Description

"With the aid of evidence drawn mainly from the ruling households of eastern India in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this book illustrates how slaves contributed to the constitution of the family and kinship. In the process, the book argues that colonial legislators left these 'domestic' slaves out of abolitionist agendas, while simultaneously erecting standards of legitimacy, proofs of marriage and purity of descent that eroded the position of those that were slave-born in precolonial times."--Jacket.