Mobile Households

In Mobile Households, Hollian Wint-Frederick rewrites the history of the Indian Ocean world by centering those who have been written out of it. Rather than the patriarchal family firms and trade networks standard to most Indian Ocean economic histories, Wint-Frederick foregrounds translocal households as the foundation of Indian Ocean commercial life. She argues that Indian Ocean economies were built through the labor of women, especially enslaved women in Indian and East African households, whose bodies, kinship, and work were fundamental to commercial operations. British imperial expansion and abolitionism did not simply dismantle this world—it reframed it, positioning East African slaves as domestic and Gujarati traders as outside Indian Ocean intimate life. Tracing fragmented and interconnected lives through multilingual archives spanning Zanzibar, Mumbai, and London, Wint-Frederick shows how even the most marginalized inhabitants of the Indian Ocean world remade their lives through daily transactions and household dramas. In so doing, Mobile Households locates the mechanics of racial othering and dispossession at the interface of Indian Ocean and imperial intimate economies.