We are glad to announce the publication of two recent books by Alessandro Stanziani:
Sailors, Slaves, and immigrants. Bondage in the Indian Ocean World, 1750-1914, by Alessandro Stanziani (Palgrave McMillan, Sept. 2014) see on the publisher’s webpage
Presentation
Slaves, convicts, indentured immigrants, and unfree seamen have traveled the world’s oceans at many times and places throughout human history. Across the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, this bondage took divergent forms and exhibited a range of historical dynamics. In spite of this variety, the conventional Atlantic World historical paradigm has largely shaped our understanding of modernity as being defined by exploration and discovery, European dominance, global capitalism, and the transition from slavery to free labor. Not only does this perspective evince a Eurocentric emphasis on the ‘uniqueness’ of the West, but it is increasingly contested even for the Atlantic itself. This provocative study contrasts the romantic conflation of freedom and the sea with the complex labor relationships of seamen, slaves, and immigrants in the Indian Ocean during the long nineteenth century. In the process, it advances a new framework for understanding labor, bondage, and modernization.
After Oriental Despotism, Eurasian Growth in a Global Perspective, by Alessandro Stanziani (Bloomsbury, 2014) see on the publisher’s webpage
Presentation
The concepts of economic backwardness, Asiatic despotism and orientalism have strongly influenced perceptions of modernization, democracy and economic growth over the last three centuries. This book provides an original view of Russian and Asian history that views both in a global perspective. Via this analysis, Alessandro Stanziani opens new dimensions in the study of state formation, the global slave trade, warfare and European and Asian growth.
After Oriental Despotism questions conventional oppositions between Europe and Asia. By revisiting the history of Eurasia in this context, the book offers a serious challenge to existing ideas about the aims and goals of economic growth. – See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/after-oriental-despotism-9781472533395/#sthash.vkCc5W0K.dpuf