Michael Laffan in Conversation with Greg Fealy - Under Empire. Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775 -1945

Michael Laffan in Conversation with Greg Fealy - Under Empire. Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775 -1945

Saturday, Jun 17, 2023 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Location:
Asia Bookroom
Unit 2, 1-3 Lawry Place
Macquarie ACT
(You will find us adjacent to the Jamison Centre in Macquarie)

RSVP by 5pm on Friday June 16th to 62515191 or books@asiabookroom.com

Entry by gold coin donation to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.

Under Empire. Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775 - 1945

Author Michael Laffan in Conversation with Greg Fealy AM

Join us on Saturday June 17th at 3pm

Following the discussion Asia Bookroom invites you to stay for afternoon tea.

RSVP by 5pm June 16th 

 

Under Empire. Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775 - 1945

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.

Michael Laffan studies Southeast Asian and Indian Ocean history and is the Paula Chow Professor of International and Regional Studies and Professor of History at Princeton.  Michael completed a B.A. in Asian Studies (Arabic) at the Australian National University in Canberra (1995) and got his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History from the University of Sydney (2001). He has been at Princeton University since 2005. Under Empire is his third book.  

ANU Emeritus Professor Greg Fealy's interest in Indonesian politics and Islam began when he was an undergraduate at Monash University. More recently, he has examined terrorism, transnational Islamist movements and religious commodification in Indonesia, as well as broader trends in contemporary Islamic politics in Southeast Asia.