Books like Lords of the Land, Lords of the Sea — picked by fans

This book explains how a powerful sultanate located on an archipel in the South China Sea maintained its independence until the very end of the nineteenth century. Being the centre of a ferocious slave-raiding network, it played a pivotal role in supplying the slave labour for commodity production both for China and the West. Warren’s book links an upsurge of slave raiding in Southeast Asia at the end of the eighteenth century with imperial expansion of the West and the economic resurrection of China. It questions the dominant perception that piracy and slavery in Asia were antithetical to economic growth.

I find Warren’s thesis tremendously valuable to understand processes of globalisation and a source of inspiration for my own research and teaching on slavery in the Indonesian archipelago in the nineteenth century. It also opened my eyes to the fact that the upsurge of slave-raiding was fed by illicit arms… show more.

Nieboer did groundbreaking research on slavery outside the Atlantic world, and not the least on Southeast Asia. He was the first to propose a universal economic theory for the occurrence of slavery, namely that its existence was the result of a scarcity of labour in relation to the availability of land. After Evsey Domar expanded this argument to serfdom, it became known as the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis and has been widely cited both by historians and economic historians. In any talk about slavery and bondage in Southeast Asia I refer to this thesis to explain why slavery had practically disappeared in densely populated Java in the eighteenth century whereas it probably increased almost everywhere else in the Indonesian archipelago.

This book became the starting point for many publications on slavery in Southeast Asia. It is a collection of essays that not only provides us with an overview of the entire region over the past 700 years but also suggests how we can study the multifarious forms of slavery and bondage in the region in a comparative manner. Although almost forty years old it is still indispensable reading for any course on slavery in Southeast Asia, including my own course.

Salman shows how the anti-slavery discourse became part of American imperialism and how contentious this issue became during US colonial administration over the Philippines. While the American administration acted with growing determination and harshness against slave-holding societies particularly in the Muslim southern part of the Philippines, it also adopted abolitionism as a legitimation for colonial rule over the entire Philippines. Salman exposes the paradoxes of imperialist rhetoric in which people were subjugated to free them from slavery. 

Laura Murphy uses nearly forty survivor narratives from around the world to demonstrate that slavery is not a heinous phenomenon of the past, but of the present as well. Her work is essential to students of American history; it ensures that slavery is never presented as merely a crime of the past or only as a despicable practice isolated to one geographic region.

I no longer remember how, around 2018, I discovered this remarkable 1850 travelogue and presentation of observations on slavery by the man most people know as a landscape architect. Before his landscaping, Olmstead was hired by the now New York Times to travel the South interviewing and recording all he could from whites, whether rich or poor, slave owners or not, and enslaved Blacks. An added treasure: I loved reading about his travel experiences by boat, horse, train, and stagecoach, as well as the challenges of finding places to overnight. 

The horrors of slavery come through without any preaching. I still think about this book a lot and what I learned from it–aspects of Southern life in the 1850s presented by someone trying to be fair and observant without a special agenda. 

While we generally know the main details of several major slave uprisings in early American history.

Rucker dives deeper into the African cultural forces that influenced these episodes and how the expression of African cultural idioms during these resistance movements tells us more about the formation of African American culture.

By focusing on these cultural expressions, Rucker gives fresh insight into major slave uprisings and African American history which also makes for a fascinating read.

The very name “Zanzibar” has a sort of magic to it—and I certainly fell under its spell when I read M.M. Kaye’s book for what would be the first of many, many times back in the 80s.

I had never heard of Zanzibar; I knew nothing of the ruling family, the Sayyids of Muscat and Oman, but by the time I was a hundred pages into M.M. Kaye’s epic story of an American woman who plunges into intrigues she thinks she understands but doesn’t, I felt I knew them all intimately. This book is a coming-of-age story, a brilliant evocation of place, and so much more.

I love this book because Genovese puts a lifetime of research and scholarship into the service of searching for an answer to the question: how did slaveholders reconcile slavery and Christian faith? What results from this project is a stunning reconstruction of the mental furniture of the individuals who led the southern states into secession and war. Genovese uncovers what they learned at school, where they traveled, with whom they spoke and interacted, what they read, and what they thought about what they read.

What emerges is a distinct group of individuals who saw themselves as no one’s imitators and from whose understanding of history and the Bible regarded the white southerners they led as God’s chosen people. What kept them awake at night was the uneasy knowledge that this special status in the firmament would not necessarily protect them from God’s wrath. 

The author and I live near each other and we got to know each other at local writer events. So when I heard that her book won Lee and Low’s New Voices Award, I just had to get Glenda’s book. And I did! She autographed a copy for me which I treasure. This is a tender, powerful, and inspiring picture book. It tells the true story of how Frederick Douglass’s mother would visit him. He was a young child working on a plantation. His mother lived and worked six miles away. At night, she would walk six miles through the dark woods to come to visit Frederick, then head back home before dawn. He knew his mother loved him—it was a love that stretched 12 miles long.