Creole Kingdoms in Southeast Asia: Slave Gathering Warfare and Cultural Exchange in Burma, Thailand, and Manipur, 18th–19th C. is an investigation of Southeast Asian cosmopolitanism as seen through the lens of slavery. My research harnesses creolization theory, an innovative research methodology that developed first amongst Caribbean intellectuals, to uncover the cultural histories of slavery in Southeast Asia and Northeast India.
Beginning in 1750 and lasting for roughly seventy-five years, a rapidly expanding Burmese empire dispatched slave-gathering armies to kingdoms across mainland Southeast Asia and what is now Northeast India. Foreign war captives numbering in the tens of thousands were forcibly relocated to Burma’s capital zone. These captives carried foreign knowledge, artistic practices, and religious beliefs, and through their labor and social interactions, they became powerful agents of “creolization,” or the multilateral processes of cultural, artistic, and religious exchange that develop in the context of long-distance slavery.
These war captives transformed Burmese society through the introduction of foreign ideas and practices, and they were themselves transformed by the crucible of slavery and their selective adoption of Burmese cultural practices. Ultimately, Creole Kingdoms maps the complex cultural transformations resulting from Southeast Asian slave-gathering warfare.
