Kris Manjapra was born in the Caribbean of mixed African and Indian parentage. He grew up in Canada and completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard. He has lived in the USA ever since. He is a professor of history at Tufts University, and a recipient of the 2015 Emerging Scholar Award by Diverse magazine. He has held fellowships at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and at UCLA. The author of BLACK GHOST OF EMPIRE, he has also written COLONIALISM IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE, AGE OF ENTANGLEMENT: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire, M.N. ROY: Cosmopolitanism and Colonial Marxism, and COSMOPOLITAN THOUGHT ZONES OF SOUTH ASIA.

Books by Kris Manjapra

Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation

by Kris Manjapra - History, Nonfiction

To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts us today, we must look closely at the way it ended. Between the 1770s and 1880s, emancipation processes took off across the Atlantic world. But far from ushering in a new age of human rights and universal freedoms, these emancipations further codified the racial caste systems they claimed to disrupt. In this paradigm-altering book, acclaimed historian and professor Kris Manjapra identifies five types of emancipations across the globe and reveals that their perceived failures were not failures at all, but the predictable outcomes of policies designed first and foremost to preserve the status quo of racial oppression.