Matthew S. Hopper's wide-ranging history of the African diaspora and slavery in Arabia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries examines the interconnected themes of enslavement, globalization, and empire, and challenges previously held conventions regarding Middle Eastern slavery and British imperialism. Linking the personal stories of enslaved Africans to the impersonal global commodity chains their labor enabled, this provocative and deeply researched study contradicts the conventional historiography that regards the Indian Ocean slave trade as fundamentally different from its Atlantic counterpart and disputes the triumphalist antislavery narrative that attributes the end of the East African–Persian Gulf slave trade to the efforts of the British Royal Navy.
