Book Review: Guts, Glory and Empire – The Epic Story of Goans in Zanzibar by Selma Carvalho
1 min read
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.
