Notes on Contributors
Richard B. Allen
studied anthropology before earning a PhD in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Slaves, Freedmen and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (1999), European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (2014), and more than 55 journal and encyclopedia articles, book chapters, and essays on the social and economic history of Mauritius, slavery and indentured labor in the colonial plantation world, and slavery, slave trading, and abolition in the Indian Ocean and Asia. He is the recipient of two Fulbright research awards and prestigious research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He co-authored the successful applications to designate the Aapravasi Ghat and the Le Morne Cultural Landscape in Mauritius as UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS) and inscribe the indentured immigration records of Mauritius on UNESCO’s Memory of the World. From 2009–11 he served as special consultant to the Truth and Justice Commission of Mauritius which investigated the legacy of slavery and indentured labor in the country. In addition to serving as editor of Ohio University Press’s Indian Ocean Studies series and consultant to the Aapravasi Ghat WHS, he is currently working on a book-length manuscript on global slaveries since 1500.
Michael D. Bennett
received his PhD in 2020 from the University of Sheffield, U.K. His Masters research, which explored the forced labor systems developed by the English East India Company in the seventeenth century, was completed in 2016 and was awarded the Roger Scola Prize for the best MA thesis in social and economic history at the University of Kent that year. His doctoral dissertation focused on the English merchants who financed the emergence of sugar plantations and African slavery on Barbados in the mid-seventeenth century.
Claude Chevaleyre
has a PhD in Chinese history from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). A former postdoctoral research fellow at the French School of Asian Studies (EFEO, Paris) and the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam), he is currently a CNRS fellow researcher at the Lyon Institute of East Asian Studies (France). He also heads the Junior Research Group on “Dependency in Asian History” at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies (Germany). His research focuses on the social, cultural, and legal history of bonded labor and dependency in early modern China. He is currently working on the dynamics of interregional and transnational human trafficking in early modern China and East Asia.
Jeff Fynn-Paul
is a senior lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His research interests include medieval Mediterranean cities, medieval slavery, economic history, and world history. He is the author of The Rise and Decline of an Iberian Bourgeoisie: Manresa in the Later Middle Ages (2015) and Family, Work, and Household in Late Medieval Iberia: A Social History of Manresa at the Time of the Black Death (2017), and has edited two volumes, War, Entrepreneurs, and the State in Europe and the Mediterranean, 1300–1800 (2014) and, with Damian Alan Pargas, Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global History (2018). He is also co-editor of Brill’s Studies in Global Slavery and an area editor for the Journal of Global Slavery. He has contributed to the second volume of the Cambridge World History of Slavery and the first volume of the Economic History of the Iberian Peninsula, 700–2000, both for Cambridge University Press. In 2016, Fynn-Paul won the European History Quarterly Prize for best article.
Hans Hägerdal
is Professor of History at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He received his PhD in 1996 from Lund University where his dissertation examined the professionalization of sinology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Much of his subsequent research has focused on colonial contact zones and cultural encounters in Southeast Asia. Among his more significant publications are Lords of the Sea, Lords of the Land: Conflict and Adaptation in Early Colonial Timor (2012) and, with Geneviève Duggan, Savu: The History and Oral Traditions on an Island of Indonesia (2018).
Shawna Herzog
is an Assistant Professor at Washington State University. Her research and teaching focuses on gender, slavery, imperialism, and modern European History. She is the author of Negotiating Abolition: The Antislavery Project in the British East Indies, 1795–1843 (2021) which investigates British abolitionism in the Straits Settlements (Malacca, Penang, Singapore) and the limits of colonial power in Southeast Asia.
Jessica Hinchy
is an Associate Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She researches the history of gender, sexuality, households and family in colonial north India. In 2019, Cambridge University Press published her first monograph, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850–1900. Her research has also appeared in Modern Asian Studies, Gender and History, and Asian Studies Review, among other journals and edited collections.
Kumari Jayawardena
taught political science at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka (1969–85), in the Women and Development program at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague (1980–82), and was a fellow of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College (1987–88). She is the author of books on the rise of the labour movement in Ceylon (1972), feminism and nationalism in the Third World (1986), ethnic and class conflict in Sri Lanka (1985), Western women and South Asia during British rule (1995), and the rise of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie (1998), and co-authored/edited books on female sexuality in South Asia (1996) and class, patriarchy, and ethnicity on Sri Lankan plantations (2015).
Rachel Kurian
is senior lecturer emerita in international labour economics at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research focuses on economic reforms and labour, plantation labour, trade unions, child labour, protection of the elderly, gender politics and women’s rights, and poverty and social exclusion. Recent publications include (with Kumari Jayawardena) Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity on Sri Lankan Plantations: Two Centuries of Power and Protest (2015) and “State, Citizenship and Democratic Deficits: Multiple Patriarchies and Women Workers on Sri Lankan Plantations” in Jayadeva Uyangoda, ed., Local Government and Local Democracy in Sri Lanka: Institutional and Social Dimensions (2015).
Bonny Ling
received her PhD from the National University of Ireland Galway. Her research focuses on international law, human trafficking, and business, labour and human rights. Previous experience includes service with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the UN team engaged in facilitating a peace settlement in Cyprus, and the UN mission in Liberia, and as an international election observer in East Timor, the Republic of Georgia, and Albania. From 2014–18 she was affiliated with the University of Zurich’s Faculty of Law as a Swiss National Science Foundation research fellow and program director of a specialized program on business and human rights at the university’s Centre for Human Rights Studies. She is currently Research Fellow with the Institute for Human Rights and Business, Advisory Board Member of the international human rights organization Human Rights at Sea and Senior Research Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Applied Research in Human Trafficking.
Christopher Lovins
is Assistant Professor of Korean History at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, specializing in early modern Korea. His publications include King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea, an examination of King Chŏngjo (r. 1776–1800) as an absolute monarch. He has also published on legitimacy, evolutionary approaches to the humanities, historical film, and science fiction. His latest article is “A Ghost in the Replicant? Questions of Humanity and Technological Integration in Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell.”
Stephanie Mawson
is a research fellow at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Her work focuses on the contested nature of empire in maritime Southeast Asia during the seventeenth century. She has published in leading historical journals including Past & Present and Ethnohistory and is the recipient of a number of prestigious prizes, including the Royal Historical Society Alexander Prize and the Dr. Robert F. Heizer Award from the American Society for Ethnohistory.
Anthony Reid
is a historian of Southeast Asia based once again at the Australian National University after serving as founding Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (1999–2002) and the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (2002–07). Best known for Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, c.1450–1680 (2 vols., 1988, 1993) and A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads (2015), he has also written extensively on Asian slavery, including editing Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (1983).
James Francis Warren
is Emeritus Professor of Southeast Asian Modern History at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. He is an award-winning historian who has published numerous monographs, journal articles, and book chapters. His books include The Sulu Zone 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (1981, 2007); Iranun and Balangingi: Globalisation, Maritime Raiding and the Birth of Ethnicity (2002); and Pirates, Prostitutes and Pullers: Explorations in the Ethno-and Social History of Southeast Asia (2008).
Don J. Wyatt
is John M. McCardell, Jr. Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at Middlebury College, where he specializes in the intellectual history of China, with a particular emphasis on identity and violence. He holds a BA from Beloit College and MA and PhD degrees from Harvard University. He has authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited several books including his own The Blacks of Premodern China (2010). In 2004 and again in 2010 he held research residencies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Among his most recent publications are chapters in the medieval volumes of both the Cambridge World History of Violence (2020) and the Cambridge World History of Slavery (2021). Projects in progress include a contribution on medieval slavery in East Asia to the Cambridge Elements Global Middle Ages series and a comprehensive study on foreign slaves in imperial China.
Harriet T. Zurndorfer
received her PhD in Chinese history in 1977 from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an Affiliated Fellow of the Leiden Institute for Area Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University in the Netherlands where she has worked as a docent and researcher since 1978. She is the author of Change and Continuity in Chinese Local History: The Development of Hui-chou Prefecture 800 to 1800 (1989) and China Bibliography: A Research Guide to Reference Works about China Past and Present (1995), editor of the collection Chinese Women in the Imperial Past: New Perspectives (1999), and has published more than 200 scholarly articles and reviews. She served as editor-in-chief of The Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient from 1992 to 2000 and is the founder (1999) and editor-in-chief of the journal Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China. She is also co-editor of The Cambridge World History of Violence, vol. 2, 500 to 1500 (2020) and a contributor to the forthcoming Cambridge Economic History of China.