Review: A Hundred Horizons

Abstract

A HUNDRED HORIZONS The Indian Ocean in Age of Global Empire Sugata Bose Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 333pp, US$27.95 doth (ISBN 978-0674021570)For those who have a penchant for pondering past on grand scales, these are exciting times. Over last decade, there has been a spate of books by historians and historically minded social scientists on expansive periods that encompass significant portions-if not entirety-of world. Taken as a whole, these exhibit a multiplicity of approaches and marshal a wonderful array of motifs in their quest to elucidate past on largest of canvases and to help us understand how world came to be as it is today.A Hundred Horizons may be thought of as an exemplar of latest wave of what are nowadays often termed global histories. This is Sugata Bose's first book-length foray into this field. He comes to it from a background in social and economic history of modern south Asia. Its imprint is clearly visible in his conception of Indian Ocean. Another major influence is Bose's current academic milieu. He is based at Harvard, where he is Gardiner professor of oceanic history and affairs. But, more importantly, Harvard is also home to Bernard Bailyn who, in mid1990s, was among first to contextualize then-burgeoning field of history, a field of which he is considered one of principal standard-bearers. It is then no surprise that there is strong resonance between work being done by Atlantic Ocean historians-especially at Harvard-and in timing of A Hundred Horizons, its approach, and themes that it explores.The main focus of this work is purportedly Indian Ocean in 19th and first half of 20th. Bose argues that, for modern period, this ocean was-and, in many ways, continues to be-characterized by specialized flows of capital and labour, skills and services, ideas and culture. Furthermore, Indian Ocean is of continuing relevance...as an interregional space in a time of intense global interconnections (3). These arguments stem from Bose's key historical claim and, potentially, his most important contribution to historiography. He has set himself task of upending commonplace view that the organic unity of Indian Ocean rim...was ruptured with establishment of European political and economic domination by latter half of eighteenth century (7).Bose knows that, by embarking on such a monumental project, he runs risk of being ensnared in a conceptual and methodological quagmire. He tries to avoid this fate in two ways. First, he embraces a fairly recent coinage among historians, namely, interregionalism. Though his analysis operates on multiple physical scales-local, national, regional, interregional, and global-it is interregionalism that ends up bearing most of explanatory burden. For his purposes, this space somewhere between generalities of a 'world system' and specificities of particular regions (6). Second, he invokes metaphor of horizons and, by extension, flags his intention to use in his study rhetorical devices more often associated with literature. It is imperative for a work of this type to find a way of resolving analytical tension between a relatively well-defined Indian Ocean as a physical or geographical space, and fluidity of Indian Ocean as a sociocultural entity. As Bose sees it, answer lies in harnessing rhetorical power of literary devices, and stories of individuals that can thus be told through them, to traditional analytical toolkit of historians. In exploring Indian Ocean history in all its richness, he insists, we have to imagine a hundred horizons, not one, of many hues and colors (4).After setting out his approach in an instructive, balanced, and fairly detailed introduction, there follow six substantive chapters in which three main themes are examined. …