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.
Author(s): Gunja SenGupta, Awam Amkpa
Publisher: University of California Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 377
City: Oakland
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
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
