Fleeting Agencies

Arunima Datta is Assistant Professor at the Department of History, University of North Texas. She is the author of the multiple award-winning book Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (2021), which received the Sara A. Whaley Award from the National Women's Studies Association, the Gita Chaudhuri Award from the Western Association of Women Historians and the Stansky Award from the North American Conference of British Studies. Her earlier work on the history of travelling ayahs in Britain has also won the Carol Gold Award. Her recent book, Waiting on Empire: History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain (2023) was recently published by Oxford University Press. She serves as an associate editor of Gender & History, Britain and the World, and as the Associate Review Editor of the American Historical Review. Her works have appeared in several scholarly journals, public history journals and magazines, and on BBC4.

'In this landmark study, Arunima Datta takes aim at decades of historiographical refusal to see and hear the situational agency of coolie women in colonial Malaysia. Drawing on a remarkable combination of archival evidence and oral histories, she makes an irrefutable case for recognizing coolie women's work as the key to plantation economies and by extension, to the history of colonialism written at large. Fleeting Agencies is world history from below at its principled best. It's also a model of anti-imperial, feminist transnational labour and migration history, and a handbook for how to decolonize archives upon which exclusionary histories have been built as well. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the gendered history of radicalized capital wherever it has taken root.' Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Acknowledgements; List of Tables; List of Figures and Diagrams; Introduction; 1. Coolie Women in the Empire's Rubber Garden: Historical and Contextual Background; 2. 'Tapping' Resources: (Re) Figuring the Labour of Coolie Women on Estates; 3. Managing 'Partnerships': Domesticity and Entrepreneurial Endeavours; 4. Negotiating Intimacies and Moralities: Enticements, Desertions, Violence and Gendered Trials; 5. Becoming 'Ranis': Coolie Women as Rani Jhansi Regiment Recruits in WWII; Conclusion; Epilogue; Glossary; Notes and References; Bibliography; Index.