With a "long-standing passion for social history," Elizabeth Rabe, a rising senior at Hamilton College, has been awarded a Freeman Grant for summer research. Her project, titled "From India to the Sugar Fields: The Lives of East Indian Indentured Laborers, 1854-1884," defines her interest and experience in the history of slaves and slave society. With the grant, Rabe will investigate the lives and cultures of East Indian indentured laborers based on British Parliamentary Papers, Colonial Office Records, and British Antislavery papers; as these documents are located at the Public Records Office and British Library in London, England, Rabe will travel overseas as a part of her project.
Additionally, on the Hamilton College campus, Rabe will complete additional research under the direction of Assistant Professor of History Lisa Trivedi. The aim of her project, Rabe explains, is to pursue a social history of East Indian laborers to address a gap in the history of British colonialism; she hopes that her project will be a "contribution to the comparative study of slavery." Examining the conditions under which Indians became indentured servants, Rabe will investigate the cultural effect indentured servants had, the nature of the Indian community in British Guiana, as well as the way Indians lived day to day. Rabe also plans to write and submit an article on her research for a publication in a scholarly journal.
Under the leadership of Associate Professor of History Thomas Wilson and drawing on the expertise of other members of the Asian Studies Program, Hamilton College received a $1,171,500 four-year grant from the Freeman Foundation in 2001, which provided funding for two new tenure-track faculty positions — one in Japanese languages and literature and another in Japanese social science. The grant also enabled the College to establish a new post-doctoral teaching fellows program to augment the breadth of its course offerings on Asia, and will provide funding for intensive short- and long-term student-faculty research collaborations both abroad and on campus.
