This book project charts an escape from nationalist histories and historiographies. It explores how one Palestinian man was at once a colonial officer and a colonized subject, an enslaver and a refugee. This figure’s trajectory from nineteenth century mobility across Baltimore and Sudan to twentieth century immobility in Lebanon places the question of Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession. The book argues that the only way to speak to these broader resonances is to transgress the nation-state’s categories and subjectivities.