New Books in the Indian Ocean World

After Caesar's assassination, the triumvirs drew up a kill list; one such target, a man named Lucius Plotius Plancus, fled to a villa near Naples and tried hiding behind a curtain. The soldiers found him anyway–thanks to his heavy perfume.
Pliny the Elder, writing a century later, used the perfume to suggest the killing was justified. Historians have often taken that at face value, as proof that Rome despised Eastern luxuries. Jeremy Simmons reads it as a joke—Pliny was calling the man a walking corpse.
In Jeremy’s latest book Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade (Princeton, July 2026) he asks what happened when goods like pepper and perfume arrived at their destinations. The goods took on new lives: perfume became a way of talking about death, pepper a medicine prescribed for its heat, Roman coins turned pendants in South Asia—or how soldiers knew the price of spices even on remote Hadrian’s Wall.
Jeremy is an assistant professor of history and the college at the University of Chicago.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Sea of Treasures. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Fictions of Freedom: Migration, Modern Slavery and Bureaucracy in India (Cambridge UP, 2026) emerges from the fact of anti-trafficking interventions having led to newer forms of oppressions and entanglements of bureaucracy. Situating the lives of sex workers and daily-wage earning labourers through a multi-sited ethnography in India, this book opens up an examination of the rescue industry alongside migration and informality, and how the lived reality of the workers is crowded with sociopolitical unfairness, individual and state-sponsored violence, informal debt, gender and caste-based hierarchies, and limited livelihood options. It aims to offer a critical lens into the practices, modalities, and contestations through which freedom is lived and asserted in India. The book is open access here.

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In the nineteenth century, global systems of capitalism and empire knit the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds into international networks in contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire (U California Press, 2023) mines multinational archives; profiles transnational human rights campaigns; shows how the discourses of poverty, kinship, and care could be adapted to defend servitude in different parts of the world; and reveals the tenuous boundaries that such discourses shared with Whiggish contractual notions of freedom. An intercontinental cast of empire builders and émigrés, slavers and reformers, a "cotton queen" and courtesans, and fugitive "slaves" and concubines populate the pages, fleshing out on a granular level the interface between the personal, domestic, and international politics of "slavery in the East," and in the age of empire. By extending the transnational framework of U.S. slavery and abolition histories beyond the Atlantic, Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa recover vivid stories and prompt reflections on the comparative workings of subaltern agency.
Gunja SenGupta: Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and currently visiting at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). Her work places nineteenth-century United States history in global contexts of slavery, abolition, empire, race, gender, and poverty. She is also the author of From Slavery to Poverty and For God and Mammon
Awam Amkpa: Vice Provost for the Arts and Dean of Arts and Humanities at New York University Abu Dhabi, and a professor of drama and social and cultural analysis at New York University. A theater scholar, filmmaker, and curator, he is the author of Theatre and Postcolonial Desires.
Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi: Assistant Professor of History at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). A historian, academic, and translator, he focuses on the history of science, empire, law, and everyday life in the Arabian Peninsula and the wider Indian Ocean world.

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Defying the dire predictions that attended its birth as an
independent nation-state in 1947, the Indian republic is more than
seventy-five years old. And yet, it is a place where criticisms of
actually existing democracy are intense and strident. In recent years,
the trope of victimized people suffering at the hands of a predatory
elite and political dysfunction has reaped rewards. The populist
language of redemptive outsiders pledging to combat a corrupt system has
been harnessed in successful electoral campaigns, like the majoritarian
regime of Narendra Modi.

Tracking the shift from postcolonial nation-building to
democracy-rebuilding, Srirupa Roy shows how the political outsider came
to be a valorized figure of late-twentieth century Indian democracy,
tasked with the urgent mission of curing a broken democratic system—what
Roy terms "curative democracy." Drawing attention to an ambivalent
political field that folds together authoritarian and democratic forms
and ideas, The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism (Stanford University Press, 2024) argues
that the long 1970s were a crucial turning point in Indian politics,
when democracy was suspended by the declaration of a national emergency
and then subsequently restored. By tracing the crooked line that
connects the ideals of curative democracy and the political outsider to
the populist antipolitics and strongman authoritarian rule in present
times, this book revisits democracy from India, and asks what the Indian experience tells us about the trajectory of global democratic politics.

Dhiren Swain is a MIPA PhD Candidate, affiliated to The University of
Melbourne and IIT Madras. His current research focuses on the Urban
Policies and Community Politics in India and South Asia.

He can be reached at kishoredhiren8@gmail.com
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In this conversation, we are entering an Indian Ocean world connected
by steamships, telegraphs, pilgrimage routes, and print. From Bombay
and the Gulf to Cairo and Mecca—and onward to Moscow and
Geneva—merchants, scholars, activists, and political exiles debated a
question that still feels urgent: how can different communities live
together without being reduced to permanent majorities and minorities?

Bombay
sits near the center of our story. Under British rule, it was a major
imperial port. But it was also a meeting place where Indian Ocean
merchants financed publications, hosted traveling scholars, and helped
ideas cross borders.

At the same time, British censuses and
representative politics produced a striking paradox. South Asia
contained the world’s largest Muslim population, yet Muslims were
increasingly classified as a political minority within India.

Dr. Roy Bar Sadeh
is a historian of modern South Asia and the broader Islamic world,
joining the University of Oxford in September 2026 as an Associate
Professor in the Faculty of History and at St Antony’s College. He is
currently a Lecturer at the University of Manchester.

His many articles and forthcoming book with University of Chicago Press, Muslims and the Minority Question: A Global History of South Asia, 1856–1947, follow
the people who refused to accept that minority label as their political
destiny. Along the way, we’ll talk about food and language, Gulf pearl
merchants and printing presses, rival plans for Mecca, an unlikely
Soviet-Saudi partnership, and the search for protection beyond the
nation-state.

Host: Dr. Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi, an assistant professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi.

Co-host: Dr. Mohammed Alsudairi,
a Lecturer of Politics and International Relations of the
Arabic-speaking world at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the
Australian National University.
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