Indian Ocean World Research Articles

The Bay of Bengal Interaction Sphere (1000 BC - AD 500)

This paper proposes the idea of the Bay of Bengal Interaction Sphere as a necessary corrective in studies on ancient Indo-Southeast Asian contacts and early contacts between Southeast Asia and the wider Indian Ocean world. Following the discoveries of Sanskritic civilizations and classical Brahmanical/Buddhist art and architecture in Southeast Asia, the Southeast Asian communities were primarily seen as consumers; recipients of high culture and prestige goods from the subcontinent. This left little space for reciprocity in the study of early interchange between Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The intense archaeological research into the preand early history of Southeast Asia which commenced in the sixties was a much required antidote to the dominant Indianization paradigm. This study attempts to evolve a third perspective by adopting a neutral interaction model. Recent researches on early IndoSoutheast Asian interchange by a new generation of scholars (Bellina 2002: 329-57, 2003: 285-97; Smith 1999: 1-26; Theunissen et al. 2000: 84-105 ) offer the basis for the idea of the Bay of Bengal Interaction Sphere.

A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (review)

Reviewed by: A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire Ned Bertz A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. By Sugata Bose. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. 333 pp. $27.95 (cloth). Revealing early on that his title is paraphrased from none other than Fernand Braudel, Sugata Bose alerts his readers that he intends his book to be an epic journey of "human agency, imagination, and action" (p. 4) carried on the warm waves of the Indian Ocean. This body of water's scholarship suffers neglect in comparison to the rich literatures of the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Pacific. This was clear from the unfortunate omission of the Indian Ocean from The American Historical Review's otherwise stimulating June 2006 forum on "Oceans of History." Who better than Bose, then—with a title of Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University—to captain Indian Ocean studies back into the conversation with theorists of oceanic world history and globalization? While he does sail into this discussion briefly, and with incisive skill, the author's eyes are fonder of other horizons: those that bound Indian Ocean world historiography, especially as seen from the shores of South Asia. It is here that Bose makes his greatest contributions, in particular by extending early modern understandings of the Indian Ocean into the twentieth century, in exploring cosmopolitan notions of anticolonialism across the region, and through the South Asianist project of deterritorializing Indian nationalism. One tension that has long beset Indian Ocean studies, like other transnational or world or global historical fields, is the question of balancing the ebb and flow of movement with the power structures that prevent or control it. At a 2002 conference on the Indian Ocean world, South Asian historian Vinay Lal of UCLA commented, in response to many papers about interregional flows and fluidity, that we needed to think more about "constipating" the Indian Ocean world. On the other end of the balance, the dominant view established by leading historians Kenneth McPherson and Michael Pearson is that European global empires sundered or subordinated preexisting Indian Ocean [End Page 377] linkages while fusing the region to the world economy. Bose offers a nuanced corrective by borrowing from Ranajit Guha, founder of India's subaltern studies collective, to argue that Europeans merely achieved "dominance without hegemony" in the Indian Ocean: "The peoples of the Indian Ocean made their own history, albeit not without having to contend with economic exploitation and political oppression, and the oceanic space supplied a key venue for articulating different universalisms from the one to which Europe claimed monopoly" (p. 273). The human agents Bose follows to illustrate his argument are a motley crew: Indian laborers in the oilfields of Bahrain and on the rubber plantations of Malaya; Gujarati merchants in Zanzibar and Tamil financiers in Burma; Indian soldiers deployed overseas in service of the British empire to France, Mesopotamia, and Southeast Asia; "expatriate patriots" such as Mohandas Gandhi in South Africa and Subhas Chandra Bose, who marched from Singapore to northeastern India with an army of colonial liberation during World War II; Muslim hajjis who traveled from India to Arabia on spiritual pilgrimage; and finally Rabindranath Tagore, whose peripatetic poetry written while on oceanic voyages made him a pilgrim of another sort, one in search of a "Greater India." This dazzling ensemble provides Bose with just a handful of the "hundred horizons" that represent the varied shared experiences found across the interregional Indian Ocean arena. Bose argues that the same scholars who sought out a precolonial Indian Ocean world "organic unity" inevitably read its collapse with the coming of European power (p. 20). Bose tells us that we must instead "keep in play an Indian Ocean interregional arena of economic and cultural interaction as an analytical unit while avoiding the pitfalls of assuming any uncomplicated and unsustainable thesis about continuity" (p. 21). The method employed here is to sketch the histories of the "circular migrants" listed above, centering their encounters with the Indian Ocean as the backdrop. However, one can see the challenge in trying to hold these stories together within a single ambitious book. One downside of...

Indian Ocean Studies and the ‘new thalassology’

This article explores the past, present, and possible future directions of the ‘‘new thalassology’’ [from the ancient Greek thalassa, ‘‘sea’’] and Indian Ocean studies from its humble beginnings in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cross-fertilization between the ‘Annales’ school and world-systems analysis in the 1980s, to its – admittedly incomplete – institutionalization in the early twenty-first century. In addition, it defines the numerous, often flexible and permeable, spatial and temporal boundaries or ‘frontiers’ of the Indian Ocean world(s). A final section surveys some of the potentialities and pitfalls of Indian Ocean studies and the new thalassology, with the strengths outweighing the weaknesses. The new thalassology undoubtedly presents some daunting challenges. It is to be hoped, however, that charting some of the ‘hundred frontiers’ of the globalized, inter-regional Indian Ocean seascape provides some sense of direction for this exciting field of scholarship and helps shape the future contours of maritime-based studies

India and the Indian Ocean World: Trade and Politics.

India and the Indian Ocean World: Trade and Politics.

Heading South

Terminology is always a site of politics, and "global South" is no exception. Many of the places proposed as likely areas for discussion in the pages of this new journal are not, in fact, south of the equator. Nor are other areas that are, in fact, south of the border necessarily as appropriate for discussion in this journal. Yet it is appropriate to reach for another terminological alleyway like this one to help us reimagine, yet again, the peoples and topics in question. "Postcolonial," either with or without a hyphen, is contentious; "commonwealth," of course, has been long abandoned (and for starters, is totally Anglocentric). "Non-aligned" is, perhaps, somewhat closer, but a good number of the "southern" peoples are, in fact, aligned. But the spirit of Bandung suggests that there is a general sense among the peoples in question that they recognize each other, and that they share a common destiny of being the industrialized world's underdogs. Can this sixth sense also give hope for a broader and non-eurocentric cosmopolitanism, even a "subaltern" cosmospolitanism. Can a recuperation of the histories of such "other" mercantile and cultural interchanges, such as that of the Indian Ocean world, enliven and empower these groups to render a "flat" world something that is not inevitably one in which they are, once again, those who are pressed beneath the iron?

Children in European systems of slavery: Introduction

This special edition on children in western systems of slavery1 follows last year's special edition of Slavery & Abolition on women in western systems of slavery in moving beyond the conventional t...

Ostrich Eggs and Peacock Feathers: Sacred Objects as Cultural Exchange between Christianity and Islam1

This article uses the wide dispersal of ostrich eggs and peacock feathers among the different cultural contexts of the Mediterranean – and beyond into the Indian Ocean world – to explore the nature and limits of cultural inheritance and exchange between Christianity and Islam. These avian materials previously possessed symbolic meaning and material value as early as the pre-dynastic period in Egypt, as well as amid the early cultures of Mesopotamia and Crete. The main early cultural associations of the eggs and feathers were with death/resurrection and kingship respectively, a symbolism that was passed on into early Christian and Muslim usage. Mercantile, religious and political links across the premodern Mediterranean meant that these items found parallel employment all around the Mediterranean littoral, and beyond it, in Arabia, South Asia and Africa. As an essay in the uses of material culture in mapping cultural exchange and charting the eclectic qualities of popular religiosity, the article provides a wide-ranging survey of the presence of these objects, from their visual appearance in Renaissance paintings to their hanging in the shrines of Indo-Muslim saints. A final section draws conclusions on the relationship between shared objects, cultural boundaries and the writing of history.

Gardens of New Spain: How Mediterranean Plants and Foods Changed America

The title does not quite capture the subject of this book. Dunmire charts the transplantation of scores of Old World domesticated plants, many of which are not Mediterranean in origin, to a region that is not quite New Spain. Instead, the analysis extends from the Caribbean and the Valley of Mexico in the south to the California missions, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas in the north, with a sidelong look at Spanish Florida in the bargain. Dunmire’s chief concern is to figure out when various crops arrived where, and how their arrival altered agriculture, horticulture, and cuisine. It is, in short, the story of how this part of the Americas acquired a mestizo agroecology in the years between the conquest and 1840.When Spaniards first came to the Americas, among their ambitions was to figure out which crops would grow well in these unfamiliar surroundings. Disappointingly, familiar ones such as wheat, olives, and vines did poorly in most of the terrain they encountered. A long period of experimentation and adjustment followed, in which encomenderos, mission priests, settler farmers, and many others tried to find suitable crops to add to, or substitute for, those already cultivated by Amerindians. Indeed, Cortes himself wrote to King Charles V of the importance of sending food plants to Mexico and suggested it be made illegal for ships to set sail from Spain to Mexico without them (p. 112). Within decades, some imported crops had proved admirably adapted to local conditions, to the point that Amerindians eventually came to regard them as native species. Dunmire provides what I believe to be the most complete and detailed account of this process. If you want to know when the apricot was introduced to Arizona, the melon to Mexico, or coriander to the Caribbean, Dunmire can tell you.The book has no particular ax to grind. Dunmire offers it as a portrayal of a process rather than as a scholarly argument. He says (p. x) that the book is not about “agricultural politics, economics, gender and class dynamics, or environmental consequences.” Dun-mire is not an academic, but a former National Park Service naturalist, and is more interested in establishing the facts than in the sorts of issues and debates that historians and cultural geographers engage in. The book follows loosely in the tradition of Carl Sauer (Dunmire’s teacher) and Alfred Crosby, although with finer resolution, more detail, and less interpretation than one finds in Sauer or Crosby. Although Dunmire recognizes their importance (p. 181, for example), he is much less interested in animals and diseases than Crosby and much less concerned with cultural contexts than Sauer.The book begins with an account of crops, agriculture, and cuisine in Spain prior to the 1490s, emphasizing the legacy of Arab connections to the Middle East and Indian Ocean worlds. The next two chapters, both essentially narrative and descriptive, cover the same subjects in pre-Columbian central Mexico and in Sonora, Arizona, and New Mexico. With the stage thus set, Dunmire proceeds to his main drama, the entry of Old World plants into the Caribbean, Mexico, New Mexico before the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico again (after 1680), and finally, Florida and California. There is also a chapter on livestock and agricultural technology, mainly in Mexico. Each chapter concludes with a mini-essay on a particular plant or set of plants, explaining their origins as cultivars, their history before they were brought to the Americas, and various other matters.The research is based on published sources, including sixteenth- and seventeenth-century original sources, often in Spanish, sometimes in translation. It is a bit stronger for New Mexico and Arizona than elsewhere; Florida — a particularly unwelcoming environment for most of the Spaniards’ preferred crops — seems to deserve more than the four pages it gets. It is one of history’s ironies that 440 years after Spanish settlers began their struggle to find and import crops suitable for Floridian conditions, state officials are now trying their hardest to keep new plant species out.The prose is serviceable but without much zest. The tables are very useful, capturing a lot of the book’s information and presenting it in economical form, and the sketches of plants and various agricultural tools are welcome. The maps are also well done and helpful. The citation style is, however, thoroughly irritating: except for direct quotations there are no citations, and one has to hunt through back matter to see whether or not a given passage is attributed to a source or not. This may have saved on publisher’s costs, but it will cost readers time.

The African-Asian Diaspora: Myth or Reality?

This chapter talks about the possibility of an African 'slave' Diaspora in the Indian Ocean world similar to that of the well-documented African Diaspora of the Americas. The key characteristics of a diaspora are - displacement from a homeland to two or more peripheral or foreign regions; the formation of a 'relatively stable community in exile'; social rejection by the locally dominant society; an awareness of a common homeland and heritage, efforts to maintain links with and improve life in that homeland; and a desire ultimately to return permanently to the homeland. Most African-Asians accepted the locally dominant religion, from Islam in Muslim regions, to Hinduism and Christianity in parts of India and Sri Lanka, to Christianity in Madagascar. In contrast to the Americas, where African communities underwent creolisation or developed an 'African' diasporic consciousness, majority of African-Asians shed consciousness of their African origins and sought assimilation into local society. Keywords:African-Asian Diaspora; Americas; India; Indian Ocean; Madagascar; slave; Sri Lanka

South Asians in the Indian Ocean World: Language, Policing, and Gender Practices in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates

Research Article| December 01 2005 South Asians in the Indian Ocean World: Language, Policing, and Gender Practices in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates Karen Leonard Karen Leonard Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2005) 25 (3): 677–686. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-25-3-677 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Karen Leonard; South Asians in the Indian Ocean World: Language, Policing, and Gender Practices in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 1 December 2005; 25 (3): 677–686. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-25-3-677 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Variorum You do not currently have access to this content.

African connections: an archaeological perspective on Africa and the wider world

1 Foreword by J. O. Vogel 2 Preface 3 1. Introducing Africa: Definitions, Routes, Resources and Interactions 4 2. The Development and Spread of African Farming Systems 5 3. The Nile and Red Sea Corridors 6 4. Africa in the Indian Ocean World System 7 5. Africa's Other Sea: The Sahara and its Shores 8 6. Africa's Opening to the Atlantic 9 7. Out-of-Africa III: The Archaeology of the African Diaspora 10 8. Reconnecting Africa: Patterns, Problems and Potentials 11 References 12 Index 13 About the Author

An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar: The Rise and Fall of an Island Empire (review)

Reviewed by: An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895: The Rise and Fall of an Island Empire by Gwyn Campbell Alison Fletcher An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895: The Rise and Fall of an Island Empire. By Gwyn Campbell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Recently there has been a growing recognition of the importance of Madagascar to African history and to the history of the Indian Ocean World. The wide array of documents available to historians of Madagascar has enabled Francophone and Anglophone scholars to add to our understanding of state-making in pre-colonial societies, the slave trade through the nineteenth century in the Indian Ocean World, the development of ethnicity and the spread of European imperialism in the region. An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895, by Gwyn Campbell, makes a substantial contribution to this growing scholarship. Exploring in considerable detail the internal and external trade in rice, cattle and slaves, Campbell demonstrates that the powerful Merina kingdom, in the central highlands of the island, resisted European incursions for most of the nineteenth century, by internal economic modernization and by a brutal expansionist campaign against its neighbors. While the autarkic economic policies that underpinned these strategies initially strengthened the Merina kingdom, over time they undermined its viability, ultimately leading to French colonization. Of particular interest to historians of empire is Gywn Campbell’s argument that the Merina kingdom was an empire. Arguing that most scholarship on Madagascar relies too heavily on the work of William Ellis, a prolific writer and missionary with the London Missionary Society, Campbell takes issue with what he argues is the predominant view of the Merina kingdom as a benign and progressive state. Rather, he says it was a brutal empire whose people shared a distinct identity that set them apart from other ethnic groups in Madagascar’ He argues that the policies of the Merina Empire were shaped by the imperial rivalry between three empires: Britain, France and Merina. It was this rivalry that led to the imposition of an autarkic regime in central Madagascar and the expansionist policies of the Merina Empire against other ethnic groups on the island. Considering Campbell’s emphasis on the importance of the Mascarene trading networks to the economy of Madagascar, it is somewhat surprising that he does not discuss the community of Malagasy living in Mauritius’ This community grew in size over the nineteenth century as people left the island largely because of the imposition of forced labor and the anti-Christian policies of the Merina court. Many were skilled artisans who, had they remained, could have made a contribution to the economy of the island. While this is an important study, there are a number of problems that give the reader pause, mostly arising from Campbell’s concentration on economic factors as the principal, perhaps sole, determinant of historical change. Additionally, at times Campbell overstates his contribution to the historiography of imperialism in Africa’ While it is a helpful reminder that British imperial policy towards Madagascar was shaped by competition with other European empires, it is not new knowledge. However, his argument that a poorly prepared French army was able to colonize Madagascar only because the economic policies of the Merina court had badly weakened the internal structure of the island is helpful in understanding why Madagascar became a colony after resisting for so long French and British attempts to add to their empires. While Campbell does discuss the importance of education in mission schools to the economic growth of the Merina kingdom, his analysis would have benefitted from a consideration of how political tensions in the Merina court were exacerbated by the education of many elites in the educational system begun by the London Missionary Society in the 1820s. Perhaps, because most Anglophone historiography on Madagascar places the London Missionary Society at the center of the history of island, Campbell has largely ignored their influence. This has had the unfortunate effect of marginalizing the impact of Christianity on the island. After the expulsion of the British missionaries in the 1830s, Christianity spread on the island due to the proselytizing of Malagasy converts. It would have been interesting to explore whether the...

Book Review: The Maritime Frontier of Burma: Exploring Political, Cultural and Commercial Interaction in the Indian Ocean World, 1200–1800

Book Review: The Maritime Frontier of Burma: Exploring Political, Cultural and Commercial Interaction in the Indian Ocean World, 1200–1800

Putting models to the data test: a case study using Indian Ocean CFC-11 data

A method is presented for comparing time-averaged model output with snapshot data. The focus is on a comparison between the cholorofluorocarbon CFC-11 simulated in the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) model, and the near-synoptic Indian Ocean World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) CFC data-set collected in 1995. In the thermocline, the simulated fields fairly closely approximate the observations. We seek to distinguish between regions in which there is room for improvement in the model physics, and regions where the mismatch is the result of comparing time-averaged model fields with snapshot data. CFC variance is estimated using an eddy-permitting Miami Isopycnic Coordinate Ocean Model (MICOM) simulation. The results indicate that the widespread method of visual comparison of vertically-gridded data with model output might lead to misattribution of model deficiencies in regions of high oceanic variability. It is suggested that consideration of error-bars obtained from eddy-permitting model simulations in future model-data comparisons could help avoid such potentially erroneous conclusions.

The Atlantic Slave Trade

The Atlantic Slave Trade

Flight to Freedom: Escape from Slavery among Bonded Africans in the Indian Ocean world, c.1750–1962

Flight to Freedom: Escape from Slavery among Bonded Africans in the Indian Ocean world, c.1750–1962

Introduction: Slavery and other forms of Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean World1

(2003). Introduction: Slavery and other forms of Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean World. Slavery & Abolition: Vol. 24, The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, pp. ix-xxxii.

"The World's Oldest Trade": Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century

This article discusses various aspects of slavery and the slave trade of the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean world: the markets of supply and demand or geographic origins and destinations of slaves; the routes to slavery or the diverse means of recruitment of forced labor; the miscellaneous occupations performed by company and private slaves; the size of Dutch slavery and the volume of the accompanying annual slave trade; and the various forms of slave resistance and slave revolt. The discussion transcends the ahistorical, incomplete, descriptive, static, one-dimensional picture and conventional generalized abstractions of slavery that characterize much of traditional scholarship. Instead, an alternative historicized, holistic, analytical, dynamic, multidimensional, and open model is suggested-one that is sensitive to chronological and geographic variations, socioeconomic and political contexts, and cross-cultural interactions.

Europe's Place in the Global History of Biological Exchange

This paper provides a framework for the European history of biological exchange and biological invasion. It distinguishes four main eras of heightened biological exchange. The first came with the introduction to Europe of the neolithic complex of domesticated plants and animals. The second was associated with the increased trade and travel of the pax romana. The third came with increased connections to Asia and the Indian Ocean world in the era of the Crusades. The fourth, well-known to historians, followed from the oceanic navigations of European mariners beginning in the fifteenth century. In all but the last of these, Europe imported far more than it exported in terms of useful species, and most of those exported were earlier imports, mainly from southwest or south Asia.

The Arabian seas: the Indian Ocean world of the seventeenth century

The Arabian seas: the Indian Ocean world of the seventeenth century