Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves - by Gunja SenGupta & Awam Amkpa

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves offers a colorful and exciting narrative of ameliorist capitalism. Its painstaking research ties together the history of nineteenth-century North America to the Indian Ocean world. A must-read for all, but especially for those seeking a layered, complex, and globally inflected history of a paracolonial present. A model of collaborative writing in global history."--Indrani Chatterjee, author of Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India

"In this innovative and microhistorical yet spatially ambitious work, Gunja Sengupta and Awam Amkpa recount the complex intersecting worlds of slavery, empire, and antislavery in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. This marvelous book shows how British imperialism reinforced slavery in Africa and Asia when evoking antislavery, while abolitionists and subaltern subjects deployed human rights to resist colonialism and new regimes of labor exploitation. The versatile authors of this gem of a book tell a complete, global history of slavery and emancipation during the long nineteenth century."--Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition

"Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves is a remarkable work of scholarship, as it engages a fascinating history of two regions of the world rarely discussed and mostly forgotten in one volume. The authors' beautiful academic prose, interspersed with testimonials and governmental documents, shows the profound commitment to unearthing new narratives that redefine these connections. It is an impressive and gripping story. This book is unique and groundbreaking; it is a long journey that disrupts and enlightens the reader along the way. We see turbulent moments described in great detail, empires challenges as women and children give voice to the abuses they endured. The impact of this important book will be long lasting."--Deborah Willis, author of Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship

Review Quotes

"This book has brilliantly narrated the politics, ideas and trails of people, especially the subaltern stories, which differed from their Western counterparts in various ways...of great value to the students and researchers of colonial, comparative and diasporic studies."-- "South Asian Diaspora"

About the Author

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.