Colloquium: The Futures of Slavery in the Nineteenth Century: Race, Finance, Family, and the Pivot to Asia

  • Date: Feb 13, 2018
  • Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Kris Manjapra
  • Location: Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin
  • Room: Small Conference Room
  • Host: Center for the History of Emotions
  • Contact: sekfrevert@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its winter semester 2017/2018 colloquium

Kris Manjapra, Tufts University / Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (WIKO)

The Futures of Slavery in the Nineteenth Century: Race, Finance, Family, and the Pivot to Asia

Manjapra considers how a storm of slave finance, unleashed in the Caribbean after abolition in the 1830s, created reverberations that crashed onto the distant shores of Asia and underwrote a new phase of British colonial speculation and expansion in the nineteenth century. Focused on the decades 1840s-1860s, the presentation explores a period that blurred economic, political, and legal categories, during which the aftermath of racial slavery in the British Empire reached destinations across Asia. The process by which plantations expanded in Asia was not fundamentally directed by Weberian statecraft, but was the result of customary, clan-based, private, secretive domains of family ties and family finance. Manjapra considers the "blur" between the public and private realms of imperial expansion, as the British imperial power seemed to pivot to Asia in the decades after abolition.

Kris Manjapra joined the Tufts University history department in 2008 after completing his dissertation at the Harvard history department, and a postdoctoral year at UCLA. As Associate Professor, he teaches courses on South Asia and globalization, comparative anti-colonialism, South Asian, Caribbean, and modern European intellectual history, and postcolonial critique. Currently, Manjapara is a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (WIKO).

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