Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World. By Elizabeth A. Lambourn (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2018) 301 pp. $99.99 cloth $39.99 paper

Abstract

The typical Indian Ocean history does not lend itself to social history or to close looks at the daily lives of actual humans. It can read like a 5,000 years-long weather report interspersed with lists of trade goods—a massive amount of research and scholarly synthesis that is more than a little dry. The other common feature of the Indian Ocean genre is recourse to Braudel’s longue duree, which allows authors to use more recent anthropological work to try to illuminate social and cultural practices from the distant past.1 Thus, a description of life on board a twentieth-century dhow might serve as an approximate guide to life on a twelfth-century ship. It might not be perfect for the task, but it is the best that we could do for now.Lambourn’s book, which is built around a list that was scribbled into the margins of a letter, represents a totally different approach to social history in the Indian Ocean. Abraham Ben Yiju, the list’s author, was a member of the community of North African Jews, whose correspondence is preserved in the contents of the Cairo Geniza.2 His list was made in 1149 as he was preparing to return from Malabar to Egypt. Lists of trade goods are a dime a dozen in Indian Ocean histories, but this one, of personal items, was meant to provide for the Ben Yiju party’s sea voyage home rather than to catalog trade goods. Items range from bags of rice to preserved fish, jars of lemons, a cabin door, and a rat trap (never go to sea without one). Lambourn also includes lists of goods that Ben Yiju’s friends and agents sent to him as gifts, which were clearly intended for household use rather than resale. Like the packing list, they shed light on the social and material culture of Ben Yiju’s world.From Lambourn we learn that raisins (which Ben Yiju received frequently as gifts) were macerated in water to make a substance that could be used as “wine” for Jewish ritual purposes. The silver trays that Ben Yiju packed for the sea voyage reveal something of South Indian rice-eating habits (dishes served on a platter and garnished with pickles). The cabin door and planks that he packed for the sea voyage testify to women’s modesty and their protection at sea. Some parts of the book consider Ben Yiju and his family’s life on land (and by inference that of the entire Jewish community), and other parts use Ben Yiju’s packing list to improve our knowledge of life at sea.In effect, Lambourn’s book is an ethnography of an 800-year-old cultural world, but its human feel makes it unlike any previous work about the region and period. Ghosh’s book also has this human element, but it is not always clear about the line between evidence and imagination. Lambourn’s is more attentive to the usual scholarly conventions about evidence. She discovers a wealth of information hiding in plain sight, waiting for new questions and contexts (most of the Geniza’s contents were translated and published decades ago). Hopefully, this good book is the first of many to deviate from the traditional lines-on-maps-and-commodity-list approach to Indian History.