Fugitives & Matriarchs: Slavery in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds

Gunja SenGupta offers an intriguing transnational perspective on slavery by taking us from colonial India to the antebellum United States. First, she relates the stories of both enslaved Virginians accompanying their masters to New York in the 1850s and East African captives traveling in the custody of traders through Indian princely states in the 1840s. Second, she shows how white female champions of racial slavery in the American South and women constructed as slaveholding prostitutes in nineteenth-century India drew upon the imagery of charity, parental care, and the links between work and “caste” to articulate the meanings of slavery in ways that carried radically different implications for gender relations in their different settings. Gunja SenGupta is professor of history at Brooklyn College and the author, most recently, of From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840–1918.