Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire

Description

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.  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