles such as The Spectator, Daily Telegraph, and The Washington Post) and podcaster (Tommies & Jerries), but her Anglo-German background, storytelling flair, and social media presence have made her an important new voice in interpreting German history for the English-speaking world. This book is a handy starting point for those who want a concise chronological narrative of the period.

One of the first scholars to write a full-length monograph on Manchukuo, Duara delves into the Chinese and Japanese writers who viewed northeast China under Japanese occupation as a means to envision their own Pan-Asianist ideals. He analyses this in the context of a broader "East Asian modern" in Manchukuo, and utilizes political and literary sources to unearth previous connections with previous iterations and currents of Chinese nationalism tied to the Pan-Asianism of the early twentieth century.

Takashi Fujitani offers a surprising historical narrative, telling the story of Korean soldiers in the Japanese army alongside that of Japanese-American soldiers in the United States during World War II. What is striking here is how total global war pushed both the United States and Japan to similar policies toward minority populations. Both abandoned more “vulgar” forms of racism (explicit discrimination) for what Fujitani calls a “polite racism,” where minority groups were now deemed as capable of cultural assimilation. But what really is inspiring is that Fujitani juxtaposes two wartime enemies—the United States and Japan—to show just how similar they actually were. 

An intimate and heartfelt portrayal of how Poland turned away from democratic values after a few brief decades of hope and tolerance following the collapse of Communism. Applebaum was herself caught up in these events, which cut right through families and friendships, and which have led to a situation in which fealty to bizarre conspiracy theories is a prerequisite for political advancement in a declining democracy.