Domestic servitude blurs the divide between family and work, affection and duty, the home and the world. In Cultures of Servitude, Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum offer an ethnographic account of domestic life and servitude in contemporary Kolkata, India, with a concluding comparison with New York City. Focused on employers as well as servants, men as well as women, across multiple generations, they examine the practices and meaning of servitude around the home and in the public sphere. This book shifts the conversations surrounding domestic service away from an emphasis on the crisis of transnational care work to one about the constitution of class. It reveals how employers position themselves as middle and upper classes through evolving methods of servant and home management, even as servants grapple with the challenges of class and cultural distinction embedded in relations of domination and inequality.

This book examines how language is a central resource in transforming migrant women into transnational domestic workers. Focusing on the migration of women from the Philippines to Singapore, the book unpacks why and how language is embedded in the infrastructure of transnational labor migration that links migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries. It sheds light on the everyday lives of transnational domestic workers and how they draw on their linguistic repertoires, and in particular on English, as they cross geographical and social spaces. By showing how the transnational mobility of labor is dependent on the selection and performance of particular assemblages of linguistic resources that index migrants as labor and not as people, the book provides a powerful lens with which to examine how migration contributes to relationships of inequality and how such inequalities are produced and challenged on the terrain of language.

When Grace’s beloved sister Glory dies in a car crash, her life spirals out of control. She discovers Glory was indebted to a local crime lord and laundering money through her café. What’s worse, Grace is now forced to take over. Defying her anxiety, Grace will stop at nothing to save herself and those Glory left behind from the clutches of Glasgow’s underworld. But her plans unravel when more family secrets emerge and Grace is driven to question everything she believed about her sister – even her death. IN SERVITUDE is a gripping roller coaster of family, crime and betrayal. Perfect for lovers of page-turning suspense. Silver medal - Best Fiction (Europe), Independent Publisher Book Awards 2019 Shortlisted - The Selfies 2019, London Book Fair Finalist - Next Generation Indie Book Awards 2019 THE BOOK BLOGGERS ARE LOVING IT: ‘The plot was perfectly paced, taut and gritty ... An excellent debut’ Chapter In My Life crime fiction blog ‘In Servitude is a dark and suspenseful read that draws you in and keeps you there.’ By the Letter Book reviews ‘A tense thriller, fast-paced and rather addictive. It’s full of twists and turns, shocks and surprises. Once you start to read, you may well find it hard to put down!’ Portobello Book Blog ‘The suspense is mind-blowing. (5*)’ The Book Decoder ‘Fabulous psychological thriller. Fast read. Hard hitting. Loved it. (5*)’ Shalini book reviews ‘If you're looking for an excellent suspense novel to keep you on your toes, then you absolutely need to read this one. (4.5*)' A Lovely Book Affair reviews ‘I’m obsessed with this plot. Twist after twist, this psychological suspense novel kept me hooked the entire time. (5*)’ Jessica Belmont reviews

This book presents a hundred-year history of tea plantations in the Assam (Brahmaputra) Valley during British colonial rule in India. It explores a world where more than two million migrant laborers worked under conditions of indentured servitude in the plantations, producing tea for an increasingly profitable global market. Behal traces the genesis and early development of the tea industry; the links between the colonial state and private British capital in fostering plantations in Assam; the nature of the 'tea mania,' and its consequences, which led to the emergence of the indenture labor system in Assam's tea gardens. The book describes process of labor mobilization and the nature of labor relations in the tea plantations. It deals with the operational aspects of labor recruitment, which involved the transportation and employment of migrant laborers, from the 1860s until the the indenture system was formally dismantled. It focuses on the power structure that ruled over the organization of production and labor relations within the plantations. This power structure operated at two levels: around the Indian Tea Association, the apex body of the tea industry, and the tea planters' coercive authority. The book examines the role of the colonial state and provides statistics on production, while also telling the story of everyday labor life in the tea gardens, and of the resistance to the oppressive regime by 'coolie' laborers who had been coerced into generational servitude. It analyses the forms of their protests, and raises the question whether the transformation of these migrant agrarian communities working in conditions of unfree labor was proletarian in nature.

Preface -- Introduction -- Claiming kinship -- Gifting land -- Producing property -- Grounding indigeneity -- Demanding return -- Reviving exchange -- Conclusion : property's afterlives.

An outlined study of the Gospel of Mark

“Seven Years in Servitude Before a Restorer” relates to issues of kidnapping, killing and abuse of communal leadership which have left the masses in terror, fear and desolation. This down-to-earth play is then a political satire through which the playwright uses as a narrative lens to capture the cruelties and brutal acts of the leaders over the led. Prince Nicholas, a leading terrorist, has his men who are depraved and corrupt, subjecting people into unwanted slavery. No one dares to question them because the prince is in power and thinks he can use it to get what he wants until death creeps in laying his icy hand on the king, and then a new king is chosen to restore the lost peace in the land. Fortune Nwaiwu Author of The Devil in the Cathedral (Rivers State, Nigeria)

Emancipation brought an end to many of the evils of slavery, but it did not do away with involuntary servitude in the South. Even during Reconstruction, state legislatures passed laws that bound laborers to the landowner with a nearly unbreakable tie—which still chains many a rural black to what a 1914 Supreme Court ruling called an "ever-turning wheel of servitude." Daniel Novak shows how federal, state, and local regulations combined in an undisguised effort to keep southern agriculture supplied with black labor. A freedman who did not immediately enter into a labor contract was subject to arrest as a vagrant. Once a contract was agreed upon, it was a criminal offense for a laborer to fail to carry it out, no matter how unfair the terms might be. If, as was almost inevitable, the freedman fell into debt to the landowner, he could be kept in service until repayment-and exorbitant interest rates and judicious bookkeeping could often postpone that day indefinitely. Novak traces the sporadic efforts of the federal government to do away with this kind of peonage. In studying the details of the legal basis for peonage in the South, he breaks new ground. The institution has aroused surprisingly little interest in the past; this compelling account should do much to establish that peonage is one of the most severe and widespread violations of civil rights in the nation.

Frontiers of servitude explores the fundamental ideas behind early French thinking about Atlantic slavery in little-examined printed and archival sources, focusing on what 'made' a slave, what was unique about Caribbean labour, and what strategic approaches meant in interacting with slaves. From c. 1620 –1750, authoritative discourses were confronted with new social realities, and servitude was accompanied by continuing moral uncertainties. Slavery gave the ownership of labour and even time, but slaves were a troubling presence. Colonists were wary of what slaves knew, and were aware of how imperfect the strategies used to control them were. Commentators were conscious of the fragility of colonial society, with its social and ecological frontiers, its renegade slaves, and its population born to free fathers and slave mothers. This book will interest specialists and more general readers interested in the history and literature of the Atlantic and Caribbean.

This book offers a comparative analysis of the major systems of servitude present in the world since 1500. Slavery, serfdom, debt bondage, indentured service and convict labour all provided labour and service through the legal subjection of one person to another, but remained very different. By comparison and contrast, this study seeks to establish their distinctive character. Servitude in Modern Times concentrates on the forms of servitude that figured in the process of early modernization: notably the white bonded labour, convict and indentured, used to settle North America; the slave systems of the Americas and the Ottoman Empire; and the serf regimes of central and eastern Europe. It also examines the servitude that survived the emancipations of the nineteenth century: the endurance of slavery and debt bondage in Africa and Asia; the extensive use of indentured service on colonial plantations; the forced labour provided by the concentration camps of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Traditional assumptions are challenged: M. L. Bush argues against the standard, neo-abolitionist view that the servile were powerless victims, proposing that, in most cases, they ingeniously succeeded in acquiring rights and liberties. He shows how servitude contributed to the modernizing process by compensating for the shortage of waged labour which was frequently encountered by early capitalism. In this respect the book challenges the progressiveness with which modernization has normally been depicted. Servitude in Modern Times will be of great interest to students and scholars in history, politics and sociology, as well as to a general public horrified by man's inhumanity to man.