The history of slavery in Sri Lanka has been shunted to one side in both academic writing and popular memory. This ambitious book seeks to tell its history through a detailed examination of the period from 1799, when the British made their first move to dismantle slavery, to 1844, when the institution was finally abolished. Nira Wickramasinghe has two main goals in Slave in a Palanquin. First, she seeks to use fragments from the archives to recover details of slave and underclass life, particularly acts of resistance and underlying notions of justice and freedom. Second, she outlines the relationship between slavery and colonialism. Slavery at the onset of British rule in 1796 was a product of the 150 years of Dutch East India Company (VOC) control of the maritime areas of Sri Lanka. It had two distinct forms: a mostly urban domestic servitude, imposed on people who had originally been brought to Sri Lanka from other parts of the Indian Ocean rim during Dutch rule, and a caste-based slave system in Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka, where the VOC had hardened and codified preexisting forms of bondage. Slavery's gradual abolition in the early nineteenth century, which took place through a series of legal and bureaucratic actions, enabled the British to claim that they were promoting freedom by eliminating antiquated practices sanctioned by the VOC and by Hindu tradition.

At times, slaves may have accounted for as much as 4 percent of the colony's population. Wickramasinghe acknowledges that the sources for their lives are scanty, but she manages to use a series of fortuitous discoveries in the archives to tell a series of insightful stories that offer glimpses of slaves’ suffering and give life to the themes of domination and resistance. There is, for instance, the tale of the Jaffna slave who was whipped for riding in his master's palanquin, which provides an entry point for understanding low-caste unrest in Jaffna, which Wickramasinghe argues may have been prompted by British promises of emancipation. Other accounts that offer traces of the lives of slaves include those of Selestina, a domestic slave in Colombo who was accused of killing her out-of-wedlock baby; Ameensa, a woman from Cochin who appeared before the Supreme Court in Galle to claim her freedom; and Rawothan, an emancipated slave in Colombo who appealed to the colonial state to force local Muslim leaders to carry out a circumcision ceremony for his son, which would have served to confirm his family's status as a respectable part of a wider community.

In the absence of direct evidence, in these cases and others, Wickramasinghe often takes a leap of faith when speculating about the emotions and worldviews of the various actors. She is, however, open about this methodology, which is informed by her deep knowledge of the local social context and research on slave societies in other parts of the world. She presents these musings in ways that enable readers to make their own decisions about the plausibility of her judgments. Wickramasinghe's argument that the underclass often acted upon notions of justice that differed from those found among many in the state or upper reaches of society is convincing, but much remains obscure about the specific nature of these worldviews.

Wickramasinghe writes in conscious dialogue with the present, most extensively in her efforts to explain the sharp disjunction between her findings and the ways in which slavery is remembered in contemporary Sri Lanka. She makes separate arguments for the two main forms of slavery. For domestic slavery in the urban settlements on the southwestern coast, she convincingly disputes the assumption that most slaves were of African origin. Most strikingly, she shows that the well-known story of a 1723 revolt by African slaves in Colombo is a myth. Records from the time show only the murder of a Dutch official and his wife by their own domestic slaves, who were of recent Indonesian origin. In fact, Wickramasinghe finds that more slaves were brought from the Dutch East Indies than elsewhere, followed by those from southern India, with Africans accounting for a relatively small number. She traces the insistence on the blackness of slaves and their marginal status in historiography and memory to a reluctance to acknowledge that after emancipation slave families became part of communities that are reluctant to acknowledge their creole heritage. In Wickramasinghe's words, “A Jansz in the twenty-first century may actually have as an ancestor someone with origins in Bali rather than hailing from Amsterdam” (p. 200). In Jaffna, on the other hand, slave communities did not integrate with the general population, and remain identifiable through their low-caste status. For Sri Lankan Tamil elites, however, to emphasize slavery would be to acknowledge their role as slaveholders over those who they now claim to be part of their own community. Some Sinhalese ethnic polemists, on the other hand, do acknowledge slavery in Jaffna, as it provides them a tool with which to undermine visions of Sri Lanka Tamil unity.

Slave in a Palanquin is written beautifully and deserves to reach a wide audience, including those interested in slavery, labor relations, social control, and colonialism in South Asia and the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For non-Asianists, it also provides an important and accessible example of slavery outside the much more heavily studied Atlantic World.