Book Review: Guts, Glory and Empire - The Epic Story of Goans in Zanzibar by Selma Carvalho

Team Kitaab reviews Guts, Glory and Empire – The Epic Story of Goans in Zanzibar by Selma Carvalho (Speaking Tiger, 2026).

Selma Carvalho’s Guts, Glory and Empire arrives as both recovery project and historical reckoning. In tracing the lives of Goans who migrated to nineteenth-century Zanzibar as sailors, cooks, musicians, physicians and clerks, Carvalho restores to Indian Ocean history a community that has often existed only in the margins of imperial archives: visible enough to serve empire but seldom centered within its narratives. The result is a deeply researched and compelling work of narrative history that asks difficult questions about migration, loyalty, class mobility and the moral ambiguities of colonial modernity.

The Zanzibar Carvalho reconstructs is a turbulent political theatre where imperial interests collided with local sovereignties and commercial ambitions. Situated at the crossroads of Africa, the Middle East, Europe and South Asia, the island emerges as a cosmopolitan, but stratified world shaped equally by mobility and violence. Slavery, mercantile capitalism and imperial diplomacy form the background against which Goan migrants sought opportunity and status.

Carvalho’s great achievement lies in how she animates this world through individual lives. Figures such as C. R. Souza, D. B. Pereira and Brás Souza are treated as richly contradictory personalities, who are entrepreneurial, vulnerable, ambitious and constrained, beneficiaries of empire who also resisted its encroachments. Their stories unfold alongside imperial actors such as John Kirk and Gerald Portal, whose bureaucratic maneuverings reveal the instability of colonial categories themselves.

One of the book’s most illuminating insights concerns the peculiar intermediary status occupied by Goans within East Africa’s colonial hierarchy. Classified by the British at various moments as half-caste Portuguese, industrious collaborators or suspect natives, they inhabited an unstable racial and political position that could shift according to imperial convenience. Carvalho demonstrates how these migrants strategically navigated competing sovereignties like the Portuguese citizenship, British administration and the patronage of the Zanzibar sultanate, to secure rights and influence. In doing so, Guts, Glory and Empire complicates simplistic binaries of coloniser and colonised. The Goans of Zanzibar were neither straightforward victims nor uncomplicated collaborators. They were historical actors negotiating survival within unequal systems that rewarded adaptability while exacting ethical compromise.

This moral complexity gives the book much of its intellectual force. Carvalho resists the temptation, common to diasporic recovery projects, to romanticise community success stories into uncomplicated triumphs. Wealth and influence came at a cost. Some Goans prospered within structures deeply entangled with imperial commerce and social stratification. Others became invested in preserving privileges granted by colonial power even as they protested discrimination directed at themselves. The book’s title captures this tension well. Guts and glory coexist uneasily with empire, which functions as an active and corrupting force.

In this regard, Carvalho’s work shares affinities with Amitav Ghosh’s Indian Ocean histories, particularly in its attention to multilingual cosmopolitan worlds eclipsed by nationalist historiography. Where Ghosh often leans toward the lyrical and speculative, Carvalho remains grounded in documentary reconstruction. Her prose is elegant without becoming ornamental, and her strongest passages emerge from close archival detail: legal disputes, correspondence, newspaper fragments and bureaucratic classifications that reveal how colonial power operated through paperwork as much as through military force.

Read an exclusive excerpt from Guts, Glory and Empire by Selma Carvalho

At times, however, the density of historical material can overwhelm narrative momentum. Carvalho’s commitment to archival completeness occasionally results in stretches where the prose feels more dutifully expository than dramatically shaped. Some secondary figures enter the narrative only briefly before disappearing again, leaving the reader wanting either fuller development or sharper pruning. The book is at its best when it lingers on the contradictions embodied by its central personalities rather than attempting exhaustive historical coverage.

Still, these are minor reservations in a work of considerable scholarly and literary importance. What distinguishes Guts, Glory and Empire from conventional imperial histories is its refusal to grant anyone moral simplicity. Carvalho understands that diasporic histories are rarely stories of innocence. Migration often demands accommodation with existing systems of power, however unjust. Communities survive through negotiation, reinvention and compromise. In foregrounding these uncomfortable truths, the book acquires a contemporary resonance extending well beyond its nineteenth-century setting.

Indeed, Carvalho’s account speaks powerfully to present debates about citizenship, racial classification and the precarious privileges of intermediary minorities. The Goans of Zanzibar occupied a world in which legal identity could determine mobility, protection and economic opportunity, which is a reality not entirely distant from contemporary anxieties surrounding migration and belonging. The instability of their status under empire anticipates modern experiences of diasporic conditionality: welcomed when useful, distrusted when politically expedient.

The book’s lasting contribution may lie in its restoration of South Asian voices to African and Indian Ocean histories too often narrated through exclusively European perspectives. Carvalho demonstrates that empire was sustained by imperial administrators soldiers, clerks, interpreters, traders and migrants navigating fractured loyalties across oceans. In recovering these lives with nuance and intellectual honesty, Guts, Glory and Empire enlarges the moral vocabulary through which colonial history itself can be understood.

It is difficult to think of many recent works of narrative history that handle archival recovery with such patience while remaining attentive to the ambiguities of power. Carvalho has produced a book that is as much about the seductions of empire as about its violences and in doing so, she offers a rare account of diaspora that refuses both nostalgia and easy condemnation.

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Selma Carvalho in conversation with Team Kitaab to discuss Guts, Glory and Empire

About the Book

A ground-breaking account of Goans who arrived in mid-nineteenth-century Zanzibar as sailors, cooks and clerks, and went on to become one of East Africa’s wealthiest and most influential communities. This is a sweeping human story of identity, ambition and the ambiguous nature of power.

Zanzibar, situated off the coast of East Africa, was for long a junction for monsoon-driven sea routes connecting Africa, Europe and Asia. By the mid-nineteenth century, it had risen to prominence as a busy, cosmopolitan trading post for cloves, ivory and, unfortunately, slaves. It became a beacon for missionaries, explorers, merchants, and a theatre of Europe’s imperial ambitions. It was at this time that Goans, who had long been travellers and traders to the East African coast, began settling in Zanzibar, flourishing under Sultan Barghash bin Said’s reign.

Among the early arrivals were C. R. Souza, D. B. Pereira and Brás Souza, who would all go on to become influential figures—ambitious, benevolent, but ultimately flawed characters. Their engagement with a host of lively per¬sonalities, including British arch-imperialists John Kirk and Gerald Portal, set in motion a compelling challenge of empire’s authority over ordinary lives. Mistaken as ‘half-caste Portuguese’, they were at times favoured by Britain as law-abiding and industrious, and at other times dismissed as natives needing supervision, even as they began to assert tremendous agency over their own individual lives, gaining influence as physicians, musicians and interpreters to the sultan. Aware of their rights as Portuguese citizens, and making intelli¬gent use of the privilege and protection extended to them by the sultanate, they pushed back against Britain’s erosion of their civil liberties.

In Guts, Glory and Empire, a compelling and unprecedented work of history set against the backdrop of Europe’s ascendancy in Africa, Selma Carvalho brings us the story of this remarkable community, and restores South Asian voices to Indian Ocean histories.

About the Author

Selma Carvalho is the author of three non-fiction books documenting the Goan presence in East Africa. Between 2011 and 2014, she directed a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, UK to record the oral histories of Goans from East Africa, now archived at the British Library. She curated the first ever East African Goan exhibition at the Nehru Centre, London and her work has been used in other exhibitions, such as ‘Documenting South Asian Histories’, Birmingham.