BiblioVault - Books about Schrikker, Alicia

Being a Slave

Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean

Edited by Alicia Schrikker and Nira Wickramasinghe

Leiden University Press, 2020

This multidisciplinary volume brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean. The volume discusses a variety of qualitative data on the experience of being a slave in order to recover ordinary lives and, crucially, to place this experience in its Asian local context. Building on the rich scholarship on the slave trade, this volume offers a unique perspective that embraces the origin and afterlife of enslavement as well as the imaginaries and representations of slaves rather than the trade in slaves itself. From Cape to Batavia, slavery is understood as a diffuse practice. This approach helps unearth 18th and 19th century experiences of being a slave in the Indian Ocean world, but also sheds light on continuities in bondage into the present. Contributors force an often hostile archive to extract traces of the lived experience of slavery in court records, petitions or private letters. They also listen to local voices by prying unexplored primary sources such as oral histories, memories and objects.

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Promises and Predicaments

Trade and Entrepreneurship in Colonial and Independent Indonesia in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Edited by Alicia Schrikker and Jeroen Touwen

National University of Singapore Press, 2015

Indonesia’s trajectory towards successful economic growth has been long and capricious. Studies of the process often focus either on the Netherlands Indies or independent Indonesia, suggesting the existence of fundamental discontinuities. The authors of the 17 essays in this book adopt a long-term perspective that transcends regimes and bridges dualist economic models in order to examine what did and did not change as the country moved across the colonial-postcolonial divide, and shifted from reliance on exports of primary products to a multi-centred economy. The aim is to analyse how economic development grew out of the interplay of foreign trade, new forms of entrepreneurship and the political economy.

The authors deal with entrepreneurship and economic specialization within different ethnic groups, the geographical distribution of exports and resource drains from exporting regions, and connections between an export economy and mass poverty. One recurring issue is the way actors from different ethnic groups occupied complementary niches, highlighting the rich variety of roles played by Asian entrepreneurs. A study of the international sugar trade shows how regime change fostered co-operation between different ethnic groups and nationalities involved with trading networks, inter-island shipping, urban public transport, and the construction sector. A comparison of export earnings and population groups involved in trade before and after 1900 shows that unexpected agricultural and industrial transitions could underpin a fundamental shift in income growth, with improved living standards for broad sectors of the population.

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World History - A Genealogy

Private Conversations with World Historians, 1996–2016

Edited by Carolien Stolte and Alicia Schrikker

Leiden University Press, 2017

World History—A Genealogy charts the history of the discipline through twenty-five in-depth conversations with historians whose work has shaped the field of world history in fundamental ways. These conversations, which took place over a period of twenty years for the world history journal Itinerario, cover these historians’ lives, work, and views of the academy in general and the field of world history in particular. An extensive introduction distills the most important developments in the field from these conversations, and sheds light on what these historians have in common, as well as—perhaps more importantly—what separates them.

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