<i>Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire</i> by Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa

Expansive though it is, the title of this important and innovative book only begins to convey a sense of its scope. Coauthors SenGupta, a professor of history, and Amkpa, a professor of drama and cultural theory, offer nothing less than a globe-spanning account that closes the gap between studies of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Where many historical inquiries focus on one of these worlds or the other, this volume treats the two as a pair of distinctive yet interrelated regions. This approach provides the basis for the book’s main argument, as SenGupta and Amkpa contend that the Atlantic and Indian Ocean histories of slavery and emancipation intersected in unexpected ways across the nineteenth century.Central to the interdisciplinary design of this book is its “interoceanic” frame of analysis (5). Building on the theorist Paul Gilroy’s approach to tracing the contours of the “Black Atlantic,” SenGupta and Amkpa follow the Atlantic and Indian Ocean itineraries of people, ideas, and commodities. In these pages, we encounter an overseer from Mississippi struggling to manage a rural labor force in British India; a ship from Charleston, South Carolina, acquiring human chattel for transport in Mozambique; a New Englander recently arrived in the Comoros, using enslaved laborers to run a sugar plantation in the wake of the American Civil War. Not all of these stories are newly discovered. But their combined force is readily apparent; they demonstrate “how the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds ‘hemorrhaged’ into each other in a moment of transition” (3).At the same time, SenGupta and Amkpa take care to explore the clots that formed throughout this interconnected expanse as well. They depict, for example, how “proslavery maternalism,” a mode of thinking grounded in assumptions about kinship and care, took very different shape in Atlantic and Indian Ocean world contexts (120). Based on multisited archival research conducted in multiple languages, their study attends simultaneously and insightfully to points of connection, comparison, and contrast.Another source of this book’s interdisciplinary value is less empirical than theoretical: SenGupta and Amkpa apply the methods of subaltern studies, a conceptual intervention in South Asian historiography, to the study of slavery’s interoceanic histories. Rare indeed are accounts focused on slavery in the Atlantic world in which we find mentioned the issue of subalternity. Yet here that issue is raised to illuminating effect. Juxtaposing the “subaltern paths” of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, an African-American emigrant to Canada, with those of Radha (later known as Gul Bihar), an alleged concubine who fled from a royal household in Delhi, SenGupta and Amkpa offer new and nuanced insights into the mutable meanings of slavery—along with the varied means by which human beings resisted slavery (170). Their approach to interpreting the conditions of subjectivity available to marginalized people adds useful complexity to the emphasis on “agency” often found in scholarship centered on the Atlantic world.This study is altogether impressive in its sweep and sophistication. And yet, for all that, it trades primarily on a historiographical argument. SenGupta and Amkpa reveal the extent to which the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds were all but inextricably entangled with one another across the nineteenth century, despite their siloing in much of the existing literature. But once that illusion of separation is punctured, one might wonder, how does our overarching understanding of the era of abolition change? In the concluding words of their book, SenGupta and Amkpa offer a final restatement of “the case we have tried to make for crossing slavery’s interoceanic boundaries on a granular level” (294). It remains for future scholars to continue to press the case, all the while clarifying how the granular pieces of this interoceanic history add up to a new and more global whole.