What happened when European colonialism coopted or confronted societies in Asia and the Indian Ocean World for the purpose of slaving, and what are the tools to analyse this? These are questions that guide the present volume. For several hundred years after 1498, seafaring European powers were involved in an increasingly fine-tuned network of commercial relations along the coastlands of the Indian Ocean World and Asia, while Russia steadily expanded into North Asia. A sombre but economically significant part of all this was the trade and employment of enslaved people which flourished until...