Forgotten Lineages. Afterlives of Dutch Slavery in the India

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My latest research project at Leiden University under an NWO Open Competitie Grant (2023 - 2027) explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and  descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch  and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and  South A frica. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became the basis of belonging and selfhood. 

 Sri Lanka was a crucial node of Dutch slave trade  activities in the Indian Ocean world connecting present-day South  Africa, Mauritius, and Indonesia. Forgotten Lineages re-evaluates early  waves of European slavery on the island, questions the role of slave  ancestry in (re)fashioning communities in creolizing colonial suburbs  and analyses the life courses of Sri Lankan enslaved and their  descendants, displaced by imperial powers to Dutch and later British  Cape Town from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Using colonial  sources from Dutch eighteenth-century last wills and cadastral  registration, over nineteenth-century British slave registers and church records, to indigenous Sinhalese narrative sources we will write  contiguous transimperial histories that traverse multiple archives.  Forgotten Lineages will shed light on three interconnected processes  that were at play in these Indian Ocean territories: individual self-identification, community formation and colonial institutions‘ role in fashioning subjects according to racialized logics. Forgotten  Lineages will not only articulate the complexity and the variety of  forms taken by Dutch and British colonialism and enslavement, it will  fundamentally alter our understanding of the afterlives of enslavement  through a deep and rooted exploration of new Dutch, British and  Sinhalese source materials