Re-visualizing Slavery: Visual Sources about Slavery in Asia

In Re-visualizing Slavery, historians, heritage specialists, and cultural scientists shed new light on the history of slavery in Asia by centering visual sources—specifically, Dutch paintings, watercolors and drawings from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. The traditional image of slavery in Asia is shaped and dominated by terms such as ‘mild,’ ‘debt,’ and ‘household,’ but new historical research that utilizes the versatility, power of expression, and silences of and within visual sources explicitly points to it as violent and harsh in character—comparable to the Atlantic history of slavery.