What does the history of American slavery look like when we cross its Atlantic boundaries, and step into the many worlds of the Indian Ocean? This site uses our recently published book, Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire (University of California Press, 2023) as a window to the people, places and politics that enter our field of vision when we do. 

As the 19th century dawned, capitalism, empire, and technologies of print, transport and communication knit the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds into international networks of encounter, exchange and contest. So that something that happened in rural India – say an experiment to grow cotton with free labor – could reverberate in the slavery politics of a Mississippi. In order words, global integration fueled a common “material and meaningful” framework for debating the meanings and merits of slavery and freedom in different parts of the world.  Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves uses multinational archives to flesh out on a granular level, the interface among the personal, domestic, and international politics of slavery and freedom. We do this by tracking the circulation of people, the echo of ideas, and the resonance of policy among nodes of commercial exchange, imperial power rivalries, and reform activism, extending from Anglo-America through the Swahili coast of East Africa, the Red Sea and the Arabian/Persian Gulf into the South Asia. 

Americans on all sides of the slavery debate were intricately networked into intercontinental coalitions. These coalitions included include human rights reformers and oppressed peoples, pitted against multinational slavers and defenders of servitude in diverse guises from Charleston to Calcutta, and Salem through Kutch to Zanzibar. As we tell their stories we move through disparate local and global locales: from Caribbean emancipation celebrations in Northampton, MA, to the counting houses of American consuls and merchants in Zanzibar. We visit cotton farms run by American slave state overseers in India, and the magnificent estate of a Union soldier-turned-slaveholding sugar planter in the Comoros. We traverse the slaving paths of East Africa and the Arabian peninsula into the mercantile establishments, plantations and zenanas or women’s quarters of Zanzibar. We cross the ship decks of slavers and anti-slavers into safe houses and police stations of South Asian towns on the trail of enslaved women and children. Along the way we meet East Africans fleeing to Massachusetts on American merchant ships, Africans landed in India on Arab vessels, and Indian concubines in the Persian/Arabian gulf states, among many other characters. 

Please join us as we begin to think through new ways of researching and teaching global histories of slavery and freedom! We look forward to exchanging ideas on these topics with you!

TEACH THE BOOK: CLICK ON THIS TAB FOR TOPICS, STUDY QUESTIONS, AND SAMPLE PRIMARY SOURCES ON COMPARATIVE HISTORIES OF SAVERY IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC AND WESTERN INDIAN OCEAN WORLDS.