Matthew S. Hopper serves as a Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where he specializes in African and Indian Ocean history. His book, "Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire" (Yale University Press, 2015), examines the history of the African diaspora in Arabia and the Gulf and was recognized as a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize in 2016.
Hopper 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, King’s College London, and The Africa Institute (Global Studies University) in Sharjah. His research has received support from organizations such as the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the British Academy. His scholarly contributions have been published in journals such as Annales, Itinerario, and the Journal of African Development. He is currently a member of a team working to incorporate the Indian Ocean into the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (SlaveVoyages.org) with the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Hopper earned his Ph.D. in History from UCLA and holds dual master's degrees: one in African Studies from UCLA and another in History from Temple University.
Research Interests
Hopper’s research interests include world history and the history of East Africa, eastern Arabia and the Gulf in the 19th and 20th centuries. His research focuses on the history of the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean and the comparative history of slavery and abolition.
Selected Publications
- Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). ISBN 9780300192018
- “Liberated Africans in the Indian Ocean World,” in Richard Anderson and Henry Lovejoy (eds.), Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2020), 271-294. ISBN 9781580469692
- With Katrina HB Keefer, “Following the Trail of the Slave Trade: Branding, Skin, and Commodification,” in Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky (eds.), Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2023), 58-81. ISBN 9780271094434
- “Enslaved Africans and the Globalization of Arabian Gulf Pearling,” in Pedro Machado, Joseph Christensen, and Steve Mullins (eds.), Pearls, People, and Power: Pearling and the Indian Ocean World (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2019). ISBN 9780821424025
- “Was Nineteenth-Century Eastern Arabia a Slave Society?” in Catherine M. Cameron and Noel Lenski (eds.), What is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 313-336. ISBN 9781107144897
- “Africans and the Gulf: Between Diaspora and Cosmopolitanism,” in Allen Fromherz (ed.), The Gulf in World History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 139-159. ISBN 9781474430661
- “The African Presence in Eastern Arabia,” in Lawrence Potter (ed.), The Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014), 327-350. ISBN 9781349503803
- “Parler en son nom? Comprendre les témoignages d’esclaves africains originaires de l’océan Indien (1850-1930)” [“Speaking for Themselves? Understanding African Freed Slave Testimonies from the Western Indian Ocean,1850-1930”], co-authored with Edward A. Alpers. Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63, no. 3 (juillet-août 2008): 799-828.
- “Imperialism and the Dilemma of Slavery in Eastern Arabia and the Gulf, 1873-1939,” Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction 30, no. 3 (2006): 76-94.
