Studies of slavery in Sri Lanka are a relatively scarce commodity, a historiographical reality that makes Slave in a Palanquin, Nira Wickramasinghe's engaging and beautifully written study of servitude and resistance in early nineteenth-century Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was known before 1972, a very welcome addition to the literature on slavery in South Asia and the wider Indian Ocean world as well as Ceylon. Wickramasinghe makes deft and compelling use of the admittedly often fragmentary archival sources at her disposal to reconstruct the lives of individual enslaved men and women in as much detail as these sources permit. Equally important, she seeks to contextualize these lives as fully as possible with a view to deepening our engagement with and understanding of areas and peoples hitherto largely overlooked by historians. In so doing, she makes a significant contribution not only to our understanding of the nature and dynamics of slavery in early nineteenth-century British colonial Ceylon, but also to the small but expanding body of scholarship on the subaltern experience in the Indian Ocean world, scholarship exemplified by Clare Anderson's Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (2012) and Matthias van Rossum, Alexander Geelen, Bram van der Hout, and Merve Tosun's Testimonies of Enslavement: Sources on Slaving for the Indian Ocean World (2020). The compelling nature of Wickramasinghe's study also stems from her adopting a sophisticated interdisciplinary approach to thinking about, analyzing, and giving deeper meaning to the lives of the men and women in question.

In her introduction, Wickramasinghe sets the stage for her reconstruction of the lives of a number of enslaved men and women who resisted what they deemed to be injustice during the period between the British conquest of the island in 1796 and the formal abolition of slavery on the island in 1844. As she rightly notes, there is no easy or single way to define the institution which held perhaps as many as 36,000 men, women, and children in servitude. The complexities of the slave experience in early nineteenth-century Ceylon lead her to structure her study around a number of prominent themes—race and blackness, bodily violence, caste and slavery, free and unfree labor, and the meaning and performance of freedom—which are examined in greater detail in the book's first five chapters. A concluding chapter explores the reasons why slaves and slavery have been largely effaced from modern Sri Lankan life, reasons that include the role that ideas of purity, authenticity, and shame played in the reshaping of Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, and Burgher community identity that began following the abolition of slavery on the island in 1844 and continued into the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Slave in a Palanquin will be a keystone work in Sri Lankan slavery studies for many years to come. Wickramasinghe's examination of the lives of the enslaved men and women in question offers a template that future studies of slavery in South Asia and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean world will want to consider adopting. Her study highlights the need, for example, to recount the story of slaves’ lives from their perspective whenever possible. Doing so includes acknowledging that their choices and actions should not be viewed as an index of “freedom” as conceptualized in liberal thought and that, as other historians of slavery in the Indian Ocean and Asia appreciate, the European and American inspired “freedom-unfreedom” continuum that dominates much of the literature on slavery is ill-suited to analyzing and understanding slavery beyond the Atlantic world. Her discussion of the Chilaw “experiment” in slave emancipation during the 1820s likewise underscores that the line between slavery and the post-emancipation indentured labor system can be easily blurred and, moreover, that this experiment must be examined in light of the introduction of slave amelioration policies in the wider British Empire at this time.

While Wickramasinghe's determination to contextualize the lives of the enslaved men and women in question and to frame developments such as the Chilaw experiment in a larger imperial context is commendable, it is unfortunate that she does not situate some of the other developments that she discusses in more fully developed contexts. It would be interesting, for example, to have a fuller sense of Sri Lanka's place in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British abolitionist discourse and endeavors in India and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean world, especially since this activity often predated similar developments in the Atlantic world. The same can be said about Ceylon's role in shaping discussions about and the ultimate recourse to indentured labor following slave emancipation in the British Empire in 1834. Her thoughtful reflections on the “repressed memory” of slavery in modern Sri Lanka would likewise have benefitted from a fuller consideration of how the Sri Lankan case study contributes to our understanding of the relationship between slavery, memory, and identity as exemplified by studies such as the 2012 collection edited by Douglas Hamilton, Kate Hodgson, and Joel Quirk. Engagement with this literature would have made a richly textured book even more compelling than it already is.