The Making and Unmaking of a Presidency: Envisioning Empire in British Bencoolen, 1685–1825

“The effort to transform Sumatra into a productive constituent of a larger imperial nexus depended on many of the same processes that were to shape modern capitalism. Not only did British officials in Bencoolen deploy coerced and enslaved labor, they did so with the intent of wresting control of the production, consumption, and circulation of valuable commodities such as pepper and sugar. Practices of slavery, transplantation, and agrarian change typically associated with British colonies in the Atlantic world fundamentally shaped Bencoolen.”

Bains, T. (2024) ‘The Making and Unmaking of a Presidency: Envisioning Empire in British Bencoolen, 1685–1825’, Journal of British Studies, pp. 1–21. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2023.142.

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