Shruti Jain’s essay, “Global Abolition and the Assemblages of Slavery in the Eighteenth Century,” interrogates a neat opposition between slavery and freedom. It situates Mariana Starke’s 1788 play Sword of Peace alongside the Parliamentary debates about the abolition of slavery, and the justifications for the East India Company’s continued development of and dependence on unfree labor and peoples. Jain’s essay invites us to attend to what she terms “assemblages of slavery”–a spectrum of unfree labor that emerged and consolidated in the wake of the movement to abolish slavery–and its justification through literary, political, and racial discourses.
In addition to her work in British studies, Jain works on community engaged public humanities projects. She hosts and produces podcasts like The Race and Regency Pod with The Race and Regency Lab and Immigrants Wake America, with the Tenement Museum, New York.