Coerced Labor, Caste, and Aspirations for Liberty in Early Nineteenth-Century Bengal: Revisiting the Antislavery Debate from South Asia

Abstract This article revisits the debate on the relationship between capitalism and abolition from the perspective of South Asia. It argues that bringing the antislavery debate into conversation with the extensive literature on caste opens up new comparative possibilities. Commercial slavery in the early modern Indian Ocean world is now well established, but global histories of slavery have rarely inspired global histories of antislavery. The dominant interpretation of abolition in South Asia remains focused on the contingent requirements of colonial governance. Through an analysis of legal conflicts over the status of slavery in the eastern Indian province of Bengal in the 1820s and 1830s, I argue that this approach obscures the ethical-political significance of abolition in a context shaped by caste and agrarian slavery. The emancipatory potential of abolition, however, was undermined by a colonial state committed to revenue extraction and social order, as well as by the global capitalist context of counter-revolution. By situating the colonial archive within this wider historical conjuncture, the essay shows how both the possibilities and limits of abolition emerged from the contradictions of liberalism and global capitalism. It thereby puts the South Asian case in conversation with broader histories of revolution and counter-revolution.