Slavery in the Early Mughal World
Book • 2025
In Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s), Ali Anooshahr uses Jawhar's life and memoirs as a unique window into slavery, selfhood, and the rise of the early modern Indian Ocean world.
Bringing a micro-historical study to a 'subaltern Mughal author' offers the opportunity to reassess the history of slavery in South Asia from an original perspective and to reframe the connected history of the early modern world.
Jawhar's life shows in vivid detail the eruption of the Mediterranean and Black Sea cultural regions into the Indian Ocean world, shedding light onto the collapse of older bonds of interdependency in the face of impersonal structures of new centralized states, and bearing witness to the process of individualization of people which was experienced not as a triumphalist 'rise of the self' but as alienation.
Bringing a micro-historical study to a 'subaltern Mughal author' offers the opportunity to reassess the history of slavery in South Asia from an original perspective and to reframe the connected history of the early modern world.
Jawhar's life shows in vivid detail the eruption of the Mediterranean and Black Sea cultural regions into the Indian Ocean world, shedding light onto the collapse of older bonds of interdependency in the face of impersonal structures of new centralized states, and bearing witness to the process of individualization of people which was experienced not as a triumphalist 'rise of the self' but as alienation.
Mentioned by
Mentioned in 0 episodes
Mentioned as the recent book by Dr. Ali Anushar published with Oxford University Press.
Ali Anooshahr, "Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s)" (Oxford UP, 2025)
