The Straits of Malacca were a central waterway connecting the Indian and the Pacific Oceans since the tenth century. Until the fifteenth century, Persian, Arabian, and Malay Muslims dominated the trade that passed this way, alongside a few Chinese merchants and sailors. The vibrant economy also attracted Europeans. The Portuguese conquest of Malacca in 1511 had two consequences. First, it led to the scattering of the Muslim merchants to the port of Banda Aceh, in the north of Sumatra, and the foundation of the Sultanate of Johor. Second, it intensified a trade in people both into and out of the region. By the eighteenth century, all Europeans, Chinese, Arabs, Indians participated in this trade. In 1786, when the British East India Company acquired the island of Penang, slaves were involved in various social and economic structures of the colony. By 1791, the East India Company's treaty with the king of Queda committed the company to recognize all property in slaves and to return runaways to erstwhile owners. Perhaps in response to this, a British officer began to register all slaves in the British settlement in 1795. The beginning of revolutionary warfare in Europe, British Parliamentary prohibition of trade in slaves in 1807, followed by the British acquisition of Singapore, all pressured British colonial officers to persecute their rivals' trades more aggressively. The contradictions of British antislavery became apparent under these conditions. By 1824, the largest slaveholders in the Straits Settlement were primarily Dutch burghers (117), followed by the Chinese and the Malay. Using the British Parliamentary Papers, East India Company correspondence, and published memoirs of officials, Shawna Herzog highlights the ideological and economic predilections and preferences of British officials in the matter of enforcing antislavery legislation.

In the first two chapters of Negotiating Abolition: The Antislavery Project in the British Strait Settlements, 1786–1843, Herzog profiles the kind of slaves and servants in the settlement. In the next two chapters, she provides glimpses of well-known divisions among officials around the meanings of debtor-slaves and “actual” slaves (96), between accommodation with social practices and enforced emancipation of all. The last three chapters trace the actions of particular officials at three different port cities—Malacca, Penang, and Singapore. Along the way, readers pick up some intriguing details such as the biography of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles as an undereducated expansionist (18–19), even though his 1817 book on Java was cited by none other than Karl Marx (“The British Rule in India,” New-York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853).

Readers unfamiliar with the early histories of Southeast Asia should begin reading this book from page 111 to page 171. Herzog uses the secondary literature adroitly to outline the chronological histories of European commerce and settlement in the region. Once this prehistory is in place, and readers remember the context of the revolutionary wars in Europe from the 1780s to 1815, they can then return to the introduction and read the early chapters of the book. This order of reading will enable a historically specific, geopolitically astute comprehension of British official divisions regarding abolition in a complex landscape. It will also enable readers to understand why some officials constructed “slavery in the east in opposition to western systems in the Caribbean and the Americas” (5). They might also understand those scholars of the region, such as the eminent Anthony Reid, who argued that slavery and servitude “functioned as a way to care for the poor and destitute” in Southeast Asian societies (11).

Readers unfamiliar with metropolitan British history will, however, need more of the kind of potted biographies of officials like those provided only for Raffles and Francis Light. Others named in this study (like Robert Fullerton and Samuel Garling) need similar biographies. These might have helped readers to connect the dots between the wild swings of Whig and Tory politics in the United Kingdom of the same years and the social classes, regional, and ideological bases of these colonial official policies. What relationships did each of the officials have with the particular Evangelical churches at work in the larger antislavery movements in Britain and in the United States in the same decades? This is especially intriguing given the alacrity with which some officials (like Garling) responded to the actions of missionaries (126–31) while others did not. Without such links, one is hard pressed to understand why one official in 1823 would resist any action against slave markets despite eyewitness accounts while another official in 1828–29 would initiate police proceedings on the basis of an identical eyewitness account. Was the attempt to prosecute Chinese junks in 1828 related to the East India Company's attempts to coerce the Qing court into an Open Door policy? If the officials could be located in the broader socioeconomic histories of Britain during those decades, then one could also think more deeply about the differentials in censorship of colonial presses touched on here (98–99). How can we understand the silencing of one critical newspaper such as the Malacca Observer and not the others, the Singapore Chronicle and the Singapore Free Press? Did the prosecutions follow a pattern found in the metropole or was it specific to the colonies and the slave trade alone? It is obvious the book raises more questions than it can answer.

Finally, a bit of hyperbole. Herzog considers my first book, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (1999) representative of the tyranny of “India studies” in the field of Asian history (41). According to her, the book was so “influential” that it stymied research in the history of antislavery movements in all of Asia. I would have apologized for this unwitting oppression if Herzog had not provided evidence to the contrary—extensive and multiple publications by Andrea Major, Gwyn Campbell, Joel Quirk, and others on abolition in the Indian Ocean world in her own footnotes!