Under Empire - (Columbia Studies in International and Global History) by Michael Francis Laffan (Hardcover)

About the Book

Michael Francis Laffan offers a sweeping exploration of two centuries of interactions among Muslim subjects of empires and nation-states around the Indian Ocean world. He traces interlinked lives and journeys, examining engagements with Western, Islamic, and pan-Asian imperial formations to consider the possibilities for Muslims in an imperial age.

Book Synopsis

Honorable Mention, 2025 Monsoon Book Prize in History

Winner, 2023 New South Wales Premier's History Awards, General History Prize

An imam banished from eastern Indonesia to the Cape of Good Hope in 1780 builds a new Muslim community with a mix of fellow exiles, enslaved people, and even the men tasked with supervising his detention. Nineteenth-century colonial chroniclers invent the legend of the "loyal Malay" warrior, whose anger can be tamed through the "mildness" of British rule. A Tunisian-born teacher who arrived in Java from Istanbul in the early twentieth century becomes an enterprising Arabic-language journalist caught between competing nationalisms.

Telling these stories and many more, Michael Francis Laffan offers a sweeping exploration of two centuries of interactions among Muslim subjects of empires and future nation-states around the Indian Ocean world. Under Empire traces interlinked lives and journeys, examining engagements with Western, Islamic, and pan-Asian imperial formations to consider the possibilities for Muslims in an imperial age. It ranges from the dying era of the trading companies in the late eighteenth century through the period of Dutch and British colonial rule up to the rise of nationalist and cosmopolitan movements for social reform in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Laffan emphasizes how Indian Ocean Muslims by turns asserted loyalty to colonial states in pursuit of a measure of religious freedom or looked to the Ottoman Empire or Egypt in search of spiritual unity. Bringing the history of Southeast Asian Islam to African and South Asian shores, Under Empire is an expansive and inventive account of Muslim communal belonging on the world stage.

Review Quotes

Under Empire is a stunning book, packed with memorable characters whose itineraries crossed political and cultural boundaries. Laffan ranges across space and time to illuminate shifting notions of Muslim belonging across the Indian Ocean. Drawing on a dazzling range of texts and archives, he finds a fresh perspective on the making and unmaking of modern empires.--Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia's History

Michael Laffan's masterly account of the "lives and loyalties" of Muslims who lived across the Indian Ocean world during the heyday of second British empire opens many new vistas. Ambitious in its scope, it is also scrupulous in its attention to sources in multiple languages. This is an impressive book that confirms the author's reputation as an important interpreter of Indian Ocean history.

--Sanjay Subrahmanyam, author of Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500-1800

About the Author

Michael Francis Laffan is professor of history and Paula Chow Chair in International and Regional Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia (2003) and The Makings of Indonesian Islam (2011) as well as the editor of Belonging Across the Bay of Bengal (2017).