Nira Wickramasinghe. Slave in a Palanquin. Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka. Columbia University Press, New York 2020. xi, 299 pp. Ill. Maps. $140.00; £117.00. (Paper, E-book: $35.00; £30.00.)

Reckoning with over 300 years of Sri Lankan history requires engaging with overlapping legacies of European colonization.Upon arriving in Colombo in 1518, the Portuguese were the first Europeans to augment and manage local practices of enslavement.After seizing control of the island from the Dutch in the early nineteenth century, British colonial officials abolished slavery in Sri Lanka in 1844.Sri Lankan slavery also implicates the island's timeless role as a conduit for migration and trade in the Indian Ocean.For some time, enslaved people from Dutch outposts such as Batavia and the Cape worked alongside enslaved laborers who arrived from British ports in South India.These intertwined histories of slavery in Sri Lanka and questions of labor, memory, and freedom are at the heart of Nira Wickramasinghe's masterful reconstruction of "fugitive lives" (p.3).Wickramasinghe argues that, in Sri Lanka, today, enslaved pasts are partially or completely unknown.In response, Wickramasinghe has written an "engaged history of the present" that focuses on the social lives of unfree laborers across the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Dutch and British empires (p.3).Beginning with the murder of a Dutch fiscal in Colombo in 1723, Wickramasinghe draws upon slave registers, census records, guidebooks, legal cases, colonial petitions, and ecclesiastical records in an approach "that interlaces the past and the present and braids archival traces with their echoes" (p.189).Wickramasinghe's exploration of individual social lives through colonial court records brings to the fore fundamental shortcomings of the liberal historical idea of an "unfreedom-to-freedom continuum" (p.88).For instance, Chapter Two focuses on the individual experiences of four enslaved people in Galle and Colombo during the first decades of British rule.The trial of an enslaved woman named Selestina in Galle sheds light on infanticide as resistance amidst an archive of violence.The murder trial of an enslaved man named Valentine hints at the social realities of enslaved Malay laborers in eighteenth-century Ceylon.Wickramasinghe even studies the "voice of a frightened nine-year old child under colonial rule" through the records of a kidnapping case (p.84).The trial of Ameensa trying to assert her and her daughter's freedom supports Wickramasinghe's assertion that enslaved people in eighteenth-century Ceylon tended not to invoke universal principles of justice.Rather, Wickramasinghe argues that "notions of justice and injustice born out of societal religious and ethical values of the limits of permissibility permeated enslaved people's attempts to deal with their condition" (p.83).The limits of an "unfreedom-to-freedom continuum" are doubly evident in Chapter Four, which focuses on a remarkable and unexplored event in the history