‘Bondage in the Indian Ocean World (IOW) cannot be studied on the basis of the usual transatlantic paradigm’ (p. 77), states Alessandro Stanziani while examining the development of labour systems within colonial Mauritius. Indeed, a distinct methodological approach is required to make sense of the complex amalgam of national indentured servitude models from Europe, New World colonial experiences, and a variety of indigenous traditions of bonded labour traversing a myriad of religious, cultural, climatic, and economic frontiers. Bonded labour and debt provides such an approach, both innovative and transnational, to evaluate the historical development of IOW labour systems in the context of the emerging global economy from the seventeenth century onwards. Within this macro-geographical region, stretching from Africa to the Far East, debt bondage became the predominant source of manpower by the nineteenth century, and has continued to shape IOW labour relations down to the present.

The surging international demand for IOW commodities during the period – exemplified by Matthew Hopper's analysis of the Arabian Gulf pearl trade, where prices soared 800% from 1873 to 1906 – created an unprecedented shortage in manpower and required new forms of bonded labour able to meet production requirements (p. 105). While these emerging forms of bondage did not directly imitate the chattel slavery of the transatlantic, they were ‘in reality … little more than slavery by a different name’ (p. 116). Undoubtedly, the confluence of colonial and local elite interests sought to undermine physical slavery while simultaneously providing the pretext for the significant expansion of bonded labour. For colonial officials, abolition meant an influx of tax revenue as former slaves joined the taxable base, epitomized by British administrators’ support of Islamic ulema in what William Clarence-Smith describes as ‘sharia-minded’, anti-slavery reforms (p. 25). Contemporaneously, indigenous rulers sought larger ‘free’ labour pools to undertake increasingly sophisticated infrastructure projects, as Gwyn Campbell explores in imperial Madagascar (p. 47). Furthermore, as Bok-rae Kim's examination of Chosun Korea illuminates, the replacement of slavery with varying forms of indentured bondage also blunted the power of slave-owning elites.

Debt, whether monetary or material, was the predominant driver of indentured labour within the IOW. Local populations were thrust into a self-sustaining vortex of indebtedness, exacerbated by both manmade and natural pressures. More prolific tax collection from the poor encouraged bureaucracies and militaries to burgeon, while the construction of major road and irrigation systems accelerated the spread of diseases such as cholera and malaria throughout the region, further reducing the available labour pool. However, it was the brutal weather patterns which bore the prime responsibility for propelling most into debt servitude. Bounded by the climatic extremes of seasonal monsoons, the subsistence agrarian peasantry often required advances of produce, livestock, or currency from wealthier patrons in order to survive. When loans, frequently with interest rates in excess of 100% of capital, went unpaid, many were forced to sell children, wives, and whole families into bondage as repayment, as Edward Alpers charts in East Africa.

Indigenous forms of physical and psychological bondage nevertheless continued to influence the development of bonded labour. The kidnapping and ransoming of Filipinos by Sulu Zone slave raiders (scrutinized by James Francis Warren) became economically fundamental to Sulu Sultanate commerce while simultaneously providing a steady stream of bonded labour for European markets in the Philippines (p. 87). Moreover, psychological bondage in cultures with highly defined systems of honour, such as the Filipino cultural tradition of ‘debt of gratitude’ investigated by Michael Salman, meant that women were often chastised by their own kin for not corporeally repaying their exploiters’ patronage for their families (p. 147). Similar cultural traditions in Edo-period Japan, outlined by Yoko Matsui, viewed prostitution as a virtuous use of women's bodies when dedicated to lifting their families out of poverty (p. 176).

Given the geographical purvey of the work, it is surprising that there are no contributions on other major debt-servitude markets within the IOW. While the Dutch East Indies are briefly mentioned by Susan Newton-King (p. 61, to highlight the globalized personal networks of freed slaves in the Dutch-owned Cape Colony), an examination of Indonesia, or Indochina for that matter, is conspicuously absent in this otherwise thorough anthology. Furthermore, although the work makes a compelling case for studying the intersection of colonial and indigenous labour traditions, the colonial aspect seems to be treated as a monolithic, occidental ‘other’. There is no comparative analysis of disparate colonial systems operating simultaneously in the same region, such as the environs of the modern Tamil Nadu state in India, which incorporated coexistent French, British, Dutch, and Danish settlements from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Such Saidean generalities of the ‘occident’ miss the dynamic, trans-colonial aspects of the region, where varying European philosophical, legal, colonial, and economic traditions converged.

From a ‘peripheral’ perspective, the work declines to elaborate on the influences of IOW societies on each other. The vast ‘coolie’ labour trade brought thousands of indentured Chinese and Indians into direct contact with other IOW societies. While Ei Murakami explores the effects of the ‘coolie’ exodus on labour practices in southern China, crucial questions are left unanswered by the work. How did periphery-to-periphery interaction reshape local ideas on debt bondage, and how did returning ‘coolies’ transplant labour traditions from other IOW societies within India or China? Often the influences of other peripheral societies are just as pivotal in transforming the periphery as those of the core, as the historical development of Singapore demonstrates.

Despite the absence of certain lines of inquiry, Bonded labour and debt makes a significant contribution to global economic history. The work is both a foil to, and extension of, Atlantic history, as economic and labour models from New World colonial experiences were adopted and adapted within the globalized realities of neo-imperialism in the Old World. Regrettably, decolonization did not bring the necessary reforms to lessen the region's reliance on bonded labour. Isabelle Guérin's examination of contemporary debt bondage in the brick, sugar cane, and rice industries of Tamil Nadu state reveals that ‘owners of capital are exploiting intensively cast institutions to control labour’, despite decades of government intervention and oversight (p. 132). The historical traditions which continue to influence forms of IOW labour certainly merit further research.