Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity. By AbdulhamitArvas, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025. 336 pp. $27.95 (paperback). ISBN: 978‐1‐4780‐3158‐1

Like the protagonists of Petronius' Satyricon, Abdulhamit Arvas's Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity 'pursues beautiful boys' (1) across the Mediterranean Sea.More specifically, the book traces a cultural history of the (both literary and very real) kidnapped boysthe ganymedes and the ganimets-abducted by the English and the Ottomans between the 1550s and the 1620s.These racially, (homo)erotically and culturally marked figures circulated in aesthetic, commercial and sexual economies in both the Ottoman and the English literary tradition, occupying a place at the crossroads of race and sexuality.As an example of the queer historicism heralded by Jonathan Goldberg, Madhavi Menon and Jeffrey Masten, Arvas deploys and expands the contrapuntal method developed by Fernando Ortiz and Edward Said, as a way of connecting English and Ottoman texts 'by situating them in the same geohistorical plane in order to uncover the imaginaries of homoeroticism related to imperial ideas and practices in early modernity' (10).His queer-race hermeneutics helps Arvas navigate insidious discrepancies, and he does not shy away from the darker underbelly of the Global Renaissance, particularly when disproving myths concerning Ottoman slavery, colourism, and racism.This is a fascinating, beautifully illustrated, and meticulously researched monograph, whose accessible style should lead to its inclusion in many a syllabus.