Matthew S. Hopper is a Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. His research focuses on slavery and abolition in the Indian Ocean world.
His book Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (Yale University Press, 2015), which examines the history of the African diaspora in Arabia and the Gulf, was a finalist for the 2016 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. He received a Ph.D. in History and an MA in African Studies from UCLA, as well as an MA in History from Temple University. He has held postdoctoral and visiting fellowships at the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the University of Cambridge, and King’s College London. His work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the British Academy. His writing has appeared in Annales, Itinerario, and the Journal of African Development.
As a 2023 recipient of the Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellowship in Global African Studies at The Africa Institute, Hopper worked on a book examining the history of liberated Africans in the Indian Ocean world. Building on his first book, the project explores the lives of enslaved Africans who were captured aboard slave ships by the British Royal Navy in the Indian Ocean between 1808 and 1897. British officials referred to these recaptives as “liberated Africans.” They were resettled in places such as Cape Town, Mauritius, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Aden, Bombay, and the Seychelles, where many were indentured for fourteen years and required to perform agricultural and domestic labor under conditions that often resembled slavery. The book examines the paradoxes of antislavery and abolition in the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean.
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