Under Empire

Winner, 2023 New South Wales Premier's History Awards, General History Prize

An imam banished from eastern Indonesia to the Cape of Good Hope in 1780 builds a new Muslim community with a mix of fellow exiles, enslaved people, and even the men tasked with supervising his detention. Nineteenth-century colonial chroniclers invent the legend of the “loyal Malay” warrior, whose anger can be tamed through the “mildness” of British rule. A Tunisian-born teacher who arrived in Java from Istanbul in the early twentieth century becomes an enterprising Arabic-language journalist caught between competing nationalisms.

Telling these stories and many more, Michael Francis Laffan offers a sweeping exploration of two centuries of interactions among Muslim subjects of empires and future nation-states around the Indian Ocean world. Under Empire traces interlinked lives and journeys, examining engagements with Western, Islamic, and pan-Asian imperial formations to consider the possibilities for Muslims in an imperial age. It ranges from the dying era of the trading companies in the late eighteenth century through the period of Dutch and British colonial rule up to the rise of nationalist and cosmopolitan movements for social reform in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Laffan emphasizes how Indian Ocean Muslims by turns asserted loyalty to colonial states in pursuit of a measure of religious freedom or looked to the Ottoman Empire or Egypt in search of spiritual unity. Bringing the history of Southeast Asian Islam to African and South Asian shores, Under Empire is an expansive and inventive account of Muslim communal belonging on the world stage.

Acknowledgments
A Note on Transliterations, Spelling, and Dates
Introduction
Part I: Western Deposits
1. From the Spice Islands to the Place of Sadness
2. Shaping Islam at the Cape of Good Hope
3. Sanguinary Attacks and Unruly Passions
4. Friends Firm and Warm
Part II: Muslim Mediations
5. Other Malays, Other Exiles
6. Between Shrinking Kandy and Distant Istanbul
7. For Queen, Country, and Caliph in Africa
8. Seven Pashas for Ceylon
Part III: Eastern Returns
9. A Caliph for Greater Java
10. For Arabs, Arabic, and the Community
11. Pan-Islamism, Nationalism, Pan-Asianism
12. Forgotten Jihad
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index