The World History Association named Professor of History Gunja SenGupta’s book Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire a winner of the 2024 Bentley Book Prize for the best book in world history. In addition, the book was awarded the 2024 Paul E. Lovejoy Prize by the Journal of Global Slavery and Brill Academic Publishers. The Lovejoy Prize is an annual prize that recognizes excellence and originality in a major work on themes related to global slavery. SenGupta and co-author Awam Amkpa were interviewed by Lovejoy Prize jury members, which you can read here. Chronicling the global systems of capitalism in the 19th century, Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves mines multinational archives to illuminate the Atlantic reverberations of U.S. mercantile projects, “free labor” experiments, and slaveholding in western Indian Ocean societies. SenGupta and Amkpa profile transnational human rights campaigns and present 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.
