Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves

America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-0-520-42472-2
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 378 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 227 mm x 151 mm, Gewicht: 564 g

In the nineteenth century, global systems of capitalism and empire knit the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds into international networks in contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves mines multinational archives to illuminate the Atlantic reverberations of US mercantile projects, "free labor" experiments, and slaveholding in western Indian Ocean societies. Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa profile transnational human rights campaigns. They show how the discourses of poverty, kinship, and care could be adapted to defend servitude in different parts of the world, revealing the tenuous boundaries that such discourses shared with liberal contractual notions of freedom. An intercontinental cast of empire builders and émigrés, slavers and reformers, a "cotton queen" and courtesans, and fugitive "slaves" and concubines populates the pages, fleshing out on a granular level the interface between the personal, domestic, and international politics of "slavery in the East" in the age of empire. By extending the transnational framework of US slavery and abolition histories beyond the Atlantic, Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa recover vivid stories and prompt reflections on the comparative workings of subaltern agency.

Autoren/Hrsg.

SenGupta, Gunja

Amkpa, Awam

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen Kolonialismus, Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Afrikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Soziale Ungleichheit, Armut, Rassismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE. BETWEEN EMPIRES: A NEW WAY OF TALKING ABOUT SLAVERY, EAST AND WEST

1. Empire, Religious Law, and Slavery by “Free Will”

2. Human Rights from Calcutta through London to Boston

PART TWO. ANTISLAVERY EMPIRE VERSUS REPUBLIC OF SLAVEHOLDERS

3. Reverberations: American Overseers, Slavery, and “Free” Cotton Experiments in India

4. The Slave Mistress and the Courtesan: Poverty, Patriarchy, and “Proslavery Maternalism”

PART THREE. HOW MIGRATIONS MADE MEANING: IMPERIAL ABOLITION, SLAVE TRADING, AND SUBALTERN SUBJECTS
5. “Domestic” Slavery and Colonial Belonging

6. Rulers, Rebels, and Refugees in Transnational Transit

7. Subaltern Prisms and Meanings of Freedom

PART FOUR. AMERICANS IN SULTANATES

8. Business, Sovereignty, and Fugitive Slaves

9. A Yankee Slaveholder, “Black Sultan,” and European Imperialists in the Indian Ocean, 1870–1906

Epilogue. Crossing Slavery’s Interoceanic Boundaries: Reflections

Notes

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Gunja SenGupta is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is author of From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840–1918.

Awam Amkpa is Professor of Drama and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and Dean of Arts and Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is author of Theater and Postcolonial Desires.