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.

In the Ottoman Empire, many members of the ruling elite were legally slaves of the sultan and therefore could, technically, be ordered to surrender their labor, their property, or their lives at any moment. Nevertheless, slavery provided a means of social mobility, conferring status and political power within the military, the bureaucracy, or the domestic household and formed an essential part of patronage networks. Ehud R. Toledano’s exploration of slavery from the Ottoman viewpoint is based on extensive research in British, French, and Turkish archives and offers rich, original, and important insights into Ottoman life and thought. In an attempt to humanize the narrative and take it beyond the plane of numbers, tables and charts, Toledano examines the situations of individuals representing the principal realms of Ottoman slavery, female harem slaves, the sultan’s military and civilian kuls, court and elite eunuchs, domestic slaves, Circassian agricaultural slaves, slave dealers, and slave owners. Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East makes available new and significantly revised studies on nineteenth-century Middle Eastern slavery and suggests general approaches to the study of slavery in different cultures.

A dramatic account of the slave trade in the early 19th century Indian Ocean is presented through the stories of the Omani Sultan Said and his daughter, Princess Salme, offering insight into the Arabian Peninsula kingdom's lucrative growth and ties to America.

div While the British were able to accomplish abolition in the trans-Atlantic world by the end of the nineteenth century, their efforts paradoxically caused a great increase in legal and illegal slave trading in the western Indian Ocean. Bringing together essays from leading authorities in the field of slavery studies, this comprehensive work offers an original and creative study of slavery and abolition in the Indian Ocean world during this period. Among the topics discussed are the relationship between British imperialism and slavery; Islamic law and slavery; and the bureaucracy of slave trading./DIV

This book examines gender politics through slavery and social regulation in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This book presents an analysis of the slavery and manumission practiced in the Persian Gulf region in the first half of the 20th century. It is unique as it exposes the life stories of several hundred slaves, speaking with their own voices. A striking aspect of the majority of studies on slavery is that they provide the reader with excellent statistics and describe the mechanism of enslavement, the routes of slave trading, and the economic and social conditions of enslaved people, but slaves themselves generally remain anonymous. The premise of this book is to give voice directly to the slaves by presenting in full-length their statements made at the British Agencies in Kuwait, Bahrain, Muscat, Sharjah, and Bushire. Altogether around 1,000 statements were made by slaves asking for manumission certificates, and the analysis of these statements sheds light on various aspects of social, economic and political life on the Arabian shore of the Gulf. Given that it uncovers new aspects of the every-day life of the Arabian Peninsula, this book will also be of help to people of this region who are looking for their roots.