A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History: Ten Design Principles (The World Readers) 1478030291, 9781478030294

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4^ A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History 64

design princi­p les for teaching history A series edited by Antoinette Burton

a primer for teaching indian ocean world history 4^ Ten Design Princi­ples 64 Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow

duke university press Durham and London 2024

​© 2024 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­ic­ a on acid-­free paper ∞ Proj­ect Editor: Michael Trudeau Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Alpers, Edward A., author. | McDow, Thomas F., author. Title: A primer for teaching Indian Ocean world history : ten design principles / Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow. Other titles: Design principles for teaching history. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2024. | Series: Design principles for teaching history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023034818 (print) LCCN 2023034819 (ebook) ISBN 9781478030294 (paperback) ISBN 9781478026068 (hardcover) ISBN 9781478059295 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: History—Study and teaching. | Teachers— Training of. | Indian Ocean Region—Study and teaching. | Indian Ocean Region—History. BISAC: HISTORY / Asia / South / India. | EDUCATION / Teaching / ­Subjects / Social Science Classification: LCC DS339.8 .A47 2024 (print) | LCC DS339.8 (ebook) | DDC 909/.09824—DC23/ ENG/20240130 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034818 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034819 Cover art: Joan Martines (1556–1590), A Map of Africa, South of the Equator, with Part of the Indian Ocean, from An Atlas of 17 Sea Charts, by Joan Martines, 1578 (vellum). British Library, London, UK. © British Library Board. All rights reserved / Bridgeman Images.

4^ Contents 64

Acknowl­edgments ​vii Introduction. Initial Thoughts ​1

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foundations and sources 7

One

Mapping the Indian Ocean ​9 Two

Beyond Eurocentrism ​21 Three

Beyond the Text ​33

%7 part ii &5 global themes 45

Four

Indian Ocean Commodities: The Life of Spice ​47

Five

­People on the Move  59 Six

Rethinking Slavery ​73 Seven

Empire and Its Aftermath ​87 Eight

Disease and Environment ​101

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teaching str ategies 117

Nine

Teaching Technologies: Some Classroom Strategies ​119 Ten

Teaching Technologies: Research Proj­ects for Student Engagement ​131 Conclusion. Final Thoughts  147 Notes ​ 149 Selected Bibliography ​185 Index ​ 191

4^ Acknowl­edgments 64

this book traces its origins to October 2014, when both Ned Alpers and Thomas (Dodie) McDow had participated in a conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign titled “The Indian Ocean: History, Networks, and Spaces of the Imagination.” The day ­after the conference ended, Alpers offered a talk on “Writing and Teaching the History of the Indian Ocean” for “Integrating the Indian Ocean into World History: A Workshop for k-­14 Educators,” which had been ­organized by Professor Antoinette Burton. The talk was based on his experience teaching the history of the Indian Ocean in a world history context at ucla since 2005. Although the audience was small, the only participant who had also attended the preceding academic conference was Dodie McDow. When Professor Burton subsequently asked Alpers if he would be interested in contributing to the series of which this volume is now a part, Alpers stated that he had just become emeritus, was no longer teaching, and so would like to collaborate with a youn­ger historian who would be teaching Indian Ocean history in the f­ uture. Thus was born the collaboration that has produced this book. Writing together has been a very gratifying experience for both of us, as each brings a dif­fer­ent set of research skills and knowledge to the ­table. As we worked to define the shape of this volume within the structural constraints of the series, we

Ac k n ow l­ed g m en ts

were guided both by Burton’s inaugural volume for the series on teaching world history and by Trevor Getz’s prospectus for teaching African history, which Burton kindly shared with us. We submitted a draft proposal to the press in 2016, and ­after receiving two very positive reader reports, both of which included many helpful suggestions for improvement, we signed a contract with Duke University Press in December 2016. Over the next c­ ouple of years, we exchanged drafts of our individual chapters, edited them for context and language, came to adopt a common voice in our writing, and fi­nally submitted a complete draft to the press in August 2021. The next step in the revision p­ rocess was a wonderful roundtable discussion convened by Antoinette Burton that was held on Zoom on October 1, 2021, right in the ­middle of the COVID -19 pandemic. Participants included Fahad Bishara, Jim Brennan, Steve Fabian, Thavolia Glymph, Matthew Hopper, Doug Jones, Adam LoBue, Pedro Machado, Renisa Mawani, Jenny Peruski, Amanda Respess, Robert Rouphail, Lex Sundarsingh, Kerry Ward, and Priyanka Zylstra. We are deeply grateful to all the participants at the roundtable discussion for their enthusiastic encouragement and critical assessments. ­Because they followed up the roundtable exchanges with specific written comments to us, we particularly wish to thank Antoinette Burton, Pedro Machado, and Kerry Ward, as well as Matt Hopper, who sent us copies of their own Indian Ocean history course syllabuses. Along the way we also learned from the syllabi and assignments of Jane Hooper, Johan Mathew, Roxani Margariti, and Rebekah Pite. Encouraged by the many detailed and enthusiastic suggestions, we proceeded to revise our text in response to our helpful critics and submitted the revised draft to the press in early 2022. We received two very enthusiastic external reviews, again with some valuable suggestions for additions and inquiries about specific details in our text. We are especially grateful for the extremely detailed attention paid to our draft by one of the external readers for the press. Over the summer we worked on the text accordingly and sent the revised manuscript to the press in September 2022. A ­ fter some excellent final recommendations by Antoinette, we finished final editing in February 2023. We are also grateful to project editor Michael Trudeau at Duke University Press viii

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for his exceptional assistance. This was a lengthy p­ rocess, but we have no doubt that the final product benefited unusually from the input of so many informed reviewers. Fi­nally, as we worked on this book together, we have been—­and remain—­especially grateful for the support and encouragement of our wives and partners, Annie Alpers and Alison Norris.

ix

4^ Introduction 64 initial thoughts the indian ocean world (iow ) encompasses a vast world region with which American students are almost entirely unfamiliar. Bounding neither the Atlantic nor Pacific shores of the United States, it is as distant from most students’ worldview and imagination as can be. Yet for all its distance both geo­graph­ic­ ally and conceptually, the Indian Ocean, its surrounding continental landmasses, and its thousands of large and small islands offer as many opportunities to a teacher of world history as challenges. The very fact that the Indian Ocean is so unfamiliar means that students carry few, if any, preconceived notions about this world region. If they bring anything with them, it is likely to be no more than knowledge of a small part of the w ­ hole that comprises the iow . Spanning what area studies specialists have divided into five distinct regions—­Africa, the ­Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia—­most world history texts that adopt a chronological ­organization broadly survey ­these separate regional units or include specific examples from them, while t­ hose texts that emphasize broad themes in world history similarly tend to draw upon area studies–­based case studies. Although ­there is a rich body of historical lit­er­a­ture on dif­ fer­ent aspects of the Indian Ocean past, u­ ntil recently most of this scholarship has focused on specific subregions and topics and has not attempted to reflect the broader place of the ­

Introduction

Indian Ocean in world history. To take only a few examples, Roman trade with India, Islamic empires, and Indian Ocean trade, ­European expansion, and empire all have their own focused historiographies. But historical scholarship on the Indian Ocean as a world region ­really dates from Mauritian archivist-­historian Auguste Toussaint’s History of the Indian Ocean (1966), which was first published in French in 1960. Even then, however, it took another quarter-­century and the publication of K. N. Chaudhuri’s Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (1985) for the rapidly emerging field of Indian Ocean history to begin to take off intellectually. Since then Chaudhuri’s pioneering intervention has been followed by impor­tant historical syntheses by Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of ­People and the Sea (1993); Michael N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (2003); and Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (2014), while impor­tant contributions with more focused geo­graph­i­cal or chronological ­parameters within a larger Indian Ocean framework include Patricia Risso’s Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean (1995), R. J. Barendse’s The Arabian Seas: The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth ­Century (2002), Sugata Bose’s A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (2006), and Abdul Sheriff ’s Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce, and Islam (2010).1 The past twenty-­five years have also witnessed the production of numerous monographs, collections of essays, and a huge range of journal articles on ­every aspect of Indian Ocean history. Since the beginning of the twenty-­ first ­century, new university centers or coordinating networks for studying the Indian Ocean and its world have been established in Canada, India, Denmark, and South Africa, while ­others feature a par­tic­u­lar subregional focus in the context of the Indian Ocean. Yet, despite all this exhilarating intellectual activity, the teaching of Indian Ocean history remains underdeveloped. Like most students of the Indian Ocean and iow , the authors of this book came to the teaching of this vast global region from more specific subregional research and teaching specializations. Alpers trained as an Africanist whose research has focused on East Africa and the western 2

I n i t i a l T h o u gh ts

Indian Ocean, reflecting the way in which gradu­ate training has developed over the years. McDow cross-­trained in both African and M ­ iddle Eastern history, but similarly with a western Indian Ocean focus. Teaching Indian Ocean history forces both of us to stretch well beyond our formal training and research specializations not only to come to grips with the eastern Indian Ocean World, but also to position ourselves more centrally as broad Indian Oceanists. In striving to achieve an Indian Ocean perspective as teachers we also seek to arrive at a balance between our own more specialized knowledge of the western Indian Ocean and synthesizing the work of other scholars on the eastern reaches of this vast region by employing certain integrative and comparative concepts. ­These include notions such as Michael Pearson’s concept of littoral socie­ties and Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s notion of connected histories, among o­ thers, both of which we discuss at greater length in subsequent chapters.2 As teachers we each continue to think about how best to construct meaningful and approachable paths to introduce students to the iow so that they can see for themselves the g­ reat variety of h ­ uman histories that have flourished, and faded, across the entire region. In a series created to emphasize “design princi­ples for teaching world history,” we take it as our responsibility to share with our readers—­teachers at both high school and undergraduate levels—­those ways that have worked for us. We have also benefited from the input of several colleagues who teach Indian Ocean history. We do not claim, however, that t­ here is any one design that w ­ ill work for you; indeed, one rewarding aspect of cowriting this book is that we each brought our unique perspectives, design, and methods for teaching Indian Ocean history to this proj­ect. In that spirit, we hope you ­will think of this primer as a cookbook—­a set of ­recipes rather than the meal. As such this is one of many useful “cookbooks” in this series of primers from Duke University Press on teaching dif­fer­ent histories that connect to world history. ­These books are nonprescriptive guides to developing a syllabus and designing a course using broadly applicable design princi­ ples for a diverse audience of instructors. This primer is for faculty, teachers, and gradu­ate students at the college or high school level who may be teaching an introductory Indian Ocean World history course for the first 3

Introduction

time, ­those who already teach one and want new approaches, and ­those teaching a world or other history course with a brief or sustained focus on the Indian Ocean World. In this primer, we want to emphasize the importance in teaching Indian Ocean history of establishing a clear vision of what one wants to cover and how one wants to accomplish one’s pedagogical goals. For us, the most impor­tant overriding issues in the field of Indian Ocean World history are connectivity and the destabilization of bound­aries. Th ­ ese are themes that also align with the broader fields of world history and global history.3 Your students ­will come to this topic with very ­little if any knowledge of the Indian Ocean region or its millions of ­peoples; so that they ­will not be overwhelmed by details or lost in the forest for the trees, to use a peculiarly terrestrial m ­ etaphor, careful attention to their needs, skills, and the demands of the subject m ­ atter is necessary to achieve meaningful learning. We hope that the ideas and methods that we discuss and propose in the following chapters ­will help you to achieve your classroom goals.

Structure of the Book We divide the book into three unequal sections: Foundations and Sources, Global Themes, and Teaching Strategies. In each chapter of each section, we seek both to establish a meaningful chronology and to achieve a representative, or at least illustrative, balance between the eastern and western reaches of the Indian Ocean World. ­Under the rubric of “Foundations and Sources,” we introduce questions concerning the spatial and imaginative dimensions of the iow , the importance of questioning Eurocentric perspectives on the region, and the value of seeking out a multiplicity of sources for a more Indian Oceanic view of this history. In chapter 1, “Mapping the Indian Ocean,” we argue that for students to engage with this unfamiliar world region it is critical that they gain a solid appreciation of its geography and the significance of mapping. In chapter 2, “Beyond Eurocentrism,” we suggest that to appreciate the world of the Indian Ocean, students need to acquire some knowledge of indigenous, as well as Western, sources of information and perspectives. In chapter 3, “Beyond

4

I n i t i a l T h o u gh ts

the Text,” we explore the multiplicity of nonwritten sources for reconstructing the history of the iow and suggest ways to encourage students to think, and read, beyond literary texts to reconstruct a more h ­ uman history of the region and its ­peoples. The section “Global Themes” includes five chapters, each addressing a set of issues that are integral to the history of the iow and that resonate with larger themes in world history. In chapter 4, “Indian Ocean Commodities,” we discuss several major commodities that dominated the history of trade in the iow . Students can relate ­these to both similar and dif­fer­ent commodities around the globe. In chapter 5, “­People on the Move,” broader themes in the movement of p­ eople are raised, including ­labor migration, trading diasporas, and religious pilgrimage. In chapter 6, “Rethinking Slavery,” we introduce students to the dif­fer­ent types of enslavement and indenture that characterized so much of the region’s ­labor history. H ­ ere the comparisons with the Atlantic World and con­temporary issues of race and identity ­will be especially striking. Throughout the primer we refer to “enslaved p­ eople” rather than “slaves”; when we use the word slave it is an adjective and not a noun. Chapter 7, “Empire and Its Aftermath,” focuses on the ways in which imperialism (­both indigenous and ­European), ­colonialism and nationalism, and Big Power competition have played out in the iow . Fi­nally, with chapter 8 we look at “Disease and Environment,” two issues that resonate especially well with world history themes and are certainly relevant to twenty-­first-­century students. The third section, “Teaching Strategies,” includes two chapters on teaching technologies that lay out vari­ous methods for engaging your students in the classroom and through online teaching. We also suggest ways in which undertaking original research can enrich their experience of studying the history of the iow . The proj­ects we have used to engage students in Indian Ocean World history are not the traditional pedagogy of the region. The most Indian Ocean–­centered pedagogy might be the chanting and recitation of Quranic verses as a prelude to copying them out on slates. While t­ hese techniques have been used for generations, they may not yield the degree of student engagement and reflective learning

5

Introduction

that our secondary schools and colleges hold in high regard. Our approach to teaching Indian Ocean World history has been influenced by backward design, student-­driven inquiry, frequent use of student reflective writing, and assignments that have audiences beyond the instructor. Backward design encourages instructors to think about their own goals for students in each assignment and to work from ­there backward, creating the tasks and steps that ­will achieve t­ hose outcomes. We have also created and used assignments that give students g­ reat leeway in topics but guide them to common formats. By allowing students to proceed from areas of their own interest and make connections to topics in the iow , we see a greater degree of engagement. Likewise, by asking students to reflect on their work, we gain a much better perspective on their ­process, what they have learned, where they need more help, and what they are proud of. By combining ­these practices with proj­ects that require students to write or pre­sent for other kinds of audiences—­not just an instructor—we help students gain the skills that they ­will be able to use long ­after they leave our world history classroom. It is our hope that the endnotes to each chapter might serve as starting points for you and your students to follow up on specific topics of interest, but we also include a selected bibliography of essential books and articles that ­will provide a solid foundation for further study. Our aim throughout the primer is to engage both you and your students in coming to grips with the exciting field of Indian Ocean World history.

6

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part i

&5

Foundations and Sources in part 1 we introduce vari­ous strategies and topics that are designed to help you and your students to approach the Indian Ocean on its own terms and as a component in world history. Specifically, we discuss dif­ fer­ent ways to conceptualize the Indian Ocean, alternate cultural voices for appreciating its history, and a variety of nontextual sources for engaging with its rich and diverse past. An impor­tant component of this orientation is to encourage your students to begin to think about the Indian Ocean on its own terms and how it informs their understanding of world history.

4^ Chapter One 64

Mapping the Indian Ocean

the first order of business in teaching the history of the Indian Ocean is to help students get a h ­ andle on the geography of the region. This is not quite so straightforward an exercise as you, or they, might imagine. Your first decision must be to decide for yourself exactly how you wish to define the Indian Ocean. For example, although we define the Indian Ocean World (iow ) in broad terms that extend from the Cape of Good Hope to the South China Sea, we draw the line at including the Philippine Islands and Australia, except for their bound­aries with Indian Ocean and Indonesian ­waters, so as to distinguish the eastern Indian Ocean from Oceania. By contrast, you might decide to include ­either or both, depending on the linkages you wish to make with other world regions, or your own interests, such as the Spanish, American, or British empires. In ­whatever way you decide to define the eastern limits of the iow , our position is that by its very location as an Old World–connecting body or bodies of ­water, the Indian Ocean cannot be studied in isolation from ­those

C h a p t er   O n e

maritime and continental regions that surround it. In addition, we believe that the iow is more than the geo­graph­i­cal entity identified on most modern maps as “Indian Ocean,” and in order to understand the histories of ­those who inhabit its shores it must be seen to extend to the Red Sea, the Persian or Arab Gulf (hereafter simply “the Gulf ”), the Java Sea, and the South China Sea. A further consideration is to recognize that to teach about the Indian Ocean is to engage with the histories of the many dif­f er­ent socie­ties and states that w ­ ere affected by Indian Ocean currents. Th ­ ese w ­ ill change over time as dif­f er­ent commercial, ­p olitical, and cultural moments waxed and waned. We ­will look more closely at such developments in subsequent chapters. Two concepts first articulated by Michael Pearson provide ­convenient methods for presenting ­these historical dynamics to your students. The first is Pearson’s notion of littoral socie­ties as a way to explore linkages around the shores of the Indian Ocean and to facilitate comparisons between such shore-­dwellers ­whether they w ­ ere located in Africa, India, or Indonesia.1 The second is Pearson’s adoption of geographers’ distinctions between umland, hinterland, and foreland when seeking to understand the external linkages of historical coastal communities, which we discuss further in the section titled “Geography and Climate” later in this chapter.2 But let us now turn to mapping the Indian Ocean.

Sailing and Cartography We have found that an engaging way to draw our students into the iow is to introduce them to the historical development of mapping the Indian Ocean. This exercise accomplishes three goals: first, it introduces students to the basic geography of the Indian Ocean; second, it demonstrates that mapping is a means to accumulate and to control knowledge; third, it reveals that most mapping was historically achieved by outsiders to the iow who needed to gain information about this vast region and how to navigate its ­waters. Understanding both the chronology and developing technology of mapping also enables students to locate the iow in the context of world history. Students may well ask, however, why the Indigenous 10

Mapping the Indian Ocean

p­ eoples who inhabited the shores of the Indian Ocean had l­ittle hand in the ­process of mapping. The answer to this question may provide another potential beginning for teaching Indian Ocean history. For generations indigenous navigation was mostly restricted to shorthaul coastal travel by s­ imple dugout canoes and rafts without sails. Once ­people came to inhabit Indian Ocean shores, they began gradually to gain knowledge of its offshore ­waters—­the foreland of any par­tic­u­lar habitation—­including its potential food resources. Learning how to exploit ­these resources took time and the evolution of appropriate techniques, such as near-shore fishing with traps or evaporation pans for producing salt. ­Human curiosity, as well as economic and social needs to communicate with other coastal communities, inevitably caused p­ eople to begin to explore along their part of the littoral. This kind of short-­ distance coastal travel is known as cabotage. Coastal sailors ­were careful to keep well within sight of landmarks, both natu­ral and constructed—­such as prominent hills or religious buildings—­and to avoid being drawn out onto open ­waters where they could not navigate. This cautious approach to oceanic travel persisted for thousands of years, as it does ­today, ­until the development of more sophisticated vessels with sails or outriggers, depending on where t­ hese techniques evolved. Sometime in the second half of the first millennium bce, more intrepid sailors began to take advantage of the seasonal shift in Indian Ocean wind patterns that we call the monsoons, which we discuss in more detail in the next section of this chapter. The monsoons are accompanied and intensified by complementary oceanic currents. Once Indian Ocean sailors understood that the monsoons ­were a permanent feature of the Indian Ocean environment, they could plan their voyages to sail across the open sea with reasonable hope of arriving at a destination on the other side of the ocean and being able to return when the monsoon shifted direction. As ­these men (and they ­were virtually all male) began to harness the monsoons, they also developed increasingly sophisticated knowledge for sailing by the stars, recognizing oceanic currents, and reading changes in weather patterns. Over time they also developed basic navigational tools for establishing their position in open ­waters. Initially, all of this knowledge remained unwritten and was 11

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passed on orally from master to apprentice by practical sailing. Eventually, such instructions and bodies of knowledge ­were committed to writing as sailing manuals, mainly in Arabic, but also in several other Indian Ocean languages, while in some cases this knowledge took the form of physical maps. Two impor­tant sources for Arabic sailing treatises are by G. R. Tibbetts (Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese) and George Hourani (Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times).3 Each of t­ hese works describes in some detail the historical development of Indian Ocean navigational practices, most notably the reliance on celestial navigation and the employment of complementary navigational techniques and instruments. In this context it is impor­tant to remind students that knowledge is power. The acquisition of maps and navigational knowledge was neither neutral nor without consequences. Both affected commercial and ­political relations for merchants and the ships that sailed the Indian Ocean. Where, then, does one begin to pre­sent the evolution of Indian Ocean maps? The most significant example of ancient sailing instructions is embedded in the first-­century ce Alexandrian Greek Periplus of the Erythraen Sea.4 This extraordinary document is primarily a guide to the commerce of the western Indian Ocean, beginning in the Red Sea, moving down the East African coast and across southern Arabia to western India, northern Sri Lanka, and southeastern India. While it does not include a physical map of the regions described, it includes sailing directions and distances between commercial ports, so that modern scholars have been able to assem­ble tentative maps based on the anonymous author’s directions. It also includes invaluable information for a ship’s captain and navigator about dangerous estuarial tides and the character of individual ports. The earliest ancient map of the Indian Ocean was produced by the Greek geographer Ptolemy, who created his world map in about 150 ce . Although his original map, which was oriented around the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, is now lost, it reappeared in manuscript form in about 1300 and was printed in 1477, that is, during the early centuries of E ­ uropean expansion. Ptolemy’s influence was not, however, restricted to ­European mapmakers. Before ­Europeans had rediscovered Ptolemy’s map, between 1020 12

Mapping the Indian Ocean

and 1050 an anonymous Egyptian author during the period of the Fatimid Caliphate produced a remarkable Book of Curiosities that, not surprisingly, makes it quite clear that Arab knowledge of the Indian Ocean was far superior to that of medieval ­Europe. The document includes a rectangular world map that includes the names of specific Indian Ocean ports, as well as a separate Indian Ocean map that includes the Swahili name for the island of Zanzibar, Unguja.5 Arabs ­were not the only geographers to map the medieval Indian Ocean. In the late ­fourteenth ­century the Ming dynasty produced a map called Da Ming Hun Yi Tu based on knowledge accumulated through several centuries of commercial voyages in the eastern Indian Ocean and a longer history of Perso-­Arab trade with the ports of southern China. Although it was not published u­ ntil the 1620s, the Mao Kun map was based on the maritime charts employed during the seven early fifteenth-­century voyages (1405–33) led by Admiral Zheng He that extended from Indonesia to the coast of East Africa.6 Both South Asian and Southeast Asian sailors also charted the w ­ aters of the Indian Ocean, although they did not at first produce a­ ctual maps. For a long time, South Asian navigators had kept rec­ords of what they had learned about sailing in books called roz nāma that they passed along to fellow navigators over time. No ­later than 1664, a Kachchhi roz nāma containing five coastal maps had been produced.7 Other Gujarati/Kachchhi maps exist from the eigh­teenth c­ entury and range in their coverage from the Red Sea to Java, while the Berlin Museum for Islamic Art h ­ ouses a fascinating Muslim Indian World Map dating to about 1770 that centers on the Indian Ocean and shows a Portuguese caravel in its center.8 Like other Islamic maps, it is oriented with North and South reversed. In Southeast Asia both Javanese and Malay maps have been identified. Geographer Joseph Schwartzberg states that early Portuguese sailors drew upon Javanese charts, although none survive from the sixteenth c­ entury. L ­ ater Malay and Bugi maps from the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries ­were prob­ably influenced by their creators’ knowledge of E ­ uropean charts.9 Indeed, once ­Europeans entered the Indian Ocean and began to develop their own systems of mapping, it is not surprising that the exchange of information 13

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between ­European and Indigenous navigators passed in both directions, as it also did in Indian Ocean ship design. The progression of E ­ uropean knowledge of the Indian Ocean is vividly expressed through mapmaking and can be demonstrated to students by the availability of key examples that are available online. Beginning with Ptolemy’s fifteenth-­century world map, one can show how Mediterranean knowledge of the Red Sea, Arabia, and India is depicted, along with insular Southeast Asia before Vasco da Gama’s fleet rounded the tip of southern Africa and entered the Indian Ocean in December 1497. The extent to which that perspective was transformed by the early Portuguese voyages is made clear in the 1519 Jorge Reinel map, which shows southern Africa and Madagascar, as well as a clearer depiction of how the Indian Peninsula and Sri Lanka divide the Indian Ocean into two halves. Further details, while still inexact, can be demonstrated in the ­great atlas produced by Abraham Ortelius in 1570 and the Indian Ocean map of Jan Huygen van Linschoten in 1598. The next significant breakthrough in ­European cartographic understanding of the Indian Ocean is seen in the map produced by Jacques-­Nicolas Bellin, hydrographer to the French navy, in 1750, which makes for an in­ter­est­ing comparison to both the Gujarati map from roughly the same date and the Muslim Indian world map in Berlin from slightly ­later in the eigh­teenth ­century that we note above. From the seventeenth ­century forward, ­every ­European imperial aspirant produced numerous maps detailing the localities that ­were of special interest to their enterprise, such as Madagascar for the French, or Sumatra and Java for the Dutch. In the nineteenth ­century, as ­Great Britain pursued the goal of making the Indian Ocean into a so-­called British lake, oceanic surveying and the steady accumulation of geo­graph­i­cal knowledge proceeded hand in hand. In the wake of the British victory in the Napoleonic Wars and the acquisition of Mauritius and the Seychelles from the French, as well as the assertion of British suzerainty over the Maldive and Laccadive Islands, British cartographers produced a number of attractively illustrated maps focused on the islands of the Indian Ocean. To be sure, ­there are hundreds of other con­temporary maps available online that the enterprising teacher can reproduce as slides for teaching about dif­fer­ent 14

Mapping the Indian Ocean

segments of the Indian Ocean World. ­Those that we indicate ­here are simply to illustrate the value of using mapping as a way to introduce students to the oceanic universe that they w ­ ill learn about in your course. We have also included map-­based assignments in chapters 9 and 10.

Geography and Climate A dif­fer­ent aspect of mapping that is an essential ele­ment in teaching oceanic history is the geography of the body of w ­ ater to be studied. In the case of the Indian Ocean, the dominant deep structural ele­ment, as Pearson calls it, is the seasonal monsoon winds. ­Until the age of, first, steamships and, more recently, air travel, the regular pattern of seasonally shifting monsoon winds determined oceanic sailing, as well as the annual agricultural cycle in the lands surrounding the ocean itself. ­Every historian who has written about the Indian Ocean provides a clear description of how the monsoonal system operates, prevailing winds blowing from the southwest from May to September (with a turbulent period in August that prevents any open sea sailing) and from the northeast from November to March.10 Students need to understand the operation of the monsoons in order to appreciate fully the way in which they affected maritime movement, agricultural production, and the social history of the Indian Ocean. ­Because of the predictable seasonal shift in direction, the monsoons made round trip sailing pos­si­ble, w ­ hether in the western (Arabian Sea) or eastern (Bay of Bengal and South China Sea) Indian Ocean. But ­because of the intermediate periods during which the monsoon winds w ­ ere e­ ither lull or blowing so strongly that sailing was impossible, seasonal travelers necessarily ­were port-­bound. Since sailing was historically a virtually exclusively male activity, it meant that throughout the trading ports of the Indian Ocean ­there was a floating population of temporarily stranded men who sought housing, hospitality, and in most cases female companionship. Historian Anthony Reid observes that in Southeast Asia this situation created a need to provide “sexual partners for itinerant travelers” that gave rise to institutions of temporary marriage or concubinage.11 The historical consequence of this annually enforced period of residence was to produce a range of ethnically and culturally mixed families across the Indian Ocean littoral. 15

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Over time, t­ hese ­human interactions gave rise to uniquely Indian Ocean Islamic communities like the Swahili in coastal East Africa, the Mappilas in coastal Malabar, southwestern India, and the Labbai along the Coromandel coast of southeastern India. The similarities among and differences between such communities offer an opportunity for both teachers and students to consider comparisons that bridge what might other­wise appear to be quite distinct littoral Indian Ocean communities when viewed from a regional and continental perspective. Further examples of how geography affects climate and ­human society are the major oceanic currents that operate in the Indian Ocean. The prevailing northerly Somali Current, for example, complements the Southwest Monsoon and speeds along ships sailing from south to north. Associated with both El Niño and southern oscillation, the Equatorial Indian Ocean Oscillation (equinoo ) affects the intensity of the southwest monsoon. For teachers whose interests include environmental history, such variations are surely meaningful. The most dramatic examples of how cyclones have deeply affected Indian Ocean socie­ties come from the northern half of the oceanic basin, notably the Bay of Bengal.12 To take another example, severe cyclones that are the result of such variations in ­these related climatic phenomena have historically had a major impact on the ­peoples of the Mascarenes, Madagascar, and Mozambique. Although the tropical monsoons dominated sailing across the Indian Ocean, other prevailing winds ­limited the extent of this seasonal regime. Year-­long northern winds restricted sailing from the Indian Ocean to about halfway up the Red Sea, while prevailing southeast trade winds marked the southern limits of the monsoons. Local conditions equally affected sailing conditions. To the southwest of the Indian Ocean the monsoons extended only to the northern end of the Mozambique Channel. Two other illustrations of how geography has affected the history of the Indian Ocean and its ­peoples are the impact of earthquakes and volcanic activity (see chapter 8). If not the only f­ actor in the decline of the dominant Persian port of Siraf in the late tenth c­ entury, the earthquake that demolished much of that city in 977 was certainly significant. One consequence of this decline was the acceleration of migration by Persian merchants to 16

Mapping the Indian Ocean

other ports in the western Indian Ocean and its implications for the so-­ called Shirazi legacy on the Swahili coast.13 Volcanic eruptions remain a cause of violent disruption, mainly from the Indonesia side of the Pacific Ring of Fire. In 1883 the small island of Krakatau, situated in the Strait of Sunda between Sumatra and Java, erupted so massively that tens of thousands of ­people died regionally, volcanic debris reached as far west as Zanzibar, and global weather patterns ­were affected for about five years afterward.14 Then, in December 2004, the eruption of an oceanic volcano off the northwestern coast of Sumatra caused the most devastating tsunami in recorded Indian Ocean history, leaving nearly a quarter million ­people dead and reconfiguring w ­ hole coastal areas of Thailand and Sri Lanka. Online satellite images taken before and a­ fter the tsunami struck offer vivid illustrations of the power of natu­ral forces in the Indian Ocean.15 One final example of how ­these forces operate in the Indian Ocean is the challenge of global warming and associated sea rise, which threatens the very existence of the low-­lying Andaman and Nicobar archipelagos in the eastern Indian Ocean, and the Maldives to the southwest of India. Taken together, introducing the dif­fer­ent geo­graph­i­cal and environmental aspects of Indian Ocean history enables you to bring some of the most pressing concerns of students ­today into the classroom. At the beginning of this chapter we mentioned the value of introducing your students to the geo­graph­i­cal terms umland, hinterland, and foreland and the way in which they have been used by Michael Pearson in making sense of the Indian Ocean World. Think about asking your students to imagine themselves in any Indian Ocean trading port and then to contemplate how historical actors conceptualized their place in that world. The umland is the immediate surroundings of such a port, the area from which daily supplies and nonurban social relations w ­ ere most immediately forged. The hinterland represents the deeper interior from which trade goods might originate but whose inhabitants would usually have been strangers or only occasional social actors in the life of the town. Fi­ nally, the foreland was the vast oceanic expanse of fishing grounds both near and far, as well as the ports with which a settlement was connected through trade, migration, and culture. Using t­ hese concepts can help your 17

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students to acquire a more systematic appreciation of what might other­ wise seem to be historically specific (and noncomparable) linkages with the continents of which Indian Ocean ports are an integral part and across the Indian Ocean.

Ships and Shipbuilding A final piece in establishing the basic ele­ments of studying the Indian Ocean introduces students to the history of regional shipbuilding technologies and navigation so that they w ­ ill acquire some sense of how Indian Ocean sailors actually voyaged upon its ­waters. The evolution of shipping brings the history of technology into play ­here, demonstrating how learning to move from the relative safety of traveling close to shore out into more open ­waters necessitated the development of more sophisticated forms of boats and, eventually, ships. At first, ancient sailors built rafts or dugouts to move cautiously from one coastal village to a nearby neighbor; as they began to venture longer distances along the coast and farther out to sea, however, sailors required larger, more stable vessels. Shipwrights developed dif­fer­ent techniques to achieve ­these goals. In the western Indian Ocean a wide variety of ships that are known generically as dhows evolved that ­were constructed by developing a ­simple keel and securing planks meeting flush at the seams (a technique known as carvel-­built) with organic cord stitching, rather than nails.16 No less noteworthy was the evolution of the lateen sail—so characteristic of dhows—­which allows ships to sail against the wind, as opposed to the square or rectangular sail.17 ­Until the introduction and spread of steamships, all indigenous trade and travel across the entire western Indian Ocean was conducted on vari­ous types of dhow, linking western India, the Gulf, and Arabia with eastern Africa and Madagascar, giving rise to what historian Abdul Sheriff calls “dhow cultures.” Across insular Southeast Asia greater stability was achieved by adding outriggers to dugouts and shallower carvel-­built canoes, double outriggers for less turbulent inland seas, single outriggers for more open ­waters.18 The dissemination of the single-outrigger canoe to South India, Sri Lanka, coastal East Africa, and Madagascar suggests that large versions of such vessels provided the transportation across the Indian Ocean from insular Southeast 18

Mapping the Indian Ocean

Asia to Madagascar for the Austronesian pioneers who settled Madagascar from the late centuries of the first millennium on.19 Ocean g­ oing ship construction in China differs significantly in that it evolved initially from cargo-­carrying river watercraft and involved the use of iron nails, a dif­ fer­ent style of sail, rudder, and divided bulwarks that made it pos­si­ble to develop much larger ships. Like dhows, a range of Chinese boats and ships are known generically as junks. Although many scholars have regarded the so-­called ­treasure ships that w ­ ere part of the fifteenth-­century Ming fleets commanded by Zheng He as “enormous,” recent research on Chinese shipbuilding technology suggests a much less certain conclusion.20 Still, as you approach the entrance of Gama’s first small fleet into the Indian Ocean at the very end of the fifteenth c­ entury, you should ask your students to compare the size of his four ships (one of which was lost during its outbound voyage) and small fleet with t­ hose of Zheng He’s massive fleet.21 It might also interest your students to note the ways in which the evolution of regional shipbuilding reflected shipwrights’ observations of dif­f er­ent shipbuilding styles. For example, the highly decorated sterns of the baghla, the largest ocean going type of dhow, are considered to reflect the influence of ­either Portuguese or Chinese vessels, or both, depending on dif­fer­ent interpretations by maritime historians.22 We believe that students ­will also be struck by the dif­fer­ent attitudes ­toward ­women as passengers on board indigenous and ­European ships. Sailing was a decidedly masculine enterprise, but ­women and sometimes ­children regularly traveled on indigenous Indian Ocean vessels. Elite ­women ­were almost always secluded in below-deck cabins, while the wives and ­children of Indian Ocean crews and even pirates often accompanied them throughout their voyages.23 By contrast, ­women rarely traveled on ­European ships u­ nless they w ­ ere members of Indigenous crew families in the so-­called country trade.24

Conclusion In this chapter we have proposed a broad definition of mapping to help orient your students to the Indian Ocean. You are certainly not bound by the specific suggestions that we make, or by the categories that we d­ iscuss. 19

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Nevertheless, however you decide to begin your course on the history of the Indian Ocean, we believe it essential to get your students thinking about what it means to study the history of an ocean, as opposed to a more familiar continental landmass with neatly drawn, if often highly contested, ­political bound­aries. Once they grasp the basic structural ele­ments of the Indian Ocean and the iow , we are confident that they can begin to delve into the more familiar historiographical territory of content, chronology, and methodology.

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4^ Chapter Two 64

Beyond Eurocentrism

if it is evident that the E ­ uropean “discovery” of the Amer­i­cas inaugurated the creation of the Atlantic World, the same is not true for the iow . Indeed, when Christopher Columbus reached the New World, he was seeking an oceanic route to the Indies; the Amer­i­cas ­were genuinely terra incognita. By contrast, when the fleet of Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed into the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese ­were entering an oceanic realm that was already well established. Indeed, it was a world of which Mediterranean ­Europe had been aware for ­decades. In addition, although ­there is no denying both the short-­term and long-­term consequences of ­European intrusion into the Indian Ocean World, the old notion that the Portuguese “discoveries” precipitated a Vasco da Gama era reflects a Eurocentric perspective that cannot be sustained historically. The purpose of this chapter is to help students appreciate the deeper dynamics of the Indian Ocean World before the establishment of ­European dominance in the long nineteenth c­ entury and, thereby, to perceive the continuities and contingencies of ­later periods.

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One method to achieve this deeper perspective is to view the Indian Ocean from dif­fer­ent footholds in the iow . For example, how does the iow appear from India or China, from Africa or Southeast Asia? What kinds of sources are available to probe such prospects? What can we learn from this kind of exercise? In chapter 1 we discuss Indigenous cartography of the Indian Ocean; this is certainly one ave­nue to approach the challenge to extend students’ vision beyond a Eurocentric perspective. But maps are only a single tool in striving t­ oward that goal. In this chapter we focus on a wide range of Indigenous historical chronicles and lit­er­a­ture that students can explore with this goal in mind. The sources that are most widely available in translation for your students ­were written in Arabic or Arabic script. Some of ­these pre­sent local or Indigenous perspectives from East Africa, the Malay Peninsula, coastal India, and central Asia, while o­ thers detail the experiences of travelers through the Indian Ocean region. In this chapter we focus our attention on sources from the medieval and early modern period b­ ecause of their historical significance and availability in translation. While ­there are translated Indigenous written histories that date to the nineteenth c­ entury, such as the vari­ous Swahili-language chronicles that are based on oral sources, we consider that they tend to reinforce the themes that we identify in the ­earlier sources we discuss in this chapter.1 The other primary sources that are available in translation are Chinese and Malay, and taken together with the Arabic sources, this collection helps establish the historical dynamism and mobility that has characterized Indian Ocean history since long before ­Europeans sailed into the region.

Arabic and Malay Chronicles To begin, we need to distinguish between accounts produced within Indian Ocean communities looking beyond the territorial confines of their specific locations and Indigenous Indian Ocean travel writing. An example of the first genre might be the anonymous Kilwa Chronicle, an account of the most impor­tant medieval Swahili city-­state, the purpose of which is to rec­ord the history of that specific place, but which in detailing that history also reveals its Indian Ocean connections. An example of the second genre is Abū Zayd al-­Sīrāfī, Accounts of China and India.2 In the first, the 22

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perspective is from that of a ruling elite grounded in a specific place and time; in the second, it is from that of an individual Persian traveling far from his homeland and describing new and dif­f er­ent places and ­people. In general, historians have used both kinds of narratives to establish “facts” about the past; h ­ ere, however, we suggest that attitudes, perspectives, and worldviews are at least as impor­tant to ascertain. Let us look at the Kilwa Chronicle for what it can reveal about the Indian Ocean World of which it was an integral part. The first t­ hing to which students must pay attention is that we do not know the identity of the author; therefore, we cannot accurately locate him (as he was undoubtedly male) in the historical context of the society about which he wrote. The best we can do is to narrow down his social and, perhaps, ­political identity by the context of the document itself. Second, we need to identify when the document was composed. In the case of the Kilwa Chronicle, the answer to the first question is made pos­si­ble by the author’s revelations in two lines in the published document, one at the beginning and one at the end. The first indicates that the Sultan of Kilwa “desired me to write a book to inform him of the history of the kings who ruled Kilwa,” while in the second the author notes that two of the courtiers who accompanied the exiled king “­were maternal u­ ncles of the writer of this book.”3 ­These two snippets of information leave no doubt that the anonymous author was a member of the Kilwa elite. As for dating the document, the last internal date is 908 ah /1503 ce ; Elias Saad suggests that it was actually composed circa 1550, but the only two versions of the chronicle are a partial Portuguese translation published in 1552 and the longer Arabic manuscript located in Zanzibar and dated to 1867.4 In brief, with re­spect to both the date of composition and the transmission of the original document, ­there are impor­tant grounds for caution.5 Nevertheless, as we are not immediately concerned with the accuracy of internal dates or details, the Kilwa Chronicle may yet provide a useful win­dow from the medieval Swahili coast on wider Indian Ocean themes. The most obvious of ­these is the claim that the origin of Kilwa was the arrival of a ship “in which ­there ­were ­people who claimed to have come from Shiraz in the land of the Persians.”6 The assertion continues that ­these ­were 23

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all male relatives (six b­ rothers and their f­ ather) who, exiled from their own country by ­political rivals, settled along the way at vari­ous ports including Mombasa, Pemba, and the Comorian island of Ndzwani. The truth of the ­matter is not ­whether such a claim “proves” so-­called Shirazi origins for t­ hese Swahili communities, but rather that they indicate an impor­ tant set of already established western Indian Ocean linkages between the Persian side of the Gulf and the Swahili coast.7 The following chapters of the chronicle are devoted, initially, to relations with mainlanders and then overwhelmingly to internal ­political rivalries, as well as occasional external threats. What interests us ­here is that when rivalries forced one contender for power out of the city-­state, he generally sought refuge elsewhere on the Swahili coast. Both Zanzibar and Mafia figure prominently in the narratives of such movement from Kilwa. Similarly, Kilwa’s ruling class w ­ ere devout Muslims who made pilgrimage (Hajj) to Mecca, sometimes sojourning at Aden or in the Hijaz to study. Aden also figures in the ­political history of Kilwa. Fi­nally, Kilwa learns from Mozambique about the arrival of the Portuguese, who soon thereafter attack and destroy the sultanate. Throughout this intensely ­political narrative, trade is scarcely acknowledged, but the p­ olitical and religious networks of the Swahili coast and Arabia are consistently attested.8 A fascinating companion piece to the Kilwa Chronicle is the Sejarah Malayu or Malay Annals, which celebrates the rise, golden age, and defeat by the Portuguese of the Sultanate of Melaka, which dominated the international trade of the eastern Indian Ocean in the fifteenth ­century. Like the Kilwa Chronicle, which was composed following its defeat by the Portuguese in 1505, the Malay Annals was also composed in the aftermath of the Portuguese attack and capture of Melaka in 1511. Following this disaster, the Malay sultan withdrew farther south on the Malaysia Peninsula to Johor, where the ruling elite de­cided it needed to preserve the history of Melaka’s heyday. This task fell to a court official named Tun Seri ­Lanang, who composed his manuscript in Malay written in a locally adapted ­Arabic script known as Jawi in the early seventeenth ­century with the title Sulalat al-­Salatin or Genealogy of Kings, although it has subsequently been known as Sejarah Malayu. ­There are currently more than thirty known 24

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copies of the manuscript in vari­ous international libraries.9 To be specific, the author was given a royal command to “make a chronicle setting forth the genealogy of the Malay Rajas and the ceremonial of their courts, for the information of my descendants who come ­after me, that they may be conversent [sic] with the history and derive profit therefrom. . . . ​And he wrote this story as he received it from his ­father and his forebears, assembling in it all the stories of the men of bygone days, for the greater ­pleasure of his lord the King.”10 ­These stories range far beyond Melaka to other parts of Asia, but the main thrust is clearly to establish the heritage of that state for posterity. Unlike the much shorter Kilwa Chronicle, which remains of interest exclusively to scholars, the Sejarah Malayu is a classic of Malay lit­er­a­ture that continues both to be debated vigorously by scholars and to advance vari­ous partisan ­political positions. Like the Kilwa Chronicle, one purpose of the Sejarah Malayu is to establish a meaningful genealogy for its rulers. This is achieved by linking the founding of the state to the previously dominant Sumatran state of Srivijaya. Beyond the recitation of the actions and attributes of Malay and other ­political leaders, and the customs that regulated their be­hav­iors, the Malay Annals displays Malay attitudes ­toward the dif­fer­ent socie­ties and ­peoples of the Indian Ocean World. For example, t­ here are many tales about the cleverness of the Malays in their ability to deceive or manipulate foreigners, ­whether Chinese, Javanese, Siamese, or Kalinga (the northeast coast of peninsular India). On the other hand, foreign envoys ­were treated with re­spect. Although the world to which the Johor court and the author ­were intimately connected was dominated by Islam—­indeed, the conversion of Melaka to Islam is at the center of one chapter—­the Malay Annals also include many passages that reveal the engagement of the Melaka rulers with Hindus and Buddhists, which is what one might expect from the eastern side of the Indian Ocean World. In fact, ­because the author drew upon many e­ arlier, mainly Persian, but also Indian, chronicles, the ­earlier sections of the document are in some re­spects a distillation of a much broader Indian Ocean past. In addition, many of the stories that the author recounts focus on neighboring rulers and states beyond Melaka and Johor. 25

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One in­ter­est­ing feature of the Malay Annals that distinguishes it from the Kilwa Chronicle is the presence of merchants and foreigners among its characters, not only rulers and soldiers. In a story about a naval attack on Samudra-­Pasai, an impor­tant state at the northern tip of Sumatra and a ­predecessor of Melaka, Tun Seri Lanang writes that the war leader ordered his fleet “to sail for Semudra in the guise of traders.”11 He notes further that b­ ecause of the extensive trade with Arabia, “all the p­ eople of Pasai knew Arabic.”12 ­Later, he notes that when a ship arrived at Melaka “from the regions above the wind”—­that is, from the Indian Ocean—­“the fish sellers all came to sell their fish to the crew.”13 This kind of mundane detail provides a valuable image of daily life at Melaka that is other­wise obscure in this kind of chronicle. Another in­ter­est­ing aside in the midst of numerous stories of wars and royal machinations is mention of the fact that, at the height of its prosperity, the streets of Melaka ­were plagued by thieves.14 A dif­fer­ent anecdote sheds light on how textile design in one part of the Indian Ocean World could be ­shaped by local taste in another. When the Sultan of Melaka “wanted forty va­ri­et­ ies of cloth and four lengths of each variety, and each length had to have forty va­ri­e­ties of floral motif,” he sent a trusted envoy to Kalinga in order to procure t­ hese cloths, but when the local artisans ­were unable to come up with satisfactory designs for the envoy, this individual “asked for paper and when ­these ­were supplied by the Kalinga men, he drew the floral motifs he wanted. When the Kalinga designers saw his work they ­were astounded.”15 Eventually, the Kalinga craftsmen satisfactorily produced the novel textiles for the envoy. Although a shipwreck caused most of the cloths to be lost at sea, four fi­nally reached Melaka.16 Fi­nally, it reveals a lot about Indian Ocean connections when the first Portuguese who reached Melaka from Goa are described as “white Bengalis.”17 A second Arabic chronicle that merits attention is the Tuḥfat al-­ mujāhidīn, which Zayn al-­Dīn al-­Malabarī’ composed in about 1583. The scion of the distinguished Makhdūm ­family whose progenitor migrated from Yemen to the impor­tant commercial port of Cochin in Malabar ­after spending time first on the Coromandel coast, Zayn al-­Dīn’s book is most famous for its polemical perspective on Malabar Muslim opposition 26

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to Portuguese intrusion and “their shameful deeds” in the early sixteenth ­century.18 It also rec­ords the rise of Calicut as a naval power. ­Here, however, what interests us is the author’s third chapter, in which he pre­sents “a brief account of certain strange customs prevalent among the unbelievers of Malabar . . . ​which are not found in any other quarter of the world.”19 ­These run the gamut of Hindu practices and beliefs that are clearly abhorrent to observant Muslims, to which ­these Indians “subject themselves . . . ​out of ignorance and foolishness.”20 Without wishing to inflame any pos­si­ble preconceptions or prejudices held by your students, the point ­here is that in a world region that is often characterized as being cosmopolitan, dif­f er­ent communities and their spokespersons often viewed “the Other” in terms not unlike the ­Europeans who ­were intruding on the Indian Ocean World and bringing their own well-­known prejudices with them. One way to address this kind of ethnocentrism is to recognize it for being the perspective of a single writer, drafted at a moment in history when Indian Islam was being threatened by an aggressively Christian Portugal and Indigenous Hindus ­were potential Portuguese allies. By way of contrast, you might have your students look at Abu al-­R aihân Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-­Burûni’s India, which he wrote about 1030 ce . Highly educated in Islam and science, in 1017 al-­Burûni—­a Central Asian Persian—­moved to Ghazni, capital of the Ghaznavid rulers of central ­Afghanistan, from where he visited India on several occasions. In the preface to his learned treatise he states emphatically: “This book is not a polemical one. I s­ hall not produce the arguments of our antagonists in order to refute such of them as I believe to be in the wrong. My book is nothing but a ­simple historic rec­ord of facts. I ­shall place before the reader the theories of the Hindus exactly as they are, and I ­shall mention in connection with them similar theories of the Greeks in order to show the relationship existing between them.”21 Nevertheless, al-­Burûni admitted right away that “the reader must always bear in mind that the Hindus entirely differ from us in ­every re­spect, many a subject appearing intricate and obscure which would be perfectly clear if ­there ­were more connection between us.” Language was one prob­lem, although he himself learned to 27

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speak Sans­krit; religion another, “as we believe in nothing in which they believe, and vice versâ.” He remarked further that “all their ­fanaticism is directed against ­those who do not belong to them—­against all foreigners.” Third, “in all manners and usages they differ from us to such a degree as to frighten their ­children with us, with our dress, and our ways and customs, and as to declare us to be d­ evil’s breed, and our d­ oings as the very opposite of all that is good and proper. By the by, we must confess, in order to be just, that a similar depreciation of foreigners not only prevails among us and the Hindus, but is common to all nations ­towards each other.”22 All in all, then, when al-­Burûni came to write about this subject that so intrigued him, he was well aware that both he and his subjects ­were burdened with their own prejudices.

Arab and Persian Travelers’ Accounts As it happens, t­ here are quite a number of Arabic travelers’ accounts for the Indian Ocean World. One of the earliest is Abū Zayd al-­Sīrāfī, Accounts of China and India, which is exceptional for its wide coverage of the entire Indian Ocean. Written at the height of Persian dominance of Indian Ocean maritime trade, al-­Sīrāfī’s book consists of two parts, the first of which dates to the mid-­ninth ­century and was written by an anonymous author; the second, by al-­Sīrāfī, is less clearly dated to perhaps a ­century ­later. Much of the book focuses on the China trade and the port ­city of Canton (Guangzhou), which Persian merchants dominated ­until a series of rebellions against the Tang dynasty and foreign merchants disrupted this commerce in the late ninth c­ entury. Not surprisingly for accounts that focus on commercial exchange with foreign partners, most of the observations in ­these two books concern the dif­fer­ent customs of the Chinese and Indians with whom they did business. Dress, food, money, personal hygiene, funerary customs, the administration of justice, and religious beliefs are all noted. Some are simply described without judgment, some are contrasted with Islamic practice, while ­others are clearly abhorred. For example, the author of the first book rec­ords without comment: “Neither the Indians nor the Chinese are circumcised.”23 By contrast, al-­Sīrāfī concludes a paragraph on the Chinese institution of prostitution by declaring: “We 28

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praise God for the guidance by which He has purified us from such temptations!”24 In a l­ ater passage about Indian ­temple prostitutes, he reiterates his thanks that “He purified us from the sins of the unbelievers!”25 In ­these Accounts of China and India, students ­will find many such examples of how ­these two medieval Muslim travelers—­Persians writing in Arabic—­viewed the Indian Ocean World of the ninth and tenth centuries. More familiar to most students w ­ ill be the famous Moroccan jurist Ibn Battúta, who spent three ­decades (1325–54) traversing and living in nearly ­every corner of the Muslim world. Like al-­Sīrāfī before him, during his Indian Ocean World peregrinations he spent considerable time in both India and China. Most of the time, Ibn Battúta lived among fellow Muslims, but almost everywhere he went he acquired wives and slave girls to keep him com­pany, siring several c­ hildren along the way and exhibiting none of the religious inhibitions expressed by al-­Sīrāfī. Indeed, his account is peppered throughout with comments on the beauty of dif­f er­ent ­people’s womenfolk. Ibn Battúta was especially alert to the attitude of non-­Muslims t­ oward his coreligionists. When he visited Ceylon (Sri Lanka), he commented that “its ­people still live in idolatry [Buddhism], yet they show re­spect for Muslim darwishes, lodge them in their ­houses, and give them to eat, and they live in their h ­ ouses amidst their wives and c­ hildren. This is contrary to the usage of the other Indian idolators [Brah­mans and Hindus], who never make friends with Muslims, and never give them to eat or drink out of their vessels, although at the same time they neither act nor speak offensively to them.”26 During his visit to Kilwa, then the most power­ful Swahili coastal city-­state, Ibn Battúta contrasts the piety of the Sultan, who like himself observed the Sunni rites, with the majority of its inhabitants, whom he describes as “Zanj, jet-­black in colour, and with tattoo-­marks on their ­faces,” noting further that on the mainland opposite the island lived “the heathen Zanj” against whom Kilwa was “constantly engaged in military expeditions.”27 As he worked his way around the rim of the western Indian Ocean World, Ibn Battúta’s sojourns in dif­fer­ent Muslim socie­ties also afforded him the opportunity to observe and comment on the dif­fer­ ent customs of his coreligionists, one aspect of which was conflict between Shia and Sunni adherents. 29

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In India, although he was everywhere accommodated by Muslims, Ibn Battúta found himself sometimes in a Muslim sultanate, other times in a Hindu state. His overland travels across India often found his caravan subject to raids “by Hindu infidels.” Yet he was not unwilling to notice with some interest certain dif­fer­ent customs among Brah­mans.28 At the southern Malabar port of Quilon (Kollam), which was frequented by merchants from China, he was pleased to find that “Muslims are honoured and respected,” even though “the sultan of Kawlam is an infidel.”29 From Malabar Ibn Battúta eventually made his way to China, the vastness and wealth of which clearly impressed him. “In this re­spect ­there is no country in the world that can rival it.”30 Still, he notes that “the Chinese are themselves infidels, who worship idols and burn their dead like the Hindus,” a custom that prevailed during the time of his visit.31 In light of the frequent prob­ lems he encountered while traveling in India, his comment that “China is the safest and best regulated of countries for a traveler” surely reflects his admiration for the strong system of imperial government that existed in Ming China.32 Nevertheless, Ibn Battúta’s personal identity as a Muslim evidently prevails when he writes: “The land of China, in spite of all that is agreeable in it, did not attract me. On the contrary I was sorely grieved that heathendom had so strong a hold over it.”33

Other Indian Ocean Writing Traditions The relatively rich body of Arabic writing in translation that exists for the Indian Ocean has perhaps overdetermined our effort to pre­sent students with perspectives that go beyond Eurocentrism. Certainly, other Indian Ocean perspectives exist in translation, such as travels of the Chinese Buddhist monk Făxiăn’s pilgrimage in India and Sri Lanka, composed in 414 ce . His perilous return voyage from Sri Lanka across the Bay of Bengal and through the Java Sea on his return voyage to China is considered the first account of sailing through the Strait of Melaka.34 An impor­ tant thirteenth-­century Chinese parallel to The Periplus of the Erythraen Sea was written in 1225 by the superintendent of maritime trade in Fujian Province. While the author never traveled himself, his book offers a Chinese view of the Indian Ocean Arab traders who conducted business at 30

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the port city of Quanzhou.35 A third critical Chinese text is Ma Huan’s The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores (1433), which is an account of the Ming so-­called ­treasure voyages that ­were commanded by Admiral Zheng He.36 The last two might well be read in conjunction with one or more of the Arabic texts we have discussed to get a more balanced perspective on the Indian Ocean World prior to the intrusion of the Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth ­century. We have already discussed the Malay Annals or Sejarah Melayu, and another available Malay document that your students might wish to explore is the Undang-­undang Laut, a code of maritime laws devised by a ship’s nakhoda at the end of the Melaka Sultanate (discussed in greater detail in chapter 6).37 One final word regarding European-­language sources. Like all historical sources, ­these are not without their biases and limitations. For example, what a E ­ uropean observer may describe may not always be quite what is ­really happening, while ­simple ethnocentrism may mar other­wise reliable eyewitness accounts by prejudicial language. Yet in the hands of a curious, intelligent, linguistically informed observer, ­these sources also can provide invaluable descriptions of ­people and practices that might not register in indigenous sources, which have their own culturally specific limitations. Still, as a field, world history has strug­gled against a set of Eurocentric tendencies born from an early “rise of the West” approach to the field. Our goal in this chapter has been to direct attention to a set of readily available primary sources in Arabic, Persian, Chinese, and Malay. ­These sources underscore a set of deeper dynamics of the Indian Ocean World that w ­ ill help your students appreciate the complexity of this world before ­European hegemony in the region and thus follow the threads of ­these dynamics during and ­after periods of ­European colonialism.

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Beyond the Text

thus far, the topics we have examined and the sources we have discussed have depended almost exclusively on the written word. In this chapter we explore the methodological possibilities of accessing world history from below, calling upon archaeology, architecture, art, ­music and dance, oral histories, and ­popular religious beliefs. In chapter 8 we ­will also look carefully at several scientific disciplines as we discuss disease and environment. Of course, access to ­these nontextual sources depends largely on their presence in scholarly and p­ opular journals, although we ­shall see that ­there are an increasing number of visual online sources that exist to enable students to think about ­these less familiar source materials.

Archaeology The study of archaeology includes not only the built environment and the use of space, but also the quotidian remains of previous populations, what archaeologists sometimes refer to as rubbish. Monumental buildings and their ruins are

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what first attracted the notice of travelers and archaeologists in the Indian Ocean World. An early example is the eighth- to ninth-century Mahayana Buddhist inland ­temple complex at Borobudur, in central Java, which has generated extensive studies in multiple ­European languages and Bahasa Indonesian.1 In the case of Borobudur, historians of the Indian Ocean have long been fascinated with the famous panel of a large double-outrigger ship that bears witness to the seagoing prowess of Indonesian sailors. As it happens, ­there are a total of more than ten images of boats at Borobudur, while four other panels depict the Bo­dhi­sat­tva (one on the path of becoming a Bud­dha) as a sea captain, a theme executed at several other major Buddhist shrines in South India.2 Furthermore, the 1,460 Borobudur stone panels reveal much more about the history of Buddhism in Southeast Asia and its connection to South Asia than ­either the famous Borobudur ship or t­ hese other maritime references. In general, archaeology is not as well developed in island Southeast Asia, where archaeology has focused on the ­great mainland sites like Angkor, as it is along the East African coast, where monumental buildings w ­ ere also the initial stimulus for investigation by both amateur and professional archaeologists.3 The first generation of trained archaeologists concentrated their efforts during the colonial period on excavating and preserving stone building sites at Gede and Manda, in K ­ enya, and Kilwa Kisiwani, in Tanzania. Following ­independence, new generations of archaeologists extended both the range and the scope of their excavations by looking beyond, or in this case below, the above-surface buildings to understand the urban contexts in which ­these remains evolved. Over time, ­these researchers have been able to elucidate the beginnings of Islam in coastal towns, the uses of public and private space, the relationships between urban and rural communities on the coast, changing dietary habits, and the relationship between local h ­ ouse­hold production and imported commodities. Students can familiarize themselves with the results of this scholarly activity through the principal site-­specific chapters along the Swahili coast in Stephanie Wynne-­Jones’s and Adria LaViolette’s massive coedited volume The Swahili World, but to more fully engage with the methodologies of modern archaeology you may wish to encourage your advanced students to consult 34

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the published site reports on which ­these summaries are based. Reading ­these reports can, it is true, be methodologically daunting for ­those who have never before tried to decipher multiple images of reconstructed potsherds, or charts of vari­ous commodities or animal bones, but engaging with the stuff from which archaeologists seek to construct the past adds value to the conclusions that they derive from such evidence. Reading such reports in scholarly journals w ­ ill introduce motivated students to the challenges of conducting archaeological research, but also to the way in which knowledge is built up over a number of seasons of excavation, something that is not as apparent to the reader of a major book publication. Th ­ ese on going reports appear more often in area-­specific journals like Azania and Nyame Akuma than they do in more general archaeological journals. In some cases, students can also consult the occasional publications of annual site reports. One good example of this kind of resource for another major Indian Ocean site are the detailed reports for the excavations at the ancient Roman-­Egyptian port of Berenike, not only the more accessible book by Steven Sidebotham.4 Another representative set of studies is for Siraf, for which six interim site reports w ­ ere published by David White­ house from 1968 through 1974 in Iran: The Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies and thirty other articles, although he never completed a full monograph on Siraf.5 If Southeast Asia is underrepresented in mainland archaeology, it is far and away the leading Indian Ocean region for maritime and nautical archaeology, especially for the prominence of numerous shipwrecks that have been studied since the 1990s.6 Shipwreck finds can provide hard evidence of ship b­ uilding technology and ship cargoes that complements written and iconographic sources. As historian Derek Heng observes, “Shipwrecks are time capsules that provide a snapshot picture of the economic interaction occurring between two regions, purveyed by a specific shipping network, at the micro level and at a specific point in time.”7 The two most impor­tant finds in Southeast Asia are the Belitung or Tang Wreck (circa 826–40 ce ) and the Cirebon Wreck (late tenth c­ entury ce ). The Belitung Wreck, in par­tic­u­lar, raises impor­tant methodological and ethical questions about salvaging that bedevil all shipwreck finds (see chapter 4). 35

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Students can access details about dif­fer­ent Southeast Asian wrecks by following the online links in Heng’s article for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, while major studies of both the Belitung and Cirebon wrecks are also available online.8 An in­ter­est­ing exercise might be to ask pairs of students to link such studies with con­temporary written and/or iconographic evidence of shipping and trade goods.

Architecture The design and construction of buildings can tell us many t­ hings, including both the ways in which buildings ­were meant to be used and the influences that helped to shape their design. Two recent impor­tant studies of how architecture reflects Indian Ocean socie­ties are by art historians Nancy Um and Prita Meier. Um writes about the Red Sea port of Mocha, the capital of the emerging global trade in coffee that ­rose to prominence in the sixteenth ­century.9 In a chapter titled “The Urban Form and Orientation of Mocha” she provides a fascinating reconstruction of the town plan of Mocha from the 1680s to the 1740s based on a wide range of sources that bring the physical space of the city into sharp focus. In the following chapter, “Trading Spaces,” she zeroes in on the architecture of the merchant ­houses where business transactions actually occurred, pointing out the similarity of Mocha’s merchant h ­ ouses with t­ hose of Suakin (on the African side of the Red Sea), Jeddah, and Gujarat. Rather than ­doing their business in an open marketplace, as was the norm elsewhere in the Arab world, in Mocha, as in much of the western Indian Ocean, she contends, merchants’ ­houses ­were the focus of trade. “This functional correspondence between structurally distinct examples of ­houses suggests that in the spatial logic that characterized the Mocha trade network, traveling merchants expected to conduct negotiations in their ­houses rather than in public structures,” with the emphasis being on “replicating a mode of commercial practice rather than imitating the physical receptacle of ­those practices.”10 In other words, what mattered was the idea of how business should be conducted, not some dogmatic application of an architectural model from elsewhere. Still, we note that this was essentially a man’s world and that w ­ omen ­were

36

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kept out of sight from visiting merchants in the domestic rooms at the back of the ­house. In her study of Swahili port cities, Meier ranges more broadly across architectural styles and the ways in which they reflect Swahili notions of “what it means to be fixed or mobile on the Swahili coast.”11 Her specific analy­sis is on Mombasa, but she also explores what she calls the “politics of style” in Zanzibar with special reference to the late nineteenth-­century ­House of Won­ders that dominates the seafront of Zanzibar Town. A very dif­fer­ent kind of architectural connection linked the Swahili coast with the medieval Gulf port of Siraf, where the width of rooms in domestic architecture was determined by the length of the mangrove poles (boriti) that w ­ ere 12 imported for construction from the Swahili coast (see chapter 4). Mosque construction is another obvious focus for investigating translocal architectural influences across the Indian Ocean. Yet even ­here, where international connections w ­ ere certainly at play, local innovations and architectural conservatism ­were a power­ful force.13 Sebastian Prange demonstrates in his detailed argument about the character of what he calls Monsoon Islam that “Malabar’s traditional mosques do not look like mosques” b­ ecause their “architectural vocabulary” derives primarily from regional Hindu ­temples, “both in their design and use of materials.”14 Yet, despite their distinctiveness, Prange argues that they share similarities with mosques in insular Southeast Asia, which he understands as one of the many links between the two areas.15 A similar argument is made by Elizabeth Lambourn with re­spect to the fourteenth-­century Friday mosque at Khambhat (Cambay). She emphasizes how the introduction of novel architectural ideas from Iran, in par­tic­u­lar minarets, combined with the incorporation of indigenous Gujarati models, like stepwells, to yield a “radical change in materials, scale and architectural vocabulary.”16 Furthermore, the use of timber, which had to be imported by sea, and local brick construction in coastal Gujarat Islamic architecture (as distinct from stone building materials in the interior) brought the architecture of coastal Gujarat “firmly into the ambit of Islamic architecture around the Persian Gulf and along the coasts of the Arabian Peninsula.”17 The significance

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of ­these examples is that they can reinforce the student’s appreciation of the ways in which ideas about the built environment can be exchanged across global regions and in the ­process of engaging with local traditions and materials yield new built forms. In a word, ideas about the built environment that w ­ ere ­either carried across the Indian Ocean by outsiders or admired by Indigenous travelers ­were not slavishly copied, but rather ­were adapted to resonate with local aesthetics and construction materials. Although mosques ­were a significant space for men to congregate, often to the exclusion of w ­ omen, it is worth noting an exception from Makassar, Indonesia, where a French Jesuit visiting in 1685 learned about a separate ­women’s mosque, as well as two small mosques at Lamu, K ­ enya, that ­were founded in the mid-­nineteenth ­century “as a place of worship used exclusively by w ­ omen” by a w ­ oman named Mwana Mshamu.18 How many other examples of such ­women’s places of worship might ­there be in the wider Indian Ocean World? Another example of an Indian Ocean architectural transfer connects insular Southeast Asia to Madagascar, which is characterized by rectangular ­houses set on piles with a steep roof, generally topped by crossed gable beams to form roof horns. The model for this style of domestic architecture is South Kalimantan (the island of Borneo), which is also linguistically home to the closest Austronesian language to Malagasy. A central architectural (and spiritual) ele­ment to both Kalimantan and Madagascar ­houses is a central pillar that supports the steep roof; in addition, the orientation of traditional ­houses in Highland Madagascar among the Merina depends on a system of four cardinal directions, which recalls Indonesian symbolic systems.19 If you d­ on’t incorporate t­ hese images into your slides, interested students can observe t­ hese architectural similarities online, where t­ here are many photo­graphs and other illustrations of ­these two architectural styles.

Art Art takes many forms, some of which link back to the preceding section on archaeology, such as the numerous depictions of Buddhist images at the Borobudur stupa, or to architecture, like the exquisite carving of the mihrab at the Kizimkazi Mosque in southern Unguja (Zanzibar). H ­ ere, 38

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however, if only for the sake of brevity and clarity, we limit our discussion to painting. Yet even h ­ ere t­ here is more than may meet the eye. An impor­ tant example of pictorial imagery that reveals Indian Ocean connections is the several wall paintings of ships at the Buddhist ­temple complex at the Ajanta Caves in Maharashtra State in western India. Consisting of some thirty caves, most of the Ajanta imagery, w ­ hether sculpted or painted, refers to the life of the Bud­dha or illustrations of key texts in Buddhist cosmology. Among ­these, however, are also invaluable repre­sen­ta­tions of Indian ocean going sailing ships in Caves 1, 2, and 17.20 Other images from the same cave complexes reveal a cosmopolitan world that was frequented with foreign merchants and exotic goods from both continental Asia and the Indian Ocean World.21 Although the entire Ajanta complex dates from the second ­century bce to the late fifth ­century ce , most of the paintings appear to have been completed in the l­ater period, which corresponds to what we know from other sources about ancient commerce in the Indian Ocean World. A millennium ­later we can see a very dif­fer­ent kind of art in the court painting of both the Mughal Empire and vari­ous Deccani sultanates. During the reigns of both Akbar (1556–1605) and Jahangir (1605–27), ­there are several images in Mughal paintings of ­Europeans at the Mughal court. During the same period, artists working at the courts of the sultanates of Golconda, Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, and Bidar produced a parallel body of work in miniature format. Best known among historians are the depictions of the prominent Africans who r­ ose to positions of leadership in several of the Deccani sultanates, among t­ hese Malik Ambar and Ikhlas Khan (see chapter 5).22 Both ­these schools of courtly painting provide vivid testimony to the engagement of t­ hese Indian states with the wider world and the presence of merchants, diplomats, and enslaved ­people from the Indian Ocean. Exactly contemporaneous with ­these Indian paintings are the famous Namban or Nanban painted folding screens of Japan. “Nanban” refers to “Southern Barbarians,” that is, primarily the Portuguese traders and missionaries who first reached Japan in 1543. In ­these elaborate, multipaneled screens, individual J­ apanese artists w ­ ere able to depict a kind of narrative flow of arriving ships, complete with their international 39

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crews, Portuguese dignitaries coming onshore to meet with their ­Japanese hosts, the goods being traded and offloaded by ­Japanese stevedores, and many other details. Images for all of ­these examples of how the arrival of ­Europeans in the Indian Ocean World impacted artistic production in both South and East Asia are readily available for students to follow online, as well as through library research. Looked at from the other side, that of the very same ­Europeans who encountered this startling new world for them, ­there also exists a disparate body of images produced by ­European artists. One fascinating area is the decoration of maps, where, in addition to steadily delineating the contours of the Indian Ocean shores and the landmasses that surrounded the ocean, the draftsmen who produced t­ hese charts inserted pictures of coastlines, landscapes, flora, fauna, and sometimes p­ eople. To be sure, they also inserted imaginary sea monsters in their maps, but as ­Europeans became more familiar with the region, both their maps and their images became more accurate. In addition, we should not neglect the very fine botanical images that ­were produced by pioneering naturalists who sought to understand the properties of the exotic indigenous plants that ­Europeans encountered and, in many cases, sought to control.23 ­These kinds of images, especially of ­people and places, ­were increasingly associated with ­European imperial propaganda, and in the nineteenth c­ entury ­were frequently reproduced for a mass audience in ­popular magazines such as The Illustrated London News (from 1842) and Le Monde Illustré (from 1857). Comparing t­ hese kinds of images with, for example, Mughal or Deccani depictions of foreigners can get students to think about how dif­f er­ent cultures depict outsiders, or “the Other.” Having artificially ­limited our examples to painting and related images, we should add that a quite dif­f er­ent aspect of Indian Ocean artistic production during the first centuries of E ­ uropean expansion involves Christian religious art. What is most in­ter­est­ing ­here is the ways in which Christian iconography, particularly depictions of ­women and of the Virgin Mary, was integrated by Asian artists who adapted both Hindu and Buddhist iconography to accommodate Christian imagery.24

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­Music and Dance One of the per­sis­tent themes in Indian Ocean studies is the influence of dif­fer­ent musical traditions across the region. Perhaps the most notorious diffusionist perspective for Africanists has been the “high culture/low culture” contention that the xylophone spread from Indonesia to Africa and that, more generally, Indonesia was at least partly responsible for “civilizing” Africa. The evidence involved in the debate about the xylophone includes tuning, morphology, and vari­ous ancillary sources, among ­these images of musical instruments on the now familiar Borobudur stupa. ­These controversies are analyzed in g­ reat depth in several articles by Roger Blench that, at the very least, point to the possibilities for integrating studies of musical exchanges across the Indian Ocean from the beginning of the Common Era.25 The fact remains, however, that most evidence for the history of ­music and dance in an Indian Ocean context dates from the more recent past. Certainly, ­music and dance have proved to be quite effective sources for tracing the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean World. What is most valuable about such evidence is how it both illustrates the retention of certain African artistic aesthetics and reveals the interpenetration of ­performance styles from other Indian Ocean cultures. Evidence is expressed in literary descriptions of ­performance and instruments by both ­European colonial authorities and travelers; the physical presence of musical instruments themselves; occasional musical transcriptions; artistic repre­sen­ta­tions; and ethnomusicological studies. In this way, for example, it is pos­si­ble to follow the movement of African musical and dance styles from eastern Africa to dif­fer­ent parts of Arabia, the Gulf, western India, Sri Lanka, and the islands of the southwest Indian Ocean. Scholarly ethnographic and ethnomusicological studies, the recollections and biographies of modern musicians, and the performative evidence available on rec­ords and video make it entirely possibly to understand the evolution of con­ temporary styles and the ways in which radio and digital recording have galvanized a global exchange of musical and dance styles. One example of this kind of interpenetration of musical styles is known as Leiwah, which 41

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combines African and Arab influences in a spirit possession ­performance in several dif­f er­ent Gulf countries.26 Another good example is the ­popular musical style on Mauritius known as Seggae, which combines the evolved Afro-­Malagasy traditional style of Sega with West Indian reggae. The incorporation of Indian instruments, lyr­ics, and ­music with Sega by some performers even gives it a kind of Bhojpuri (a Hindi dialect spoken in Mauritius) twist.27 ­Here is an opportunity for students to think about how ­music and musical ­performance can serve to integrate numerous “foreign” sources of inspiration. Elsewhere in the Indian Ocean World, dif­fer­ent South Asian musical styles, for example, the Sufi Islamic devotional ­music of Qawwali, have moved intact as heritage musical styles with specific sociolinguistic communities. But as ongoing research is demonstrating, the availability of phonograph rec­ords, the production of which was centered in India and Egypt, facilitated the movement of ­popular musical ideas and ­performance styles among Arab musicians of Arabia.28 Fi­nally, as musicians moved around the Indian Ocean as part-­or full-­time performers, they encountered, learned, and often mastered dif­fer­ent musical styles from ­those of their homelands. This happened with K ­ enyan Mzee Mombasa, who worked as a sailor in the western Indian Ocean, learned new instruments, came to play with Indian musicians in India, and back home in ­Kenya was the only African in at least one band performing Indian m ­ usic (see chapter 10).29 Interested students might also wish to explore the many parallels of musical fusion that characterize Indonesian folk and ­popular ­music. In par­tic­u­lar, the evolution of the urban, p­ opular ­music called Kroncong—­ which dates to the arrival of the Portuguese in the sixteenth ­century, and subsequently integrates both Dutch and other global influences—­testifies to the responsiveness to new musical instrumentation and styles right into the con­temporary era.30 Another impor­tant Indonesian ­popular musical style that incorporates traditions from Indian, Arab, and Malay genres is Dangdut.31 Our knowledge of the musical styles noted above is based partly on many oral interviews, much delving into the recorded examples of dif­f er­ent 42

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Indian Ocean musical genres, and, in the case of Leiwah, spirit possession. From the student’s perspective, of course, all of ­these sources of information depend initially on publications. Yet, such publications can be complemented by directing students to online recordings of dif­fer­ent Indian Ocean ­music and dance traditions. Even allowing for the methodological limitations of how and for whom such recordings and videos ­were generated, hearing or seeing ­these p­ erformances can enliven students’ study of the musical genres of the Indian Ocean.32

Oral Histories, ­Popular Religious Beliefs As it happens, this grouping of themes represents still another example of how difficult it is to disentangle nontextual sources of evidence for the teaching of Indian Ocean World history. Nevertheless, t­ here exists a variety of renderings of oral histories, or stories about the past, that include local perspectives on Indian Ocean connections. In chapter 2, we discussed both Arabic and Malay chronicles, for which the ultimate sources before they ­were committed to writing ­were often oral. This was certainly the case for the body of Swahili oral town histories that date to the nineteenth ­century, many of which ­were collected during the German colonial period in mainland Tanzania, five of which are available in E ­ nglish translation.33 “The Ancient History of Kilwa Kisiwani” begins by stating explic­itly: “­These words ­were spoken by the elders of Kilwa Kisiwani.”34 In addition to much fascinating detail about local history, ­these transcribed oral histories include references to vari­ous Indian Ocean connections—­some to Shirazis, or Indians, or Zanzibar—as well as to the coming of the Germans.35 The longest and most impressive of the Swahili traditional histories is The Pate Chronicle, nearly all of the dif­fer­ent published and manuscript versions of which are based on the oral narration of a certain Bwani Kitini, who apparently learned it from his grand­father, Bwana Simba.36 Like the much shorter oral Swahili town histories, The Pate Chronicle incorporates and elaborates upon the same stories of ­Middle Eastern origins. One final set of observations based on the Swahili experience returns us to spirit possession. Among the many va­ri­e­ties of possessing spirits are included an entire category called sea spirits, which ­were always associated 43

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with Arabs.37 An impor­tant ele­ment in the movement of such ­popular religious beliefs regarding sea spirits across the Indian Ocean was the circulation of Hadrami traders, pilgrims, and sailors, who carried Sufi beliefs and practices with them that connected South Arabia, Indonesia, and the Swahili coast and its offshore islands, as we ­will see in chapter 5. Once again, we are reminded that insular Southeast Asia provides students with fertile grounds for comparisons with the western Indian Ocean.

Wrapping Up We have so far emphasized the many dif­fer­ent perspectives and sources of information upon which you and your students can draw in the p­ rocess of coming to grips with the Indian Ocean in world history. Th ­ ese examples and illustrations should help both to familiarize the Indian Ocean and to bring the wider region into comparative perspective with other global regions. In the next part of the book, we shift our focus to specific topics and themes that resonate with larger world history questions and, we hope, ­will enrich the learning experience of your students.

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part ii

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Global Themes

­ ere we explore several themes that connect the h Indian Ocean World to more familiar topics in world history. ­These broad themes include dif­fer­ent commodity chains, some of which may seem familiar, ­others exotic; diasporas and migration that connect ­peoples from across the Indian Ocean; forms of slavery and bondage, which ­will raise questions about how ­these relate to your students’ greater familiarity, or preconceptions, about the Atlantic World; questions of imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism and the growing geostrategic significance of the region; plus issues in disease and environment that w ­ ill surely resonate with you and your students in a post-­pandemic world marked by climate change.

4^ Chapter Four 64

Indian Ocean Commodities the life of spice

the iow was built on thousands of years of trade. A wide variety of commodities, both primary and manufactured, exchanged hands across the vast spaces of the Indian Ocean. At ­every point of exchange ­were the merchants, both international and local, who transacted this business, but many other ­people and communities ­were ultimately engaged in the ­process of commodity production and exchange. Hunters in the interior of Africa tracked, killed, and butchered the animals that produced the ivory and skins that ­were sought as luxury items in many Asian socie­ties; Gujarati farmers produced the cotton that was spun into thread and then woven into a variety of textiles, most of which ­were colored with natu­ral dyes that still other farmers produced from crops like indigo or from other natu­ral sources that eventually made their way to the ports of western India to be exchanged with merchants across the region. In the tiny Maluku Islands in eastern Indonesia the local inhabitants learned to harvest the several unique tree crops like cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg

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that became so widely sought by elites in the ancient world for seasoning their food. From the seventeenth c­ entury, opium produced in India emerged as a major commodity in response to demand in China. In all ­these instances, and many ­others, ­these commodities needed to be ­organized by regional merchants who financed transoceanic trade, bundled into recognizable units of volume or weight, loaded onto ships, and then sailed across the Indian Ocean to their destination ports. Thus, when you introduce your students to the commodity chains that dominated the iow over time, you also have the opportunity to help them to think about the social history that is embedded in the life of ­these precious trade goods, as well as the very materiality of the commodities themselves. In this chapter we introduce several key categories of commodities around which you can build p­ resentations and other instructional activities in your Indian Ocean history class.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral Animals and animal products occupy an impor­tant place in the history of Indian Ocean commodities. For Africa the most impor­tant such commodity was unquestionably elephant ivory, prized for its whiteness and malleability. African elephants have been hunted for their ivory for thousands of years.1 In the iow the main historical demand for African ivory came from India and China, where it was transformed by skilled artisans into bangles, jewelry, and figurines, or inlaid into furniture. In the nineteenth ­century African ivory was sought by the emerging cap­i­tal­ist economies of western ­Europe and North Amer­i­ca, where it served as the plastic of that age. Billiard balls and piano keys are two such examples of how a rapidly growing cap­i­tal­ist class stimulated the Western market for African ivory.2 One question to ask your students is why African ivory was in such demand in India, which had its own population of elephants. What drove the Indian demand? How was African ivory dif­fer­ent from Indian elephant ivory? Other questions to pose that can get your students thinking about w ­ ere the many skills it took for Africans to hunt elephants successfully and the implications of the expansion of elephant hunting in the nineteenth ­century for African socie­ties. What protection did African 48

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hunters have as they undertook this extremely demanding and dangerous economic pursuit? How did the wealth that successful hunters and their leaders accumulated affect their socie­ties, if at all? What did they obtain from Indian Ocean traders in return for their precious ivory? Equally significant are questions regarding the environmental impact of expanded elephant hunting. On the other side of the Indian Ocean, who ­were the artisans who produced ivory products for local consumption? How ­were they ­organized? Who purchased their wares? And in E ­ urope and Amer­i­ca, how was the manufacturing of ivory ­organized? ­These questions about ivory and the overlapping histories related to its commodity chain provide a model for the kinds of inquiry that you and your students can pursue for any Indian Ocean commodity. We briefly introduce the histories of ­horses, cowries, pearls, cloves, timber, and gold before turning to beads, ceramics, and textiles, but t­ hese are certainly not meant as an exhaustive list. ­Horses w ­ ere another impor­tant animal commodity. They ­were valued for their use in royal display and, especially, as cavalry in warfare.3 ­Horses ­were initially imported to northern India from Central Asia, while as early as the third ­century ce ­horses ­were exported from the Bengal coast, prob­ ably to both Southeast Asia and the Coromandel coast of southeastern India.4 The rise of vari­ous regional states in India a­ fter about 500 ce engendered a steady state of armed hostilities that created regular demand for military advantage, including cavalry. Since India was not conducive to ­horse breeding, sources for superior h ­ orses w ­ ere sought elsewhere. ­Until about 1000 ce Central Asia and Persia remained the main sources, transporting ­horses overland into the subcontinent. But beginning in the second millennium, ­horses ­were bred in Arabia, Persia, and the Indus Valley for overseas shipment to India. While the overland trade continued, especially to markets in northern India, the sea trade dominated the supply of ­horses to India thereafter and flourished from the medieval period into the eigh­teenth ­century. ­Horses from Arabia and Persia ­were considered superior to all o­ thers and called bahri (bahr is a body of w ­ ater, in this instance “sea,” in Arabic), meaning ­horses of the sea, ­because that is how they ­were transported to India.5 At dif­fer­ent periods of time major ports 49

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of embarkation included Aden and Hormuz. Thousands ­were shipped to competing states in South India, where first coastal kingdoms and then the Portuguese taxed the trade. Like elephant hunting and ivory artisanal production, ­every aspect of the ­horse trade involved ­great risk, exceptional ­organization, and highly developed skills. ­These included the breeding of ­horses for warfare, the outfitting of sufficiently large cargo ships that could accommodate many h ­ orses, the provisioning with w ­ ater and fodder of ­these valuable cargoes, the specialized knowledge of h ­ orse traders, and the ­great skills involved in maintaining large stables of ­horses and training them for warfare.6 This was certainly a luxury trade, but again it involved many dif­f er­ent skills and knowledge. Beginning in the nineteenth ­century and continuing into the first ­decades of the twentieth c­ entury, the young British colony of New South Wales became a major source of ­horses for the developing Indian army; during World War I thousands of ­horses ­were shipped to India from Australia.7 ­Here is still another dif­f er­ent entry point for you to relate a historically impor­tant Indian Ocean commodity to dif­fer­ent historical eras and world history topics, or to compare and contrast them. A dif­fer­ent kind of animal product that linked the Indian Ocean to both East Asia and the Atlantic World is cowries, the luminescent shells produced by dif­fer­ent species of sea snails. The most sought-­after cowries (Cypraea moneta) ­were collected in the w ­ aters of the Maldives Islands, in the ­middle Indian Ocean, southwest of the Indian subcontinent.8 Maldivian cowries ­were used as money in ancient China and in a variety of other ways throughout Asia. During the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade, billions of cowries from the Maldives ­were shipped as ballast to West Africa, where they ­were used extensively as small change in markets, as personal adornments, and as ritual decoration.9 The Maldives are ­today threatened by rising sea levels, so examining the history of the cowry trade might also provide an entry to larger discussions of how the changing global environment has affected history over time. Still another kind of sea animal product that linked the Indian Ocean to the global market was natu­ral pearls, which enjoyed a boom during the nineteenth ­century ­until the development of cultured pearls in Japan and 50

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the ­Great Depression destroyed the industry.10 Pearl beds existed in many dif­fer­ent world oceans, as well as some freshwater sources, but historically the main areas for pearl divers w ­ ere the w ­ aters off the eastern Arabian shores of the Persian/Arab Gulf, the Gulf of Mannar between present-­ day India and Sri Lanka, coastal Burma (Myanmar), and northwestern Australia. Like ivory, pearls found an ­eager market among the fash­ion­able inhabitants of Euro-­America, but they w ­ ere also favored by wealthy Indians and Chinese. Each of the major maritime regions for pearl extraction featured its own specific commodity chains, from boat owner­ship to ­labor regimes (including the use of enslaved l­ abor) to purchase and shipping networks to final integration in regional markets. Comparing and contrasting ­these commodity chains, both within the pearling industry and between pearling and other Indian Ocean submarine commodities, such as sea cucumbers (trepang), opens up new vistas for students of world history.11 We introduce this chapter by signaling spices as the most representative Indian Ocean commodity. Indeed, the history of commercially exchanged spices in the iow can certainly be traced back at least to the beginning of the Common Era and, if a single carbonized clove discovered at the Mesopotamian site of Terqa can ever be verified genet­ically, much ­earlier.12 According to both literary and archaeological evidence, Malabar pepper was traded from southwest India to Roman Egypt through the Red Sea port of Berenike by the first ­century ce , and for centuries Malabar remained the global center of pepper production, where peasant producers worked through local merchants and Indian rulers to export this commodity. Pepper was also produced in Sumatra and was exported in quantity to China, but it was generally considered inferior to that of Malabar. Securing the pepper trade by outflanking the Ottoman-­Venetian mono­poly on the Mediterranean trade was one of the key objectives of the Portuguese when they ventured into the Indian Ocean at the end of the sixteenth ­century.13 ­Although cloves are noted in second-­and fourth-­century ce Indian sources, they first appear in confirmed archaeological sites that date slightly ­later, to the ­middle of the first millennium, at Batajaya, in West Java, and Mantai, in Sri Lanka.14 While pepper production was focused on Malabar, it was not monopolized by any one port; even when rival E ­ uropean trading 51

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companies seized control of the export trade, none could entirely monopolize the business. Together with nutmeg and mace, however, cloves ­were exclusively cultivated on a handful of tiny islands in the Maluku Archipelago and their export controlled in the hands of Javanese traders who kept the source of t­ hese precious spices a secret. When competing E ­ uropean powers entered the Indian Ocean marketplace, they tried in vain to secure this trade for themselves, but in the seventeenth ­century the Dutch East India Com­pany (voc ) wiped out the local tree farmers and replaced them with slave ­labor; in the case of cloves, they moved slave production to a dif­ fer­ent, slightly larger island, where the voc could control production and marketing. But Dutch attempts at monopolizing the spice trade to ­Europe ­were short-­lived. In the late eigh­teenth ­century, a French botanist at Mauritius managed to smuggle seeds from the spice islands and planted them in the botanical garden over which he presided at Pamplemousse. Once established, several French planters began to cultivate cloves in addition to the sugar that dominated the island’s slave economy. ­Later, but certainly by the 1820s, some enterprising French trader introduced cloves to Zanzibar, prob­ably through an Omani landowner.15 Soon, slave-­produced cloves ­were a dominant feature of the Zanzibari export economy. Although the world market for cloves and other once rare spices was transformed by the global expansion of production to new terrains, cloves remain an impor­ tant cash crop in both Indonesia and Zanzibar. To ­these spices we might also add coffee and tea; we find that students are astonished to learn that the old slang for coffee, “java,” comes from the Indonesian island, while their Mocha traces its name to the Yemeni port of that name. A notorious agricultural commodity was opium, which gained prominence once smoking this narcotic became p­ opular in China in the seventeenth c­ entury. Indian cultivation of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) was concentrated in Bihar and Malwa. In the first half of the eigh­teenth ­century, the voc dominated the seaborne trade to China from western India via the com­pany headquarters at Batavia, but a­ fter the British East India Com­pany (eic ) conquest of Bengal in 1757, the opium trade from Bihar became the principal source of this drug. In the first third of the nineteenth ­century, Gujarati and Indo-­Portuguese merchants in western 52

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India circumvented the British in Bengal by exploiting their connections to Malwa and trading to China through Portuguese Macao. But the opium trade had become too profitable for the eic , which gradually squeezed ­these traders out and channeled the Malwa traffic through British Bombay, often in collaboration with Parsi financiers. At the same time, Imperial Chinese efforts to limit the opium trade resulted in the First Opium War (1839–42) and the cession of Hong Kong Island to the British. From this date forward, the British controlled the production and trade of opium in India, which served as an essential foundation of British capitalism in the nineteenth ­century (see chapter 6).16 The availability of a handful of sources on prominent Indian opium traders provides a glimpse into the entrepreneurial side of the business.17 By way of contrast, novelist Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, in which he uses opium “as a narrative device,” offers students a fictionalized vision of the ­human toll of the trade.18 We should also not ignore the movement of more benign agricultural products through trade across the Indian Ocean that evolved with the steady integration of ­peoples and markets over the longue durée. Certainly, in ­earlier times most Indian Ocean socie­ties produced their own food, but as p­ eople migrated and introduced new patterns of consumption, foodstuffs followed. By the second millennium bce , Africa was a major source of impor­tant cereals to South Asia and Arabia; it was also the recipient of cereals from Asia.19 Similarly, dif­fer­ent food crops migrated along trade routes in the eastern Indian Ocean World as well.20 Students may also find that delving into specific food cultures in the iow is another way to appreciate its connected history.21 In the modern period, a good example of how population movement and economic development affected the exchange of food crops is rice, which in the nineteenth ­century was exported from western Madagascar to Mozambique, the Swahili coast, and the Mascarene Islands; rice was also imported at Zanzibar from India.22 Ironically, in the twentieth ­century Madagascar moved from self-­sufficiency in rice to importing rice from Thailand.23 A quite dif­fer­ent vegetal commodity around the Indian Ocean littoral was timber. Ship construction required specific kinds of woods that w ­ ere not always available locally. Teak from the Malabar forests was especially 53

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valuable in ship construction ­because of its ­resistance to deterioration in salt w ­ ater. Lying between the Swahili coast and western India, what Abdul Sheriff dubs “the intermediate desert zone”—­most notably the Arabian Peninsula—­sorely lacked timber. Teak and other hardwoods ­were transported by sea from western India to coastal Arabia for ship construction, while mangrove poles, called boriti in Swahili (see chapter 3), ­were shipped from the Swahili coast to Arabia primarily for h ­ ouse construction.24 Of course, modern ships are built of steel, and modern building materials are now available for ­house construction in the oil-wealthy Gulf states, but although it is much diminished and environmental deterioration has negatively affected mangrove forests, the boriti trade still survives locally along the Swahili coast. Wood was not the only tree product sought ­after by Indian Ocean merchants. Frankincense and myrrh w ­ ere valued aromatic tree resins derived from trees that grew only in the Horn of Africa and the southern Arabian Peninsula. Both camphor and benzoin or gum benjamin are tree resins native to northwestern Sumatra that ­were widely used for centuries in Asia for medicinal purposes and in incense. Camphor was also employed in furniture varnish. In the ­later nineteenth ­century, another tree resin, gum copal, became an impor­tant peasant export crop from East Africa through Zanzibar to the United States, where it was widely used in varnish. The third category of commodity in this section is minerals, the most significant of which for the premodern history of the Indian Ocean was unquestionably gold, although at dif­fer­ent times and in dif­fer­ent places the maritime trade in copper and iron was also noteworthy. The two most famous gold-­producing areas ­were south-central Africa and Sumatra, but while south-central Africa produced significant amounts of gold for export, Sumatra did not, at least not u­ ntil con­temporary times. U ­ nder the Arabic name of Sufālah (Sofala), this coastal region gained fame as a source of gold from the ninth c­ entury on. The gold was actually mined in the highlands of the Zimbabwe Plateau, hundreds of miles from the coast, but demand for the precious metal in West and South Asia to exchange for textiles and trade beads stimulated the development of an overland route to the port of Sofala and helped sustain several African kingdoms inland. 54

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By comparison, notwithstanding Chinese, Sans­krit, and even Latin sources that hailed Sumatra and the region around it as “Golden Island” or “Golden Peninsula” from the turn of the Common Era; Arabic sources that similarly report fabulous wealth in gold from this same area; and ­later Portuguese sources reporting about gold sources in the sixteenth c­ entury, a major export trade in gold never developed historically from Sumatra ­until the last two ­decades. Certainly, both alluvial and shallow-­mined gold was produced in the highlands, but most of it was absorbed internally through trade with lowland rulers for Indian Ocean imported goods. Indeed, for most of its history greater Indonesia was a consumer of foreign gold, both as ­treasure and specie. In the seventeenth ­century the Dutch sought in vain to resuscitate local sources of gold by using ­European methods of mining along with slave ­labor, but the experiment failed utterly.25 A less-­known, but still impor­tant, mineral that was traded across the western Indian Ocean is rock crystal. During the tenth and eleventh centuries craftsmen in Fatimid Egypt produced beautiful vessels from rock crystal that archaeological research now suggests may have originated in Madagascar and been exported from the Swahili port of Mahilaka.26 On the other side of the Indian Ocean, Myanmar was for centuries the principal source of rubies, which ­were traded far and wide.27

Glass Beads, Chinese Ceramics, Indian Textiles Thinking about the pro­cessing of tree crops and gold reminds us that Indian Ocean commercial cir­cuits w ­ ere fueled by manufactured commodities as well. Three categories of manufactured goods stand out for their widespread distribution and longevity: glass beads, Chinese porcelain, and Indian textiles. Glass trade beads dominated two cir­cuits of exchange between Asia and East Africa from about 600 to 1100 ce . The first was based on beads manufactured primarily at Mantai, then the largest seaport in Sri Lanka, although some of ­these beads apparently originated from Iraq/Iran via Thailand. Th ­ ese w ­ ere traded mainly to coastal East Africa. A second cir­ cuit carried beads manufactured around the Gulf or coastal Pakistan, prob­ ably by South Asian artisans; they appear in ­great numbers at Chibuene, in southern Mozambique, where they ­were arguably incorporated into 55

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the ivory and gold trade from inland southeastern Africa, and also appeared north of t­ here at Pemba Island.28 Beads continued to constitute an impor­ tant item of exchange right through the nineteenth ­century—­for example, the Maasai of East Africa only began to bead their goatskin skirts in the nineteenth ­century—­but from the late medieval period most glass beads traded in the Indian Ocean entered from the Mediterranean and, l­ater, from northern ­European sources. Although students may be inclined initially to regard trade beads as trinkets, it is impor­tant to appreciate the role played by African consumer tastes; color, size, and shape varied from place to place, so the savvy trader needed to be fully cognizant of both cultural preferences and passing fashion. Failing that knowledge, a trader could be stuck with unsalable merchandise. Chinese ceramics ­were neither the only nor the most abundant type of pottery that was traded around the Indian Ocean, but their long history and high prestige make them of par­tic­u­lar interest. Students could just as well look into the production and trade in ­Iranian or more mundane Indian or Swahili pottery. But in the case of Chinese ceramics, we are fortunate to have the remarkable ninth-­century shipwreck of a western Indian Ocean dhow to illustrate the magnitude and geo­graph­i­cal scope of Indian Ocean commerce (see chapter 3). The ship itself was on a return journey from China to the western Indian Ocean, most prob­ably to a Gulf port, when it sank off Belitung Island in the Java Sea. Recovery of the ship’s timbers indicate clearly that it was constructed in e­ ither western India or, possibly, Oman. In any event, its cargo was dominated by a huge shipment of Chinese ceramics, some fifty-­five thousand pieces of mostly Changsha ware, but also including both White-­ware and Yue ware.29 The Belitung wreck offers students, through the many online resources available, a unique opportunity to think about the movement of t­ hese and similar manufactures from continental places of production to regional ports for export, to the ­process of loading and conveying such trade goods on board ships, to their final destinations and distribution. ­Because of the professional controversy surrounding the underwater excavation of the Belitung wreck, this example can also open up a venue for discussing how knowledge is produced. In considering ­these questions, you might ask 56

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students to consider how such imported wares might have affected local ceramic production, or how such export wares may have been designed to meet regional consumer tastes. A quite dif­fer­ent example of how Chinese ceramics occupied a place of prestige in Indian Ocean trade comes from the display of such wares in the homes of elite Swahili in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries or embedded in the characteristic pillar tombs of coastal elites in the same period.30 Such questions are just as clearly an integral part of coming to grips with the Indian Ocean textile trade, where long-­established preference and momentary fashion played fundamental roles in determining consumer tastes. The most widely appreciated textiles in the iow ­were cottons produced in India, but it is worth remembering that India also produced many other textiles. Chinese silks w ­ ere mainly a luxury item, affordable only by the most power­f ul and wealthy individuals around the Indian Ocean. At the same time, however, handwoven textiles of many dif­fer­ent types ­were also designed and produced by many local communities around the Indian Ocean littoral. Indian cottons circulated across the iow , from east to west, from the early centuries of the Common Era, although material evidence dates only to the ­later medieval period. ­Here it is impor­tant to remind your students that, unlike ceramics or metalware, textiles woven from organic materials are perishable. Before 1500 the two major export regions ­were Gujarat and the Coromandel coast; a­ fter 1500 they w ­ ere joined by regional centers in Bengal, the Punjab, and Sind. As the global economy expanded and the currents of Indian Ocean trade increasingly penetrated new inland markets, regional specialization in textile production and commerce evolved. To take only one example, in the eigh­teenth ­century, the region of Jambusar in Gujarat integrated both indigo cultivation and regional weaving centers to become the main center of production for export cloth to southeastern Africa.31 Among the most intriguing questions to ask about the movement of Indian and Chinese textiles across the Indian Ocean are the ways in which local and regional consumer preferences, that is, taste and fashion, determined the quality, design, and colors of export cloths.32 While some scholars have argued that imported textiles often replaced indigenous 57

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cloths ­because of their superior quality, o­ thers have observed that imports sometimes complemented local weaving traditions. In Java ­after about 1600, local batik print was stimulated by the smoother surface of Indian, and ­later Dutch, imported cloth, while designs ­were incorporated from Indian textiles. In nineteenth-­century southern Somalia, local weavers deconstructed imported Indian silks and colored cottons to weave t­ hese vivid threads into their formerly plain cotton wraps. They ­were not the only Indian Ocean weavers to undo the handi­work of Indian weavers to embellish their own cottons. In the nineteenth c­ entury, the American plain cotton textiles (known as merikani) overwhelmed that part of the East African market that had been dominated by plain Indian cloths, but in the ­later ­decades of the c­ entury when dif­f er­ent ­European factories tried to move into this market, their products ­were sometimes rejected by African consumers ­because they did not smell right, that is, the chemicals used in finishing t­ hese cottons differentiated them from more familiar textiles. As for fashion, just as t­ oday’s young p­ eople (and clothing manufacturers) display brand name trademarks, upcountry East Africans wrapped merikani around their bodies so that the New ­England trademark stamps could be seen on the outside to prove that it was the genuine article. What we hope to have established in this chapter is that commodities have many dif­fer­ent meanings to ­those who make them, exchange them, and consume them, wherever they may reside around the Indian Ocean littoral. Exploring commodity chains is not only an exercise in economics, but also no less an engagement with cultural preferences, consumer tastes, and fashion. W ­ hether one begins with agricultural or primary products, or with manufactured goods, we believe that it is impor­tant to emphasize to students that commodities have a life and involve ­human agency at ­every step of the way, beyond the ­simple—­yet impor­tant—­fact of their material presence.

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4^ Chapter Five 64

­People on the Move

the mobility of p­ eople within the Indian Ocean remains one of the most distinctive characteristics of this region in world history. The movement of ­people across the ocean and between its islands, littorals, and hinterlands has defined the Indian Ocean World from prehistoric times, and the consequences of ­these movements in ­every era have ­shaped the ­political, social, and economic history of the region. The trafficking of enslaved and indentured ­labor that we discuss in the next chapter is a subset of this broader movement of ­people. The Indian Ocean region is marked by numerous diasporas made pos­si­ble and sustained by the vast mobility in the region. Histories of the Indian Ocean frequently begin with the explanations of the monsoon wind system, for it was ­these winds, in K. N. Chaudhuri’s formulation, that created a region governed by “a single global variable.”1 This single variable fit into innumerable equations, and h ­ uman mobility has been a profound consequence of ­these regular and predictable winds. As a result of the monsoons, the dominant winds of

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the Indian Ocean reverse directions once a year, and this has permitted an unusual degree of mobility for ­people living in the region. In teaching world history, however, we also must be attuned to other variables that affect mobility. Helping students see the local histories and transoceanic practices that facilitated movement reveals deeper patterns of Indian Ocean history. We can identify push and pull ­factors like environmental conditions, economic pressures, business and f­ amily networks, and pilgrimage. We should also be mindful of practices and frameworks that ­shaped mobility. For instance, access to credit underwrote connections across the Indian Ocean, and the Islamic ­legal frameworks of partnership contracts helped structure ­these kinds of arrangements.2 ­These commenda partnerships have their roots in the pre-­ Islamic Arabian Peninsula and spread widely across the Indian Ocean and even to medieval ­Europe.3 Likewise, the prevalence of Islam across the western Indian Ocean and some of the eastern Indian Ocean meant that contractual forms for credit and debt ­were drawn from the same traditions of scribal practice and created instruments that could move with ­these users.4 Despite their deep histories, t­ hese contracts w ­ ere not static forms: they ­were adapted to new practices and to solve new prob­lems. For instance, Islamic contracts, which in theory did not allow interest, ­were adapted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to finance commodity speculation. The larger point is that ­legal frameworks and practices are an example of Indian Ocean practices that ­were linked to the ways that ­people moved around. While movement across and around the Indian Ocean began in earliest times within the region and attracted outsiders in the age of sail, Indian Ocean mobility has continued into the period of steamships and airplanes. The study of ­people on the move helps us see the distinctive character of the Indian Ocean region and understand the heterogeneous population centers that ring this ocean. In the examples that follow, we look specifically at premodern movement, the Islamic pilgrimage, and diasporas of Arabs, Indians, Malays, and Chinese, while not ignoring their modern counter­parts.

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Early Histories of Mobility Even from ancient times mobility ­shaped the peopling of the Indian Ocean. Perhaps the most surprising and intriguing of ­these is the Austronesian seafarers who navigated the Indian Ocean and settled in Madagascar. The Malagasy language derives from the Malayo-­Polynesian f­ amily of languages that are most common in Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands. ­Whether ­these Austronesian-­speakers crossed the Indian Ocean in their outrigger canoes via a direct, open sea route or by following the coast from Southeast Asia, they likely reached Madagascar in the second half of the first millennium of the Common Era and continued for another millennium. In the early years of the Common Era, mobile h ­ uman traders and missionaries spread Buddhism to Southeast Asia, and the account of pilgrims like Făxiăn, who sailed home to China from India via Java in the first quarter of the fifth ­century, provide a sense of both the numbers of ­people moving along ­these itineraries and the perils they faced.5 His account offers a primary-source win­dow into this era. Another example of commercial mobility comes from the discovery of more than two hundred inscriptions and pictograms, including ships, in the Hoq Cave in Socotra that date to the first several centuries of the Common Era. Most of the inscriptions are in Brahmi script, but o­ thers include South Arabian, Ethiopic, Greek, and Bactrian.6 Maritime connections between the western Indian Ocean and China w ­ ere pioneered by Persian merchants, who established a significant diasporic settlement in Tang dynasty (618–907) China u­ ntil their success triggered a massacre by dissident Chinese forces in 878. For students of world history, the documents recovered in the Cairo Geniza in the late nineteenth c­ entury animate webs of mobility that linked the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds from the ninth ­century. While the focus of t­ hese sources is the Jewish traders who created the documents, and the most comprehensive work on them has focused on the Mediterranean aspects, t­ hese sources also reveal details of non-­Jewish business partners, allies, and servants in networks stretching to India’s

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Mangalore coast. The accessibility of the translations of ­these documents in work such as Shelomo Goitein’s multiple volumes make them a useful source for lectures or assignments.7 The scholar/novelist Amitav Ghosh connects ­these networks to his experience as an expatriate anthropologist in Egypt in the early 1990s in a wonderful multistranded narrative, while medieval Islamicist Elizabeth Lambourn constructs a remarkable cultural history out of a single baggage list in her study titled Abraham’s Luggage.8 How might you encourage your students to try their hands at similar historical imaginations based on the Geniza documents? You might provide them with copies of one or more texts from the Geniza that include hints about ­family, gender, servitude, and/or faith and ask them to write about what kinds of sources we would need to expand upon t­ hese bits and pieces of evidence.

Hajj While the monsoonal patterns structured the mobility of ­people in the longue durée of the Indian Ocean, Islam, between its lunar Islamic calendar and its encouragement of pilgrimage to Mecca, has propelled the movement of millions of Muslims across the Indian Ocean. Visiting the Kaaba in Mecca, the holiest site of Islam, is part of the pilgrimage that all Muslims are encouraged to undertake during their life. The formal Hajj takes place during the Islamic month of the same name, but pilgrims visit Mecca year-­ round for umrah, a lesser but still esteemed pilgrimage. The Hajj in itself is a world historical phenomenon. As historian Eric Tagliocozzo notes, “The Hajj combines an ancient history with a global reach, and it also combines ­immense size with a cosmopolitan diversity that is simply unique in world history.”9 Muslims moved around, across, and eventually over the Indian Ocean on their way to Mecca. The Hajj makes a useful introduction to Indian Ocean voyages and Indian Ocean itineraries, and narratives of the Hajj come in a ­great variety, inviting students and their teachers to compare and contrast them. From the early modern account of the Shahzadi (Princess) Gulbadan Begum’s pilgrimage from the Mughal Court between 1575–82 and Richard Francis Burton’s well-­documented clandestine journey in the 62

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mid-­nineteenth ­century, to that of Malcolm X in 1964, Hajj narratives provide a perspective on the cosmopolitan character of Islam and the vast number of Muslims who descend upon Mecca to circle the Kaaba.10 And as Gulbadam Begum’s seven-­year journey makes clear, much happened outside of the rites of pilgrimage that reflect modes of travel, ­political alliances, and social mobility. From the Mughal perspective, for example, her journey took place “when the delightsome country of India was an abode of peace, and the vagabonds’ abode of Gujarat had become inhabited by right-­thinking lovers of justice, and the masters of the ­European islands, who ­were a stumbling-­block in the way of travellers . . . ​had become submissive and obedient.”11 The Mughal ruler Akbar sent her and her companions with a ­great deal of money and goods for trade. The Hajj is linked to economies of prestige and to economies of goods, to engendered and paralleling trade networks, and to notions of individual status. Th ­ ese sources help us discern perceptions of rank among travelers and the populations they encountered, and thus offer clues to assumed social ­orders and hierarchies. You might ask students to read one or more of ­these accounts (or another of the many Hajj narratives) with guiding questions: Who ­were the travelers?12 What was their route to Mecca and what means of conveyance did they rely on? What borders and empires did they cross? What ­were the challenges they faced in their journey? Whom did they encounter? How did they perceive and relate to other Muslims? How did trade and commerce shape their journey? What aspects of the pilgrimage does their narrative emphasize? What does it leave out? Did w ­ omen experience pil13 grimage differently than men? (Student analy­sis and research could also be part of the digital mapping assignment explained in chapter 10.) If reading more than one account, students might also recognize some common tropes of Hajj accounts. In such an assignment, you may have other aspects that you wish to draw attention to, as you help students consider the Hajj in historical perspective. Hajj histories of the Indian Ocean also intersect with histories of infectious disease (see chapter 8). Before airplanes, pilgrims plied the Indian Ocean from around the world to converge on the Red Sea port of Jeddah. 63

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During the nineteenth ­century, for instance, pilgrims on the way to and from Jeddah frequently suffered from and spread cholera, extending the reach of the global pandemics. During this time much of the Indian Ocean World was u­ nder colonial rule, and the spread of disease was one of the reasons that imperial rulers wished to understand and control the Hajj. Pilgrimage came ­under the surveillance and supervision of colonial actors in attempts to regulate it and rationalize it. The Dutch orientalist and Muslim convert Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje’s pilgrimage in 1885 led to a published account that helped E ­ uropeans understand the Hajj, and his published photo­graphs of the p­ eople he encountered in Mecca offer excellent portraits of the extent and variety of pilgrims gathered from far-­flung locales.14 ­European colonial powers saw controlling Mecca as an impor­tant step to regional security, imperial control, and their legitimacy with Muslim subjects. The colonial aspects of Hajj management include so many tantalizing world history stories. For instance, when the British worried about the safety and transport of Hajjis ­after a pilgrimage ship found­ered and nearly sank, officials called on travel agent Thomas Cook in 1886 to ­organize the Hajj from India. Machinations during the First World War to control the Hijaz helped create the postwar map of the ­Middle East and many of the con­temporary ­political alignments. In 1920, when Winston Churchill noted about the British Empire, “We are the greatest Mohammedan power in the world. It is our duty . . . ​to study policies which are in harmony with Mohammedan feeling,” he echoed a sentiment that British officials had been articulating for ­decades.15

Diasporas The concept of trade diasporas is central to world history b­ ecause it provides a notion of movement and interactivity that undercuts and complements the state-­centered versions of history that world history tends to distrust. In 1984, Philip Curtin, Africanist and world historian, described dozens of trade diasporas, drawing extensively on Indian Ocean communities.16 Scholars who have sought to refine Curtin’s ideas have focused on the Indian Ocean as well. Rather than seeing diaspora as a permanent 64

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dispersal, for instance, studies of Sindi merchants from South Asia show a pattern of circulation.17 With reference to Armenian merchants, Sebouh Aslanian has argued they should be considered not a trade diaspora but a “circulation society.” They arrayed themselves around the Indian Ocean (and beyond), maintaining a headquarters in a suburb of Isfahan, Persia, and their movements of p­ eople, goods, and information catalyzed a ­dynamic that allowed the far-­flung community to remain eco­nom­ically and culturally distinct.18 Hadrami Arabs, originally from the Hadhramaut region of southern Yemen, are another characteristic diaspora of the Indian Ocean, and their members settled from eastern Africa to South India to Southeast Asia from the early modern period, with some rising to prominence as scholars, rulers, and businessmen. To understand the constitution and per­sis­tence of ­these vast diaspora ties, Engseng Ho has shown the complex meanings that elite families from south Arabia have attached to genealogies. ­These documents became meaning-­making devices in their own right and applied order within the diaspora, mediating claims of belonging even as Hadrami men married local wives. The offspring of t­ hese marriages—­Ho calls them “cosmopolitan creoles”—­asserted their connections to the Hadramaut and to their places of birth. (See chapter 1 for the phenomenon of temporary wives and concubinage.) As such, the study of diasporas like the Hadrami are useful ­because they interweave and exist across empires, revealing the strengths and weaknesses of t­ hese historic formations. The introduction of passports by the Dutch in their early twentieth-­century Southeast Asian colony, for instance, highlighted the ways that ­people belonged to both empires and diasporas, and the new forms of documentation severed and reconfigured diaspora relations for nonelite Hadramis while the sayyids—­ those who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad—­more readily maintained both identities.19 In Southeast Asia, the Hadramis of the western Indian Ocean overlapped with two impor­tant groups of mobile ­people from the eastern edge of the Indian Ocean: the Malays and the Chinese. Malays ­were widely acknowledged as outstanding seamen and sea nomads, in many re­spects the quin­tes­sen­tial “­people on the move,” so it is not surprising that they ­were engaged in trade from a very early period. 65

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Malay sailors prob­ably dominated the maritime settlement of Madagascar, where ge­ne­tic research indicates that Austronesian w ­ omen w ­ ere part of the ­process, while Malays ­were undoubtedly among the motley sea pirates who came to serve as the armed maritime forces of the Srivijaya Empire (circa 670–1025). Malay shipping also dominated the early centuries of commercial connections to southern China; as historian Derek Heng writes, “By the seventh c­ entury, Malay traders had established a significant presence at the port of Guangzhou.”20 It is worth noting, however, that this critical port of trade also ­housed a large mixed Persian and Arab community of merchants u­ ntil they ­were wiped out in 873 by a rebel Chinese force. Nevertheless, Malay traders retained a position of prominence in southern Chinese ports into the twelfth c­ entury, ­after which time Chinese merchants and shipping superseded Malays in this commercial cir­cuit. Yet even following Chinese domination of this commerce, Malay traders still controlled the regional spice trade that attracted Chinese merchants to insular Southeast Asia. By the late fifteenth ­century, when Melaka was the dominant emporium in the eastern Indian Ocean, a Malay nakhoda developed a Malay code of maritime laws (the Undang-­undang Laut) that governed shipboard be­hav­ior and even took p­ recedence over Islamic law at times. One fascinating feature of this code is how it reflects the regular presence of w ­ omen on board Malay trading vessels, in sharp contrast to the ships of other p­ eoples.21 Historian Anthony Reid observes that a­ fter the fall of Melaka to the Portuguese in 1511, with “their international connections and mobility” Malay Muslim merchants scattered across the islands of Southeast Asia to become the dominant commercial minority.22 When the voc forged its imperial Indian Ocean network in the seventeenth ­century (see chapter 7), it initiated a system of ­free and forced migration linking its centers in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and South Africa.23 One result of this ­process was the emergence of a settlement of so-­called Cape Malays at Cape Town. A dif­f er­ent feature of Malay migration history also dates initially to the Dutch period when certain Malays w ­ ere recruited into the colonial army and served in campaigns against the Portuguese in Ceylon and on the Malabar coast. For t­ hese men and their families, military s­ ervice became both a way of life and a form of community identifi66

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cation. Accordingly, when the British seized Ceylon in 1796, many Malay soldiers signed up for the British colonial army. Their descendants now number some fifty thousand persons in Sri Lanka. It should come as no surprise, then, that “the stories of the Sri Lankan Malays are ones of circulations and cir­cuits, flows, and mobility.”24 As we have just noted, in the eastern Indian Ocean and in the islands of Southeast Asia, Chinese mobility ­shaped politics and the economy of the region. The termination of the fifteenth-­century Ming voyages into the Indian Ocean led to a period of official withdrawal from the region and a formal ban on Chinese emigration and maritime trade to Southeast Asia from the 1470s to 1567. Yet this did not stop traders from Fujian in southeastern China who established trade networks ser­viced by their large junks, some of which could carry three hundred passengers.25 Chinese immigration expanded into Southeast Asia in the early modern period, and only increased with the growing ­European presence in the region. Some of ­these ­were merchants and traders who came to dominate the retail trade in Southeast Asia; o­ thers ­were laborers bound for tin mines in Malaysia and Chinese-­owned plantations near Singapore.26 The most impor­tant crop was opium and the dominant economic activity the opium trade (see chapter 4). Vast numbers of Chinese contract laborers arrived to work on opium farms that had been established in the eigh­teenth ­century to compete with British Indian opium. A ­ fter the First Opium War (1839–42) and the imposition of “­free trade” on China, the opium economy expanded in Southeast Asia and drew even greater number of workers. Indeed, it was locally born Chinese in Singapore and the surroundings Straits Settlements that led and benefited from the opium farming push of the nineteenth c­ entury. Singapore thus became the center of the Chinese l­ abor market in Southeast Asia and the primary Chinese commercial center.27 While t­ hese groups have been colloquially and collectively called “overseas Chinese,” historical scholarship has worked to differentiate them within the countries and regions where they settled and in relation to mainland China. In addition to Southeast Asia, Chinese laborers and petty merchants also settled in the Mascarene Islands, Madagascar, Mozambique, and South Africa. Many in Southeast Asia ­were called Nayang 67

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Chinese, or the Chinese of the Southern Ocean. In Singapore, the Straits, and Batavia, locally born Chinese ­were known as Peranakans. During the nineteenth ­century, most of the Peranakans ­were of mixed descent, spoke Batavian Chinese-­Malay, and had significantly ­adopted many ele­ments of Indonesian culture. As Susan Abeyasekere observes, “It was always the ­women who set the tone of the mestizo culture.”28 But to call them “overseas Chinese” is incorrect, as Wang Gungwu, the foremost authority on this group, has suggested. The term that came into use in the late nineteenth ­century, huáqiáo, should be translated as “Chinese sojourner,” he suggests. This term was first used by the Qing government in the 1890s to reconnect ­these p­ eople of Chinese descent to China, and this reconciliation and reclamation played an influential role in the Chinese republican period.29 Thus, like the term Non-­resident Indian that the Indian government has used to claim diasporic Indians, huáqiáo makes a claim that ­these diasporic Chinese belong to the Chinese nation.30 Like many other diasporas, the postcolonial period created new challenges for Chinese and Chinese-­descended p­ eople in the ­independent nations of Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, for instance, ­after a failed coup in 1965, a wave of vio­lence that ostensibly targeted Communists and killed hundreds of thousands also resulted in the deaths of many Chinese p­ eople and the looting and destruction of their property.31 The New Order government that came to power blamed China for supporting the coup and cut off relations with Beijing and treated Indonesia Chinese harshly, banning Chinese schools and cultural observances.32 This policy launched a systematic, decades-­long attempt by the government to stigmatize Chinese Indonesians and frame a “Chinese prob­lem.” In this context Chinese business o­ wners and property ­were targeted once again in the economic crisis the gripped Indonesia in 1997–98. Thus, the ethnic Chinese populations of Southeast Asia help us see the dynamics of migration as they changed across several eras; the intertwining of multiethnic socie­ties and colonialism; how mi­grants ­were claimed by leaders in China; and how postcolonial politics made Chinese sojourners vulnerable.

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The Indian Ocean in world history has also been ­shaped by the movements of p­ eople from the subcontinent of India. The Hindu taboo of kala pani (black sea) suggested that p­ eople who crossed the ocean would lose varna (caste) status, although this ban on sea travel was never as prohibitive as some have thought.33 The prohibition is said to have l­ imited the mobility of Indians, but in fact, Hindu and Muslim traders from South Asia traversed wide areas of the Indian Ocean. The history and legacies of this mobility are still enacted in the postcolonial states of the Indian Ocean World, and the p­ rocess of how this came into being deserves more attention. Indian movement to eastern and southern Africa provides a clear example. Building on long-­extant trading networks and connections across the early modern Portuguese Empire, Indian mobility and settlement in eastern Africa has occurred from at least the late eigh­teenth c­ entury, with merchants and traders attracted to commerce on the East African coast.34 With the commercial expansion of East Africa in the nineteenth c­ entury some Indians became extraordinarily wealthy and not only financed Arab and African ivory caravans to the African interior, but also provided the capital to help keep ­European and American merchants afloat in the Zanzibar market.35 Yet to see only ­these elite and extremely successful individuals is to miss petty traders, pawnbrokers, and craftsmen who also made their way to the African coast. Thus, while ­there w ­ ere Indian mi­grants on the move to East Africa before the ­European partition of Africa, it was the colonial presence that intensified ­these movements and broadened the categories of ­people who took part. To build the railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, for instance, the British officials hired twenty-­nine thousand Indian contract laborers from India on three-­year contracts. While most of t­ hese so-­called coolies returned to India ­after their contracts expired, some remained in upcountry outposts along the new rail line.36 The early colonial governments in both British East Africa and German East Africa encouraged Indian emigration and depended on a large number of Indians, from elite merchants to h ­ umble clerks. Alidina Visram opened shops along the railway and through Uganda, and the colonial state relied on

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his firm’s ability to cash checks and give credit to colonial officers to support the fledging state.37 Indeed, Sir Harry Johnston, the British commissioner in Uganda, famously called East Africa “the Amer­i­ca of the Hindu.”38 Yet as t­ hese Indians sought to take part in the intensifying politics of the colonies, British colonialists tried to limit their access to the state. Ali­­ bhai Mulla Jivanjee and his contemporaries in ­Kenya formed the East African Indian Congress in 1914, and the o­ rganization attempted to coordinate with African nationalists to demand greater rights.39 When British East Africa became the Colony of ­Kenya in 1920, Indians ­were shut out by white supremacy, and a special declaration in 1923 said that African interests—­not Indian—­should be foremost in the colonial order. The politics of Indians in East Africa do not simply reflect the efforts of activists in India like Mohandas Gandhi. Recent scholarship has made it abundantly clear that Indian nationalism was fueled by the experiences of Indians overseas. Gandhi’s own sense of rights and imperial citizenship ­were honed during his two ­decades (1893–1914) in South Africa where he saw firsthand the injustices and obvious disparities of colonial rule. His ­legal ­career in Durban focused on the rights and ­legal ­matters of the many Indians in South Africa, including the contract laborers brought to work Natal’s sugarcane plantations. Seeing India and the imperial world from abroad sharpened the sense of diasporic consciousness that contributed to Indian nationalism upon Gandhi’s return.40 At the same time, we need to think beyond the politics of empire and nationalism to recognize that Indian ­women also migrated across the Indian Ocean to South Africa and that their voices enrich our appreciation of the Indian diaspora in South Africa.41 A valuable exercise for your students would be to compare sources for the history of Indian w ­ omen during the period of indenture in Mauritius (see chapter 6) and South Africa. As with the Chinese sojourners in Southeast Asia, postcolonial politics cast diasporic Indians in East Africa in a harsh light. P ­ olitical rhe­toric in ­Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda focused on the outsized economic role of Indians and raised questions about loyalties. Idi Amin’s government, however, took the extreme step of expelling Indians from Uganda in 1973. This crisis highlighted the challenge of belonging that mobile populations have 70

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faced, even for relatively long-­settled groups. In the case of the Ugandan Indians, it was not just that their ­adopted country spurned them. ­Great Britain had passed laws in 1968 and 1971 to make it more difficult for East African Asians (the term employed a­ fter the division of imperial India into India and Pakistan in 1947) holding UK passports to enter the country unrestricted.42 While the histories of Arab, Malay, Chinese, and Indian diasporas in the Indian Ocean have long been a focus, the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean World has been, with a few exceptions, an area that has been all but overlooked u­ ntil the twenty-­first ­century. Demands for l­abor around the Indian Ocean drove the enslavement and forced migration of Africans, and historians are actively engaged in reconstructing the diasporic presence of Africans in the Gulf and Arabia, Iran, the Mascarenes, and continental South Asia.43 ­These include the broad group of siddis, African-­ descended ­people living in South Asia, and a substantial enough population of Africans in Arabia in the nineteenth c­ entury that Charles Doughty described Khaybar as “an African village in the Hejaz.”44 While many of ­these histories are entangled with histories of slavery, historian Pier Larson’s account of the Malagasy diaspora shows the role of both enslaved and ­free Malagasy ­people in sustaining and expanding ­these communities, largely through the use of the Malagasy language, in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth ­century.45 Documentary and visual evidence complement examples of African practices of ­music, dance, religion, and healing in t­ hese locations, and scholars have created documentaries that may help your students connect with ­these topics.46 Mobility and ­people on the move are hallmarks of Indian Ocean World history. This chapter has focused on the time depth of t­ hese movements; the role of pilgrimage as a motor; and the diasporic experiences of Arabs, Chinese, Malays, Indians, and Africans. Highlighting t­ hese movements shows the dynamics of ­these histories and also provides perspective on the populations among whom they lived and the colonies and states that tried to control them.

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4^ Chapter Six 64

Rethinking Slavery

slavery is an impor­tant global theme in world history, and the wide variety of slavery and coerced ­labor in the Indian Ocean underscores the value of approaching this vital topic from an Indian Ocean perspective. This chapter aims to help you and your students reconceptualize slavery as both a historical phenomenon and a human experience. Our starting assumption is that most American students approach this history from a ­limited perspective ­because of what they have learned about racialized plantation slavery in the Atlantic World and the par­tic­u­lar experiences and legacies of slavery in the United States. The Indian Ocean helps us see a more nuanced picture despite the fact that the global history and historiography of slavery have been dominated by the Atlantic narrative. Certainly, one question that underlies this chapter is to ask how Indian Ocean slavery helps us to think about Atlantic slavery. Yet the place of slavery in the Indian Ocean has a much deeper history and a more recent end. Practices of unfree ­labor occurred in a wider variety of forms in the Indian

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Ocean and included ­people of many racial groups. Furthermore, the long denouement of slavery in the Indian Ocean region gave rise to a startlingly complex system of other forms of bonded or coerced l­abor. Therefore, the diversity of systems of unfree ­labor in the Indian Ocean World pre­ sents a panoply of social hierarchies, racial and ethnic identities, forced migrations, and p­ olitical economies that allows us to understand better the nature of slavery writ large.1 An impor­tant strategy for engaging your students in this p­ rocess of discovery is to get them to think about the challenges involved in recovering voices of the enslaved.

Indian Ocean Slaveries ­ ere was not one monolithic form of Indian Ocean slavery. A historical Th approach to the topic allows students to see how specific systems of bondage in specific localities arose at specific times and contributed to a diverse set of practices that we can consider ­under the rubric of Indian Ocean slavery.2 Many students ­will come to this topic with Atlantic, plantation-­ based chattel slavery of Africans as their touchstone. One starting point is to ask students what their ideas about slavery are. Can they illustrate their ideas with specific examples? To think more clearly about the Indian Ocean arena, let us put aside three fundamental assumptions that students might bring to the discussion. First, the term slavery encompasses much more than chattel slavery and includes other forms of bonded, coerced, and unfree ­labor. We need to think of slavery much more broadly. Second, systems of unfree ­labor in the Indian Ocean ­were not uniformly race-­based. We need to look at f­ actors beyond race for both enslaved and slave-­owning ­people to appreciate the diversity of practices. More broadly, we should encourage students to reflect on ways in which Indian Ocean slavery complicates our notions of race. An impor­tant source from the Dutch East India Com­pany Court of Justice at Cochin, in Malabar, is the collection of original testimonies in Dutch and ­English by a team of Dutch historians that provide an opening to posing such questions.3 Third, slavery was not the cornerstone of an overarching Indian Ocean economy. While unfree ­labor existed in many social, cultural, and economic structures, ­there was not one monolithic form of “Indian Ocean slavery.” Unlike the primacy of 74

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slavery in the enduring, deeply rooted Tropical Atlantic Plantation Complex that Philip Curtin described, plantation-­based economies and slave-­based extractive industries in the Indian Ocean emerged at specific times, such as the nineteenth c­ entury, in response to broad economic forces.4 Slavery in the Indian Ocean was also part of symbolic and non-­economic practices. An example from an early modern E ­ uropean account of “slavery” in Southeast Asia makes it clear that Indian Ocean slavery did not fit the categories of the Atlantic. Captain William Dampier, who had managed a sugar plantation in Jamaica and served as a pirate in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, was bewildered when he reached Aceh in Southeast Asia, in 1688. He was attuned to slavery, but what he saw undercut his assumptions. Dampier noted that one man “had no less than 1000 Slaves, some of whom ­were topping Merchants, and had many Slaves ­under them.” He tried to puzzle it out: “And even t­ hese, tho’ they are Slaves to Slaves, yet have their Slaves also; neither can a stranger easily know who is a Slave and who not among them: for they are all, in a manner, Slaves to one another.” He saw that ­people who ­were “slaves” ­were merchants, market-­keepers, tradesmen, craftsmen, and fishers. They lived in­de­pen­dently from their “masters,” though t­ hese “masters” lent them money and might receive a share of their profits.5 What he saw in Aceh highlights the nonracialized slave systems of the Indian Ocean—­Dampier ­couldn’t easily tell who was enslaved and who was not—­and also points to a complex system of patronage and clientship grounded in levels of ­dependency, reciprocity, and protection that touched—­but did not define—­the local economy. With this example in mind, you might point your students to a variety of primary sources on Indian Ocean slavery to investigate other examples to compare with Dampier’s observations.6 The diversity of practices related to slavery, bondage, and unfree ­labor across the Indian Ocean region makes it difficult to pin down a single definition. Indeed, one of the challenges in the field is defining slavery in a way other than in opposition to the narrow Atlantic model. In trying to define slavery-­related practices in South Asia, Richard Eaton described slavery as “the condition of the uprooted outsiders, impoverished insiders—or the descendants of e­ ither—­serving persons or institutions on which they are 75

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wholly dependent.”7 This is a useful starting point, though as the example from Aceh shows clearly, the enslaved ­people ­were not wholly dependent, and the degrees of autonomy that enslaved p­ eople experienced is one key aspect of understanding systems of slavery in the region. This is certainly more productive than a ­simple dichotomy of ­free versus enslaved. Indeed, it’s perhaps more useful to consider networks and webs with degrees of dependence. Likewise, Eaton’s definition does not mention gender, but females ­were the largest proportion of enslaved ­people traded in the Indian Ocean.8 Thus, let us be aware of the broad definition for understanding slavery across the region and look more closely at misconceptions and more localized practices. Essentialized categories of race and religion have obscured the study of unfree ­labor in the Indian Ocean, where slavery was not explic­itly racialized. Even if we take racial categories as fixed, slavery occurred within racial categories: Africans enslaved Africans and Indians enslaved Indians. For one, the racial component in t­ hese situations was not the driving ele­ment, and an analytical view brings to light social and cultural differences as perceived by ­people within ­these racial groups. Frequently, enslaved ­people ­were outsiders, but in the Indian Ocean, race was not the central aspect of slavery or unfree l­abor. Historians have tended to overemphasize the African presence in slavery, thus playing to a racialized narrative.9 Africans certainly ­were enslaved in ­great numbers in the Indian Ocean arena, yet if we focus solely on the African diaspora in tracing slavery along the ocean’s shore, we miss the coercion of Baluchis, Indians, Southeast Asians, and Chinese in a variety of contexts.10 Equally, an e­ arlier tendency to focus on Africa as a source of enslaved ­labor for the Indian Ocean makes it harder to see other pro­cesses and interactions that connected that continent and the Indian Ocean.11 We must also avoid ­simple characterizations about ­those who took part in the enslavement and trafficking of p­ eople in the region. We ­can’t put stock in older labels like “the Arab Slave Trade” and “Islamic slavery.” Th ­ ese are insufficiently analytical (and overly essentialized) for world historical purposes. The presence of slaves in Arabia, the role of Arabs in the nineteenth-­century trade, and the broader role of Islam in the Indian Ocean region has tempted some commentators to see 76

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slavery through ­these narrow lenses. Th ­ ese labels spring, in part, from late nineteenth-­century tropes that emerged at the very moment that E ­ uropean efforts at abolition and imperialism in the region unfolded. ­These labels also serve to obscure the vital roles that ­Europeans played in the expansion of slavery in the Indian Ocean region from the sixteenth ­century onward. While recent scholarship has underscored how embedded slavery and forms of unfree l­abor w ­ ere in Indian Ocean—­and especially Southeast Asian—­socie­ties before colonialism, and that slave trading was more widespread than scholars have assumed, it is also clear that the East India companies that ­were established by ­European nations depended on slavery across the Indian Ocean region.12 In chapter 4, we noted the transformation in spice production in the Malukus from peasant to slave ­labor that the Dutch effected in the seventeenth ­century. When the French occupied the Mascarene Islands from the late seventeenth ­century, they experimented with dif­f er­ent cash crops, fi­nally focusing on coffee in Ré­union and sugar in Mauritius. Drawing on their experience in the C ­ aribbean, slave ­labor was imported from Madagascar and East Africa to clear the land for plantation production. While some have been tempted to see slavery in the Indian Ocean as part of an Arab or Islamic practice with essentialist cultural roots, scholars have shown time and again that slavery as a l­abor system was linked to specific historical conditions. Even if we look at the rise of plantation agriculture in the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth c­ entury, we see the emergence of a new form of slavery that was distinct from older practices of patron-­client servitude. In East Africa, the advent of sugar, grain, and clove plantations on the coast led slave ­owners to try to force enslaved ­people who had been part of a patron-­client system into a form of plantation slavery in which they had fewer rights.13 A new economic system that responded to global demands for East African products depended on servile l­abor and meant that two systems of slavery existed side by side. We can see this clearly in the w ­ ill of Said bin Sultan, the Omani ruler whose realm encompassed Baluchistan, parts of the Gulf, eastern Arabia, and the Swahili coast. When he wrote his w ­ ill in 1850 during the rise of plantation agriculture, t­ hese two systems of slavery w ­ ere in effect. 77

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Said bin Sultan’s w ­ ill freed most of his h ­ ouse­hold slaves, a diverse group from many corners of the Indian Ocean and beyond, but did not manumit his agricultural slaves.14 One way for students to confront this history is to read some of the statements by enslaved persons who w ­ ere “liberated” by British antislavery naval patrols in the nineteenth c­ entury, or by the life histories and memories of slavery that date to this era.15 The availability of the official British anti-­slave-­trade documentation (Foreign Office 84 series) online is another rich source that students can explore for themselves.16 In other parts of the region, slavery has waxed and waned in relation to other ­factors. In both the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, slave ­labor on date plantations and pearling boats increased with the global demand for ­these regional products in the nineteenth c­ entury. When, during the early twentieth ­century, the advent of date farming in California and of cultured pearls in Japan undercut Arabian markets, slavery in Arabia dwindled. In fact, the economic decline of slavery in the region highlighted the social aspects. During the G ­ reat Depression, slave o­ wners ­were ­eager to divest themselves of obligations to their dependents, so they freed their bonded laborers. The formerly enslaved ­people, however, used their manumission papers to make claims on their former masters’ families for support. Students can acquire a more personal appreciation of the conditions of Gulf slavery by reading and analyzing published accounts of ­these manumission papers for themselves.17 ­These accounts also lend themselves to the biography-­writing assignment detailed in chapter 10.

Slavery as ­Process Seeing slavery solely as an economic institution keeps us from understanding the effects slavery and slave systems have on society. Enslaved ­people lived within socie­ties and ­were vital to non-­economic spheres as well. The degree to which ­house­holds ­were connected to the formal economy is a ­matter of scholarly debate, but enslaved ­people ­were intimately linked to domestic production and reproduction in socie­ties around the Indian Ocean. ­Women ­were concubines in ­house­holds across a broad geographic and socioeconomic range. Within Islamic socie­ties, the number of wives that a man could take was ­limited, but the number of concubines was 78

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theoretically unlimited. The status of t­ hese ­women was ambiguous and open to negotiation within the ­house­hold. Beyond the ­house­hold, owning slaves also had social purposes. Slave owner­ship was a form of con­spic­u­ous consumption in some socie­ties, including the Portuguese in India, and the ways that ­owners named, dressed, and showed off enslaved ­people reflected their values. Such practices did not end when slavery ended. E ­ uropean missionaries and colonial officials who oversaw pro­cesses of freeing slaves also gave ­these ex-­slaves names, dressed them in par­tic­u­lar ways, and used their public images to show off their own proj­ects.18 Rather than seeing slavery solely as an economic institution, it is also useful to view it as a social ­process. In many Indian Ocean socie­ties, slavery has served as a means of assimilation, a mechanism to incorporate outsiders. How dif­fer­ent to the conception of chattel slavery in the Atlantic World ­will this seem to your students? In the Indian Ocean slavery was critical in shaping both social and economic pro­cesses and the aspects of lived experience in which they overlapped. We certainly do not wish to reduce the economic and social aspects of slavery to a dichotomy, but we emphasize the ­process ­here to underscore the parts of unfreedom that may be more surprising for American students. Following slavery as a ­process, from enslavement to pos­si­ble manumission and beyond, illuminates many other aspects of the social, ­political, and economic aspects of a given society. During his life Malik Ambar (circa 1548–1626) passed into and out of the status of slavery, crossing the Indian Ocean and through cultural and social bound­aries along the way. He was born and captured into slavery in the Horn of Africa, traded to Arabia, and educated in Baghdad, converting to Islam in the ­process. He was one of thousands of enslaved African military men brought to India’s Deccan Plateau, and his master was another enslaved Abyssinian, Mirak Babir / Chengiz Khan. Khan ­rose to be the prime minister of Ahmadnagar Sultanate and trained Malik Ambar in the ways of court. Malik Ambar emerged as a successful military leader, regent, and, eventually, de facto ruler of Ahmadnagar in the years following his master’s death. As was the practice of the day, Ambar became ­free on his master’s death. Yet Khan’s wife also formally manumitted Malik Ambar, perhaps to express her gratitude for his ­service to her husband. 79

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Subsequently, Ambar led a mercenary army before returning to Ahmadnagar, where he is best known for defending the Deccan kingdoms against Mughal expansion in the early seventeenth c­ entury.19 Malik Ambar’s spatial and social mobility show how the ­process of enslavement, incorporation, and manumission played out in the early modern Indian Ocean and its hinterlands. He was also part of a longer history of slave soldiers in Indian Ocean socie­ties. Many of ­these “Habshi” or “Sidi” soldiers from East Africa and the Horn arrived in India as enslaved soldiers but became incorporated into society as military leaders, high-status rulers, and other officials, both before and ­after the Mughal period. Students can read more about ­these African elites and their legacies in a richly illustrated collection of essays coedited by Kenneth X. Robbins and John McLeod.20 But students should also be aware that not all Habshis r­ ose to such heights. They would do well to read the story of Gabriel, an Ethiopian Jew who converted to Islam, then to Chris­tian­ity, and, not surprisingly, fell afoul of the Inquisition in late sixteenth-­century Goa.21 What does his tale do to the heroic concept of African military and ­political prowess in seventeenth-­century India? Another contrasting example is the movement of African Islamic scholars around the western Indian Ocean during the late medieval period. The history of ­these pious men is underresearched, but ­there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that t­ here existed other ave­nues of achievement, both in freedom and slavery, for such remarkable individuals to make their mark.22 A broad definition of slavery includes the practice of debt bondage and pawning, in which individuals ­were placed ­under the control of another for the sake of debt or credit. In theory, pawning was temporary, but many pawned c­ hildren ­were unredeemed. ­Children could become a ­family’s asset of last resort, and parents pledged or pawned their ­children when they faced hardships, such as famine. This was a way of getting credit and also of potentially rescuing c­ hildren from dire circumstances. In the expanding commercial world of East Africa in the early 1860s, for example, Indian merchants—­Banians, Khojas, and Bohoras—­who lived on the mainland coast accepted young ­children as payment for the trade goods they supplied.23 Unscrupulous coastal merchants also manipulated families’ debts in order to secure c­ hildren as pawns that could then be trafficked into 80

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slavery or servitude.24 In the Sulu Zone of Southeast Asia, debt bondage offered a way out of slavery. New “masters” paid for emancipation, but the “freed” person worked for them to pay off the debt.25 As Malik Ambar’s example shows, being attentive to how practices of slavery come to an end is vital to understanding how social systems function. Practices of manumission allowed enslaved p­ eople to leave the status of slavery and take up other roles in society. Islamic manumission was governed by a set of rules and practices that created bonds between the formerly enslaved person and their former master. Socie­ties’ internal pro­cesses of manumission ­were frequently invisible to outside observers. As noted above, the E ­ uropean colonial presence in the Indian Ocean often justified itself through attempts to abolish slavery. Th ­ ese moves, however, occurred frequently as a series of mild steps that w ­ ere intended to affect the economy as l­ ittle as pos­si­ble. Thus, in plantation socie­ties of the Indian Ocean, just as they had in the Atlantic World, abolition came with a host of other rules and enforcement, like vagrancy laws, that ­were meant to keep formerly enslaved ­people out of towns and near agricultural ­labor. In places where ­there was an external imposition of abolition rather than internal pro­cesses of manumission, we see a marked difference with regard to assimilation of formerly enslaved p­ eople. Examples of individuals in the Indian Ocean region resisting manumission, such as in Imperial Madagascar or in the Aden Protectorate, highlight the inapplicability of a f­ ree versus slave dichotomy and the existence of traditional rights for enslaved p­ eople that manumission would force them to give up.26 States that took steps to end slavery frequently did not do enough to assure the postslavery well-being of ­those who ­were freed. A vivid example of how manumission did not deliver “freedom” to an individual and her descendants is historian Sue Peabody’s reconstruction of titled Madeleine’s ­Children.27 A dif­f er­ent Mascarene example for students to ponder is the story of the young Edmond Albius, who in 1841 discovered the technique for pollinating vanilla on Ré­ union while still enslaved yet fell into penury ­after emancipation in 1848.28 The threat of reenslavement loomed for some, especially in the Gulf, where manumitted ­people ­were reenslaved up to the mid-­twentieth ­century.29 The carry-on effects of abolition ­were also widely felt: Richard Allen argues 81

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that the attempts to abolish the slave trade in the Indian Ocean fostered new forms of coerced ­labor. Indeed, the ­European role in the trade of captive ­people and attempts to suppress this trade created “an increasingly interconnected global movement of slave, convict, and indentured l­ abor.”30

Indentured, Convict, and Bonded ­Labor The Indian Ocean was also a laboratory of experimentation for other forms of coerced l­abor, especially indentured servitude and bonded l­abor. The plantation islands of the southwest Indian Ocean w ­ ere the center of this. Mauritius’s early attempt to use indentured l­ abor as a replacement of slave ­labor resulted in more than twenty-­five thousand Indians arriving ­there in the late 1810s. This was two ­decades before similar indentured Indians reached the ­Caribbean.31 On the sugar plantations of Mauritius and Ré­ union, indentured servitude began before the end of slavery but jumped afterward.32 Students can investigate original documents about the indenture system to Mauritius in several sources, and read about the experiences of Indian men and w ­ omen in several collections of mi­grant voices.33 Both ­earlier and parallel to the development of this novel source of bonded ­labor was the transportation of convicts across the Indian Ocean. The voc transferred a number of elite prisoners from Batavia to Cape Town in the eigh­teenth ­century, while the eic sent convicts to Mauritius and other British possessions in the Indian Ocean, while the home government transported convicts most famously to Australia. Following the lives of ­these individuals can be an eye-­opening experience for students to grasp the ways in which transportation resembled slavery and how it affected both the person enslaved and their ­family.34 While some ­Europeans may have decried slavery and used abolition as a justification for intervention in the Indian Ocean, E ­ uropeans also participated in and perpetuated practices of slavery and engagement of unfree l­abor. In order to supply the l­abor needs for the plantation economies of the French Indian Ocean islands ­after abolition in 1848, for example, French merchants hired p­ eople who w ­ ere considered “­free laborers” from East African ports, but their freedom was a ­convenient fiction. The Africans in ­these situations had been captured into slavery and 82

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then manumitted so they could be signed into ­labor contracts. This “insincere manumission” highlights overlapping l­ egal regimes and the role of ­Europeans and their agents in perpetuating slavery and unfree l­abor.35 In the aftermath of nineteenth-­century ­European efforts to abolish slavery in the Indian Ocean, a new set of practices arose to coerce and transport laborers within the broader region. This “new system of slavery” resulted in more than 2.2 million ­people from Africa, China, India, Japan, Madagascar, and Southeast Asia moving as indentured or contracted laborers.36 Hundreds of thousands of Indians, both men and w ­ omen, worked in the tea plantations of Sri Lanka, harvested rice in Myanmar, labored in rubber plantations in Malaysia, and cut sugarcane in South Africa. A parallel movement transported Chinese indentured “coolies” and urban laborers through Singapore to peninsular Southeast Asia and island Southeast Asia, where they worked in agriculture and mining. Some Chinese ­were recruited right across the Indian Ocean to the Mascarenes and South Africa. The per­sis­tence and geographic scope of Indian Ocean systems of indenture lasted well into the twentieth ­century and only ended in Mauritius and South Africa in the 1920s. The indenture system also reached far beyond the Indian Ocean, with indentured Indian laborers sent to plantations in the ­Caribbean and some in the Pacific in such numbers as to alter the demographics of their new socie­ties.37

Con­temporary Variations The long history of slavery and unfree ­labor in the Indian Ocean region begins well before the Common Era, and its many legacies color the pre­ sent. For example, the Chinese system of Mui tsai, meaning “­little ­sister,” in which the ­daughters of poor families ­were sold when young to work for rich families or as prostitutes, dates as far back as the sixteenth ­century. The system persisted, however, well into the twentieth c­ entury, as is stunningly documented in the moving autobiography of Janet Lim, who was sold into slavery in Singapore in the early 1930s.38 More recently, the l­ abor systems of the oil economies of the Gulf pre­sent continuities with older forms for contracted ­labor in the Indian Ocean. Deportable noncitizens make up most of the laborers in the region. The anticipation of the 2022 83

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World Cup in Qatar brought attention to l­ abor practices in the region in relation to building stadiums. This has highlighted the poor working and living conditions for the Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Sri Lankan workers charged with constructing the infrastructure for the World Cup. In 2015, Qatar had 1.5 million mi­grant workers, both men and ­women, who ­were employed ­under the kafala system. Employers sponsor mi­grant workers to come to Qatar, but the workers require their employers’ permission to change jobs or leave the country, and many are indebted to the ­labor recruiting agents who helped them secure the contracts, ­whether as day laborers or domestic workers.39 One way to gain a more personal perspective on this situation is to direct students to the outstanding ethnography of mi­grant lives in the Gulf by anthropologist Pardis Mahdavi, who helps us see the uneasy bound­aries between mi­grants, tourists, and trafficked victims.40 Meanwhile, the clandestine sex work industry in the United Arab Emirates is a testament to continued trafficking of ­women and girls from the peripheries of the Indian Ocean World.41 ­These recent instances of coerced ­labor occur alongside new acknowl­edgments of the past. The Bin Jelmood ­House Museum in Doha uses the former ­house of a pearl merchant (and slave ­owner) to tell the story of slavery in Qatar, the Gulf, and the Indian Ocean regions up to the pre­sent, including concerns about mi­grant ­labor.42 ­These experiences ­were not unique to the Gulf. An in­ter­est­ing exercise might be for you to ask students to conceptualize their own museum of Indian Ocean slavery and to provide it with relevant examples drawn from their assigned reading and individual research. This could be done as a digital history proj­ect, as explained in chapter 10. Much of this history is still to be written. If your students feel uncertain about the contours of Indian Ocean slavery, assure them that this history is an evolving field and that t­ here are still many promising areas of new research. Enslaved Africans have received the most attention, but scholars are beginning to study non-­African bonded ­people to understand their experiences in the Indian Ocean world. Likewise, systems of slavery controlled by Muslims have been the focus of much scholarly work, but a recent generation of historians have illuminated the ­European slave trade in the Indian Ocean. We still have much to learn about indigenous and 84

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non-­Muslim systems of slavery in the region.43 Even with ­these outstanding questions and promising ave­nues for new research, we hope that it is clear how the complexity, variety, and reach of slavery and related systems in the Indian Ocean illuminates the value of a world historical approach to the topic. Fi­nally, we think it salutary to return to the impor­tant question for your students to think beyond the Atlantic World by using what they have learned about the va­ri­e­ties and complexities of slavery in the Indian Ocean region to see Atlantic slavery as a historically specific phenomenon, rather than as a universal paradigm.

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4^ Chapter Seven 64

Empire and Its Aftermath

the indian ocean has often been portrayed as a world region ­free from imperial ambitions before the arrival of the Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth ­century. Nothing could be further from the truth. As early as Alexander the G ­ reat’s invasion of India in the fourth c­ entury bce , dif­f er­ent Mediterranean powers sought a presence in the northwest Indian Ocean region, particularly in the Red Sea and in the Gulf. To the east, at vari­ous times in its long history Imperial China similarly exercised its power and influence to secure tribute and commercial advantage in Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, although none of the imperial ventures resulted in the creation of permanent, territorial occupation or colonial settlement, they bear witness to p­ olitical and economic ambitions of major states well before Vasco da Gama entered Indian Ocean ­waters in late 1497. All this changed with the intrusion of the Portuguese and, following in their wake, the other major Indian Ocean ­European imperial powers—­Dutch, E ­ nglish, and French, as well as latecomer Italy. Asian imperial powers also operated

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in this region, with the Ottoman Empire in the Red Sea and Japan in Southeast Asia. Accordingly, the broader theme of empire and its aftermath offers your students an impor­tant link to a set of more familiar themes in world history.

Indian Ocean Imperialisms Perhaps the first example of imperial ambitions in the Indian Ocean concerns that exercised by the maritime empire of Srivijaya, the roots of which date to 670 ce (see chapter 5). Strategically located in southeast Sumatra, it sat between the two narrow passages between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea—­the Strait of Melaka and the Sunda Strait. Once it had gained control of the coastal ports on both sides of the Melaka Strait, Srivijaya was able to dominate commerce across the region and built its ­political control on the basis of this mono­poly. By the eighth ­century, Imperial China reached out to Srivijaya by sending missions to its capital at Palembang, while the Srivijayans reciprocated by dispatching diplomatic missions to Guangzhou. Eventually, rival entities in Java that sought control over the spice trade, Song China’s desire for more direct access to Southeast Asian commodities, and competition in the Bay of Bengal from the south Indian Chola Kingdom combined to undermine Srivijaya’s imperial domination. In 1025 Chola attacked Srivijaya’s Strait of Melaka ports and ended its domination of maritime trade, although Srivijaya remained an impor­tant regional player for another two centuries. The rise of Melaka u­ nder a dissident Malay prince named Paramesvara at the end of the ­fourteenth ­century enabled this river port on the Malay Peninsula to become the most impor­tant entrepôt of the eastern Indian Ocean in the fifteenth ­century. As such, it attracted the cupidity of the Portuguese, who attacked and subdued it in 1511. Although the Gujarati port of Cambay was the western Indian Ocean parallel to Melaka in the fifteenth ­century, ­there was no regional equivalent to Srivijaya in ­those w ­ aters.1 During the ­decades ­after Chola’s dismemberment of Srivijaya’s watery empire, Imperial China u­ nder both the Song and Yuan dynasties began to flex its muscles eco­nom­ically and diplomatically in Southeast Asia. The culmination of this push came ­after the Ming dynasty came to power in 88

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1368. The most notable show of Chinese force and gunboat diplomacy occurred in the fifteenth c­ entury in the seven famous maritime expeditions undertaken by the Ming dynasty between 1405 and 1433 that w ­ ere commanded by Admiral Zheng He (see chapter 1). The Ming fleets assembled u­ nder Zheng He’s command w ­ ere arguably larger than any o­ thers previously witnessed on the Indian Ocean. Th ­ ese voyages, which reached as far as East Africa, combined diplomatic gift-­giving, some polite saber-­ rattling, and at least one major armed confrontation with a Chinese pirate chieftain based at Palembang. Diplomatic exchanges took place with the rulers of many port cities in India, the Gulf, the Red Sea, and Swahili coast. As historian Tansen Sen suggests, the consequences of the Ming voyages significantly anticipated the E ­ uropean entry into the iow at the end of the ­century.2 In the end, however, ­after the death of Zheng He in 1433 the Ming dynasty abandoned its Indian Ocean outreach, so that when the Portuguese entered the scene, ­there was no regional sea power to challenge its ambitions.

­European Imperialism Although the Portuguese Empire in the Indian Ocean World was dominated by its seaborne character throughout the early modern period, its impact on the ­peoples of the region was not negligible. While Portuguese fleets w ­ ere able to disrupt historic patterns of shipping and trade, they w ­ ere unable to forge a new economic order across the vast region where they intruded. Certainly, where they established their coastal fortresses they succeeded in creating a local footprint, at least for a while. In some cases—­ Mozambique, Goa, Macao—­these endured into the modern period; in ­others—­Mombasa, Oman, Melaka—­these collapsed when forced out, often by a combination of local r­ esistance and external support. During the sixteenth ­century, when Portugal was truly the dominant maritime power in the Indian Ocean, however, what success it experienced depended on collaboration with local and regional trading partners. One consequence of this commercial complementarity was that vari­ous forms of creolized Portuguese became a new lingua franca for Indian Ocean merchants. In the ­process, not only did words enter Portuguese from a variety of Indian 89

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Ocean languages, but they also often traveled from one language into another through the medium of this newly pop­u­lar­ized form of Portuguese. No less did words from Portuguese enter the lexicon of dif­fer­ ent Afro-­Asian languages.3 Another aspect of this local collaboration was intermarriage with ­women in Southeast Asia that led to the emergence of groups like “the black Portuguese” and Topasses, who w ­ ere part of an informal Portuguese empire long ­after formal Portuguese control in the region faded.4 When the Dutch and ­English entered the competition for exploiting the wealth of the Indian Ocean region, they approached the challenge quite differently from the Portuguese, mainly ­because they possessed stronger domestic economic foundations than the weakening Portuguese Crown. The Dutch, in par­tic­u­lar, worked to transform the production of spices in their Indonesian empire, violently suppressing peasant production in the Maluku Islands and, eventually, establishing plantations based on forced ­labor where they could (as seen in chapter 4). The transition to plantation production had long-­term consequences for the agricultural economy of Indonesia, as it did in the French islands of Bourbon (La Ré­union) and Île de France (Mauritius), which are usefully conceived of as C ­ aribbean plantation islands in the wrong ocean. In the British case in India, production was left in peasant hands, although when they established tea production in Assam in the 1820s, they ­organized it on plantation ­labor, as they did in the 1860s in Sri Lanka. Thus, from the first quarter of the nineteenth ­century, plantation ­labor, based first on forced and then on indentured ­labor, came to dominate the colonial economies of large segments of South and Southeast Asia.

Imperial Competition and Conflicts A dif­fer­ent kind of comparative exercise might be to ask students to consider the chronologies of ­European colonial presence in the Indian Ocean World and their consequences. For example, what difference, if any, did it make that the Portuguese w ­ ere a colonial presence in Mozambique from the sixteenth ­century, the Dutch in Indonesia from the seventeenth ­century, the British in India from the mid-­eighteenth ­century, but the 90

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French in Madagascar and Indochina or the British in East Africa and Arabia only from the late nineteenth ­century? Similarly, what difference has it made that France maintains Ré­union and Mayotte as integral parts of France, while Mauritius, which shares a colonial history with Ré­union, is now i­ndependent? Indeed, from a world history perspective, understanding the history of how specific colonial configurations came about is not insignificant. Major issues ­were often solved by war, as in the case of the British takeover of the Cape Colony and Mauritius in the Napoleonic Wars, while Ré­union was returned to France by the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1815. G ­ reat Britain acquired mainland Tanzania in the wake of defeating Imperial Germany in World War I, as Tanganyika became first a League of Nations Mandate and then a United Nations Trust Territory. The peculiar ­legal status of Tanganyika enabled a much dif­fer­ent path t­ oward i­ndependence than its Indian Ocean–­bordering neighbors ­Kenya or Mozambique. Furthermore, the history of colonial treaty-­making reveals clearly how decisions about who got what took place exclusively within a E ­ uropean imperial context, with l­ ittle or no attention whatsoever to Indian Ocean politics. Staying with coastal East Africa, the treaty by which in 1890 ­Great Britain acquired the coastal strip of ­Kenya and German recognition of British suzerainty over Zanzibar in exchange for German Heligoland, in the North Sea, as well as other concessions in southern Africa is especially instructive.5 This foothold on the Swahili coast opened up what eventually became settler-­dominated ­Kenya Colony and the intimate relationship between British India and British East Africa.6 World War I also affected the Indian Ocean World as it transformed the Arabian Peninsula, where the defeat of the Ottoman Empire paved the way for the ­House of Saud to establish the ­independent Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 and for the contorted politics of Yemen to revolve around British Aden. If World War I was l­ imited in its reach to the western Indian Ocean, World War II engaged the entire Indian Ocean basin. British troops from their East African colonies—­regiments of the King’s African ­Rifles—­participated in the campaign against Fascist Italy’s occupation of Imperial Ethiopia, but also in the British campaign against Imperial Japan in Burma.7 In 1942 a combined Allied naval and land force seized 91

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Madagascar from Vichy France control and denied the ­Japanese navy from gaining access to its ports. Among the British land forces involved ­were regiments from Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Nyasaland (Malawi), South Africa, East Africa (­Kenya), and Tanganyika. The Southeast Asian Theater in World War II was a major area of conflict between the Allies and Imperial Japan, engaging metropolitan and colonial troops from ­Great Britain, Australia, British India, the Netherlands, and the United States. For pos­si­ble World War II buffs among your students, the Indian Ocean is very likely a region that is relatively unknown to them. Quite apart from the many land operations in Southeast Asia that are well covered in both primary and secondary sources, naval operations across the entire ocean basin involved the navies of G ­ reat Britain, Australia, the Netherlands, and Italy. World War II was truly global.8

Colonial Economies With the exception of constructing railways and feeder roads for the extraction of wealth, together with associated port construction for deep-­ water shipping, ­European colonial powers w ­ ere reluctant to invest in economic development. An engaging exercise for your students might be to compare and contrast the history of railways around the Indian Ocean World with an eye to their capitalization, l­ abor, economic, and social impact over time. Colonial economies w ­ ere designed to complement metropolitan economies, producing both agricultural and mineral raw materials for home markets, while also providing an outlet for domestic manufactures. ­There is a wealth of primary and secondary evidence available to students to pursue some of t­ hese issues in a comparative colonial context. One strategy might be to compare two or more dif­fer­ent colonial economies with re­spect to systems of production, exports and imports, and consequences for postcolonial economies. Another possibility would be to consider gender relations in colonial economies, comparing, for example, the masculinization of industrial ­labor and the devaluing of female ­labor in India, or the vital role of Chinese female sex workers in the explosive growth of Singapore.9 A third possibility is to examine the way in which a single crop, like tea, has played itself out in dif­fer­ent British colonies, 92

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like Sri Lanka and ­Kenya. If any of your students read French, they could compare and contrast the production of vanilla in La Ré­union and Madagascar. Mining is another economic enterprise that offers colonial parallels, such as tin mining in Malaysia as compared to diamond and gold mining in South Africa. Related to the extraction of wealth is the failure ­until ­after World War II to develop h ­ uman capital in the E ­ uropean colonies. A vivid example of colonial parsimony is the farming out of basic education to vari­ous missionary socie­ties, rather than state investment. To be sure, in certain colonies, like British India, education was aggressively seized upon by individual colonial subjects, who over time became a colonial, and ultimately national, elite. But for the most part education was designed to produce specific cadres, such as clerks to staff colonial administrations, or workers for industries that required a basic level of literacy. Each of t­ hese colonial economic strategies had impor­tant structural consequences for the ­independent nation-­states that emerged from ­under colonial rule in the twentieth ­century.

Colonialism and Nationalism Colonial rule was, by definition, a top-­down business that took its lead from the metropole and managed territorial interests as represented primarily by local constituencies of E ­ uropean settlers, business leaders, religious authorities, and, occasionally, Indigenous voices. In the Indian Ocean this concatenation, which often belied the notion of a unified ­European colonial presence, was also complicated by impor­tant immigrant settler communities of South Asians/Indians in eastern and southern Africa, Aden, Oman, and Southeast Asia, as well as Hadrami Arabs in eastern Africa and Indonesia, and Chinese throughout Southeast Asia (see chapter 5). Th ­ ere is both a rich scholarly lit­er­a­ture focused on t­ hese Indian Ocean immigrant communities and a still-­emerging indigenous literary tradition that includes both fiction and autobiographies. Th ­ ese immigrant communities, many of whom engaged in circular transnationalism, frequently occupied intermediary positions in commerce and administration that placed them between ­European colonial authorities and Indigenous 93

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populations. In t­ hese roles, it was t­ hese nonnatives who w ­ ere often the face of colonialism, ­whether as ­shopkeepers or government clerks, not the ­European authorities, w ­ hether local, territorial, or metropolitan. Resentment against Indian so-­called dukawallahs (small ­shopkeepers) in ­Kenya and Chinese merchants in Indonesia that fermented ­under colonial rule erupted in vio­lence against t­ hese communities a­ fter i­ndependence. Another divide-­and-­rule strategy of colonialism was to assign Indigenous police to areas where they ­were not themselves natives and did not speak local languages. All of ­these colonial governing strategies have had their independence-­era legacies. Taken together, this authoritarian colonial approach to governing without bother­ing e­ ither to consult or to take into consideration the wants and needs of the mass of subjects translated more or less directly into the be­hav­ior of most i­ndependent governments a­ fter ­independence. Not surprisingly, politics was regarded as dangerous during the colonial era. Virtually any form of ­organization was suspect, from occupational to religious to ethnic to overtly p­ olitical; yet the very fact of colonial rule ensured that its subjects would, inevitably, seek ways to express their own p­ olitical sentiments. Voluntary associations took many forms, but in general they w ­ ere led by local elites within any par­tic­u­lar community. Prominent among t­ hese w ­ ere o­ rganizations that w ­ ere vehicles for minority communities, including Chinese or Hadramis in the Dutch East Indies; Indians in British East Africa, Portuguese Mozambique, South Africa, Aden, or Malaysia; Comorians in Zanzibar; or Armenians in India. A significant colonial characteristic of virtually all of ­these groups was record-­keeping, often in the language of the colonial power, but just as frequently in the language of the association members. Minutes of meetings, local publications, newsletters, and newspapers all embodied the importance of education and literacy. In some cases, such publications included both colonial and indigenous languages, as in the case of the newspaper of the African Association in colonial Mozambique, O Brado Africano, which published in both Portuguese and Shironga.10 In an influential thesis for all colonial ­peoples, Benedict Anderson argues that what he calls print c­ apitalism was essential for establishing ideas 94

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about modern sovereignty and, thereby, enabling colonial territories to imagine themselves as coherent nations.11 Anderson’s ideas have been challenged over the years, but they continue to stimulate scholarship about colonialism and nationalism, and provide a rich theoretical template for students to undertake their own research. Another of Anderson’s influential interventions in this book is his observation of how the rise of Bahasa Indonesian was an essential ele­ment in knitting together the geo­graph­ i­cally extensive and fragmented ­peoples of Indonesia. A parallel Indian Ocean example of how an indigenous language became standardized and consequently emerged as a critical ele­ment in creating a sense of national identity is the case of Swahili in Tanzania.12 By way of contrast, students might look at the evolution and position of Hindi as an official national language in India, where although it is widely spoken in the north, is mostly regarded as a second or third language in the south.13 Economic and p­ olitical transformations occasioned by colonial rule, ranging from the emergence of a modern working class, a Western-­ educated elite, and new possibilities for ­women, to countless associations of disaffected and disgruntled colonial subjects, eventually produced nationalist movements that sought to overthrow colonial rule and gain ­independence. Nevertheless, while ­these ­political movements bore many similarities, they ­were by no means uniform ­in either their ­organizational structures or their ideologies. ­Because so many of the colonial territories of the Indian Ocean World ­were British, however, certain parallels did emerge. For example, the British insistence on a gradualist approach to ­political repre­sen­ta­tion with a ­limited franchise imposed certain characteristics on nationalist movements in British colonies. Tensions generated by the presence of British settlers, or significant groups of Indian immigrants, in both East Africa and Southeast Asia also complicated the dynamics of nationalist p­ olitical movements. An in­ter­est­ing comparison for students to ponder would be the dif­fer­ent tactics a­ dopted by Indian communities in ­Kenya and Ma­la­ya, for instance, as well as their connections to nationalist politics in India.14 A similar exercise might be to compare and contrast Chinese immigrant politics in Ma­la­ya and Indonesia.15 Another approach might be to compare the ­political strategies and tactics ­adopted by two 95

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dif­fer­ent ethnic immigrant communities.16 Of course, while the awakening of anticolonial, nationalist sentiments and p­ olitical movements was a global phenomenon, the dif­fer­ent post–­World War II trajectories of the several ­European colonial powers across the Indian Ocean region had a profound effect on both the timing and the character of nationalism. An impor­tant Indian Ocean initiative during this critical transitional period was the rise of the nonaligned movement, which sought to situate emerging new nations between the West and the Soviet bloc to avoid being shackled by this postwar ­Great Power strug­gle. Nonalignment did not mean neutrality, but in an either-or world of global politics, it was a difficult row to hoe (see chapter 8 for the impact on Sri Lanka’s antimalaria campaign). Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was the leader of this initiative and sought to create an o­ rganizational base for nonalignment at the Bandung Conference of 1955. In the end, nonalignment proved difficult to sustain, but its legacy within the Indian Ocean region, as well as globally, suggests a dif­fer­ent path for shaping a nation’s international relations.17 For students with special interest in global affairs you might point them ­toward the original documents of the Bandung Conference and ask them to imagine how a dif­fer­ent post-­Bandung trajectory might have affected countries of the Indian Ocean rim. Looked at chronologically, we can see that gaining ­independence was not a uniform ­process. Indeed, beginning with Indonesia (1945–49) and India in 1947, and ending with Timor-­Leste in 2002, Indian Ocean national strug­g les for ­independence covered a period of more than half a ­century. In addition, as the case of Timor-­Leste, or Eritrea, the final achievement of ­independence was the result of armed strug­gle against a neighboring state (Indonesia and Ethiopia, respectively).18 In the case of South Africa, although it had reached ­independence from ­Great Britain in 1910, the majority African population suffered u­ nder white settler colonial rule u­ ntil 1994. Th ­ ese last examples also remind us that the path to ­independence was by no means achieved only by the ballot box; where electoral politics failed or was blocked, armed strug­gle followed. Sometimes the cause was the frustration built up during and in the aftermath of World War II, as in Vietnam; in other cases, it was a response to diehard 96

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r­ esistance to surrendering metropolitan (in the case of weak-­state Portugal and Mozambique) or settler (in that of apartheid South Africa) control. While vio­lence did not always succeed, as in the case of the 1947 uprising against French colonial rule in Madagascar, the Viet Minh defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 clearly marked the beginning of ­independence for North Vietnam, although it certainly did not signal the end of warfare in peninsular Southeast Asia.19 Emergent nationalisms also created uneven space for ­women, and Indian Ocean ­women engaged in nationalist strug­gles in dif­f er­ent ways.20 ­There is fertile ground for students to compare and contrast the dynamics of anticolonial armed strug­gle in Vietnam, Mozambique, Eritrea, Timor-­Leste, and South Africa with re­ spect to strategies, tactics, and global politics. Fi­nally, it is also impor­tant to remember that not all the nation-­ states that are part of the Indian Ocean World ­were formally colonized by ­European powers, even if they w ­ ere informally subjected to dif­fer­ent levels of domination by E ­ uropean powers. Their vari­ous passages through the era of anticolonialism and nationalism ­were quite dif­fer­ent. Interestingly, the dominant form of government of ­these states was monarchy, ­whether historical, as in the case of Persia (Iran) and Siam (Thailand), or newly constructed, such as Saudi Arabia. Examining how ­these states confronted the challenges of modernization in both their politics and their economies provides still another way for students to think about the modern era in the Indian Ocean World.

Regional Cooperation and Big Power Competition In the twenty-­first ­century, Indian Ocean politics have been dominated by ­great power rivalries, but in the aftermath of empire t­ here have also been numerous examples of cooperation among the emerging nation-­states of the wider region. Propelled by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s commitment to a foreign policy of nonalignment, the earliest example of such interregional outreach was India’s support for the nationalist movements in East Africa and its stance against apartheid South Africa. Not surprisingly, India also has paid par­tic­u­lar attention to the situation of ­people of Indian descent in Africa, a harbinger of con­temporary India’s larger commitment 97

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to Indians in the diaspora.21 Born out of a shared colonial history ­under Portuguese rule, ­after gaining ­independence in 1975, Mozambique became a critical supporter of the armed liberation strug­gle waged by the Revolutionary Front for an ­Independent East Timor (Fretilin) in Timor-­Leste against Indonesia, as well as a refuge for its leadership in exile.22 More broadly, both Mozambique and Timor-­Leste are members of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (cplp), an ­organization that extends well beyond the Indian Ocean World.23 A much differently ­imagined and inclusive postin­de­pen­dence o­ rganization is the Indian Ocean Rim Association (iora ), which was initially conceived in 1995 and officially established in 1997 and consists of twenty-­two Indian Ocean rim nations. The main objectives of the iora are economic cooperation in such areas as maritime security, trade, fisheries, scientific exchange, disaster relief, and tourism.24 For students who are interested in international relations, ­there are clearly many opportunities to pursue. Turning to big power ambitions in the Indian Ocean, the dominant example is the steadily growing competition between China and India. For the Chinese, the B ­ elt and Road Initiative (bri ), which was launched in 2013, dominates their Indian Ocean strategy, driving investment in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and more than forty countries in Africa, among many other states. ­There are more online links to the bri than almost any other Indian Ocean topic, so students ­will have ample sources and assessments available for study of this ambitious strategy. In many re­spects, the bri represents the most ambitious Chinese venture into the Indian Ocean World since the ­great Ming voyages of the fifteenth ­century. It remains to be seen ­whether China succeeds in achieving its stated goals by the announced deadline of 2049. What can be asserted, and studied, is the challenge the bri poses to India’s foreign policy in the region, as well as its own ambitions to be a major player in Indian Ocean affairs. Certainly, the bri has prompted a much more vigorous Indian presence in Africa, as well as a buildup of the long-­neglected Indian navy to meet the challenge posed by the greatly expanded Chinese navy. One especially sensitive area of Chinese oceanic ambitions is its naval and military expansion in the South China Sea, which threatens bordering states like the Philippines and Vietnam, and 98

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has precipitated a strong United States response. ­These are developments that can be followed by students in numerous newspaper, official policy, and academic sources. Role-­playing by individuals or groups of students is well suited to exploring ­these issues at a policy and applied level. A parallel but quite distinct historically defined situation concerns the remote Chagos Archipelago, located in the m ­ iddle of the Indian Ocean. This formerly British territory had been a subset of British colonial administration of Mauritius since the end of the Napoleonic Wars and was separated in 1965 from Mauritian control as a price for achieving ­independence by Mauritius. Redesignated the British Indian Ocean Territory, the United States acquired the Chagos on a ninety-­nine-­year lease from ­Great Britain in a deal that was approved by neither Congress nor Parliament. The vast air and naval base that the United States built in the 1970s and expanded in 1986 on Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos, became a critical military ­factor in both Gulf wars.25 This act of ­great power manipulation also displaced the entire population of the Chagos to Mauritius. For any student interested in the way in which big power governments carry on their affairs in secret, the story of the Chagossians and the American base on Diego Garcia is a perfect example for them to explore (as we note in chapter 10). By way of conclusion, we note that the Chagos Archipelago pre­sents a compact example of the shifting imperial map of the Indian Ocean and the ongoing importance of the region in con­temporary geopolitics. More broadly, colonial occupation, settlement, and exploitation across the Indian Ocean helps reveal both the reach and the limits of empire, as well as the new set of contingent, interlinked histories in the region that emerged in empire’s wake.

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4^ Chapter Eight 64

Disease and Environment

the extinction of the dodo, the eruption of Krakatau, and the origins (and last cases) of smallpox are all Indian Ocean stories with world historical resonance. This chapter deals with ­these and related phenomena so that we can think about teaching the environmental and disease histories of the Indian Ocean World. The history of disease and environment in the Indian Ocean World links the region to broader world histories and offers ways to better understand the region on its own terms. This chapter builds on and connects with the previous chapters that have highlighted key themes of Indian Ocean history: the mobility of ­people around the Indian Ocean w ­ ere often motivated by environmental crises, and t­ hose on the move carried diseases with them or encountered new parasites. Systems of ­labor and the coercive forces ­behind them tried to overcome environmental shortcomings in the region, and many labored in challenging disease settings. The age of E ­ uropean empires was a period of intensification of disease movement and a time of

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new approaches to diseases. Attempts at disease eradication in the twilight and aftermaths of empire met with mixed results. The Indian Ocean also provides a crucible for the effects of anthropogenic climate change as they play out in the twenty-­first ­century, and new knowledge and new approaches to environment and disease that consider, among other ­things, nonhuman actors and the submarine oceanic world help us recast our understanding of the Indian Ocean past. This chapter starts with diseases that ­were endemic to the Indian Ocean and have had a global reach. From t­ here we turn to think about the disastrous and long-­reaching consequences of natu­ral phenomena like the explosion of Krakatau, and then focus on the ways that ­human actions have changed the flora and fauna of the region, including the extinction of the dodo bird, and the most recent findings on anthropogenic climate change. The chapter finishes with a dive below the surface to consider new ways of thinking about Indian Ocean history.

Diseases covid-­19 has made us all newly aware of the long reach of transmissible viral infections that emerge from animal populations. Less than a ­decade before covid-­19 was first recognized in China, a coronavirus dubbed ­Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (mers -­CoV) emerged. The virus seems to have infected h ­ umans from camels, who carry the same virus. The disease spread throughout the M ­ iddle East and, by 2015, as far 1 away as ­Korea. This highly contagious disease with zoonotic beginnings anticipated the much more widespread and deadly covid-­19 pandemic, but it was only the most recent instance of a disease moving through the region. Three diseases that are linked to Indian Ocean environments and have deep historical roots in the region are malaria, cholera, and smallpox. Thinking about disease and history in the Indian Ocean offers a very useful counterpart to a set of world histories that embraced disease and environment as deterministic ­factors. This is another way that the Indian Ocean upends Eurocentric notions of world history. Indeed, the long history of contact across the Indian Ocean region and its links to broader Eurasia 102

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meant that the Indian Ocean was not like the Atlantic, where some historians have suggested that diseases did the work of killing Indigenous ­people that ­European conquerors could not. Historian David Arnold has argued that, in fact, the ­European appearance in the Indian Ocean did not result in dramatic depopulation, and it was only the subsequent intensification of the ­European presence ­after the mid-­eighteenth c­ entury that disease patterns ­were magnified.2 We can see this pattern with all three diseases ­under consideration—malaria, cholera, and smallpox—while also pointing to sources you might call on and ways you might teach your students about ­these diseases.

malaria Malaria is a mosquito-­borne disease caused by a parasite, and it occurs in almost all the countries of the Indian Ocean region. This makes it a useful lens through which to consider Indian Ocean history, both for comparative purposes within the region, and for how global forces have s­ haped responses to malaria in the Indian Ocean.3 Malaria and the Anopheles mosquitos that spread it are connected to local environments and par­tic­u­lar ecologies that provide the standing ­water in which malarial mosquitos breed. Malaria has a deep history in the region. The Hindu text the Atharvaveda, written around 1000 bce , offers several incantations to ward off intermittent fevers, including ­those associated with the rainy season.4 Two thousand years ­later, in the 1340s, Ibn Battúta contracted a malaria-­like fever when he visited the Maldives, and the illness, along with the ruler’s desires for this learned man’s ­services, extended his stay in the archipelago.5 As with any other disease, it is worth asking students how we can understand diseases historically when our con­temporary conception of disease is highly scientific and biomedical. Looking at primary-source accounts like the Atharvaveda and Ibn Battúta has us mapping symptoms and ­causes backward rather than paying attention to how ­people at the time experienced and named diseases. The distribution and the effects of malaria w ­ ere magnified by E ­ uropean colonial intervention in the Indian Ocean region. The expansion of plantation agriculture, involving practices like constructing irrigation canals and 103

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moving laborers to new settings, expanded malaria’s reach. As knowledge of the disease grew, so did the means of intervening against it, and in the Indian Ocean region the motives and outcomes are tied to broader world historical themes like slavery, the spread of plantation agriculture, the difficulties associated with global commodity production, and the challenges of urbanization. In many places malaria posed a prob­lem for agriculture, but some Indian Ocean populations had greater ­resistance to the disease. In general, lower areas that depended on monsoonal rains saw upticks of malaria during and following the rainy season. ­People exposed to malaria from a young age develop a kind of tolerance for malaria, and most Africans have an additional ge­ne­tic advantage ­because they carry the homozygous sickle-­cell trait that grants a degree of protection against death from malaria. In short, Africans ­were more likely to survive malaria. Historian Benjamin Reilly argues that the malaria-­vulnerable population of Arabia used enslaved Africans, with their ge­ne­tic defenses against malaria, as “proxy farmers” to exploit lowland areas for agricultural production.6 In this case we see how histories of slavery and ­labor exploitation dovetail with histories of disease. More explicit interventions against malaria ­were pos­si­ble a­ fter new understandings of germs and disease emerged in the nineteenth ­century. Given the widespread endemicity of malaria in the Indian Ocean World, it is no surprise that this is the region where key aspects of the disease w ­ ere discovered. Early goals of tropical medicine w ­ ere to protect ­European administrators and soldiers from malaria, and the ground bark of the South American cinchona tree, of which the active ingredient is quinine, became the best way to treat it. By the 1860s both the British and Dutch had established cinchona plantations in their Indian Ocean colonies, with more than half a million trees growing in Java.7 In the p­ opular imagination quinine, malaria prophylaxis, and empire are tied up in the myth of the origins of the gin and tonic (the ­bitter taste comes from quinine), and you might ask your students to explore this muddled history through ­recipes and accounts, perhaps using one of the digital humanities assignments in chapter 10.8

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Like the transplantation of the cinchona tree, the discovery of the link between mosquitoes and the transmission of the malarial parasite was tied up in empire. Ronald Ross, the scientist who made t­ hese discoveries—in India—in 1897 and, eventually, won a Nobel Prize for them, was very much a product of Anglo-­India. For teaching purposes, it is useful to remind students that science is not simply a neutral undertaking as they might imagine it to be but is linked to social, p­ olitical, economic, and military forces of the period. One assignment you might consider is asking students to read the biography of Ronald Ross on the Centers for Disease Control (cdc ) website and look for the ways that his scientific c­ areer was entangled with empire. You might ask them to map some of his movements within India, and around the world, to consider how his work was linked to the British Empire and the expansion of tropical medicine.9 Malariology in the Indian Ocean region shows the way that science was linked to colonial ambition and economic expansion. In Southeast Asia, new understandings of malarial mosquitos and their habitats led to new kind of interventions to lessen the impact of malaria. In the early twentieth ­century, for instance, malaria had detrimental effects on the Chinese workers brought to work the rubber and tea plantations of colonial Ma­la­ya. Administrators drained marshes and filled in bodies of ­water to try to limit mosquito breeding. This was taken a step further in the Dutch East Indies, where the practice of “species sanitation,” which means eliminating breeding sites of specific Anopheles mosquitoes, was refined by entomologists ­there in the 1910s.10 Undoubtedly, changes in the production of global commodities like rubber and tea, even beyond plantations, brought new malarial regimes to peasant farmers and their families as the Indian Ocean was increasingly linked to commodity chains. Throughout the twentieth c­ entury, advances in malarial prophylaxis, treatments, and insecticide-­treated nets made it pos­si­ble for many countries in the world to eliminate malaria. Yet countries in the Indian Ocean region continue to have some of the highest malarial burden in the world despite several concerted efforts to end malaria. To help students get a sense of the malarial burden in the region t­ oday, ask them to explore the

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data and create their own data visualizations linked to malaria using the extraordinary Gapminder tools.11 To think historically, the Indian Ocean region helps us see the unevenness of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Malaria Eradication Proj­ect (mep ) (1955–69). High on the promise of ddt and chloroquine, the mep did not have long-­term success in the Indian Ocean region. Only Singapore and Brunei ­were able to eradicate malaria by 1970, and they ­were exceptional cases in the Indian Ocean, benefiting from their relative size (small) and wealth (­great). Moreover, the focus on phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal interventions meant not addressing the under­ lying social and economic f­ actors that made malaria prevalent.12 Picking up a theme we noted in the previous chapter, the failure of malaria eradication in the Indian Ocean region was also affected by the vicissitudes of international funding and Cold War politics. Although Sri Lanka had nearly eliminated malaria by 1963, the United States, refusal of foreign aid starting in that year ­because of Sri Lanka’s socialist politics resulted in an explosion of malaria over the next half ­decade, from fewer than ten cases to a million.13 So while the mep greatly reduced the numbers in many Indian Ocean countries, the results w ­ ere not sustainable, and cases of malaria grew tremendously a­ fter the 1960s. The exceptions h ­ ere are worth studying, and, like Singapore, they are both island nations. The Maldives, where Ibn Battúta contracted malaria long ago, became malaria ­free in 2015, and Sri Lanka fi­nally eliminated malaria in 2016, yet most countries in the Indian Ocean region have been unable to do so.14

cholera Although cholera has been a global scourge for more than two centuries, its history is intertwined with the Indian Ocean region. We now understand that cholera, a diarrheal disease, is caused by a bacterium and spreads through oral and fecal exposure. From the time it emerged as a pandemic disease in the early nineteenth ­century, however, ­people did not understand where it came from or how it spread, but they saw the way massive numbers of individuals died in a short time frame when the disease swept through. Learning the history of cholera in the Indian Ocean region is a way to appreciate the Indian Ocean’s connections with the world from the nineteenth c­ entury and 106

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how increased mobility and steamship technology multiplied the disease’s reach. The bacterium that ­causes the disease was identified in Calcutta in 1884, and the treatment that allows ­people to survive the disease was worked out in the refugee crisis of the Bangladeshi War for ­Independence (1971). Teaching students about cholera in this region also lets them see the implications of the intersection of science and policy. The generation of students versed in the covid-­19 pandemic may be surprised to know that the world has known seven global pandemics of cholera in a ­little more than two centuries. The first cholera pandemic emerged from the Gan­g es River delta during the second ­decade of the nineteenth ­century, but when scholars have looked for deep historical pre­ ce­dents, they can point to Sans­krit texts of the fifth c­ entury that attest to an illness with matching symptoms. In the early d­ ecades of the nineteenth ­century, cholera was a rampant killer whose movement across the Indian Ocean and globally traced the networks of trade and mobility of that era. Infected ­people traveled by sail throughout the region, and steam-­ powered travel sped up cholera’s movement and deadly impact.15 Combining steam travel with long-standing motivators for travel had devastating results. The Hajj pilgrimage became increasingly dependent on steamships, and steamships also made it pos­si­ble for more Indian Ocean pilgrims to reach Arabia. This combination expanded cholera’s reach and carnage. For example, during two months in 1865, as many as 30,000 of the 150,000 pilgrims died from cholera. The disease then moved through Egypt to the Mediterranean, and then on to E ­ urope and North Amer­i­ca, killing 200,000 p­ eople in major cities.16 Meanwhile, it traveled and continued to wreak havoc within the Indian Ocean region. For instance, deadly bouts of cholera plagued the divers and crew who plied the pearl fisheries of the Gulf of Mannar between Sri Lanka and India in the nineteenth ­century.17 The history of cholera is also tied to the history of mapping and data visualization, so this offers a g­ reat opportunity to work with regional maps with your students. During the cholera outbreak in London in 1854, the physician John Snow mapped the cases in the Soho neighborhood and used t­ hese to determine that the disease seemed to center on the Broad Street pump.18 While National Geographic has created a chance for 107

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students to re-­create Snow’s map, your students can use digitized primary sources from the Indian Ocean region to make their own maps of cholera’s movements in dif­fer­ent pandemics.19 For example, the Scottish physician James Christie served as the Sultan of Zanzibar’s physician and wrote a detailed firsthand account of cholera along the East African coast in the 1850s and 1860s. His book is available in online formats, and students can use details from his book to understand the interconnected land and sea trading routes that facilitated cholera’s movement and that the monsoon winds and pilgrimage seasons overlay other connections.20 For mapping or comparing cholera in parts of British India, students might turn to the Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India, a report published each year between the mid-1860s and 1921, with many dif­fer­ent years available online.21 ­These are troves of information that can be used in a g­ reat variety of ways. For example, you might ask your students to compare cholera reports from dif­fer­ent parts of India in the same year or to have them look at accounts of several dif­fer­ent years. Cholera in the Indian Ocean also offers students a chance to peek into the scientific debate between the contagionists and anticontagionists that raged in the nineteenth ­century and had strong policy implications. The anticontagionists, with their view that the disease could not be spread person to person, and that it interfered with maritime commerce and pilgrimages, tended to be against quarantines and social controls that would limit the spread of disease. Thus, quarantine regulations ­were prohibited in India by the 1880s.22 Historian Christopher Low shows that during the nineteenth ­century, when the Ottoman Empire and other ­European nations attempted to institute quarantines and documentary controls to contain cholera, British imperial authorities “obstructed and undermined” them and “obstinately denied a mounting body of scientific evidence and international consensus that cholera was a contagious disease.”23 In cholera students can see the links to mobility, the use of ­mapping, the power of competing scientific discourses, and the ways that the study of disease and the reactions to it help illuminate both world and imperial history.

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Cholera, however, is not only a disease of the past. We are living in the seventh pandemic and ­there is still no cure. Since the m ­ iddle of the nineteenth ­century, however, cholera has affected the world unevenly. The Indian Ocean region continues to experience sporadic and deadly outbreaks, especially when large populations live in unsanitary conditions and when fresh­water supplies are threatened by infrastructural failure and natu­ral disasters. In the last half of the twentieth c­ entury, however, new breakthroughs helped reduce the disease’s impact. In response to a massive outbreak in Calcutta in 1953, Dr. Hemendra Nath Chatterjee documented the first use of oral rehydration therapy (ort ). The spread of cholera and the displacement of ten million p­ eople in the m ­ iddle of the Bangladeshi War of ­Independence proved a vital testing ground. By deploying emergency ort in some of the camps cholera mortality dropped from 30 ­percent to 3 ­percent, and this was an impor­tant step in the global ­acceptance of ort to save lives from cholera. ort has become the standard care and has reduced cholera’s impact in ­every place that health interventions reach. Nevertheless, the disruption caused by civil war, as in Yemen most recently, has precipitated large outbreaks of cholera. The lessons your students can take from cholera and therefore deal with its global spread from the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth ­century include the connection of the disease to mobility and networks of movement, the debates on evolving science, and the global differentiation of places that cholera still affects and ­those that are cholera ­free.

smallpox Smallpox is a contagious viral disease that c­ auses fever and pustules and can lead to death. ­Those who survive smallpox gain lifetime immunity. The history of smallpox is a rare triumphant tale of ­human eradication of an infectious disease through vaccination, and while this story has a global character, much of it can be told from the Indian Ocean World. As with cholera, we can trace smallpox’s beginnings, and in this case endings, to the Indian Ocean region. Recent scientific evidence suggests that smallpox began, like mers and covid-­19, with zoonosis, but smallpox crossed

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over to ­humans in northeastern Africa no ­earlier than four thousand years ago.24 It is pos­si­ble to trace early mentions of smallpox within the Indian Ocean arena, but it is hard to know its impact. Epidemic smallpox in the Malukus in 1613 was said to have killed one-­third of the population, and an outbreak on the island of Banda eighty years ­later killed 12 ­percent of the ­people.25 As with malaria and cholera, a greater ­European presence seems to have exacerbated the disease in the region. In the Dutch East Indies trade activities brought smallpox to new areas, and the ­European facilitation of the slave trade also spread the disease.26 Outbreaks in the modern period in the Indian Ocean had case fatality rates around 30 ­percent, so the disease struck fear and ­shaped population dynamics when ­there ­were outbreaks. The history of smallpox offers two impor­tant lessons for your students: encapsulated histories of vaccine hesitancy and global health campaigns. The word vaccine is part of the history of smallpox. Edward Jenner used cowpox virus to inoculate ­people against smallpox in the last yeas of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, and the word vaccine is based on the Latin vaccinus, from the word vacca, “cow.” In 1804, only a few years ­after Jenner’s experiments, Dutch officials had introduced vaccination in Java and implemented a program to administer them widely. Within a few ­decades, they hit stumbling blocks: some vaccinated ­children contracted smallpox and died, Indigenous elites refused vaccines for their families, and ­people ­were skeptical of the E ­ uropean officials who oversaw the programs.27 Your students may be interested to know that from the earliest period some p­ eople w ­ ere “antivaxxers,” or more generally vaccine hesitant. This hesitancy occurred for many reasons, and the Indian Ocean region lets us see some of them clearly at dif­fer­ent moments in the history of smallpox. In the second half of the twentieth ­century smallpox became a focus of the who ’s eradication program (1960s–79), and countries of the Indian Ocean ­were among the targets. The campaign paired intensive surveillance and vaccination campaigns, working in concert with local public health officials. Officials offered cash rewards for reporting cases, and the isolation of ­people with smallpox and the vaccination of t­ hose in contact with them had the trappings of military campaigns. The last case of smallpox 110

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in Asia can be traced to Bangladesh in 1975, and the last case in Africa occurred in Somalia in 1977. Two years l­ ater, the who declared the world smallpox ­free. ­Here are two assignments related to smallpox that you might implement. First, the official account of the who ’s campaign is an easily accessible report that details efforts in several key Indian Ocean countries or regional groupings.28 Divide ­these among your students and ask them to summarize the campaigns for their assigned country/region. In class, divide them into groups with other countries and have them derive the commonalities and differences within their group. If you ask them what accounts for the differences, you can help them see that global public health campaigns must adjust to national and regional peculiarities. The second assignment is more biographical and imaginative. Ask your students to write a paper about e­ ither of the last two cases from the Indian Ocean region by researching the final two patients, Rahima Banu on the Bay of Bengal and Ali Maow Maalin on the Banaadir Coast, southern Somalia. What ­were their experiences like? How did their neighbors and friends experience this? What w ­ ere the governmental and public health mechanism that operated around them? Ask them to speculate on how and why such seemingly everyday ­people from the Indian Ocean region have their own Wikipedia pages and what this tells us about history. (For more on biography-­writing assignments, see chapter 10.) The examples of malaria, cholera, and smallpox suggest an approach to disease histories in the Indian Ocean that could be applied to other illnesses.29 By looking at the interplay of disease ecologies, epidemiology, and global history, we can see the particularities of both the disease and the region. The importance of h ­ uman mobility, the region’s connections to global networks, and the amplification of disease effects during the period of E ­ uropean high imperialism all highlight key aspects of Indian Ocean history. Disease ecologies are vital to t­ hese stories, and they are embedded in broader ecologies. Indeed, environmental histories have become a significant focus in recent Indian Ocean scholarship, and we turn our attention now to histories of natu­ral disasters and anthropogenic climate change to help us consider ­these new directions. 111

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Natu­ral Disasters Natu­ral disasters of the Indian Ocean World have had profound effects in the region, and some have had a global reach. They also enable the student to move beyond a narrow focus on the monsoon in studying the environmental history of the Indian Ocean World. For teaching purposes, natu­ ral disasters are both specific events and part of larger patterns. While we can zero in on one event—­a devastating cyclone, a volcanic eruption, or a tsunami—­and follow its impact, we can also look at the broader historical pattern across the Indian Ocean. Some of t­ hese natu­ral disasters occurred with some frequency, like tropical cyclones, droughts, and flooding, and thus had a kind of periodicity, while ­others have much longer and less predictable patterns, such as geologic events like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis. All of them, however, had ­measurable ­human impacts, and asking your students to consider the effects of disasters on everyday p­ eople and their lives is an impor­tant pedagogical step. As events and as pro­cesses, natu­ral disasters help us frame the history of the Indian Ocean and the relationship between natu­ral phenomena and ­human society. Monsoon winds and the rains that accompany them are hallmarks of the Indian Ocean, but the devastating cyclones with their fierce winds and torrential rains have offered sharp punctuation in regional histories. The cyclone that hit Zanzibar in April 1872 is well known for destroying the clove industry on that island, causing most clove production to move from Unguja to Pemba, and crippling the economy. In the aftermath of the storm, the sultan was forced into a treaty to curtail the slave trade, and this set into motion British indirect rule via a protectorate in the years that followed.30 While that storm and its aftermath have received much attention, recent analy­sis shows that cyclones in the western Indian Ocean in this period drove East Africans into slavery and pushed the demand for enslaved l­ abor in the Gulf.31 In the twentieth c­ entury, cyclones constituted a major ele­ment in the ­popular history of Mauritius.32 Some natu­ral disasters in the Indian Ocean region also had global implications. The explosion of the Krakatau volcano in the Dutch East Indies in 112

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August 1883 had far-­reaching effects. The sound of the explosion was heard for thousands of miles in ­every direction: as far as Australia and in India. The thunderous explosion triggered a tsunami that killed almost forty thousand p­ eople, and the volcanic ash that spewed forth turned sunsets around the world lurid colors in 1883 and 1884. In fact, it was the “blood red” sunset over central Norway that inspired Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, an iconic image of anxiety and alienation that your students ­will likely recognize.33 One English-­language con­temporary source that you can use with your students allows you to have them read and analyze a composite account of the explosion or use the data to map the range of debris in the year afterward.34 In this c­ entury, an underwater earthquake off the northwest coast of Sumatra triggered a massive, terrifying tsunami in late December 2004 that swept clear across the Indian Ocean. More than two hundred thousand p­ eople ­were killed in fourteen countries and many more displaced. In Somalia, more than three thousand miles from the epicenter, tsunami waves killed more than three hundred p­ eople, affected more than e­ ighteen thousand ­house­holds, and destroyed innumerable ­houses, ­water sources, and fishing boats.35 For teaching purposes, this relatively recent and highly vis­i­ble event has many resources to help students understand the tremendous force of such a tsunami and the interconnectedness of Indian Ocean communities.36 For all of ­these natu­ral disasters, and especially the historical ones, finding details about the lives of everyday p­ eople may be challenging. By using images, ­whether recent photo­graphs or older lithographs, of the devastation and the aftermaths of dif­fer­ent events and reading more recent accounts, however, you might ask your students to speculate on the ways that ­people at the time may have experienced such events.

Anthropogenic Climate Change Students likely may not realize they know an early example of how h ­ umans altered the ecol­ogy of the Indian Ocean, but they may recognize the phrase “­going the way of the dodo” as a shorthand for extinction. The flightless dodo (Raphus cucullatus) on the island of Mauritius was encountered by Dutch sailors in 1598, and within a c­ entury the flightless dodo had been 113

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hunted into extinction and ­later, ­because of its absence, became one of the most famous birds in the world.37 ­Today we reckon with not just the disappearance of one species, but the broader, multispecies implications of anthropogenic climate change. The effects of human-­caused climate change are pronounced in the Indian Ocean, and the ­future detrimental effects of what is now the world’s fastest-heating ocean invite us to explore the global history of ­these events. One of the challenges of this history is lack of deep climate data, but recent data suggest a grim f­ uture. The Indian Ocean is a buffer for global warming b­ ecause of its vital role in the pro­cesses of reabsorbing anthropogenic co2 and regulating global ocean temperatures. The Indian Ocean accounts for about 20 ­percent of global oceanic uptake of co2, and warming in the Indian Ocean modulates climate in the Atlantic and Pacific and is linked to droughts in the Mediterranean and the Western Sahel.38 The effects of climate change are felt profoundly in the Indian Ocean region. Warming seas lead to more intense rainfalls and to stronger cyclones, and ­these both can trigger flooding that then sets off outbreaks of cholera and typhus.39 The threat to Indian Ocean islands is even more profound. While sea-­level rise may be the most direct threat to the lives of ­these islands’ inhabitants, anthropogenic climate change also threatens both food security and the availability of fresh w ­ ater and puts pressure 40 on sources of energy. In the Maldives, the government carried out a cabinet meeting underwater in 2009 to highlight the threat of sea-­level rise. The documentary film The Island President, portrays this threat to the Maldives and the challenge that small countries face in international diplomacy related to climate mitigation.41 ­After your students watch the film, ask them to characterize the p­ olitical and social obstacles at local, national, regional, and global scales that leaders in the Maldives faced. New environmental histories of the Indian Ocean World suggest the intimate link between climate, ecol­ogy, and history. Debjani Bhatta­ charyya’s history of Calcutta (Kolkata) emphasizes the city’s location atop the world’s largest river delta. This account writes the Hooghly River and the ecol­ogy of the delta into the history of the city, its l­ egal regimes around land, and the market for property.42 Another environmental history that 114

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moves out into the Bay of Bengal frames the background for the massive movements of ­labor mi­grants across the bay to Malaysia and Burma. ­There are many ­angles you can take on this in the classroom, but one of the most direct is that it allows us to see the interconnection of climate, l­abor regimes, and mobility: the failure of the rains due to the El Niño–Southern Isolation of 1877–78 led to famines that prompted l­ abor migrations from India to Southeast Asia.43

More Than Skimming the Surface Littoral socie­ties—­with their distinctive relationship with the land and the sea—­have been a key aspect of understanding Indian Ocean history. Scholars, however, have generally been terrestrially bound, and the oceanic turn in historiography filled the sails of Indian Ocean history. Recent scholarship has pushed this even further by considering the materiality of the ocean beyond its monsoons, tides, and currents and bringing submarine worlds into focus. And by combining this view below the waterline with an attention to—­and agency for—­nonhuman actors, the Indian Ocean yields new histories. For teaching purposes, some of the most approachable work ­here emerges from oyster beds and their pearlescent products. Pearls w ­ ere part of complex commodity chains and l­abor regimes, as noted in chapter 4, but recent work has also asked us to see them at the center of pro­cesses that connected underwater places, ports, islands, coasts, and distant markets to one another. The submarine aspect writes oysters and pearls into “terraqueous” histories and challenges territorially defined notions of space and bound­aries.44 By moving away from anthropocentric narratives and using multispecies historical approaches and nonhuman agency, the oyster can also become a historical actor. One ­great example is Samuel Ostroff ’s chapter on pearls and empire in South India and Sri Lanka, provocatively titled “Can the Oyster Speak?” The short answer is yes. Ostroff draws on recent energy directed ­toward marine environmental history and is inspired by Timothy Mitchell’s examination of the agency of mosquitos in shaping twentieth-­ century Egypt through the spread of malaria. Ostroff sees the oyster as “a 115

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live actor in a complex system formed by the relationship between animals, ­humans, and the natu­ral world” and argues that for the Portuguese, Dutch, and British empires in the Indian Ocean, the oyster beds of the Gulf of Mannar w ­ ere sites “through which governmental power flowed, territorial sovereignty [was] established, and scientific knowledge [was] produced.”45 Pearls and pearling are a starting point for such interspecies and marine environmental histories, and you could use a similar approach for other sea products (like sea cucumbers or seaweed) and sea animals. Indeed, as scholars and scientists look more carefully underwater, they are discovering new aspects of the Indian Ocean’s history. Passive recording devices placed in Oman, Madagascar, and the Chagos Archipelago during the 2010s, for instance, led to discovery of a novel ­whale song and the identification of a population of blue ­whales that had not been identified before.46 The exploitation of w ­ hales for fuel to power lights in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries drew American ships into the ­waters of the Indian Ocean.47 Thus ­whales as targets of American hunters and as ­human adversaries helped write a chapter of Indian Ocean World history, yet ­these stories have previously been told only from a humancentric, above-­the-­sea perspective. How much more might we learn by shifting our perspective to ­those of the nonhuman inhabitants of that watery world and the watery world itself ?

Conclusions From smallpox, Krakatau, and the dodo and their associated phenomena, this chapter has suggested ways that you can tie histories of disease and environment in the Indian Ocean to broader world histories to understand the region itself. We have tried to show how much we can comprehend by thinking about the Indian Ocean with extinct birds, exploded volcanoes, and global pandemics. With recent scholarship taking us below the sea or paying attention to nonhuman actors, historians literally plumb new depths and go beyond the h ­ uman. We encourage you to grab a snorkel and help your students dive into Indian Ocean history.

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Teaching Strategies the necessarily exponential growth of online instruction during the covid -­19 pandemic has in many re­spects fundamentally changed how we all think about teaching and learning. In the last section of the book we seek to unite the themes on Indian Ocean his­­ tory with suggested pedagogies and assignments that ­will help your students engage with this exciting field. We share several strategies that we have used over the years with our own students and that we have learned from valued colleagues. Our pedagogical approach draws on backward design, student-­driven inquiry, reflective writing, and writing or presenting for a broader audience. Some of t­ hese ­will be familiar and time-­ tested; o­ thers may be novel. Each is intended to emphasize student learning and the development of skills that ­will enable your students to continue to learn for themselves, w ­ hether the topic is Indian Ocean World history or something entirely new.

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Teaching Technologies some classroom str ategies

writing during the sars -­CoV-2 pandemic reminds us that teaching is no longer necessarily located in, or restricted to, a physical classroom. Of course, online instruction was already becoming increasingly significant in the second ­decade of the twenty-­first ­century, but the threat of students and teachers (and by extension their families) contracting covid-­19 at school, especially in the confined spaces of classrooms, abruptly forced education at all levels to rethink how best to offer instruction. We believe that this is an educational game-­changer, so that even ­after this novel virus is controlled and students and teachers can return to their campuses, online teaching w ­ ill remain an integral and increasingly significant component of educational practice. With that observation, in the next two chapters, we offer a number of classroom-­based and online suggestions for teaching about the Indian Ocean in world history.

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Chronological Depth and Periodization Perhaps the first challenge is how to ­organize your syllabus into time periods and have students grasp the geography of the region. In previous chapters we have suggested a number of critical issues, themes, and topics around which you might wish to engage your students; ­here we consider vari­ous possibilities for the chronological framework of your course. Much ­will depend on your own preferences, but ­these may also be restricted by the larger world history context required by your department’s or school’s curriculum. Given ­free rein, however, we would argue for a very deep time frame, but for practical purposes the habitual starting point for most historians of the Indian Ocean World is the anonymous first-­century Periplus of the Erythraen Sea, which we have referred to frequently in ­earlier chapters. Apart from its very early date, the Periplus opens up most of the western Indian Ocean, even creeping around to the Coromandel Coast, although the text suggests that its author was much less familiar with that side of the Indian subcontinent. Always in search of balance in our p­ resentation of the iow , it is impor­tant to find sources—­whether primary or secondary—­ that introduce the eastern regions of this vast world in ancient times. The usual periodization finds a break with the rise and expansion of Islam from the seventh c­ entury ce , but teachers who are especially interested in environmental or medical history might prefer to explore the sixth-­century Plague of Justinian as a dif­fer­ent kind of historical marker. Another moment of decision regarding periodization usually occurs with the intrusion of the Portuguese fleet of Vasco da Gama into the Indian Ocean at the very end of the fifteenth c­ entury. The prob­lem ­here, of course, is that this moment, which usually is dated more con­ve­niently to 1500, both emphasizes the ­European presence—­what in an ­earlier historiographical era was called the Vasco da Gama period—­and reinforces Eurocentric chronological notions such as the “­Middle Ages” and the “early modern period.” Such conceptions might make sense in the context of a Western Civilization syllabus, but do they carry the same analytical weight in the Indian Ocean World? One way to counteract both of ­these Eurocentric tendencies is to establish a dif­fer­ent periodization, one that finds a 120

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more meaningful transition in about 1400, thereby marking a culmination for the long period of Islamic domination of the wider region and leaving space for the Ming voyages of the fifteenth c­ entury that offer an intriguing premonition of the Portuguese arrival only seven ­decades ­later.1 The next major decision for you to make in establishing an Indian Ocean periodization, and to get your students thinking about the region on its own terms, is to think through the dif­fer­ent advantages of playing with the competing notions of a long eigh­teenth and a long nineteenth ­century. Each has its virtues, and drawbacks, in terms of the growing E ­ uropean presence in the Indian Ocean World. Should you want, you might even pre­sent both concepts as a way to get your students thinking for themselves about which, or any other regionwide periodization, provides the most usable frame for thinking about this impor­tant transitional period in Indian Ocean history. Is ­there, ­after all, an early modern period across the region, or is this a meaningless way to think about this part of the world? Fi­nally, how best can one capture the chronological framework for modern colonialism and postcolonialism? Th ­ ese are all significant questions of periodization that we believe ­will get your students thinking—­whether you ask them in the classroom or on an exam—­about the kinds of questions that regularly perplex professional historians.

Geography As we have previously noted, the Indian Ocean is an unfamiliar world to most American students. This is partly a consequence of the failure to teach geography, in general, but also reflects the fact that ­until the third quarter of the twentieth c­ entury, most Americans looked e­ ither to the Atlantic or the Pacific World, or to the Amer­ic­ as, for the place of origin of their forebears. The immigration of ­peoples from western, South, and Southeast Asia has transformed this history, so that depending on where your school or college is located, your students may bring a greater awareness of at least their families’ corners of the Indian Ocean World, if not necessarily its current and historical geography. Accordingly, one essential tool for teaching Indian Ocean history is to help your students familiarize themselves with the geo­graph­i­cal contours of this vast region. In addition, 121

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b­ ecause of the deep history of the Indian Ocean World, students need to appreciate that while the geo­graph­i­cal contours of the Indian Ocean coastline have not varied significantly for several thousand years, the commercial and ­political hubs that ­were most impor­tant did change over time, so that mapping t­ hese places and understanding their connections involves a grasp of this changing geopo­liti­cal map. Even before you begin to teach them the geography of the region, you can set them up to explore it on their own. One ­simple exercise to connect the students in your classroom to the Indian Ocean is to assign each student a city or site in the region and ask them to use a travel website to figure out how to get from h ­ ere to ­there.2 They should come to class the next day with an itinerary and be prepared to talk about the routings and layovers (and cost!). Google Earth also offers students a chance to “explore” a region on their own, and the program’s Voyager section has several Indian Ocean destinations.3 Historian Roxani Margariti begins her Indian Ocean seminar by pairing students in the first class meeting and having each group choose an Indian Ocean port city from a list. In the second meeting of the seminar, the students pre­sent the geography and environment of the port and its immediate hinterland. In addition to creating rapport between seminar members, this assignment asks students to be curious and take initiative in understanding the geography. You could also do this exercise in conjunction with the itinerary work or a Google Street View ­presentation. ­These are just some of the ways you can ask students to explore the region on their own. For teaching Indian Ocean geography, an essential starting point is the monsoon system, both ­because it directly conditioned sailing Indian Ocean w ­ aters before the advent of steamships and b­ ecause it has always determined and continues to shape the agricultural cycle of socie­ties across the entire region. Complementing the monsoons are the dominant Indian Ocean currents, the influence of which also should be appreciated. ­There are many useful short explanations of the monsoon regime and oceanic currents in the standard texts on Indian Ocean history, some of which are accompanied by useful maps.4 ­There are, as well, many much more detailed scientific studies of both available in the scholarly lit­er­a­ture, as 122

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well as online illustrations and charts to help explain the way in which each functions. Our experience is that the best way to get students to come to grips with t­ hese dominant environmental f­ actors is to have them map them for themselves. To do this we provide a link to a blank Indian Ocean map template that you and your students can download and print out as many copies as necessary for practice.5 Armed with this blank map, your students can also plot the location of the main historical sites over time, for example, as well as chart any links between dif­fer­ent Indian Ocean regions that ­will help them to visualize the many interregional connections that constituted the Indian Ocean World. You may also opt to have them complete several maps over the course of the semester, filling in new maps or new detail on their e­ arlier maps. Fi­nally, testing students with one or more map quizzes during the class offers an easy confidence booster for most students and a reasonable way for you to see if they are actually paying attention to such basic material. In our own teaching experience, this kind of test helps students to see how the changing p­ olitical geography of the Indian Ocean evolved over time, with certain coastal regions remaining significant even while specific towns ­rose and fell, depending on dif­f er­ent combinations of natu­ral, economic, and ­political circumstances. We ­will return to maps in the next chapter in relation to digital humanities proj­ects that you can do.

Critical Reading A quite dif­fer­ent approach to teaching and learning is common to all historians, namely, how to read sources critically. This educational goal, which strikes us as being especially impor­tant as part of civic education in an era when “fake news” and conspiracy theories abound and constitute the informational world in which our students live, can be achieved in many ways. The most obvious is to assign specific primary sources for students to evaluate against the wider context of reading and instruction that you establish in your course. Depending on the resources of your college or university library, students may be encouraged to venture into the library to find an appropriate source that you know is available in the collection.6 Alternatively, the digitization of many primary sources enables all of us to consult essential works online and, with the notable exception of Google 123

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Books, to download and print out relevant passages for deeper analy­sis. Many are cited in the notes to previous chapters in this book. Software programs like Hypothes.is and Perusall allow students to annotate and comment on digital texts as they read. ­These programs offer integration with learning management systems and can be used in­de­pen­dently. They reside in your browser (Hypothes.is) when you pull up texts or as a standalone page (Perusall) where instructors can link documents for students to read and annotate. This form of social annotation works particularly well for primary sources ­because it allows students to work collaboratively and asynchronously to figure out what the source is saying. Social annotation also allows students to ask questions of one another and react to what they are reading. Instructors w ­ ill do well to add their own notes, reactions, and questions through their own annotations. ­These programs allow students to connect and interact remotely and thus do some of the work of creating community within a class, especially if it is an online course. For primary sources most students ­will be restricted to sources available in ­English, ­whether as the original language or in translation, but for ­those of your students who can read another language, the possibilities are ­really infinite. When approaching a primary source in the original language, standard questions should be posed regarding the identity of the writer, their social, economic, and p­ olitical status, the purpose of the document they produced, and the internal reliability of what is recorded; for example, ­were they an eyewitness to the events or details described, or was all or some of their account second­hand? When considering a translated document, students must ask themselves what they can ascertain about the translator and the accuracy of the translation in order to be able to evaluate its usefulness as a source for Indian Ocean history. Specific strategies for this kind of exercise might be to have students compare and contrast dif­fer­ent accounts of a single event, such as the Indian Rebellion of 1857, or descriptions of a specific place or person, for example the East African merchant Tippu Tip. One of the most effective ways to bring the history of an unfamiliar region to life for students is to assign imaginative lit­er­a­ture. The trick, then, 124

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is to get students to appreciate what can be learned from such sources and to distinguish between what is history and what is fiction. Nearly every­ one who teaches Indian Ocean history has, at one time or another, used Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992), but that is a work of nonfiction, however many questions it raises about the Indian Ocean World before the modern era. In Sea of Poppies (2008), the first volume in his Ibis trilogy, however, Ghosh fictionalizes the plight of Indian indentured workers in the context of British imperialism as they leave Bengal for Mauritius. In this example, students might consider how Ghosh’s imagining of their odyssey compares to historical accounts of this exodus, which is well documented in several major scholarly studies and collections of primary evidence.7 Abdulrazak Gurnah, a writer with Indian Ocean roots, won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture. Gurnah, born in Zanzibar, has shown keen interest in themes that have come up throughout this primer: diaspora and belonging; race in the Indian Ocean; and Islam and society. In her Indian Ocean history course, Jane Hooper has assigned Gurnah’s By the Sea (2001) to approach diasporic memory. Historian Robert Rouphail has his students read Gurnah’s Paradise (1994), a historical novel about Indian Ocean caravan traders in East Africa, and students respond extremely well to the book. ­There is also a considerable body of fiction by East African–­born Indian writers about Africa that speaks to both issues of the Indian diaspora and to Indian attitudes t­ oward Africans. A good beginning can be made with the pioneering novel The Gunny Sack (1989) by M. G. Vassanji, whose collection of short stories, Uhuru Street (1991), is also revealing.8 Two novels set in the colonial islands of Seychelles and Mauritius that raise impor­tant questions of race and gender are British author Julia Blackburn’s The Book of Colour (1995) and Mauritian writer Lindsay Collen’s The Rape of Sita (1993).9 The interested student might consider each, or both, against the body of historical writing on slavery in the Mascarene Islands. Two quite dif­fer­ent novels by British authors that ­will challenge students are David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), which is set in the Dutch voc establishment at Nagasaki, Japan, in the late eighteenth century, and Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), which many students w ­ ill have read in an entirely dif­fer­ent 125

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context, but which raises fascinating questions about imperialism and race in late nineteenth-­century island Southeast Asia. Looking eastward, ­there are also fictional works by South Asian and Chinese heritage authors that provide a ­human ele­ment to historical studies of their communities’ migration to Southeast Asia. A short story by Chinese author and scholar Xu Dishan (Hsü Ti-Shan) titled “The Merchant’s Wife” (1925) is an entertaining tale that poses intriguing questions about gender, race, and religion in southern China, Singapore, and Bengal in ten pages. Its abbreviated length makes it an excellent vehicle for stimulating discussion in a classroom setting.10 Rani Manicka’s The Rice ­Mother (2003) follows the challenges faced over several generations by a Sri Lankan f­ amily in Malaysia that includes the period of ­Japanese occupation, while in The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) Malaysian author Tash Aw imagines the world of a Chinese entrepreneur through the first half of the twentieth ­century as seen through the eyes of his skeptical son. Questions of racial identity and ­Japanese imperialism are equally at the center of Malaysian author Tan Kwan Eng’s power­ful novel The Gift of Rain (2008). What we look for in ­these novels is not history, of course, but rather the kind of ­human texturing that is especially difficult to capture in both primary and secondary sources. Returning to a more familiar assignment, let’s consider two ways to approach a critical book review. First, as we expect that many instructors ­will continue to use Ghosh’s In an Antique Land in teaching Indian Ocean World history, ­we’ll use it to illustrate our “Guidelines for Writing a Critical Book Review.” We begin by making the impor­tant point that a critical review is not simply a book report. Of course, students are expected to analyze the book’s contents, identify its main historical and ­sociological themes, and comment on their relevance to the course subject ­matter. What is Amitav Ghosh’s thesis? What are his main arguments? What is his o­ rganizational strategy? What issues does he highlight? How does he employ evidence to sustain his argument and specific points? Is his ­presentation of the arguments and the evidence logical? You might also want to suggest some par­tic­u­lar issues for students to address, such as: What can we learn from the ­career of Abraham Ben Yiju about the 126

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medieval trade of the Indian Ocean? How does Ghosh use the story of the unidentified enslaved Indian of Abraham Ben Yiju to illustrate the history of the Indian Ocean?11 Why does the author spend so much time describing his anthropological research in Egypt in a book about the Indian Ocean? How does the confrontation of past and pre­sent in the book serve to illustrate historical change over time in the Indian Ocean? Fi­ nally, we emphasize the importance of giving specific examples to illustrate one’s points and the requirement to cite specific pages for making such references, especially when quoting directly from the text. How you want students to format their papers with re­spect to page citations and direct quotations is, of course, up to you, but at the very least we think it essential to have each critical review essay accompanied by a full bibliographical reference at the top of the essay, as would be expected in any professional journal review. The other successful approach to the critical book review is to have students read selected reviews and, as a class, derive their own criteria for a book review. This method actively engages students in both historiography and the assessment p­ rocess. This has the advantage of having them encounter book reviews in their natu­ral context—­a kind of academic primary source—­and then work together to make sense of them. This assignment then sets them up to write their own critical book reviews with a set of criteria that they, as a class, have come to on their own (sometimes with the skillful guidance of their instructor). The key to this assignment is two contrasting reviews of the same book so that students are able to plot two points on the spectrum of book reviews. Given the relative brevity of most book reviews, this assignment is adaptable. You might assign students to read paired reviews of two books or divide the class and have each half read paired reviews of a dif­fer­ent book. Students read the reviews before class and come ready to consider what makes a good book review. To help them prepare, ask them to consider questions about content and ­organization as they read the two reviews: What does a review tell us about the book? What does it leave out? What is the role of summary in a review? What is the reviewer’s opinion of the book and how do they indicate this? They should also pay 127

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attention to the content and writing. What parts do they think w ­ ere well written? Ask them to choose a sentence or two from the review that they think provides the best critique or insight in the review. For this assignment, for instance you might use two reviews of Sugata Bose’s A Hundred Horizons, one from the American Historical Review and one from Pacific Affairs, an interdisciplinary journal focused on Asia and the Pacific.12 While both reviews summarize and analyze the book, the reviews have numerous differences and come to quite dif­fer­ent conclusions. Historian Vinayak Chaturvedi’s review in Pacific Affairs lauds the book for “bringing fresh insights to the history of the Indian Ocean.”13 In contrast, historian Gwyn Campbell in the American Historical Review is more pessimistic. Campbell doubts the book’s contribution to the field and calls it “a national Indian version of Indian Ocean history.”14 Both reviews support their conclusions with reference to the text, and both are relatively short reviews, each five paragraphs long. Students w ­ ill be able to read them easily, and the stark differences in tone ­will alert them to contradictions. In class, students ­will work together first in pairs and then collectively to describe the book reviews and then to use them to devise their own criteria for book reviews. The first step is to ask students in pairs to outline the reviews as a way of dissecting them. What work is each paragraph ­doing? Each group discusses the review and jots notes about its structure and content. The next step is a group discussion that uses a whiteboard to collect each group’s observations about the content and structure of the reviews. This discussion is a chance to compare and contrast the reviews and understand the nuance of each one. In our example, each author describes the book in related ways, but they come to vastly dif­fer­ent conclusions. Students can see firsthand what historiographical points are at stake in the work and how each author h ­ andles them. It should also become clear that ­there are many ways to write an engaging review! In facilitating the discussion of the book reviews, be prepared to draw out students on several points if they d­ on’t make them on their own. Note how clearly reviewers state the central claims of the book, and that while reviews may include notes on the structure, they are not simply summaries. Reviews balance summary and critique. Reviews put a book in its 128

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context. Help them see that dif­fer­ent journals have dif­fer­ent interests or focuses, and that reviewers’ specialties likely influence their approach to the book. At the level of style, make sure students are attuned to the fact that reviewers do not tend to quote extensively from the books they are reviewing but do so to make par­tic­u­lar points. All of the ideas that arise in the discussion of the reviews should be noted or summarized on the board. By the end of the session the class ­will have generated many ideas. You might ask students to pick out the most impor­tant points or highlight them yourself. As t­ hese insights on the book reviews and the historiography are ones that the students have come to themselves, they have a better sense of how to write their own review. To help them with this ­process, make sure you save a version of this work (take a picture, save the whiteboard, e­ tc.). You can then choose the points that you think are most impor­tant to emphasize, and then include them with your review assignment. The guidelines that they generate can also be used in the grading rubric, allowing students some input into their own assessments. The teaching strategies we have enumerated—­from syllabus design and periodization, to learning geography and engaging in critical reading and writing—­are discrete ways that you can o­ rganize your course and help students learn about the Indian Ocean in world history. In the final chapter, we discuss longer research proj­ects that guide students in their own inquiries about the rich history of the Indian Ocean.

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Teaching Technologies research proj­e cts for student engagement

in this chapter we showcase four dif­f er­ent semester-­long assignments that use our key pedagogical ele­ments—­backward design, student-­driven inquiry, reflective writing, and audiences beyond the instructor—­for quite dif­fer­ent outcomes. The first focuses on biography-­writing to help students better understand the ­people of the Indian Ocean. The second is a research proposal in the form of a Fulbright application. The third assignment is on mapping and the digital humanities, and the fourth is a deceptively short—­six minutes and forty seconds—­presentation form called PechaKucha that encourages students to master complex material and pre­sent it in ways that teach ­others.

Indian Ocean Biography Assignment The first of four assignments that we’d like you to consider is a biographical proj­ect that focuses on an individual to highlight some of the themes of Indian Ocean World history, such as how an individual experiences mobility; the effects

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of multiple layers of sovereignty; conceptions and lived experiences of race and identity; and vari­ous degrees of coerced ­labor. Biographies allow students to work closely with primary sources and glimpse into personal histories and p­ eople’s journeys. Depending on the level of the course you could dial up or dial down the level of difficulty, with a high school class working from a suggested list of individuals for whom material is clearly available, and an advanced university research seminar asking students to delve into the lives of unheralded, ­little-known, or marginal individuals. The inspiration for this assignment comes from Clare Anderson’s thoughtful book Subaltern Lives, which focuses on unlikely subjects of biography—­men and w ­ omen who w ­ ere convicts, sailors, enslaved or indentured laborers, Indigenous ­people, and “poor whites” of Empire—­and pre­sents partial and fragmented accounts of their lives to “shed new light on some of the practices and pro­cesses associated with imperial expansion in the Indian Ocean, the ways in which individuals lived them, and the broader geo­graph­i­cal and social connections that they underpinned.”1 While her book focuses on the colonial period (and its relative wealth of archival collections) the assignment could deal with other periods as well and offers a nice way to focus on ­women and other groups who are less represented in the historical lit­er­a­ture. In the past, assignments that focused on less-­than-­famous historical individuals would be hard to do in most courses without a herculean effort from the instructor to assem­ble volumes of primary sources. Ready access to archival materials, dedicated databases, and digitized sources through the internet, however, has made it pos­si­ble for students to explore unremembered lives and track individuals across their life span. The research for this proj­ect ­will not yield a full picture, and Anderson emphasizes that not only is incompleteness acceptable, it is perhaps inevitable. Reading a chapter of her book might help your students ­free themselves from the narrative beginnings and endings of traditional biographies. When writing about ­people who ­were not prominent, the documentary basis for their histories are traces, and t­ hese traces and fragments can be put together “to construct snapshots of at least part of their lives and social worlds.”2 132

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In carry­ing out their research and writing their papers, students should remain alert to the broad claims that your course is making. How much does their person fit certain commonplace understandings, and to what extent do they provide a dif­f er­ent example? What ­were their social lives? Who ­were their kin? What kinds of networks w ­ ere they part of ? Students should also pay attention to aspects of race, ethnicity, and gender. Looking closely at one individual helps us see ­these aspects more clearly, and the specific details help students ask better questions. The mobility of their subject might also be a category of analy­sis, both how and when they traveled (or w ­ ere forced to move). What kinds of p­ olitical and social formations did they find themselves within? Again, ­these ­don’t have to be complete biographies: we can learn from t­ hese snapshots of their social worlds from the ­limited sources students might use. What about the sources? One starting point for students are letters and petitions that circulated within the Indian Ocean milieu. Online archives like the Qatar Digital Library (https://­www​.­qdl​.­qa​/­en) contain hundreds of thousands of pages of digitized archives, and t­ hese include testimonies and appeals from thousands of individuals who ­were enslaved and transported to the Gulf region throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth ­century.3 Students may also be able to find evidence of individuals who ­were bound through indenture from India to sites across the Indian Ocean or beyond.4 ­These kinds of accounts can be used to assem­ble individual life stories. Other sources include memoirs or travel accounts by better-­known individuals from which students could elucidate the details of p­ eople that they encountered or depended upon. Emily Reute’s memoir of growing up in the Zanzibar h ­ ouse­hold of the Omani ruler Said bin Sultan during the ­middle of the nineteenth ­century introduces a wide cast of characters that could be the focus of this assignment.5 Another example of this approach is the details that emerge of the guides, like Ali, who was Malay, or the unnamed guide, a Melakan Creole with Portuguese ancestors, who made Alfred Russel Wallace’s natu­ral specimen hunting so successful in Ma­la­ya.6 Similarly, the story of a figure like Sidi Mubarak Bombay, a man who was born and enslaved in East Africa before being freed in India and 133

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returning to accompany some of the best-­known ­European travelers into the African interior, can be told from the travel accounts of the p­ eople he accompanied.7 Indeed, many such nineteenth-­century travelogues are available online via Google Books, Hathi Trust, or other repositories. By way of comparison, a modern example of an ordinary individual whose life history connected Africa and India is that of K ­ enyan seaman and musician Mzee Mombasa.8 Guidelines that you may consider: How many primary sources must the proj­ect include? Are students l­ imited to write about figures from one period or allowed to work across the ­whole of your course’s time frame? How ­will the results be presented? We like to encourage proj­ects that have an audience beyond the grader. You could construct an online gallery of your subjects, have students post and respond to online discussion posts about their p­ eople, ask each student to pre­sent the key aspects of their person, or even have them write (or add to) Wikipedia entries on the person they have learned about—­like the short entry on Sidi Mubarak Bombay.9 Fi­nally, consider asking students to reflect on the biography proj­ect when they submit it or at the end of the term. Some questions they might consider: What sources ­were the most useful? Which ­were the hardest to use? What did you appreciate about the work that other students did? What w ­ ere the challenges of writing this biography? Knowing what you know now, how would you approach this proj­ect differently? What did you learn from this proj­ect? ­These kinds of reflective questions allow you to better understand what the student produced and how they learned.

Grant Application as Assignment If your students could carry out their own research in the Indian Ocean, where would they go and what would they study? A research proposal or grant application asks students to formulate a research topic, think through the steps of how they would carry out the research, and then pre­ sent ­these in such a way that o­ thers ­will be willing to support them. As an assignment, a grant application asks students to engage in the p­ rocess of knowledge production and to recognize the way bureaucracies of grants and research funding shape research agendas. Thus, we have found it useful 134

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in advanced undergraduate courses to have students write a proposal to carry out their own research proj­ects. We have preferred a fellowship assignment template that mirrors a­ ctual fellowships that our students could pursue ­after graduation. Some colleges are partners with the Thomas F. Watson Fellowship, which allows yearlong, multicountry research proj­ects. While this could be an ideal match, we focus ­here on the Fulbright research fellowship, using the proposal requirements of the Fulbright US Student Program, ­because of its format and its wider availability and applicability.10 The Fulbright application is relatively concise (a two-­page statement of grant purpose and a one-­page personal statement) and has well-­developed criteria for evaluation. The fact that the audience of a Fulbright application includes scholars, bureaucrats, embassy personnel, and host country nationals compels students to write for an audience other than their instructor and for an audience that ­will know the host country. For research topics, instructors can impose limits on the topics that students are allowed to pursue, but we have also found success in giving students ­great leeway so long as it is academically grounded. Note that the very format of the Fulbright grant raises useful questions related to studying the Indian Ocean that you might engage with your students. The US State Department sponsors the Fulbright program, and grants have their roots in Cold War–­era foreign policy and bilateral exchange. Students may only apply to carry out research in one country. Ask students to reflect on how Indian Ocean approaches to history challenge this framing of research within one nation-­state and how they can approach Indian Ocean questions from one place. Over the course of the proj­ect, you might also ask them for other reflections on the trade-offs for this approach. While we hope that this ­whole primer has helped make the case that the nation-state is a very ­limited way to study Indian Ocean history, we recognize that the Fulbright offers a manageable framework for diving into Indian Ocean history and asking students to think about carry­ing out research in the region. While this may seem to be a complex assignment, we have found that by scaffolding it throughout the semester even lower-division students can be 135

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successful. We have had excellent results by breaking the assignment into eight steps, encouraging students to revise and clarify the proj­ect at each point. ­These eight steps include a proposal, a preliminary list of sources, a historical background paper with an annotated bibliography, a statement of research affiliation, a draft proposal, a peer-­review ­process, a revision, and a reflective ­process essay. As a first step, we ask students to pose a preliminary research question, consider the methods that would be necessary to answer that question, and indicate a country where they could carry out the research. You might also ask for a preliminary proj­ect description, a specified number of sources, and a reflection on what aspects they are most excited about and/or need more help on. This assignment comes early in the semester, like in the fourth week of a fifteen-­week term. This fits especially nicely a­ fter beginning the term with readings that w ­ ill stimulate student imagination about pos­si­ble questions or approaches. A book like Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, for instance, highlights textual and ethnographic research while revealing a deep history of cross–Indian Ocean connections, while Mandana Limbert’s In the Time of Oil is a more con­temporary anthropological study that links ideas of nationalism in Oman to the country’s history.11 In both, the researcher is pre­sent in the text, and this helps students consider their own role as researchers. We encourage students to pursue topics that they care about, ­whether that is professional sports (­Kenyan runners in the Gulf ) or piracy (historical or con­temporary), ­because they are much more invested in the proj­ect. Instructor feedback is key at this point to help focus students and point them ­toward useful resources. A student reflection helps you know which aspects have captured the student’s attention and which ones they are worried about. The second step is to create a list of ten pos­si­ble sources. This is a useful time to talk to students about appropriate sources and to let them put what they have learned, into practice. You might choose to require a certain number of primary sources and/or require them to add notes about their sources and why they w ­ ill be useful. This can be a short in-­class peer-­review assignment rather than something that is formally graded. Peer reviewers

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consider the quality and variety of sources, look for gaps, and help the author think about what is needed. The list of pos­si­ble sources anticipates the third step, a robust annotated bibliography, a short historical background paper, and a brief reflection. The emphasis ­here is on asking good historical questions that ­will inform their topic and in engaging critically with their sources. This is often the point when students dig into the sources and gain clarity about their topic and focus. The fourth step requires students to situate their research in their host country by writing a statement of affiliation. Fulbright applications require a letter from an in-­country institution, but we ask students to write their own statement. This is a crucial step in helping students move from the idea of a proj­ect to thinking about implementation and engagement with the host country. What would be the ideal place to carry out the research? Who is the ideal mentor or institution to link with in carry­ing out this proj­ ect? How ­will the combination of location and mentor/institution help them answer their research question? In proposal writing, this requires students to think through their research, make choices, and justify ­those choices. Specificity is a g­ reat boon in this step. Students find themselves looking up scholars and their affiliations or investigating local universities and research institutes. We grade this for completion and rely on feedback from in-­class peer review. Classmates consider proj­ect design, evaluate the justifications, and help one another think about what is needed to move the proj­ect forward. In the fifth step students draft a statement of grant purpose (two pages) and a personal statement (one page). Most students are not familiar with proposal writing, so a template for the general format is useful: introduction or background and proj­ect overview; location of proj­ect and affiliation; timeline and methodology; qualifications; cultural interactions or outreach; and conclusion. Writing a personal statement is something students have done, but they ­will need prompts to help them think about writing about themselves in relation to a research proj­ect. For youn­g er university students this can be challenging ­because they may lack many of

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the skills or experiences they would need to make the proj­ect successful. We encourage students to write about their experiences and to explain how they might gain key skills—­like some language exposure—­before they undertake the proj­ect. Even the p­ rocess of thinking through ­these ­things makes students more attuned to the p­ rocess of carry­ing out research and the degrees of expertise required. With complete drafts submitted, the sixth step simulates a review panel. Students are divided into groups of four and given the same four proposals to review. We have found that it works best to have no overlap between the readers and the authors, that is, no one in the group is reading and commenting on the proposal of another person in the group. Like a review panel, students read and take notes on the proposals on their own, completing a rubric for feedback for each author. Then the reviewers meet as a group and discuss each proposal, comparing notes, considering the strengths and weaknesses of the proposal, and writing up their notes for the author. For example, what are the three most impor­tant steps the author could take to improve the proposal? The panel also makes a mock recommendation: forward to the host country; forward with reservations; request revisions; or indicate that the proposal author has misunderstood the Fulbright ­process. If a panel thinks they are dealing with an exceptional proposal, one that is likely to be among the very best two or three in the entire class, we request that the authors of the exceptional proposals allow them to be shared with the ­whole class. The seventh step, a thorough revision of the draft proposal, builds on the intensive peer review ­process and highlights one of the most impor­tant aspects of this proj­ect: students can learn from one another. Students have made clear to us over the years that the ­process of discussing and commenting on other proposals gives them g­ reat insights on their own work, and ­these, combined with the notes from the panel that reviewed their work, lead to extremely polished final submissions. Students submit their revised proposal with a proj­ect portfolio that includes the eighth and final step, a reflection on the work they have done. What ­were the most impor­tant steps and changes in the ­proj­ect? What challenges would they imagine in actually carry­ing out the p­ roj­e ct? 138

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What insights into scholarship and knowledge production have they gained from this ­process? We also invite them to note what they are most proud of and where they found the greatest challenges. Th ­ ese reflections reveal areas of individual growth and broader understanding. The portfolio brings all of their work together: the final revised versions of the statement of grant purpose and the personal statement; the proj­ect bibliography; the statement of affiliation; and the reflection. Through the scaffolded nature of this proj­ect, students gain a degree of expertise in one Indian Ocean country and a par­tic­u­lar topic and complete the proj­ect with a well-­deserved sense of accomplishment.

Mapping and Digital Humanities Assignments The digital humanities offer another set of in-­depth research proj­ects that allow your students to think about an audience beyond the class. While ­there are many possibilities, the two we would like to focus on ­here are combining maps with historical narratives or analy­sis and digital collection-­making or curating. Mobility is one of the key themes of Indian Ocean history that we have stressed throughout this primer, and you can use digital tools to help your students tie their research to maps and localities. Scholars who are engaged in ­these kinds of digital proj­ects make clear their value: “New historical cartographies allow us to visualize the networks and cir­cuits that define spatial history . . . ​the study of movements (of ­people, plants, animals, goods, and information) over time.”12 Your students can also do this kind of work without having to master gis . One of the easiest programs to use is the StoryMapJS tool developed by Knight Lab of Northwestern University.13 StoryMapJS provides an interface where students can combine text, images, and location data to tell stories or make historical arguments. As a tool, it works particularly well for proj­ects in which locations and/ or mobility are prominent, so it is well suited for Indian Ocean work. A StoryMapJS assignment can require students to research and assem­ble a historical narrative or analytical proj­ect that has the reader move through vari­ous—­but not too many—­locations. Proj­ects with eight to twelve slides prob­ably work best. 139

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As for the content, you can choose to focus on or limit student work to thematic, geographic, or chronological divisions as you see fit. From primary sources you might ask them to choose an Indian Ocean voyage and map a ship’s journey or use a historical map to explore a port city, like Singapore in 1836.14 In a narrower focus, students might detail an area of a town, like the StoryMapJS of Pondicherry’s French Quarter.15 Students could also research and plot specific encounters or moments in a commodity chain, following ivory from East Africa or teak from Burma through exchanges and locales. Likewise, if the focus of the class is diasporas or any of the groups of “­people on the move” we mentioned in chapter 5, students could tell part of one of t­ hose stories or plot their own f­ amily’s movements if they have ­family linkages in the region. StoryMapJS could also be used in conjunction with the published collections of the Geniza documents, or some of the scholarship that is based on them. Fi­nally, another option is pairing a story map with one of the approaches to biography mentioned above, or like Janet Lim in chapter 6. You could ask students to make a story map based on one of Clare Anderson’s chapters or have them map the biographies that they themselves have researched and written. For ­these assignments, while the maps and the final product may look slick, the key to the proj­ect is the research and the considerations of how to move from the primary and secondary sources to specific locations and visual repre­sen­ta­tions. It is useful to stress the research basis by asking students to frame and pursue a research question with appropriate sources. When they have a sense of the topic and key details, they can then work on creating a story­board with visuals to bring their research to life. For semester-­long proj­ects, you might include a peer review step in the p­ rocess before the final submission. It is also useful to have students submit a written p­ rocess and reflection paper with the digital assignment so that you can understand their choices and assess the work and thought ­behind the proj­ect. The second area of digital scholarship that offers ­great promise for the Indian Ocean World history classroom are student collections and curations of images and artifacts. In this case we suggest using Omeka, a web publishing platform that makes it easy to create and share digital collec140

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tions and exhibits that include diverse media like images, maps, and timelines, among ­others. The program allows students working individually or in groups to curate a collection of items so that ­others can experience them. Many teachers have already used Omeka as the basis for teaching proj­ects, so ­there are very useful starting guides, such as the one developed at Davidson College that includes a set of learning goals and outcomes, an example assignment, strategies for preparing students, guidelines for assessment, related readings, and examples.16 As with other assignments we have showcased, an Omeka assignment lets students use research and their own synthetic work for an outward-­ facing proj­ect. Students may be asked to pick up one aspect of a larger class and collect materials and commentaries to support them. One useful set of examples ­here is the work of students from historian Rebekah Pite’s course on the history of global stimulants at Lafayette College. The course focuses on the global histories of coffee, tea, choco­late, and yerba mate, and each semester Pite has students create interpretive Omeka exhibits on their research. Some students have focused on the Indian Ocean World, such as l­abor recruitment and its repre­sen­ta­tion in Assam and Ceylon in the nineteenth and twentieth ­century or the ways colonialism is reflected in Indian tea advertisements, and thus provide good examples ­here.17 Proj­ ects on Indian Ocean–­linked foods, from bananas and dates, to pepper and cloves, or curry and India Pale Ale, could grab the attention of your students. Foodways are also good routes into gendered histories. In his Indian Ocean history course at Rutgers, Johan Mathew has assigned a paper in which students choose any two objects related to the Indian Ocean, from something small and organic, like the peppercorn, to something massive and manufactured, like the container ship, and asks students to reflect on how their two objects contributed to the Indian Ocean’s connectivity. In their responses, students must address the ­factors that facilitated or obstructed the pro­cesses that made their objects prominent. This assignment could be turned into an Omeka assignment in which students created pages for their two objects and wrote about them together. The class could then see all of the other objects and think about them together. 141

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A similar approach with Omeka would be to have students design a digital museum of the Indian Ocean World. What objects or exhibits would they include? How would they group t­ hese objects? What points would they make about them? Are t­ hese objects primarily used by men or by ­women? This could be done collectively as a class so that you come up with a set of criteria together, or you could assign groups to dif­fer­ent topical areas or eras and ask them to curate their sections. (Likewise, in chapter 6, we suggested you could have students create a museum focused on slavery and coerced ­labor systems.) Omeka also has the possibility of creating archives and repositories. Anthropologist David Vine and his students at American University have used Omeka to create the Chagos Archive, an online archive to document, collect, and display material related to the Chagossian ­people displaced from their Indian Ocean archipelago by the creation of the United States’ military base on Diego Garcia (see chapter 7).18 This is a dif­fer­ent kind of class proj­ect, but one that has students evaluate and situate primary-source material for ­others to use.

The PechaKucha ­Presentation A visual, public-­facing p­ resentation asks students to master a topic well enough to teach o­ thers about it. The PechaKucha format, which leans heavi­ly on images and a time constraint, was initially used by architects and designers to showcase their work.19 Each ­presentation includes exactly twenty slides that autoadvance exactly e­ very twenty seconds, and the format has proven remarkably useful in academic settings.20 For the Indian Ocean, a PechaKucha proj­ect has students dive into visual archives, research, and storytelling. Rather than writing ­toward a word count or number of pages, students weigh which material is most impor­tant for supporting their arguments. For upper-division courses, we have used the PechaKucha ­presentation as a multistep assignment that builds across the semester. Students work in groups of four, and, b­ ecause of the brief and easily enforced p­ resentation time (6:40), it is pos­si­ble to have ­every group pre­sent, even in a big class.21 The scope of your class might suggest or limit topics, or you can assign topics and groups. We have combined the ­process of topic ideation and 142

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group formation through a “concept fair” where students can discuss the pos­si­ble topics and team up with p­ eople interested in the same topics.22 We ask groups to solidify their topic and make a research plan that also is alert to the visual and storytelling aspect of the proj­ect. What kinds of images ­will they look for? Who are the compelling characters? Whose voices do they want to feature? For research four ­people can cover more ground than one, and the annotated bibliography highlights the way individual efforts are assessed in relation to the group. We have each student submit an annotated bibliography with four sources, one of which must be an image. Each member of the group must have unique sources. Depending on the course and the level, instructors may need to give more guidance on using library resources and identifying appropriate sources. The PechaKucha p­ resentation relies on visuals, so instructors should direct students to visual archives relevant to the Indian Ocean. While a general database like Artstor may offer many options, Leiden University’s digital collections has extensive holdings on Southeast Asia, with more than one hundred thousand available for downloading.23 Likewise, Northwestern University’s Humphrey Winterton Collection contains a wealth of photos from East Africa.24 Museums like the British Museum and the Rijksmuseum also have massive online collections, and Getty Images hosts a huge repository of con­temporary pictures. ­These collections are easier for students to cite and contextualize, but they can also draw on images they find through Google. Searching for images helps them learn visual analy­ sis and to think about how images both support and advance the points they wish to make. Students should treat the images as sources, too, and annotate them as well with the bibliography. The annotated bibliography is a turning point for many students ­because they test their ideas with the available sources, and the results often shift the group’s focus. ­After this step, students teach one another what they learned in their research and share their images so that they can begin to build to twenty slides. Storyboarding can help them determine a narrative or argument and match the visuals to help move the p­ resentation along. What voices and perspectives can they include to bring the main argument 143

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to life? For some this w ­ ill mean a narrative told from the point of view of one person; for o­ thers it may mean jumping between an analytical point of view and a story. For example, our students who created a p­ resentation on hijra/ kinnar (third-gender) communities in South Asia paid close attention to historical agency and representative voices, and all students should consider w ­ hether their proj­ect centers on p­ eople from the Indian Ocean region. While they could tell the stories of obvious individuals like Ibn Battúta, Zheng He, or Vasco da Gama, encourage them also to take on ­people like the Indian ­women who traveled to Mauritius as indentured workers. As they consider their topic, does it encompass more than one point of view? Does it consider age or gender in shaping ­these voices? Does it put historical actors in context? Part of this ­process, as with a typical paper, is figuring out what background material to include. In this case, the time constraints of the p­ resentation format force students to be very efficient in their argument, evidence, and storytelling. Assembling the images for the twenty-­slide deck requires students to think visually. Students should use compelling pictures, minimal text, and easily interpretable graphs or figures rather than walls of text. The best ­presentations ­will be an interaction between what the students are saying and what the audience is seeing. Th ­ ere is room for g­ reat creativity in the ­presentation. ­We’ve seen p­ eople play historical characters, take on oppositional roles in a dialogue, or create mini-plays to accompany the slides. We strongly discourage students from reading from notes but instead encourage them to practice u­ ntil they know what they want to say and can speak to their classmates. Dedicating class time to student p­ resentations lets students show off their work and learn from one another. With some preparation it is not hard to make ­things run smoothly.25 ­After each ­presentation we have a short q&a , and then move to the next group. The time ele­ment keeps the ­presentations exciting to watch, and students are attentive to their classmates’ work. Students’ written notes on feedback sheets are very positive, and it is clear to students which are the very best ­presentations. In online learning when it is not pos­si­ble to have a “live” group ­presentation, we have asked students to submit their slides and scripts as 144

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one document and then posted ­these for peer review via discussion posts in the course management system. As with the Fulbright proposal, the final step in the PechaKucha proj­ ect is a portfolio of the work that students have completed. We also ask them to write two additional short papers evaluating and reflecting. We ask that each student submit an abstract or proj­ect overview, their slides and scripts, a bibliography of the proj­ect, and a bibliography of images. While students submit ­these individually, the expectation is that ­these ele­ments look the same for all group members. The difference in the portfolio is the individual evaluation of the group and an individual reflection paper. The group evaluation has been a vital tool in understanding how the group worked. We ask each student individually to write about the group’s dynamic, ­process, and working style; consider their own role in the group; detail challenges; and reflect on the degree to which each member contributed to the final product. Reading all four portfolios from one group makes it easy to see the degree of cooperation. In general, we have had g­ reat success with ­these group evaluations: most students do good work and are generous ­toward their peers. In the reflection paper (750–1,250 words) we ask each student to think through the ­process of researching and preparing the ­presentation; the ­presentation itself; the feedback they received from classmates; and their reflection on synthesizing knowledge. In cases where they have received formal peer review from classmates via the course discussion boards, we ask them to summarize or characterize the most impor­tant, engaging, useful, or critical feedback. And b­ ecause t­ hey’ve seen other students’ ­presentations, we ask them to think about how they might change or improve their own proj­ect. For the final part of the reflection paper, we ask them about the most impor­tant ­things they learned about their topic from their proj­ect and what lessons they take from the PechaKucha proj­ ect that semester. Student reflections have borne out the value of the proj­ect. Pulling together research and visuals and having to be concise gives some students real opportunities for growth. One student wrote, “Synthesizing a pecha kucha was one of the most exciting/difficult/rewarding tasks I have undertaken. 145

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It ­really challenged my original way of thinking. I am a very type A, logical, and linear thinker. I d­ on’t, for lack of a better phrase, have a creative bone in my body. This ­presentation made me reach further than I had before into the creative realm and create an engaging narrative from a mountain of information in only 6 minutes and 40 seconds.” Students also learn how to communicate and connect with their audience. As one noted, “Telling a story on a personal, ­human level is sometimes far more compelling than showing a plethora of statistics and overarching research.” In this chapter we have presented four pedagogies for involved research that allow students to direct their own proj­ects with guidelines and constraints to explore the Indian Ocean past. We hope your students create engaging proj­ects grounded in research and framed with skills that ­will help them ­after they leave your classroom.

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4^ Conclusion 64 final thoughts this is not a conclusion, for as Antoinette Burton entitled her epilogue to the first volume in this series of primers, the challenge of teaching world history is “never done.”1 In our case, the rapidly evolving field of Indian Ocean history ensures that the ­process of learning and teaching about this vast global region w ­ ill continue to evolve exponentially in the coming years. In this volume we understand we have scratched the surface of what you can do to engage your students in this proj­ect. As other historians have noted about their own areas of specialization, asking questions about the Indian Ocean opens new paths into engaging with world history. For while the details may differ, the broad themes are truly universal. Student-­centered learning is the goal we hope we have encouraged in this primer by providing several ideas for studying Indian Ocean World history. To this end we have sought to introduce you and your students to a body of historical lit­er­a­ture that has evolved over the past four d­ ecades. To be sure, neither the ideas nor the sources we discuss are exhaustive. Rather, they reflect how our own evolution as historians of Africa has opened the wider field of Indian Ocean World history to both of us. Our shared perspective on the Indian Ocean ­will differ from t­ hose of scholars who launch their intellectual and pedagogical journey as teachers of world history from other subregions of the Indian Ocean, but it shares with

Co n c lus i o n

them a ­process of lifelong learning to understand that wider context. As outsiders to this world, what especially excites us about the ­future of Indian Ocean World history is the growing number of young scholars from the Indian Ocean World who are now studying the broader region. The questions they are raising promise to yield new perspectives on ­those areas in which their expertise is rooted, the linkages across the wider Indian Ocean, and the region as a ­whole. The production of knowledge about the Indian Ocean World is both international and multisited, so it is well worth the time it takes occasionally to survey what is taking place in relevant conferences, lectures, and seminars. We encourage you to stay in touch with this evolving scholarship by consulting the journals and websites that we include in the selected bibliography to this volume. So, while the work may never be done, we hope that it w ­ ill always be intellectually rewarding and that it ­will encourage you and your students to continue to probe the questions raised by the study of Indian Ocean World history.

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4^ Notes 64

Introduction. Initial Thoughts 1. For an overview of this historiography, see Edward A. Alpers, “Indian Ocean Studies: How Did We Get H ­ ere and Where Are We G ­ oing? A Historian’s Perspective,” Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies 5, no. 2 (2022): 314–36. 2. Michael N. Pearson, “Littoral Society: The Case for the Coast,” ­Great Circle 7, no. 1 (April 1985): 1–8, reprinted in Michael N. Pearson, The World of the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800: Studies in Economic, Social and Cultural History ­(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate/Variorum, 2005), chap. 6; Michael N. Pearson, “Littoral Society: The Concept and the Prob­lems,” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (December 2006): 353–73; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes ­towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 ( July 1997): 735–62. 3. In this book we generally use the term world history to imply a commonsense usage that takes account of the “global turn” in history. We also sometimes use global as a category, and some may won­der what distinction we understand between world history and global history. In 2006, in the very first issue of the new Journal of Global History, the editors noted the “subtle difference between the closely related endeavours of global and world history.” Without defining world history, but implying its shortcomings, the journal editors argued for historicizing the pro­cesses of globalization and continuing to deconstruct Western metanarratives. The journal aimed to amplify scholarship that followed the life cycles of commodities and paid attention to the cultures of consumption and ­labor. Rather than covering the ­whole globe, they desired to publish work that both straddled regions and made cross-­regional comparisons. William Gervase Clarence-­Smith, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Peer Vries, editorial in Journal of Global History 1, no. 1 (March 2006): 1–2, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1017​ /­S1740022806000015. ­These broad outlines of a “global turn” in history inform

N ot es to I n t r o d u c t i o n our approach ­here. While the attempts to distinguish between world history and global history have attracted scholarly debate, historian Peer Vries, one of the Journal of Global History’s original editors, recently dismissed the focus on distinguishing between world and global. For a lively discussion of this topic with useful references, see Jordan Barnes, “Defining World History vs. Global History,” H-­World, March 3, 2015, https://­networks​.­h​-­net​.­org​/­node​/­20292​ /­discussions​/­66052​/­defining​-­world​-­history​-­vs​-­global​-­history. The maturation of the fields of global/world history has led scholars to recognize two subbranches: one that focuses on universal pro­cesses and largely draws from secondary material, and one that focuses on microhistories and local histories from primary sources but does not make global claims. Cátia Antunes, “An Old Practitioner Still in Search of the métier d’historien Response to Peer Vries, ‘The Prospects of Global History: Personal Reflections of an Old Believer,’ ” International Review of Social History 64, no. 1 (April 2019): 123–27, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1017​/­S0020859019000087. In this primer, we draw from both subbranches to keep the focus on a strong tradition within the field of world history: teaching and providing a synthesis for students.

One. Mapping the Indian Ocean 1. Michael N. Pearson, “Littoral Society: The Case for the Coast,” ­Great Circle 7, no. 1 (April 1985): 1–8; Michael N. Pearson, “Littoral Society: The Concept and the Prob­lems,” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (December 2006): 353–73. 2. Michael N. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Period (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 67. 3. G. R. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese: Being a Translation of Kitāb al-­Fawā’id fī uṣūl al-­baḥr wa’l-­qawā’id of Aḥmad b. Mājid al-­Najdī [. . .] (London: Royal Asiatic Society of ­Great Britain and Ireland, 1971); George F. Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times, rev. ed. by John Carswell (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1995). For two valuable overviews, see Marina Tolmacheva, “Long-­Distance Sailing in the Indian Ocean before the Portuguese,” in Maritime Cultures in East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean, ed. Akshay Sarathi (Abingdon, UK: Archaeopress, 2018), 215–26; and Eric Staples, “Indian Ocean Navigation in Islamic Sources 850–1560 ce,” History Compass 16, no. 9 (September 2018), https://­compass​.­onlinelibrary​.­wiley​.­com​/­doi​/­full​/­10​.­1111​ /­hic3​.­12485. 4. The best modern E ­ nglish translation is by Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1989). Teachers should also be

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N ot es to C h a p t er O n e aware of the online version of W. H. Schoff ’s 1912 translation, archived June 7, 2017, at Archive​.­org, https://­archive​.­org​/­details​/­periplusoferythr00scho​/­page​ /­n5​/­mode​/­2up, but Casson’s translation and annotation are superior. 5. ­Until it was removed in October 2017, this document was available in an online, interactive version through the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. The entire document has been published by Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-­Smith in Kitāb Ghara’ib al-­funūn wa-­mulah al-­uyūn, an Eleventh-­ Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The Book of Curiosities, Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science, Texts and Studies, vol. 87 (Boston: Brill, 2014). A digital version of the Arabic manuscript is available at the Bodleian Libraries, accessed August 31, 2023, https://­digital​.­bodleian​.­ox​.­ac​.­uk​/­objects​ /­748a9d50​-­5a3a​-­440e​-­ab9d​-­567dd68b6abb​/­surfaces​/­d6fc79a9​-­a87a​-­48cb​ -­aebe​-­edd36c2158c6. 6. See Wikipedia, s.v. “Da Ming Hunyi Tu,” last modified August 22, 2023, 15:58, https://­en​.­wikipedia​.­org​/­wiki​/­Da​_­Ming​_­Hunyi​_­Tu; and Wikipedia, s.v. “Mao Kun map,” last modified October 29, 2023, 23:39, https://­en​.­wikipedia​ .­org​/­wiki​/­Mao​_­Kun​_­map. 7. Joseph E. Schwartzberg, “Nautical Maps,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 1, Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Socie­ties, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 494–98. 8. Schwartzberg, “Nautical Maps,” 498–503; Samira Sheikh, “A Gujarati Map and ­Pilot Book of the Indian Ocean, c.1750,” Imago Mundi 61, no. 1 (2009): 67–83, https://­www​.­jstor​.­org​/­stable​/­40234194; for the Berlin Museum map, see Eclectic Indian World Map, accessed July 24, 2021, https://­www​.­myoldmaps​ .­com​/­early​-­medieval​-­monographs​/­2262​-­eclectic​-­indian​-­world​/­. 9. Joseph E. Schwartzberg, “Southeast Asian Nautical Maps,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 2, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Socie­ties, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 828–38. Images of ­these maps can be extracted for Power­ Point slides from the publications already cited. 10. See, e.g., Michael N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003), 19–23; Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 20–23; Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7–9. 11. Anthony Reid, “Female Roles in Pre-­colonial Southeast Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1988): 632–34. See also Laura J. Mitchell, “­Women and Men in the Indian Ocean World Temporary Marriage,” accessed October 13, 2022,

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N ot es to C h a p t er O n e https://­ccat​.­sas​.­upenn​.­edu​/­indianocean​/­modules​/­group3​/­temporarymarriage​ .­html. 12. For a nontechnical analy­sis of the impact of cyclonic activity on the history of the Bay of Bengal, see Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Fortunes of Nature and the Fortunes of Mi­grants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 13. Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean, 156–66. 14. Tom Simkin and Richard S. Fiske, Krakatau 1883: The Volcanic Eruption and Its Effects (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984). 15. For satellite images from vari­ous sources, see https://­www​.­google​.­com​/­search​ ?­q​=­2004+tsunami+satellite+images+before+and+­after&tbm​=­isch&tbo​ =­u&source​=u­ niv&sa​=X ­ &ved​=­0ahUKEwi​_­vMmh4OfaAhVQ5WMKHZUF BDwQsAQIKA&biw​=1­ 229&bih​=­587, accessed May 2, 2018. 16. Dionisius A. Agius, In the Wake of the Dhow: The Arabian Gulf and Oman (Reading, UK: Ithaca, 2002). 17. The origin of the lateen sail is still undetermined, but for an impor­tant intervention, see I. C. Campbell, “The Lateen Sail in World History,” Journal of World History 6, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 1–23, https://­www​.­jstor​.­org​/­stable​/­20078617. 18. See Pierre-­Yves Manguin, “Austronesian Shipping in the Indian Ocean: From Outrigger Boats to Trading Ships,” in Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World, ed. Gwyn Campbell (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 51–76, and sources cited therein. 19. The details of the settlement of Madagascar and of its culture history remain highly contentious and methodologically challenging. For a useful overview, see Solofo Randrainja and Stephen Ellis, Madagascar: A Short History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 17–43. For examples of current debates, see the following chapters in Campbell, Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World: Alexander Adelaar, “Austronesians in Madagascar: A Critical Assessment of the Works of Paul Ottino and Philippe Beaujard,” 77–112; Anneli Ekblom, Paul Lane, Chantal Radimilahy, Jean-­Amie Rakotoarisoa, Paul Sinclair, and Malika Virah-­Swamy, “Migration and Interaction between Madagascar and Eastern Africa, 500 bce–1000 ce: An Archaeological Perspective,” 195–230; and Jason A. Hodgson, “A Genomic Investigation of the Malagasy Confirms the Highland-­Coastal Divide, and the Lack of ­Middle Eastern Gene Flow,” 231–54. 20. Sarah Ward, Chinese Whispers: Zheng He’s ­Treasure Ships in the Context of Chinese Maritime Policy in the Ming Dynasty (1364–1644) (self-­pub., Academia​ .­edu, 2006), https://­www​.­academia​.­edu​/­4632863​/­Chinese​_­Whispers​_­Zheng​ _­He​_­s​_­Treasure​_­Shi​.­pdf; Sarah Ward, “Zheng He’s ­Treasure Ships: Myth or Real­ity?,” Immersed (blog), January 21, 2021, https://­sarahward​.­org​/­zheng​-­he​ -­treasure​-­ships​/­.

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N ot es to C h a p t er T wo 21. See Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean, 296–97. 22. Agius, In the Wake of the Dhow, 52. 23. Elizabeth A. Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of ­Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 196–97, 205; Michael N. Pearson, “Class, Authority and Gender on Early-­Modern Indian Ocean Ships: ­European and Asian Comparisons,” South African Historical Journal 61, no. 4 (2009): 696–97. 24. Pearson, “Class, Authority and Gender,” 695–96.

Two. Beyond Eurocentrism 1. See, e.g., Dagmar Weikler, C. H. Stigand, and Marina Tolmacheva, The Pate Chronicle: Edited and Translated from mss 177, 321, 344, and 358 of the Library of the University of Dar es Salaam [. . .] (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1993). “A Chronicle of Lamu,” Bantu Studies 12, no. 1 (1938): 9–33. For Swahili town histories of Mombasa, Kilwa Kisiwani, Lindi, Dar es Salaam, Bagamoyo, and Kua, Juani, Mafi, see G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville, The East African Coast: Select Documents from the First to the Earlier Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 213–42, 297–99. For an Arab perspective on Mombasa, see Al-­Amin bin Ali Mazrui, The History of the Mazru‘i Dynasty of Mombasa (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Acad­emy, 1995). For each of ­these sources the Indian Ocean linkages need to be rooted out by the reader. 2. Abū Zayd al-­Sīrāfī, Accounts of China and India, trans. Tim Mackintosh-­Smith, ed. Philip F. Kennedy, foreword by Zvi Ben-­Dor Benite (New York: New York University Press, 2017). 3. The quotations are from Freeman-­Grenville’s translation of the Arabic document in The East African Coast, 34–49, while noting Elias Saad’s many criticisms of Freeman-­Grenville’s translation. Elias Saad, “Kilwa Dynastic Historiography: A Critical Study,” History in Africa 6 (1979): 177–207. 4. For the Arabic version, see S. Arthur Strong, ed., “History of Kilwa,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of ­Great Britain and Ireland 27, no. 2 (1895): 385–430; for the Portuguese version, see George M. Theal, Rec­ords of South-­Eastern Africa 6 (London: Government of the Cape Colony, 1900), 233–44. 5. For a meticulous analy­sis of the chronicle, see Saad, “Kilwa Dynastic Historiography.” 6. Freeman-­Grenville, The East African Coast, 35. 7. See Randall L. Pouwels, Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 17–37.

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N ot es to C h a p t er T wo 8. An in­ter­est­ing Swahili parallel to the Kilwa Chronicle is Said Bakari bin Sultani Ahmed, The Swahili Chronicle of Ngazija, ed. Lyndon Harries (Bloomington: Indiana University African Studies Program, 1977). 9. Malay Annals at the Library of Congress World Digital Library, accessed May 7, 2020, https://­www​.­wdl​.­org​/­en​/­item​/­14286​/­. 10. C. C. Brown, “Sĕjarah Mĕlayu or ‘Malay Annals,’ ” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 25, no. 2/3, 159 (October 1952): 5–276, quoted at 12, https://­www​.­jstor​.­org​/­stable​/­41502950; R. O. Winstedt, “The Malay Annals or Sejarah Melayu,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 16, no. 3 (December 1938): 1–226, https://­www​.­jstor​.­org​/­stable​ /­41559927. For more detail on the many variations on this document, see Wikipedia, s.v. “Malay Annals,” last modified November 4, 2023, 20:37, https://­en​ .­wikipedia​.­org​/­wiki​/­Malay​_­Annals. 11. Brown, “Sĕjarah Mĕlayu or ‘Malay Annals,’ ”45. 12. Brown, “Sĕjarah Mĕlayu or ‘Malay Annals,’ ”46. 13. Brown, “Sĕjarah Mĕlayu or ‘Malay Annals,’ ” 62; see also pp. 134 and 153 for references to this characteristic Southeast Asian way of naming the wider Indian Ocean, as contrasted to the “lands below the winds,” which refers to Island Southeast Asia. 14. Brown, “Sĕjarah Mĕlayu or ‘Malay Annals,’ ” 113–14. 15. Brown, “Sĕjarah Mĕlayu or ‘Malay Annals,’ ” 140–41. 16. For a comparative example of how local tastes stimulated design across the Indian Ocean, see Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 134–38, 141–43. 17. Brown, “Sĕjarah Mĕlayu or ‘Malay Annals,’ ” 157. 18. The quote is from the title to chapter 4 of Shaykh Zainuddin Makhdum, Tuḥfat al-­Mujāhidīn, an Historical Work in the Arabic Language, trans. S. Muhammad Husayn Nainar (Madras, India: University of Madras, 1942), 53. 19. Makhdum, Tuḥfat al-­Mujāhidīn, 43. 20. Makhdum, Tuḥfat al-­Mujāhidīn, 50. 21. Edward C. Sachau, trans. and ed., Alberuni’s India: An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Lit­er­a­ture, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws and Astrology of India about A.D. 1030, vol. 1 (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1910), p. 7, archived December 27, 2016, at Archive​.­org, https://­archive​.­org​ /­details​/­alberunisindia​_­201612​/­alberunisindia​-­color​_­001​/­, italics in translation. 22. Sachau, Alberuni’s India, 17–20. 23. al-­Sīrāfī, Accounts of China and India, 26. 24. al-­Sīrāfī, Accounts of China and India, 33.

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N ot es to C h a p t er T h r e e 25. al-­Sīrāfī, Accounts of China and India, 60–61. 26. H. A. R. Gibb, trans., Ibn Battúta: Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325–­1354 ­(London: Darf, 1983, first published 1929), 96, archived January 22, 2017, at Archive​.­org, https://­archive​.­org​/­details​/­in​.­ernet​.­dli​.­2015​.­62617​/­page​/­n1​/­mode​ /­2up. 27. Gibb, Ibn Battúta, 112. 28. Gibb, Ibn Battúta, 190–92. 29. Gibb, Ibn Battúta, 238. 30. Gibb, Ibn Battúta, 282. 31. Gibb, Ibn Battúta, 283. 32. Gibb, Ibn Battúta, 287. 33. Gibb, Ibn Battúta, 292. 34. James Legge, trans., A Rec­ord of Buddhistic Kingdoms, Being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fâ-­Hien of Travels in India and Ceylon (A.D. 399–414) in Search of the Buddhist Books of Discipline (Oxford: Clarendon, 1886), accessed September 1, 2023, at https://­www​.­g utenberg​.­org​/­cache​/­epub​/­64535​/­pg64535​ -­images​.­html. See also Tansen Sen, “The Travel Rec­ords of Chinese Pilgrims Faxian, Xuanzang, and Yijing: Sources for Cross-­Cultural Encounters between Ancient China and Ancient India,” Education about Asia 11, no. 3 (2006): 24–33, http://­afe​.­easia​.­columbia​.­edu​/­special​/­travel​_­records​.­pdf. 35. Friedrich Hirst and W. W. Rockhill, trans., Chau Ju-­Kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-­fan-­chï (St. Petersburg: Imperial Acad­emy of Sciences, 1911), archived October 31, 2009, at Archive​.­org, https://­archive​.­org​/­details​ /­cu31924023289345​/­page​/­n7​/­mode​/­2up. 36. Ma Huan, Ying-­yai sheng-­lan: “The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores” (1433), trans. Feng Ch’eng-­chün, ed. J. V. G. Mills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society, 1970), archived October 27, 2020, at Archive​.­org, https://­archive​.­org​/­details​/­ying​-­yai​-­sheng​-­lan​-­j​.­​-­v​.­​-­g​-­mills. 37. Richard Winstedt and P. E. De Josselin De Jong, “The Maritime Laws of Malacca,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 29, no. 3 (August 1956): 22–59, with the translation on 51–59, https://­www​.­jstor​.­org​ /­stable​/­41503096.

Three. Beyond the Text 1. See Wikipedia, s.v. “Borobudur,” last modified November 1, 2023, 18:42, https://­en​.­wikipedia​.­org​/­wiki​/­Borobudur; unesco, “Borobudur ­Temple Compounds,” World Heritage List, accessed June 4, 2020, https://­whc​.­unesco​ .­org​/­en​/­list​/­592​/­.

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N ot es to C h a p t er T h r e e 2. Himanshu Prabha Ray, Beyond Trade: Cultural Roots of India’s Ocean (New Delhi: Aryan Books International, 2015), 119. 3. An early example of this kind of approach to the numerous ruins that dot the Swahili coast is pioneering archaeologist James Kirkman’s Men and Monuments on the East African Coast (London: Lutterworth, 1964). For an appreciation of Kirkman’s c­ areer, see Thomas Wilson, “James Kirkman and East African Archaeology,” in “From Zinj to Zanzibar, Studies in History Trade and Society on the Eastern Coast of Africa in Honour of James Kirkman on the Occasion of His Seventy-­Fifth Birthday,” ed. J. de V. Allen and Thomas H. Wilson, special issue, Paideuma 28 (1982): 3–6. For a brief overview of archaeological research on the coast, see John Sutton, “The East African Coast: Researching Its History and Archaeology,” in The Swahili World, ed. Stephanie Wynne-­Jones and Adria LaViolette (New York: Routledge, 2018), locs. 2181–2622 of 25166, Kindle. 4. The six site reports by Steven E. Sidebotham and Willemina Z. Wendrich, with contributions by o­ thers, for Berenike ­were published between 1994 and 2007; Steven E. Sidebotham, Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 5. See St John Simpson, “David Bryn White­house, 1941–2013,” Iran, Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 51, no. 1 (2013): v–­vii. 6. Jeremy Green, “Maritime Archaeology and the Indian Ocean,” ­Great Circle 2, no. 1 (April 1980): 3–12; Himanshu Prabha Ray, “Maritime Archaeology of the Indian Ocean,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, February 27, 2017, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1093​/­acrefore​/­9780190277727​.­013​.­27; Pierre-­Yves Manguin, “Ships and Shipwrecks in the Pre-­Modern Indian Ocean,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, February 28, 2020, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1093​/­acrefore​ /­9780190277727​.­013​.­326. 7. Derek Heng, “Ships, Shipwrecks, and Archaeological Recoveries as Sources of Southeast Asian History,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, September 26, 2018, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1093​/­acrefore​/­9780190277727​.­013​.­97. 8. Regina Krahl, John Guy, Julian Raby, and J. Keith Wilson, eds., Shipwrecked: Tang ­Treasures and Monsoon Winds (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2011), separate chapters available at the National Museum of Asian Art website, accessed September 1, 2023, https://­asia​.­si​.­edu​ /­research​/­publications​/­exhibition​-­catalogues​/­shipwrecked​-­tang​-­treasures​-­and​ -­monsoon​-­winds; Horst Hubertus Liebner, “The Siren of Cirebon: A Tenth-­ Century Trading Vessel Lost in the Java Sea” (PhD diss., University of Leeds, UK, 2014), https://­etheses​.­whiterose​.­ac​.­uk​/­6912​/­. 9. Nancy Um, The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).

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N ot es to C h a p t er T h r e e 10. Um, Merchant H ­ ouses of Mocha, 158. 11. Prita Meier, Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 3. 12. Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 160. See also John Lockerbie, “Islamic Design: Gulf Architecture 02—­Materials,” Catnaps​.­org, accessed July 21, 2021, https://­catnaps​.­org​/­islamic​/­g ulfarch2​.­html#materials; and Lockerbie, “Islamic Design: Gulf Architecture 03—­Use of Mangrove Poles,” Catnaps​.­org, accessed July 21, 2021, https://­catnaps​.­org​/­islamic​/­g ulfarch3​ .­html#mangrovepoles. 13. See Marc Horton, “Islamic Architecture of the Swahili Coast,” in Wynne-Jones and LaViolette, The Swahili World, locs. 14972–15140 of 25166, Kindle. 14. Sebastian R. Prange, Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 123. 15. Prange, Monsoon Islam, 125–26. 16. Elizabeth Lambourn, “ ‘A Collection of Merits . . .’: Architectural Influences in the Friday Mosque and Kazaruni Tomb Complex at Cambay, Gujarat,” South Asian Studies 17, no. 1 (2001): 117–49, quoted at 142. 17. Elizabeth Lambourn, “Brick, Timber, and Stone Building Materials and the Construction of Islamic History in Gujarat,” Muqarnas 23 (2006): 191–217, quoted at 214. 18. Nicolas Gervaise, An Historical Description of the Kingdom of Macasar in the East-­Indies (London: Tho. Leigh and D. Midwinter, ­Rose and Crown, St. Paul’s Church-­Yard, 1701), 152, 158–59, archived November 7, 2022, at Archive​.­org, https://­archive​.­org​/­details​/­an​-­description​-­of​-­macasar​/­page​/­n1​/­mode​/­2up; Jenny Peruski, “The Mosques of Mwana Mshamu: Creating ­Women’s Religious Spaces in Nineteenth-­Century Lamu” (abstract paper presented at the African Studies Association Conference, November 18, 2022, Philadelphia). Students interested in pursuing issues of modern w ­ omen’s mosque participation might begin with Eva F. Nisa, “Negotiating a Space in the Mosque: ­Women Claiming Religious Authority,” in Mosques and Imams: Everyday Islam in Eastern Indonesia, ed. Kathryn M. Robinson (Singapore: nus Press, 2021), 143–70. 19. Wikipedia, s.v. “Architecture of Madagascar,” last modified November 8, 2023, 21:12, https://­en​.­wikipedia​.­org​/­wiki​/­Architecture​_­of​_­Madagascar; Susan Kus and Victor Raharijaona, “­House to Palace, Village to State: Scaling Up Architecture and Ideology,” American Anthropologist 102, no. 1 (2000): 102. 20. Dieter Schlingloff, “Kalyāṇakārin’s Adventures: The Identification of an Ajanta Painting,” Artibus Asiae 38, no. 1 (1976): 5–28.

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N ot es to C h a p t er T h r e e 21. Pia Brancaccio, The Buddhist Caves at Aurangabad: Transformations in Art and Religion (Boston: Brill, 2011), 80–87. 22. Kenneth X. Robbins and John McLeod, eds., African Elites in India: Habshi Amarat (Ahmedabad, India: Mapin, 2006), includes numerous illustrations. 23. See Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 82–83, for two relevant images. 24. See, e.g., Chris­tian­ity in Asia: Sacred Art and Visual Splendour, Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, accessed August 31, 2020, https://­artsandculture​ .­google​.­com​/­exhibit​/­christianity​-­in​-­asia​-­sacred​-­art​-­and​-­visual​-­splendour​ -­national​-­heritage​-­board​-­singapore​/­MwJCDh0tZZeFIQ​?­hl​=e­ n. 25. Among ­these, Roger Blench, “Using Diverse Sources of Evidence for Reconstructing the Past History of Musical Exchanges in the Indian Ocean,” African Archaeological Review 31 (2014): 675–703, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1007​/­s10437​-­014​ -­9178​-­z. Blench’s list of sources for this wide-­ranging piece is especially useful. 26. Maho Sebiane, “Entre l’Afrique et l’Arabie: Les esprits de possession sawahil et leurs frontiers,” Journal des Africanistes 84, no. 2 (2014): 48–79; Sebiane, “Beyond the leiwah of Eastern Arabia: Structure of a Possession Rite in the Longue Durée,” Música em Contexto 11, no. 1 (2017): 13–44. 27. Edward A. Alpers, “African Diaspora in the Northwestern Indian Ocean: Reconsideration of an Old Prob­lem, New Directions for Research,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the ­Middle East 17, no. 2 (1997): 62–81; Alpers, “When Diasporas Meet: The Musical Legacies of Slavery and Indentured ­Labor in the Mascarene Islands,” in History, Memory and Identity, vol. 2, ed. Alpers, Stéphan Karghoo, and Vijayalakshmi Teelock (Port Louis, Mauritius: Nelson Mandela Centre for African Culture, 2019), 89–110. 28. Gabriel Lavin, “Arabian Passings in Indian Ocean History: Troubadors, Technology, and the Longue Durée, 1656–1963,” in Sounding the Indian Ocean: Musical Circulations in the Afro-­Asiatic Seascape, ed. Jim Sykes and Julia Byl (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023), 158–78. 29. “Mzee Mombasa’s Story,” uts Review: Cultural Studies and New Writing 6, no. 2 (2000): 181–85. 30. See Philip Yampolsky, “Kroncong Revisited: New Evidence from Old Sources,” Archipel. Études Interdisciplinaires sur le Monde Insulindie 79 (2010): 7–56; Yampolsky, reviews of Kroncong: Early Indonesian Pop ­Music, vol. 1, and Early ­Popular ­Music of Indonesia, in Ethnomusicology 58, no. 2 (2014): 364–78; Lutgard Mutsaers, “ ‘Barat Ketemu Timur’: Cross-­Cultural Encounters and the Making of Early Kroncong History,” in Recollecting Resonances: Indonesian-­ Dutch Musical Encounters, ed. Bart Barendregt and Els Bogaerts (Boston: Brill, 2014), 259–79.

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N ot es to C h a p t er F o u r 31. Andrew N. Weintraub, Dangut Stories: A Social and Musical History of Indonesia’s Most Popular Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 32. For an example of modern leiwah, see NowHereBlow, “Liwa UAE Traditional Dance | Emirati Traditional Dance Liwa | Expo 2020 Dubai,” April 10, 2022, YouTube video, 9:49, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=3­ m​-­UN2KQdmI. For an official p­ resentation of sega, see unesco, “Traditional Mauritian Sega,” November 27, 2014, YouTube video, 9:47, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​ /­watch​?­v​=T ­ GHl7Rf9e0c. For one performer’s take on seggae, see Becherel Jonathan, “Seggae M ­ usic Ras Do,” May 24, 2014, YouTube video, 4:54, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­pO0AJnsUJyk. For an early recording of kroncong, see sunnyboy66, “Kroncong: Early Indonesian Pop ­Music Vol. 1: 50s 60s Asian Folk Country World M ­ usic Bands,” August 8, 2020, YouTube video, 57:22, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­HqFDuSCPae0. 33. G. S. P. Freeman-­Grenville, The East African Coast: Select Documents from the First to the ­Earlier Nineteenth ­Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 220–40. See also Anna Rita Coppola, “Swahili Oral Traditions and Chronicles,” in Wynne-­Jones and LaViolette, Swahili World, locs. 4973–5327 of 25166, Kindle. 34. Freeman-­Grenville, East African Coast, 221. 35. See also Freeman-­Grenville, East African Coast, 297–99, for “The History of Kua, Juani, Island, Mafia,” which Freeman-­Grenville recorded personally in 1955 and which includes many of the same Indian Ocean tropes. 36. The most complete coordination is Dagmar Weikler, C. H. Stigand, and Marina Tolmacheva, The Pate Chronicle: Edited and Translated from MSS 177, 321, 344, and 358 of the Library of the University of Dar es Salaam (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1993). One version is reprinted in Freeman-­Grenville, East African Coast, 241–96. See also Randall L. Pouwels, “Reflections on Historiography and Pre-­Nineteenth-­Century History from the Pate ‘Chronicles,’ ” History in Africa 20 (1993): 263–96; Pouwels, “The Pate Chronicles Revisited: Nineteenth-­Century History and Historiography,” History in Africa 23 (1996): 301–18. 37. Alpers, “ ‘Ordinary House­hold Chores’: Ritual and Power in a 19th-­Century Swahili ­Women’s Spirit Possession Cult,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 17, no. 4 (1984): 677–702, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­2307​/­218907.

Four. Indian Ocean Commodities 1. Edward A. Alpers, “The Ivory Trade in Africa: An Historical Overview,” in Elephant: The Animal and Its Ivory in African Culture, ed. Doran Ross (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of Cultural History, ucla, 1992), 348–63.

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N ot es to C h a p t er F o u r 2. Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873 (London: James Currey, 1987). 3. Owning a ­horse was a royal privilege; even ­today it remains a source of sometimes fatal contention in India, for which see “Indian Lowest Caste ‘Dalit’ Man Killed ‘for Owning ­Horse,’ ” bbc News, March 31, 2018, http://­www​.­bbc​.­com​ /­news​/­world​-­asia​-­india​-­43605550. 4. Ranabir Chakravarti, “Equestrian Demand and Dealers: The Early Indian ­Scenario (up to c. 1300),” in Pferde in Asien: Geschichte, Handel und Kultur; ­Horses in Asia: History, Trade and Culture, ed. Bert G. Fragner, Ralph Kauz, Roderick Ptak, and Angela Schottenhammer (Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaft, 2009), 145–60. 5. Elizabeth Lambourn, “­Towards a Connected History of Equine Cultures in South Asia: Bahrī (Sea) ­Horses and ‘Horse­mania’ in Thirteenth-­Century South India,” Medieval Globe 2, no. 1 (2016): 57–100. 6. For an indication of the costs of maritime transportation of ­horses from Basra to Kolkata at the beginning of the nineteenth ­century, see Jos Gommans, “The ­Horse Trade in Eighteenth-­Century South Asia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 37, no. 3 (1994): 235. 7. Michael N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003), 196. 8. Bin Yang, Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History (London: Routledge, 2018). 9. Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 10. Pedro Machado, Steve Mullins, and Joseph Christensen, eds., Pearls, ­People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019). 11. Kathleen Schwerdtner Máñez, and Sebastian C. A. Ferse, “The History of Makassan Trepang Fishing and Trade,” plos One 5, no. 6 (2010), https://­doi​ .­org​/­10​.­1371​/­journal​.­pone​.­0011346. 12. Matthew Spriggs, “Research Questions in Maluku Archaeology,” Cakalele 9, no. 2 (1998): 58–60. 13. Steven E. Sidebotham, Berenike and the Ancient Spice Route (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 224–26; A. R. Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 149–53. See also Michael N. Pearson, ed., Spices in the Indian Ocean World (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996). 14. Peter Bellwood, “The Northern Spice Islands in Prehistory, from 40,000 Years Ago to the Recent Past,” in The Spice Islands in Prehistory: Archaeology in the

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15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

Northern Moluccas, Indonesia, ed. Peter Bellwood (Canberra: anu Press, 2019), 219. Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar, 49. See, e.g., John F. Richards, “The Opium Industry in British India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 39, nos. 2–3 (2002): 149–80; Om Prakash, “Opium in the Indian Ocean Trade in the Early Modern Period: A Commodity of Both Official and Contraband Commercial Exchange,” in Early Global Interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean World, vol. 1, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies, ed. Angela Schottenhammer (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 227–38; Amar Farooqui, “The Global C ­ areer of Indian Opium and Local Destinies,” Almanack Guarulhos 14 (2016): 52–73; George Bryan Souza, “Opium and the Com­pany: Maritime Trade and Imperial Finances on Java, 1684–1796,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 1 (2009): 113–33; Claude Markovits, “The ­Political Economy of Opium Smuggling in Early Nineteenth ­Century India: Leakage or ­Resistance?,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 1 (2009): 89–111. Teotonio de Souza, “Rogerio de Faria: An Indo-­Portuguese Trader with China Links,” in As Relações entre a Índia Portuguesa, a Ásia do Sudeste e o Extremo Oriente: Actas do VI Seminário Internacional de História Indo-­Portuguesa, Macau, 22 a 26 de Outubro de 1991, ed. Artur Teodoro de Matos and Luís Filipe F. Reis Thomaz (Macau: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1993), 309–19, https://­www​.­researchgate​ .­net​/­publication​/­285594146​_­Rogerio​_­de​_­Faria​_­An​_­Indo​-­Portuguese​_­trader​ _­with​_­China​_­links​/­link​/­566179e608ae4931cd59ee8c​/­download, accessed September 1, 2023; Naomal Hotchand, A Forgotten Chapter of Indian History as Described in the Memoirs of Seth Naomal Hotchand, C.S.I. of Karachi 1804–1878 (Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 1982, first published 1915); Asiya Siddiqi, “The Business World of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy,” in Trade and Finance in Colonial India, 1750–1860 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 186–217. Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008); Ghosh, River of Smoke (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Ghosh, Flood of Fire (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). The quote is from Clare Anderson, “Empire and Exile: Reflections on the Ibis Trilogy,” American Historical Review 121, no. 5 (2016): 1523, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1093​/­ahr​/­121​.­5​.­1523. Nicole Boivin, Alison Crowther, Mary Prendergast, and Dorian Q. Fuller, “Indian Ocean Food Globalisation and Africa,” African Archaeological Review 31 (2014): 547–81, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1007​/­s10437​-­014​-­9173​-­4.

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N ot es to C h a p t er F o u r 20. Cristina Cobo Castillo, Bérénice Bellina, and Dorian Q. Fuller, “Rice, Beans and Trade Crops on the Early Maritime Silk Route in Southeast Asia,” Antiquity 90, no. 353 (2016): 1255–69, www​.­doi​.­org​/­10​.­15184​/­aqy​.­2016​.­175. 21. Elizabeth A. Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of ­Things in the ­Medieval Indian Ocean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 22. Gwyn Campbell, An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 182–83; Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar, 54. 23. Solofo Randrainja and Stephen Ellis, Madagascar: A Short History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 198. 24. Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 32–33. 25. John N. Miksic, “Traditional Sumatran Trade,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-­Orient 74 (1985): 450–54; Mary Somers Heidhues, “Johann Wilhelm Vogel and the Sumatran Gold Mines: One Man’s Fortune,” Archipel 72 (2006): 221–38. 26. Marc Horton, Nicole Boivin, Alison Crowther, Ben Gaskell, Chantal Radimilahy, and Henry Wright, “East Africa as a Source for Fatimid Rock Crystal: Workshops from K ­ enya to Madagascar,” in Gemstones in the First Millennium ad: Mines, Trade, Workshops and Symbolism, ed. Alexandra Hilgner, Susanne Greiff, and Dieter Quast (Mainz, Germany: Römisch-­Germanisches Zentralmuseum, 2017), 103–18. 27. See Kenneth R. Hall, A History of Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100–1500 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 220; Archaeological Survey of India, Epigraphia Indica: A Collection of Inscriptions Supplementary to the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum of the Archaeological Survey, trans. Oriental Scholars, ed. Jas Burgess, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1894), 190, where rubies are noted in verse 16 of the Nagpur Stone Inscription (1104–5 ce) of the rulers of Malava (Malwa), archived January 20, 2017, at Archive​.­org, https://­archive​.­org​/­details​/­in​.­ernet​ .­dli​.­2015​.­100320​/­page​/­n11​/­mode​/­2up. For a wider survey, see Brigitte Borell, “Gemstones in Southeast Asia and Beyond: Trade along the Maritime Networks,” in Hilgner, Greiff, and Quast, Gemstones in the First Millennium ad, 21–44. 28. Marilee Wood, “Divergent Patterns in Indian Ocean Trade to East Africa and Southern Africa between the 7th and 17th Centuries ce: The Glass Bead Evidence,” Afriques: Débats, methods et terrains d’histoire 6 (2015), www​.­doi​.­org​ /­10​.­4000​/­afriques​.­1782.

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N ot es to C h a p t er F i v e 29. Zoi Kotitsa, Jayne Ward, and Alessandra D’Angelo, eds., The Belitung Wreck: Sunken T ­ reasures from Tang China (New Zealand: Seabed Explorations New Zealand, 2004), accessed June 25, 2022, https://­www​.­iseas​.­edu​.­sg​/­centres​ /­nalanda​-­sriwijaya​-­centre​/­research​-­tools​/­compilations​/­the​-­belitung​-­wreck​ -­sunken​-­treasures​-­from​-­tang​-­china. The late tenth-­century Cirebon shipwreck contained some 250,000 pieces of Chinese ware. See Regina Krahl, John Guy, Julian Raby, and J. Keith Wilson, eds., Shipwrecked: Tang ­Treasures and Monsoon Winds (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2011), separate chapters available at the National Museum of Asian Art website, accessed September 1, 2023, https://­asia​.­si​.­edu​/­research​/­publications​ /­exhibition​-­catalogues​/­shipwrecked​-­tang​-­treasures​-­and​-­monsoon​-­winds. 30. For Swahili interiors, see illustrations in Prita Meier, Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). For an example of a pillar tomb with incorporated Chinese ceramic bowls, see Boris Kester, White Plaster and Chinese Bowls in a Pillared Tomb, photo­graph, November 2016, http://­www​.­traveladventures​.­org​/­continents​/­africa​/­kunduchi​ -­ruins04​.­html. 31. Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 120–67. 32. Pedro Machado, Sarah Fee, and Gwyn Campbell, eds., Textile Trade, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean: An Ocean of Cloth (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Five. ­People on the Move 1. K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 23. 2. Thomas F. McDow, Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018), 56–59. 3. Abraham L. Udovitch, Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1970), 172. 4. Fahad Ahmad Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 5. Michael N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003), 57–58. 6. Ingo Strauch, ed. Foreign Sailors on Socotra: The Inscriptions and Drawings from the Cave Hoq, Vergleichende Studien zu Antike und Orient 3 (Bremen, Germany: Hempen Verlag, 2012). See also Julian Jansen van Rensburg, “Rock Art of Socotra, Yemen: A Forgotten Heritage Revisited,” Arts (2018): 7, 99, http://­dx​.­doi​.­org​/­10​.­3390​/­arts7040099.

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N ot es to C h a p t er F i v e 7. Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–93); Shelomo Dov Goitein and Mordechai Friedman, India Traders of the ­Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza; “India Book,” Part 1 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2007). 8. Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale (New York: Vintage, 1994); Elizabeth Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of ­Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 9. Eric Tagliacozzo, The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5. 10. The Hajj journey of Begam is best covered in the chronicle by Abu’l-­Fazl, The Akbar Nâma of Abu’l-­Fazl: History of the Reign of Akbar Including an Account of His ­Predecessors, vol. 3, trans. H. Beveridge (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 2000), 205–7, 569–71. More information on Gulbadan Begum herself is in the volume (and notes) of her chronicle: Gul-­Badan Begam, Humayun-­Nama: The History of Humayun, trans. Annette S. Beveridge (New Delhi: Goodword, 2001, first published 1902), 70–75; Richard F. Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-­Madinah and Meccah (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1856); Alex Haley and Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine, 1964), 348–73. 11. Abu’l-­Fazl, Akbar Nâma, 205. 12. Consider the wide range of narratives represented in Narrating the Hajj, published in conjunction with a conference of the same title, ­organized by Marjo Buitelaar and Richard van Leeuwen at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, December 11–13, 2019, https://­www​.­rug​.­nl​/­ggw​/­news​/­events​/­pdfs​ /­191208​-­conference​-­book​.­pdf. 13. Viola Thimm, “Gendered Pilgrimage: Hajj and Umrah from ­Women’s Perspectives,” Journal of Con­temporary Religion 36, no. 2 (2021): 223–41, https://­doi​.­org​ /­10​.­1080​/­13537903​.­2021​.­1930878. See also the curious account by Nawab Sikander, A Pilgrimage to Mecca, by the Nawab Sikander Begum of Bhopal, G.C.S.I., trans. and ed. Mrs. Willoughby-­Osborne (London: Wm. H. Allen, 1870). 14. C. Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th ­Century: Daily Life, Customs and Learning; The Moslims of the East-­Indian-­Archipelago, ed. and trans. J. H. Monahan, Brill Classics in Islam 1 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2007), based on the author’s German publication Mekka, vol. 2, 1889. 15. Quoted in John Slight, The British Empire and the Hajj, 1865–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 1. 16. Philip Curtin, Cross-­Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

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N ot es to C h a p t er F i v e 17. Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 18. Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: ­University of California Press, 2014), 211. 19. Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 322–24; Ulrike Freitag and William G. Clarence-­Smith, eds., Hadhrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s–1960s (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1997); Noel Brehony, ed., Hadhramaut and Its Diaspora: Yemeni Politics, Identity and Migration (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017). 20. Derek Heng, Sino-­Malay Trade and Diplomacy from the Tenth through the ­Fourteenth ­Century, Ohio University Research in International Studies, Southeast Asia Series 121 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 31. 21. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, vol. 2, Expansion and Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 49. 22. Reid, Southeast Asia, 126–29. 23. Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Com­pany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For the interlinking of empire and Islam in modern Malay history, see Michael Francis Laffan, ­Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties across the Indian Ocean World, 1775–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). 24. Ronit Ricci, “Telling Stories of Seas, Islands, and Ships: A Sri Lankan Malay Perspective,” Positions 29, no. 1 (2021): 203–24, quoted at 219, https://­www​ .­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1215​/­10679847​-­722862. For more detail, see Ricci, Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 25. Craig A. Lockard, “ ‘ The Sea Common to All’: Maritime Frontiers, Port Cities, and Chinese Traders in the Southeast Asian Age of Commerce, ca. 1400– 1750,” Journal of World History 21, no. 2 (2010): 225; Carl A. Trocki, “A Drug on the Market: Opium and the Chinese in Southeast Asia, 1750–1880,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 1, no. 2 (2005): 149, www​.­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1353​/­jco​.­2007​.­0025. 26. Melissa Macauley, Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China’s Maritime Frontier (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2021). 27. Trocki, “A Drug on the Market,” 147–68. 28. Susan Abeyasekere, “­Women as Cultural Intermediaries in Nineteenth-­ Century Batavia,” in ­Women’s Work and ­Women’s Roles: Economics and Everyday Life in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, ed. Lenore Manderson

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N ot es to C h a p t er F i v e (Canberra: Australian National University, Development Studies Centre Monograph no. 32, 1983): 15–29, quoted at 22. 29. Wang Gungwu, The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 30. While nri is technically a tax status as defined in India’s Income-­Tax Act of 1961 (article 6), it is widely used as a shorthand for ­people who live outside of India but who ­were born in India or descended from p­ eople of Indian origin. 31. Geoffrey Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2018). 32. Ian James Storey, “Indonesia’s China Policy in the New Order and Beyond: Prob­lems and Prospects,” Con­temporary Southeast Asia 22, no. 1 (2000): 146–47, http://­www​.­jstor​.­org​/­stable​/­25798482. 33. Crispin Bates and Marina Car­ter, “Kala Pani Revisited: Indian ­Labour Mi­ grants and the Sea Crossing,” Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies 1, no. 1 (2021): 36–62. For a vivid employment of kala pani in fiction, see Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). 34. Edward A. Alpers, “Gujarat and the Trade of East Africa, c. 1500–1880,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 9, no. 1 (1976): 22–44; Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 35. McDow, Buying Time, 47–48. 36. J. S. Mangat, A History of Asians in East Africa c. 1886 to 1845 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 30–40; Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) 180–203. 37. Mangat, History of Asians in East Africa, 51–53, 77–82. 38. Quoted in Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 166. 39. Sana Aiyer, Indians in ­Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 40. Maureen Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience ( Johannesburg: Ravan, 1985); Ramachandra Gu­ha, Gandhi before India (New Delhi: Penguin, 2013); Isabel Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-­Bearer of Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). 41. Kalpana Hiralal, “Voices and Memories of Indentured ­Women in Natal,” African Economic History 48, no. 1 (2020): 74–90. 42. Becky Taylor, “Good Citizens? Ugandan Asians, Volunteers and ‘Race’ Relations in 1970s Britain,” History Workshop Journal 85 (2018): 120–41, https://­doi​ .­org​/­10​.­1093​/­hwj​/­dbx055.

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N ot es to C h a p t er S i x 43. For an overview of this scholarship see Edward A. Alpers, “Recollecting Africa: Diasporic Memory in the Indian Ocean World,” African Studies Review 43, no. 1 (2000): 83–89. The exception to this trend was Joseph Harris, The African Presence in Asia: Consequences of the East African Slave Trade (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971). More recent examples include Richard B. Allen, ­European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014); Matthew S. Hopper, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); and Shihan De S. Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst, eds., The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 2003). 44. Quoted in Benjamin Reilly, Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), 87. 45. Pier M. Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 46. Two representative films are Behnaz Mirzai, dir., Afro-­Iranian Lives, 2007, and Amy Catlin-­Jairazbhoy and Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy, dirs., From Africa to India: Sidi ­Music in the Indian Ocean Diaspora, 2003.

Six. Rethinking Slavery 1. Such a move takes us closer to the ideal expressed by Richard Eaton: “Eventually, scholars may be able to place all va­ri­e­ties of slavery, including the Atlantic plantation model, in broader frameworks of comparative history and even world history.” Eaton, introduction to Slavery and South Asian History, ed. Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 2. See also Damian Alan Pargas, “Slavery as a Global and Globalizing Phenomenon,” Journal of Global Slavery 1, no. 1 (2016): 1–4, https://­doi​ .­org​/­10​.­1163​/­2405836X​-­00101004. 2. Marina Car­ter, “Slavery and Unfree L ­ abour in the Indian Ocean,” History Compass 4, no. 5 (2006): 800–813. 3. Matthias van Rossum, Alexander Geelen, Bram van den Hout, and Merve Tosan, Testimonies of Enslavement: Sources on Slavery from the Indian Ocean World (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 4. Philip D. Curtin, Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History, 2nd ed., Studies in Comparative World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1017​/­CBO97805​ 11819414. 5. William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World, vol. 2 (London: James Knapton, 1699), 141–42.

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N ot es to C h a p t er S i x 6. Van Rossum et al., Testimonies of Enslavement. 7. Eaton, introduction to Slavery and South Asian History, 2. 8. Gwyn Campbell, “Introduction: Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree ­Labor in the Indian Ocean World,” in The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 2004), xi–­xii. 9. Joseph Harris, The African Presence in Asia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971). 10. Car­ter, “Slavery and Unfree ­Labour,” 800–801; Anthony Reid, “Introduction: Slavery and Bondage in Southeast Asian History,” in Slavery, Bondage and ­Dependency in Southeast Asia, ed. Anthony Reid (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 106–23. 11. See, e.g., Thomas Vernet, “East African Travelers and Traders in the Indian Ocean: Swahili Ships, Swahili Mobilities ca. 1500–1800,” in Trade, Circulation, and Flow in the Indian Ocean World, ed. Michael Pearson (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 167–202; Mahmood Kooria, “Eastern African Doyens in South Asia: Premodern Islamic Intellectual Interactions,” South Asian History and Culture 11, no. 4 (2020): 363–73. 12. Hans Hägerdal, Lords of the Land, Lords of the Sea: Conflict and Adaptation in Early Colonial Timor, 1600–1800 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2012); Ulbe Bosma, The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter of ­Labor (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019); Richard B. Allen, ­European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014); Alicia Schrikker and Nira Wickramasinghe, eds., Being a Slave: Histories and Legacies of ­European Slavery in the Indian Ocean (Leiden, Netherlands: Leiden University Press, 2020), 17. 13. Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Jonathan Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and P ­ opular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, NH: Heineman, 1995). 14. Thomas F. McDow, Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018), 150, 156. For a firsthand description of the social ­organization of the ­house­hold and plantation of Sultan Seyyid Barghash of Zanzibar by his ­daughter, see Emily Reute, Borne Salme, and Princess of Oman and Zanzibar, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar (Prince­ton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1989). For the life history of an enslaved African who was purchased and worked for Bibi Zem-­Zem, the ­sister of Seyyid Barghash, see W. F. Baldock, “The Story of Rashid Bin Hassani of the Bisa Tribe, Northern Rhodesia,” in Ten Africans, ed. Margery Perham (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 81–119.

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N ot es to C h a p t er S i x 15. Edward A. Alpers, “The Other ­Middle Passage: The African Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean,” in Many ­Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 20–38; Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E. Greene, and Martin A. Klein, eds., African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. chaps. by Felicitas Becker, Hideaki Suzuki, Klara Boyer-­Rossol, and Elisabeth McMahon. See also M. Car­ter, V. Govinden, and S. Peerthum, The Last Slaves: Liberated Africans in 19th ­Century Mauritius (Port Louis, Mauritius: Centre for Research on Indian Ocean Socie­ties, 2003). 16. Foreign Office: Slave Trade Department and Successors: General Correspondence before 1906, Rec­ords of the Slave Trade and African Departments, National Archives, London, accessed January 17, 2022, https://­discovery​ .­nationalarchives​.­gov​.­uk​/­details​/­r​/­C7404. 17. Matthew S. Hopper, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 88–89, 117– 21, 133–35; Jerzy Zdanowski, Speaking with Their Own Voices: The Stories of Slaves in the Persian Gulf in the 20th ­Century (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2014). Interested students may also wish to read the fictionalized story of an enslaved ­woman named Zarifa by Omani writer Jokha Alharthi, translated by Marilyn Booth, Celestial Bodies (Inverness, Scotland: Sandstone, 2019). 18. Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 124–34. 19. Omar H. Ali, Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2–3, 43. See also Richard M. Eaton, “Malik Ambar (1548–1626): The Rise and Fall of Military Slavery,” in A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 105–28. 20. Kenneth X. Robbins and John McLeod, African Elites in India: Habshi Amarat (Ocean Township, NJ: Gran­tha, 2006). 21. Ananya Chakravarti, “Mapping ‘Gabriel’: Space, Identity and Slavery in the Late Sixteenth-­Century Indian Ocean,” Past and Pre­sent 243 (2019): 5–34. 22. Mahmood Kooria, “Un agent abyssinien, et deux rois indiens à la Mecque: Interactions autour du droit islamique au XVe siècle,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 74, no. 1 (2019): 75–103, https://­www​.­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1017​/­ahss​.­2019​.­140; Kooria, “Eastern African Doyens in South Asia: Premodern Islamic Intellectual Interactions,” South Asian History and Culture 11, no. 4 (2020): 363–73, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1080​/­19472498​.­2020​.­1827593.

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N ot es to C h a p t er S i x 23. Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy, “Pawnship in Historical Perspective,” in Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa, ed. Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 2003), 2. For a more precise attempt to isolate the phenomenon of debt slavery, see Alain Testart, “The Extent and Significance of Debt Slavery,” supplement, “An Annual ­English Se­lection,” Revue française de sociologie 43 (2002): 173–204; and C. P. Rigby to Secretary to Bombay Government, September 14, 1860, Zanzibar National Archives 12/2. 24. David Livingstone, The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa [ . . .], ed. Horace Waller (New York: Harper and ­Brothers, 1875), 310; Edward A. Alpers, “Debt, Pawnship, and Slavery in Nineteenth-­Century East Africa,” in Bonded L ­ abour and Debt in the Indian Ocean World, ed. Gwyn Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani (London: Chatto and Pickering, 2013), 31–43, notes at 197–200. 25. James Francis Warren, “Ransom, Escape, and Debt Repayment in the Sulu Zone, 1750–1898,” in Campbell and Stanziani, Bonded L ­ abour and Debt, 87–102. 26. Gwyn Campbell and Edward A. Alpers, “Introduction: Slavery, Forced ­Labour and ­Resistance in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia,” in Slavery and ­Resistance in Africa and Asia, ed. Edward A. Alpers, Gwyn Campbell, and Michael Salman (London: Routledge, 2005), 12. 27. Sue Peabody, Madeleine’s ­Children: ­Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 28. Wikipedia, s.v. “Edmond Albius,” last modified September 15, 2023, 02:10, https://­en​.­wikipedia​.­org​/­wiki​/­Edmond​_­Albius. For additional insight into the role of knowledge of enslaved ­people in colonial agriculture, see Dorit Brixius, “From Ethnobotany to Emancipation: Slaves, Plant Knowledge, and Gardens on Eighteenth-­Century Isle de France,” History of Science 58, no. 1 (2020): 51–75. For a se­lection of original sources on liberated Africans for Mauritius, see Marina Car­ter and Raymond d’Unienville, Unshackling Slaves: Liberation and Adaptation of Ex-­apprentices, British Mauritius Collected Documents (London: Pink Pigeon, 2001). 29. Hideaki Suzuki, “Baluchi Experiences ­under Slavery and the Slave Trade of the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf, 1921–1950,” Journal of the M ­ iddle East and Africa 4, no. 2 (2013): 221, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1080​/­21520844​.­2013​.­830995. 30. Allen, ­European Slave Trading, 3. 31. Allen, ­European Slave Trading, 194. 32. Vijayalakshmi Teelock, “Indentured ­Labour in the Indian Ocean, and the Creation of New Socie­ties,” in The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Socie­ties, ed. Abdul Sheriff and Engseng Ho (London: Hurst, 2014), 175.

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N ot es to C h a p t er S i x 33. Saloni Deerpalsingh and Marina Car­ter, eds., Select Documents on Indian Immigration: Mauritius, 1834–1926, 3 vols. (Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1994–96); Marina Car­ter and James Ng Foong Kwong, Forging the Rainbow: ­Labour Immigrants in British Mauritius (Mauritius: Alfran, 1997); H. Ly Tio Fane Pineo, Lured Away: The Life Histories of Indian Cane Workers in Mauritius (Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1984); Marina Car­ter, Lakshmi’s Legacy: The Testimonies of Indian ­Women in 19th ­Century Mauritius (­Rose Hill, Mauritius: Éditions de l’Océan Indien, 1994). 34. Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Com­pany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michael Laffan, “From Javanese Court to African Grave: How Noriman Became Tuan Skapie, 1717–1806,” Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies 1 (2017): 38–59; Clare Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815–53 (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000); Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Alexandra Hasluck, Unwilling Emigrants: A Study of the Convict Period in Western Australia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959); Hasluck, Unwilling Emigrants: Letters of a Convict’s Wife (Fremantle, Australia: Arts Centre, 1969). 35. McDow, Buying Time, 154–56, 168–70, 177–78. 36. Allen, ­European Slave Trading, 180, 193–206; cf. Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian L ­ abour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974); and David Northrup, Indentured ­Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 37. Allen, ­European Slave Trading, 180; Teelock, “Indentured ­Labour in the Indian Ocean,” 151–57. 38. Janet Lim, Sold for Silver: An Autobiography of a Girl Sold into Slavery in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Monsoon, 2004, first published 1958), esp. 11–54. See also Suzanne Miers, “Mui Tsai through the Eyes of the Victim: Janet Lim’s Story of Bondage and Escape,” in ­Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude, and Escape, ed. Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed, 1994): 433–52, which is based on an interview with Janet Lim in 1989. 39. “Qatar’s Mi­grant Workers: Still Slaving Away,” Economist, June 6, 2015, https://­ www​.­economist​.­com​/­middle​-­east​-­and​-­africa​/­2015​/­06​/­06​/­still​-­slaving​-­away. 40. Pardis Mahdavi, Crossing the Gulf: Love and F ­ amily in Mi­grant Lives (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). 41. Mike Davis, “Fear and Money in Dubai,” New Left Review 41 (2006): 64; “2017 Trafficking in Persons Report: United Arab Emirates,” US State Department,

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N ot es to C h a p t er S i x 2017, accessed August 25, 2023, https://­www​.­state​.­gov​/­reports​/­2017​-­trafficking​ -­in​-­persons​-­report​/­united​-­arab​-­emirates​/­. 42. For more information on the Bin Jelmood ­House and Museum, see “Bin Jelmood H ­ ouse,” Msheireb Museums website, accessed August 25, 2023, https://­ msheirebmuseums​.­com​/­en​/­about​/­bin​-­jelmood​-­house​/­. 43. Gwyn Campbell, “The Question of Slavery in Indian Ocean World History,” in Sheriff and Ho, Indian Ocean, 149.

Seven. Empire and Its Aftermath 1. See, e.g., Engseng Ho, “The Two Arms of Cambay: Diasporic Texts of Ecumenical Islam in the Indian Ocean,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50, nos. 2–3 (2007): 347–61. 2. Tansen Sen, “The Impact of Zheng He’s Expeditions on Indian Ocean Interactions,” Bulletin of soas 79, no. 3 (2016): 609–36. 3. The classic study is Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado, Glossário Luso-­Asiático, 2 vols. (Coimbra, Portugal: Imprensa da Universidade, 1919–21), archived August 12, 2009, at Archive​.­org, https://­archive​.­org​/­details​/­glossriolusoas00dalguoft​ /­mode​/­2up. Dalgado authored a number of other books on the influence of Portuguese on Asian languages. See also Fernando Rosa, The Portuguese in the Creole Indian Ocean: Essays in Historical Cosmopolitanism (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 89–114. 4. Leonard Y. Andaya, “Trade, Ethnicity, and Identity in Island Southeast Asia,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, February 23, 2021, https://­doi​ .­org​/­10​.­1093​/­acrefore​/­9780190277727​.­013​.­549. 5. For the text of the 1890 Anglo-­German Treaty, see German History in Documents and Images, vol. 5, Wilhelmine Germany and the First World War (1890–1918), ed. Roger Chickering, Steven Chase Gummer, and Seth Rotramel, accessed July 20, 2021, http://­germanhistorydocs​.­ghi​-­dc​.­org​/­pdf​/­eng​/­606​ _­Anglo​-­German%20Treaty​_­110​.­pdf. 6. Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 7. For a remarkable undergraduate honors thesis on the Burma Campaign, see Ian A. Pylväinen, “Bwanas in Burma: British Officers and African Regiments in Southeast Asia, 1944–1945” (undergraduate thesis, Wesleyan University, 2010), https://­digitalcollections​.­wesleyan​.­edu​/­object​/­ir​-­1067. 8. See Ashley Jackson, Of Islands, Ports and Sea Lanes: Africa and the Indian Ocean in the Second World War (Warwick, UK: Helion, 2018). 9. Samita Sen, ­Women and L ­ abour in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); James Francis Warren, “Chinese Prostitution in

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N ot es to C h a p t er S ev e n Singapore: Recruitment and Brothel ­Organization,” in ­Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude and Escape, ed. Maria Jaschol and Suzanne Miers (London: Zed, 1994), 77–107. 10. Jeanne Penvenne, “João dos Santos Albasini (1876–1922): The Contradictions of Politics and Identity in Colonial Mozambique,” Journal of African History 37, no. 3 (1996): 429–64; Antonio Hohlfeldt and Fernanda Graubaska, “Pioneers of the Press in Mozambique: João Albasini and His ­Brother,” Brazilian Journalism Review 6, no. 1 (2010): 187–205, which does not, however, cite Penvenne’s pioneering article. 11. Benedict Anderson, ­Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 12. See John M. Mugane, The Story of Swahili (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), 192–226; Jan Blommaert, State Ideology and Language in Tanzania (Cologne, Germany: Köppe, 1999); ­Rose Marie Beck, “Language as Apparatus: Entanglements of Language, Culture and Territory and the Invention of Nation and Ethnicity,” Postcolonial Studies 20, no. 2 (2018): 231–53. 13. Uday Kumar, Status of Hindi in India (New Delhi: Readworthy, 2009); Ganpat Teli, “Revisiting the Making of Hindi as a ‘National’ Language,” Language in India 12, no. 1 (2012): 1–13. 14. For ­Kenya, see Sana Aiyar, Indians in ­Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). For Ma­la­ya, see K. S. Sandhu and A. Mani, eds., Indian Communities in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), 182–87, 211–36; and Darinee Alagirisamy, “The Self-­Respect Movement and Tamil Politics of Belonging in Interwar British Ma­la­ya, 1929–1939,” Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 5 (2016): 1547–75. 15. Pek Koon Heng, Chinese Politics in Malaysia: A History of the Malaysian Chinese Association (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Hak Ching Oong, Chinese Politics in Ma­la­ya, 1942–55: The Dynamics of British Policy (Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 2000); Mary F. Somers, Peranakan Chinese Politics in Indonesia (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University, 1964). 16. Jayati Bhattacharya and Coonoor Kripalani, eds., Indian and Chinese Immigrant Communities: Comparative Perspectives (New York: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies / Anthem, 2015). 17. Christopher J. Lee, Making a World ­after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its ­Political Afterlives, Ohio University Research in International Studies, Global and Comparative Studies Series 11 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); Asian-­African Conference, Selected Documents of the Bandung Conference: Texts of Selected Speeches and Final Communique of the Asian-­African Conference,

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N ot es to C h a p t er S ev e n Bandung, Indonesia, April 18–24, 1955 (New York: Distributed by the Institute of Pacific Relations, 1955). 18. Awet Tewelde Weldemichael, Third World Colonialism and Strategies of Liberation: Eritrea and East Timor Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 19. Jacques Tronchon, L’insurrection malgache de 1947: Essai d’interprétation historique (Paris: Karthala, 1986, first published 1974); Fulgence Fanony and Noël Jacques Guennier, Temoins de l’insurrection: Documents sur l’insurrection malgache de 1947 (Antananarivo, Madagascar: Foi et justice, 1997). For an introduction to the large bibliography on Dien Bien Phu, see Jean-­Jacques Arzalier, “­Battle of Dien Bien Phu,” Oxford Biblio­graphies, last modified September 22, 2021, https://­www​.­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1093​/­OBO​/­9780199791279​-­0174. For the Vietnam War, see Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1997). 20. See, e.g., Susan Geiger, tanu ­Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955–1965 (London: Heinemann, 1997); Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: ­Women Writing ­House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 21. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy: Selected Speeches, September 1946—­ April 1961 (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1961), 127–31, 269–72, 543–50; Aparajita Gangopadhyay, “India’s Policy ­Towards Its Diaspora: Continuity and Change,” India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs 61, no. 4 (2005): 93–122; Shobana Shankar, An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). For a useful overview, see Christian Wagner, India’s Africa Policy (Berlin: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik / German Institute for International and Security Affairs, 2019). 22. Jeremy Luedi, “Why East Timor Would Not Be ­Free without Mozambique,” Jeremy Luedi website, January 24, 2019, http://­www​.­jeremyluedi​ .­com​/­portfolio​/­2019​/­1​/­31​/­why​-­east​-­timor​-­would​-­not​-­be​-­free​-­without​ -­mozambique. 23. Wikipedia, s.v. “Community of Portuguese Language Countries,” last modified November 7, 2023, 17:47, https://­en​.­wikipedia​.­org​/­wiki​/­Community​_­of​ _­Portuguese​_­Language​_­Countries. 24. For the Indian Ocean Rim Association, see https://­www​.­iora​.­int​/­en, accessed July 21, 2021. 25. David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2009).

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Eight. Disease and Environment 1. “­Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (mers),” cdc, last updated August 2, 2019, https://­www​.­cdc​.­gov​/­coronavirus​/­mers​/­index​.­html; “­Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (mers-­CoV),” who, accessed February 24, 2021, https://­www​.­who​.­int​/­health​-­topics​/­middle​-­east​-­respiratory​-­syndrome​ -­coronavirus​-­mers. 2. David Arnold, “The Indian Ocean as a Disease Zone, 1500–1950,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 14, no. 2 (1990), 1, 5, 7, www​.­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1080​ /­00856409108723152. 3. Historian James McCann calls malaria a “dynamic, shape-­shifting force of nature” and a “unique h ­ uman affliction of ecol­ogy” and notes the exceedingly “local . . . ​complex tapestry of nature’s forces” that makes malaria a difficult disease to control. McCann, The Historical Ecol­ogy of Malaria in Ethiopia: Deposing the Spirits (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), 1–2. 4. See Hymns of the Atharva-­Veda: Together with Extracts from the Ritual Books and the Commentaries, trans. Maurice Bloomfield, vol. 42, Sacred Books of the East (Oxford: Clarendon, 1897), esp. V.22, I.25, VI.20, and VII.116, available at https://­www​.­sacred​-­texts​.­com​/­hin​/­av​.­htm. 5. Ross Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Batutta: A Muslim Traveler in the 14th ­Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 232. 6. Benjamin Reilly, Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), 102–3. 7. Rohan Deb Roy, Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 41–42, www​.­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1017​/­9781316771617. 8. Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt, Just the Tonic: A Natu­ral History of Tonic ­Water (London: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2019). 9. “Ross and the Discovery That Mosquitoes Transmit Malaria Parasites,” cdc, last updated September 16, 2015, https://­www​.­cdc​.­gov​/­malaria​/­about​/­history​ /­ross​.­html. As a source, the cdc likely published this account for quite dif­fer­ent reasons than we are using it, so you might ask students to reflect on that as well. 10. Randall Packard, The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 119. 11. See Gapminder​.­org, and look at their tools. The ­bubble chart, for instance, allows you to plot vari­ous data, including malaria health data, for most of the countries of the world si­mul­ta­neously. Where t­ here are historical data, you can also press Play, and the chart w ­ ill show you how it changes over time. Gapminder ­bubble chart, accessed November 18, 2023, https://­www​.­gapminder​.­org​ /­tools​/­#$chart​-­type​=­b­ ubbles&url​=v­ 1.

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N ot es to C h a p t er E i g h t 12. In the Indian state of Kerala, the government’s ­earlier commitments to education, social ­services, and health meant that they ­were able to eradicate malaria within the state, but the failure of other Indian states to do so meant that Kerala’s achievement could not be sustained. Packard, Making of a Tropical Disease, 159–61. 13. Packard, Making of a Tropical Disease, 171. 14. who, Regional Office for South-­East Asia, Malaria-­Free Maldives (New Delhi: who, Regional Office for South-­East Asia, 2016), available at https://­ platform​.­who​.­int​/­docs​/­default​-­source​/­mca​-­documents​/­policy​-­documents​ /­report​/­MDV​-­CH​-­33​-­01​-­REPORT​-­2016​-­eng​-­malaria​-­elimination​-­booklet​ .­pdf. See also Eva-­Maria Knoll, “How the Maldives Have Navigated Disease and Development,” Current History 120, no. 825 (2021): 152–58, https://­doi​.­org​ /­10​.­1525​/­curh​.­2021​.­120​.­825​.­152. 15. Myron Echenberg, Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Pre­sent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 4. 16. Michael Christopher Low, Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 11. 17. Tamara Fernando, “Death at the Pearl Fishery,” Hypocrite Reader 95 ( July 2020), hypocritereader​.­com​/­95​/­tamara​-­fernando​-­mannar​-­pearls​-­cholera. 18. Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (New York: Riverhead, 2006), has argued that Snow’s map of death became a blueprint for modern cities and a renewal of infrastructures so that large numbers of ­people could live together. 19. “Mapping the Cholera Epidemic of 1854,” National Geographic Education Resource Library, archived September 18, 2020, at Archive​.­org, https://web. archive.org/web/20200918152459/https://www.nationalgeographic.org/ activity/mapping-cholera-epidemic-1854/­. 20. James Christie, Cholera Epidemics in East Africa: An Account of the Several Diffusions of the Disease in That Country from 1821 till 1872 (London: Macmillan, 1876); Edna Robertson, Christie of Zanzibar: Medical Pathfinder (Glendaruel, Scotland: Argyll, 2010). Christie is also notable for his acknowl­edgment of the African and Arab experts who helped him understand the movement of cholera. 21. Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, [1865?]–1921), accessed November 18, 2023, at the Wellcome Collection, https://­wellcomecollection​ .­org​/­works​/­sqqnawms. The Wellcome Collection has thirty-­three dif­fer­ent years of reports available online: https://­wellcomecollection​.­org​/­collections.

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N ot es to C h a p t er E i g h t 22. Jeremy D. Isaacs, “D D Cunningham and the Aetiology of Cholera in British India, 1869–1897,” Medical History 42, no. 3 (1998): 282. 23. Low, Imperial Mecca, 12. Thus, while the discovery of vibrio cholerae took place in Calcutta in 1884, it was not a British scientist but the renowned German microbiologist Robert Koch who identified the bacterial source of cholera, and a British commission published “The Official Refutation of Dr. Robert Koch’s Theory of Cholera and Commas” two years ­later. See “The Official Refutation of Dr. Robert Koch’s Theory of Cholera and Commas,” Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science 26 (1886): 303–16, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1242​/­jcs​.­s2​-­26​.­102​.­303. For a full discussion of this article and its context, see Mariko Ogawa, “Uneasy Bedfellows: Science and Politics in the Refutation of Koch’s Bacterial Theory of Cholera,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74, no. 4 (2000): 671–707. 24. Igor V. Babkin and Irina N. Babkina, “The Origin of the Variola Virus,” Viruses 7, no. 3 (March 2015): 1100–12, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­3390​/­v7031100. 25. Peter Boomgaard, “Smallpox, Vaccination, and the Pax Neerlandica: Indonesia, 1550–1930,” Bijdragen Tot de Taal-­, Land-­En Volkenkunde 159, no. 4 (2003): 598. 26. Boomgaard, “Smallpox, Vaccination, and the Pax Neerlandica,” 609. 27. Vivek Neelakantan, “Eradicating Smallpox in Indonesia: The Archipelagic Challenge,” Health and History 12, no. 1 (2010): 65. 28. F. Fenner, D. A. Henderson, I. Arita, Z. Ježek, and I. D. Ladnyi, Smallpox and Its Eradication (Geneva: who, 1988), https://­apps​.­who​.­int​/­iris​/­handle​/­10665​ /­39485. ­There are separate chapters dealing with eradication in Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Eastern Africa, Ethiopia and Yemen, and Somalia and Djibouti. 29. See, e.g., Anna Winterbottom and Facil Tesfaye, eds., Histories of Medicine and Healing in the Indian Ocean World, 2 vols. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Edward A. Alpers, “Chikungunya and Epidemic Disease in the Indian Ocean World,” in Disease Dispersion and Impact in the Indian Ocean World, ed. Gwyn Campbell and Eva-­Marie Knoll (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 211–36. 30. Thomas F. McDow, Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018), 165–66. 31. Matthew S. Hopper, “Cyclones, Drought, and Slavery: Environment and Enslavement in the Western Indian Ocean, 1870s to 1920s,” in Natu­ral ­Hazards and ­Peoples in the Indian Ocean World: Bordering on Danger, ed. Greg Bankoff and Joseph Christensen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 255–82. 32. See Robert Rouphail, “Disaster in a ‘Plural Society’: Cyclones, Decolonization, and Modern Afro-­Mauritian Identity,” Journal of African History 62, no. 1 (March 2021): 79–97.

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N ot es to C h a p t er E i g h t 33. Simon Winchester, Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded; August 27, 1883 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003); Marilynn S. Olson, Donald W. Olson, and Russell L. Doescher, “Marilynn S. Olson, Donald W. Olson, and Russell L. Doescher on the Blood-­Red Sky of Munch’s The Scream,” Environmental History 12, no. 1 ( January 2007): 132–33, www​.­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1093​/­envhis​/­12​.­1​.­131. 34. G. J. Symons, ed., Eruption of Krakatoa and Subsequent Phenomena: Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society (London: Trübner, 1888), archived June 7, 2009, at Archive​.­org, https://­archive​.­org​/­details​ /­eruptionkrakato00whipgoog​/­page​/­n2​/­mode​/­2up. The account of the ­actual explosion is on pages 14–29. This section is ripe for a primary source analy­sis and what it might tell students about this period. Likewise, the chart on pages 48–56 provides latitude and longitude on discovery of debris that students could use for their own maps. Also of note, the frontispiece contains chromolithograph reproductions of six stages of the sunset in London in November 1883, and t­ hese make an excellent comparison with Munch’s famous painting. 35. Hermann M. Fritz and Jose C. Borrero, “Somalia Field Survey ­after the December 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami,” Earthquake Spectra 22, no. s3 (December 2019): s220, www​.­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1193​/­1​.­2201972. 36. See, e.g., Getty Images for photos related to the 2004 tsunami, accessed July 10, 2021, https://­www​.­gettyimages​.­com​/­photos​/­sri​-­lanka​-­tsunami​-­2004. The film The Impossible (dir. J. A. Bayona, 2012) tells the story of a ­family that was caught in the 2004 tsunami in Thailand and, miraculously, survived being swept to sea and ­were eventually re­united. 37. Julian P. Hume, “The History of the Dodo Raphus cucullatus and the Penguin of Mauritius,” Historical Biology 18, no. 2 (2006): 65, 67. 38. J. C. Hermes et al., “A Sustained Ocean Observing System in the Indian Ocean for Climate Related Scientific Knowledge and Societal Needs,” Frontiers in Marine Science 6 (2019), https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­3389​/­fmars​.­2019​.­00355. 39. Jennifer Fitchett, “Why the Indian Ocean Is Spawning Strong and Deadly Tropical Cyclones,” Conversation, May 8, 2019, https://­theconversation​.­com​/­why​-­the​ -­indian​-­ocean​-­is​-­spawning​-­strong​-­and​-­deadly​-­tropical​-­cyclones​-­116559. 40. Kristina Douglass and Jago Cooper, “Archaeology, Environmental Justice, and Climate Change on Islands of the ­Caribbean and Southwestern Indian Ocean,” Proceedings of the National Acad­emy of Sciences 117, no. 15 (2020): 8254–62, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1073​/­pnas​.­1914211117. 41. “Maldives Cabinet Makes a Splash,” bbc, October 17, 2009, http://­news​.­bbc​ .­co​.­uk​/­2​/­hi​/­8311838​.­stm; John Shenk, dir., The Island President (2011, ­After Image Public Media), https://­theislandpresident​.­com​/­.

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N ot es to C h a p t er N i n e 42. Debjani Bhattacharyya, Empire and Ecol­ogy of the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 3. 43. Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Mi­grants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 44. Pedro Machado, Steve Mullins, and Joseph Christensen, eds., Pearls, ­People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2020), 9–10. 45. Samuel Ostroff, “Can the Oyster Speak? Pearling Empires and the Marine Environments of South India and Sri Lanka, c. 1600–1900,” in Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World, ed. Martha Chaiklin, Philip Gooding, and Gwyn Campbell, Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2020), 65–98, https://­link​.­springer​.­com​ /­content​/­pdf​/­10​.­1007​/­978​-­3​-­030​-­42595​-­1​_­3​.­pdf. 46. Salavatore Cerchio et al., “A New Blue ­Whale Song-­Type Described for the Arabian Sea and Western Indian Ocean,” Endangered Species Research 43 (2020): 495–515, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­3354​/­esr01096. 47. Jane Hooper, Yankees in the Indian Ocean: American Commerce and Whaling, 1786–1860 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022).

Nine. Teaching Technologies: Some Classroom Strategies 1. Tansen Sen, “The Impact of Zheng He’s Expeditions on Indian Ocean Interactions,” Bulletin of soas 79, no. 3 (2016): 609–36. 2. Travel sites like Expedia and Google Flights ­will give them many options. You could also ask them to start from the websites of national (or regional) carriers and see how results might differ. 3. Google Earth includes guided tours of cultural and historic phenomena through the Voyager option. This includes the Pilgrimage to Mecca, the Salt March to Dandi, Rivers of India, and Orang Asal Indigenous Lands of Malaysia, among ­others. You may also “visit” thirty unesco World Heritage Sites, including Indian Ocean locales like the Buddhist Borobudur T ­ emple in Java and the Hindu Prambanan T ­ emple in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Google Street View tours can also take you to “The ­Temples of Java, Indonesia,” and also on country-­specific “tours” such as Discover the United Arab Emirates, Discover Madagascar, Discover Ré­union Island, and Discover Sri Lanka, among ­others. 4. See Michael N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003), 19–23; Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 20–23; Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7–9; Gwyn Campbell,

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5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

Africa and the Indian Ocean World from Early Times to circa 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 8–13. A blank map is available at Thomas F. McDow’s Ohio State University webpage, accessed November 20, 2023, https://­u​.­osu​.­edu​/­mcdow​.­4​/­indian​-­ocean​ -­map​/­. For pos­si­ble published and online primary sources, see relevant articles in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, https://­oxfordre​.­com​ /­asianhistory. See Huguette Ly-­Tio-­Fane Pineo, Lured Away: The Life History of Indian Cane Workers in Mauritius (Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1984); Marina Car­ter, Lakshmi’s Legacy: The Testimonies of Indian ­Women in 19th ­Century Mauritius (­Rose Hill, Mauritius: Éditions de l’Océan Indien, 1994), 1–55. For two dif­fer­ent and quite stimulating analyses of Indian writing about Africa, see Gaurav Desai, Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); and Antoinette Burton, Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). For some suggestions, see Ronit Frenkel, “A History of Cultural Negation in Indian Ocean Lit­er­a­ture: Julia Blackburn’s The Book of Colour and Lindsey Collen’s The Rape of Sita,” in Eyes across the W ­ ater: Navigating the Indian Ocean, ed. Pamila Gupta, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Michael N. Pearson (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2010), 314–25; Beverly B. Mack, “Lindsey Collen’s The Rape of Sita,” in African Novels in the Classroom, ed. Margaret Jean Hay (Boulder: Lynne Reiner, 2000), 75–84. Banned upon its release by the Mauritian government for its frank treatment of sexual vio­lence and opposition by religious fundamentalists, Collen’s novel won the 1994 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for the best novel in Africa. Xu Dishan (Hsü Ti-Shan), “The Merchant’s Wife,” trans. William H. Nienhauser Jr., in Modern Chinese Short Stories and Novellas 1919–1949, ed. Joseph S. M. Lau, C. T. Hsia, and Leo Ou-­Fan Lee (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 41–50. We thank Tansen Sen for this reference. Two scholarly works that address the same material are Amitav Ghosh, “The Slave of Ms. H. 6,” Subaltern Studies 7 (1992): 159–220, and Elizabeth A. Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Another book that works well for this assignment but is less directly related to the Indian

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N ot es to C h a p t er T e n Ocean World is Jonathan D. Spence’s The Question of Hu (New York: Vintage, 1988). Two reviews of this book provide an even more striking contrast in pairing. See, for instance, Nicolas Standard, review of The Question of Hu, by Spence, Journal of Asian Studies 49, no. 1 (1990): 136–37; W. J. F. Jenner, review of The Question of Hu, by Spence, ­English Historical Review 108, no. 427 (1993): 474. 13. Vinayak Chaturvedi, review of A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire, by Bose, Pacific Affairs 82, no. 2 (2009): 346–48. 14. Gwyn Campbell, review of A Hundred Horizons, by Bose, American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (2007): 1140–41. This review also has a glaring error of undeleted html code. Students ­won’t miss it, and it provides an opportunity to talk about careful editing!

Ten. Teaching Technologies: Research Projects 1. Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920, Critical Perspectives on Empire (Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 2012), 7. 2. Anderson, Subaltern Lives, 6. 3. For some details of understanding ­these testimonies, see Edward A. Alpers and Matthew S. Hopper, “Speaking for Themselves? Understanding African Freed Slave Testimonies from the Western Indian Ocean, 1850s–1930s,” Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies 1, no. 1 (September 29, 2017): 60–89, https://­doi​ .­org​/­10​.­26443​/­jiows​.­v1i1​.­20. 4. The National Archives of the UK even has a webpage to help p­ eople find details about Indian indentured laborers, https://­www​.­nationalarchives​.­gov​ .­uk​/­help​-­with​-­your​-­research​/­research​-­g uides​/­indian​-­indentured​-­labourers​/­. Other pos­si­ble sources include, among ­others, the Parliamentary Papers of the UK Parliamentary Archives, https://­archives​.­parliament​.­uk​/­online​-­resources​ /­parliamentary​-­papers, and the British Newspaper Archive, https://­www​.­bl​.­uk​ /­collection​-­g uides​/­british​-­newspaper​-­archive#. All accessed August 31, 2022. 5. A digital version of this book is available through the Hathi Trust and would work for students and this assignment. Emilie Reute, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess: An Autobiography (New York: D. Appleton, 1888), last updated May 22, 2014, https://­catalog​.­hathitrust​.­org​/­Record​/­011208204. The definitive scholarly edition is Reute, An Arabian Princess between Two Worlds: Memoirs, Letters Home, Sequels to the Memoirs; Syrian Customs and Usages, ed. E. J. van Donzel (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1993). 6. Carey McCormack, “Collection and Discovery: Indigenous Guides and Alfred Russel Wallace in Southeast Asia, 1854–1862,” Journal of Indian Ocean

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N ot es to C h a p t er T e n World Studies 1, no. 1 (September 2017): 111–29, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­26443​ /­jiows​.­v1i1​.­22. 7. Royal Geo­graph­i­cal Society, “Hidden Histories of Black Geographers,” accessed November 20, 2023, https://­www​.­rgs​.­org​/­about​-­us​/­our​-­work​/­equality​ -­diversity​-­and​-­inclusion​/­black​-­geographers​-­past​-­present​-­future​/­hidden​ -­histories​-­of​-­black​-­geographers. This work, the site states, “recover[s] stories of ­those previously ignored, forgotten or deliberately excluded from the rec­ord, and their stories can be used to trou­ble, complicate and undermine traditional narratives of ­European exploration.” 8. “Mzee Mombasa’s Story,” uts Review: Cultural Studies and New Writing 6, no. 2 (2000): 181–85. Mzee Mombasa was interviewed with the assistance of a translator by Stephen Muecke in Mombasa on October 9, 2000. 9. Wikipedia has support and training for proj­ects like this that diversify Wikipedia and write about overlooked and underappreciated historical figures. This includes training for instructors and very useful units that help students think about writing for the encyclopedia’s audience and about citing sources and avoiding plagiarism. See “Teach with Wikipedia,” Wiki Education, accessed August 28, 2022, https://­wikiedu​.­org​/­teach​-­with​-­wikipedia​/­. 10. Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, https://­watson​.­foundation​/­fellowships​/­tj, and Fulbright Fellowship, https://­us​.­fulbrightonline​.­org​/­fulbright​-­us​-­student​ -­program, both accessed August 28, 2022. 11. Mandana E. Limbert, In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 12. Vincent Brown, “Mapping a Slave Revolt: Visualizing Spatial History through the Archives of Slavery,” Social Text 33, no. 4 (125) (December 2015): 135–36, https://­doi​ .­org​/­10​.­1215​/­01642472​-­3315826. This is about a digital humanities proj­ect related to a slave revolt in Jamaica, and Brown uses it to think about what we gain from this scholarly approach. The same volume of the journal has two other articles that engage with Brown’s ideas: Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “By Design: Remapping the Colonial Archive,” and Claudio Suant, “Mapping Space, Power, and Social Life.” 13. For an introduction and overview, see the StoryMapJS website, accessed May 27, 2022, https://­storymap​.­knightlab​.­com​/­. 14. National Library Board (Singapore), “1836 Map of the Town and Environs of Singapore,” February 10, 2020, https://curiocity.nlb.gov.sg/resource-room/ story-maps/1836-town-and-environs-singapore-map/. 15. Heritage Lab, “Pondicherry Heritage Walk: The French Quarter,” December 5, 2016, https://­www​.­theheritagelab​.­in​/­pondicherry​-­heritage​-­walk​/­. 16. Davidson College Digital Learning Resource Hub, “Omeka Proj­ects,” accessed May 27, 2022, https://­digitallearning​.­davidson​.­edu​/­omeka​-­projects​/­.

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N ot es to C h a p t er T e n 17. For an overview of all the sites, see “Global Stimulants,” accessed May 27, 2022, https://­exhibits​.­lafayette​.­edu​/­s​/­mate​/­page​/­welcome. For the specific examples, see Alisha Gangadharan, “Tea Industry L ­ abor Recruitment and Its Repre­sen­ta­ tions: Assam and Ceylon, 1830s–1920s,” Fall 2019, https://­exhibits​.­lafayette​.­edu​ /­s​/­mate​/­page​/­tea​-­industry​-­labor​-­recruitment​-­and​-­its​-­representations​-­assam​ -­and​-­ceylon​-­1850s​-­1920s, and M. Deacon, “Cup of a Nation: Indian Tea Advertisements as a Reflection of Colonialism,” Fall 2019, https://­exhibits​.­lafayette​ .­edu​/­s​/­mate​/­page​/­indian​-­tea​-­advertisements​-­as​-­a​-­reflection​-­of​-­colonialism. 18. David Vine et al., “The Chagos Archive: An Archive for the Exiled P ­ eople of the Chagos Archipelago,” accessed February 18, 2022, https://­edspace​.­american​ .­edu​/­chagosarchive​/­. 19. PechaKucha website, accessed August 4, 2021, https://­www​.­pechakucha​.­com​ /­about. 20. Mark L. Johnson, “Engaging Students through Pecha-­Kucha ­Presentations,” Techniques: Connecting Education and ­Careers 87, no. 6 (September 2012): 8–9; James Rhem, “Pecha Kucha in Nevada: Susanna Newbury and Student Success,” National Teaching and Learning Forum 24, no. 3 (March 2015): 1–4, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1002​/­ntlf​.­30021. 21. We have used this in a lecture class of more than ninety students and had ­presentations over three days. 22. The mechanics of the concept fair that we have developed may be helpful to you: We solicit pos­si­ble topics by having students submit short proposals with a research question and a brief (fewer than 150 words) description of the topic. We gather, number, and anonymize the proposals into one document to share with students. Students read the proposals and choose the three that they are most excited about. The “fair” itself is an exercise in topic generation that also builds work groups. In a physical space, we post each proposal on its own sheet of paper, covering the walls of the classroom. (Pro tip: ­painter’s tape.) In a digital space, we have used numbered breakout rooms. Students in the physical space are given three dif­fer­ent colored sticky notes (designated first, second, and third choice) and asked to write their names on them. They post their interest on the proposals of their choice. In an orchestrated sequence, we ask students to go to their first choice and discuss the topic; we call time and send them to their second choice, and then third. Students assess the viability of the topic and the groups. Are t­ here enough ­people interested in a topic? Are ­these ­people you could see working with? ­After a moment to consider, we ask them to go to their best choice with the goal of forming groups of four. It is pos­si­ble to combine or split topics, and ­there may be a few lost sheep who need help finding a group. It is surprising, however, that this exercise consistently yields

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N ot es to C h a p t er T e n workable groups, and students are pleased to be working on topics of their choice with ­people with whom they have chosen to work. The wrap-up for the concept fair is to have students submit the names of every­one in their group and a rough idea of their topic. 23. Southeast Asian and ­Caribbean Images (kitlv), Leiden University Libraries Digital Collections, accessed February 8, 2022, https://­digitalcollections​ .­universiteitleiden​.­nl​/­imagecollection​-­kitlv. 24. Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photo­graphs: 1860–1960, Northwestern University Libraries, accessed February 8, 2022, https://­dc​ .­library​.­northwestern​.­edu​/­collections​/­6f58c85f​-­f1fc​-­43c1​-­be52​-­678867659ff6. 25. For efficiency’s sake we have students submit their slides ahead of time so all ­presentations can be loaded and ready at the start of class. This also assures that the timer in Power­Point is set so that each slide autoadvances ­every twenty seconds. It is not hard to set up a laptop to run them automatically so that each group just hits the Space bar when ­they’re ready to start and the p­ resentation begins.

Conclusion. Final Thoughts 1. Antoinette Burton, A Primer for Teaching World History: Ten Design Princi­ples (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 127.

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4^ Selected Bibliography 64

This selected bibliography is designed to provide you and your students with some key sources to begin your study of Indian Ocean World history. The endnotes of each chapter w ­ ill provide critical entry points for more detailed exploration of specific topics raised in the text.

Journals Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies. Published by McGill University. https://­ jiows​.­mcgill​.­ca​/­. Journal of the Indian Ocean Region. Published by Taylor and Francis for the Indian Ocean Research Group. https://­www​.­tandfonline​.­com​/­loi​/­rior20. Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim. Published by Duke University Press. https://dukeupress.edu/monsoon.

Online Research Encyclopedias Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Published by Oxford University Press. https://­oxfordre​.­com​/­africanhistory​/­. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. Published by Oxford University Press. https://­oxfordre​.­com​/­asianhistory.

Books and Articles Agius, Dionisius A. In the Wake of the Dhow: The Arabian Gulf and Oman. Reading, UK: Ithaca, 2002. Ali, Omar H. Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Allen, Richard B. ­European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014.

S el ec t ed B i b l i o gr a p h y Alpers, Edward A. The Indian Ocean in World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Amrith, Sunil S. Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Fortunes of Nature and the Fortunes of Mi­grants. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Anderson, Clare. Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Arnold, David. “The Indian Ocean as a Disease Zone, 1500–1950.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 14, no. 2 (1990): 1–21. Aslanian, Sebouh David. From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Bankoff, G., and J. Christensen. Natu­ral ­Hazards and ­Peoples in the Indian Ocean World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Bhattacharyya, Debjani. Empire and Ecol­ogy of the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Bishara, Fahad Ahmad. A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Campbell, Gwyn. Africa and the Indian Ocean World from Early Times to circa 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Campbell, Gwyn, ed. Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Campbell, Gwyn, and Eva-­Marie Knoll, eds. Disease Dispersion and Impact in the Indian Ocean World. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Campbell, Gwyn, and Alessandro Stanziani, eds. Bonded ­Labour and Debt in the Indian Ocean World. London: Chatto and Pickering, 2013. Casson, Lionel, ed. The Periplus Maris Erythraei. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1989. Chatterjee, Indrani, and Richard M. Eaton, eds. Slavery and South Asian History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Chaudhuri, K. N. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic ­History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Desai, Gaurav. Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Echenberg, Myron. Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Pre­sent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Ghosh, Amitav. Flood of Fire. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

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S el ec t ed B i b l i o gr a p h y Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale. New York: Vintage, 1994. Ghosh, Amitav. River of Smoke. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Ghosh, Amitav. Sea of Poppies. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Gibb, H. A. R., trans. Ibn Battúta: Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325–1354. London: Darf, 1983. First published 1929 by Routledge and Kegan Paul (London). Goitein, Shelomo Dov, and Mordechai Friedman. India Traders of the ­Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza; “India Book,” Part 1. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2007. Gu­ha, Ramachandra. Gandhi before India. New Delhi: Penguin, 2013. Hall, Kenneth R. A History of Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100–1500. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011. Harris, Joseph. The African Presence in Asia. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971. Heng, Derek. “Ships, Shipwrecks, and Archaeological Recoveries as Sources of Southeast Asian History.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, September 26, 2018. https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1093​/­acrefore​/­9780190277727​.­013​.­97. Heng, Derek. Sino-­Malay Trade and Diplomacy from the Tenth through the ­Fourteenth ­Century. Ohio University Research in International Studies, Southeast Asia Series 121. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009. Ho, Engseng. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Hooper, Jane. Yankees in the Indian Ocean: American Commerce and Whaling, 1786–1860. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022. Hopper, Matthew S. Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Jackson, Ashley. Of Islands, Ports and Sea Lanes: Africa and the Indian Ocean in the Second World War. Warwick, UK: Helion, 2018. Jayasuriya, Shihan De S., and Richard Pankhurst, eds. The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean. Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 2003. Laffan, Michael Francis. ­Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties across the Indian Ocean World, 1775–1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. Lambourn, Elizabeth A. Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of ­Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Larson, Pier M. Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Lee, Christopher J. Making a World ­after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its ­Political Afterlives. Ohio University Research in International Studies, Global and Comparative Studies Series 11. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010.

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S el ec t ed B i b l i o gr a p h y Levathes, Louise. When China Ruled the Seas: The T ­ reasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Low, Michael Christopher. Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Machado, Pedro. Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Machado, Pedro, Sarah Fee, and Gwyn Campbell, eds. Textile Trade, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean: An Ocean of Cloth. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Machado, Pedro, Steve Mullins, and Joseph Christensen, eds. Pearls, ­People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019. Markovits, Claude. The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. McDow, Thomas F. Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018. Metcalf, Thomas R. Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Mukherjee, Rila. India in the Indian Ocean World: From the Earliest Times to 1800 ce. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore, 2022. Peabody, Sue. Madeleine’s ­Children: ­Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pearson, Michael N. The Indian Ocean. London: Routledge, 2003. Pearson, Michael N. “Littoral Society: The Case for the Coast.” ­Great Circle 7, no. 1 (1985): 1–8. Pearson, Michael N. “Littoral Society: The Concept and the Prob­lems.” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 353–73. Pearson, Michael N., ed. Spices in the Indian Ocean World. Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1996. Pearson, Michael N., ed. Trade, Circulation, and Flow in the Indian Ocean World. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pouwels, Randall L. Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Prange, Sebastian R. Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Prestholdt, Jeremy. Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Reid, Anthony, ed. Slavery, Bondage and ­Dependency in Southeast Asia. New York: St. Martin’s, 1983.

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S el ec t ed B i b l i o gr a p h y Reid, Anthony. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680. Vol. 2, Expansion and Crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Schnepel, Burkhard, and Julia Verne, eds. Cargoes in Motion: Materiality and Connectivity across the Indian Ocean. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022. Schottenhammer, Angela, ed. Early Global Interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean World. Vol. 1, Commercial Structures and Exchanges. Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Seetah, Krish, ed. Connecting Continents: Archaeology and History in the Indian Ocean World. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018. Sen, Tansen. Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade: The Realignment of India-­China Relations, 600–1400. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003. Sen, Tansen. “The Impact of Zheng He’s Expeditions on Indian Ocean Interactions.” Bulletin of soas 79, no. 3 (2016): 609–36. Sheriff, Abdul. Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Sheriff, Abdul. Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873. London: James Currey, 1987. Sheriff, Abdul, and Engseng Ho, eds. The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Socie­ties. London: Hurst, 2014. Sidebotham, Steven E. Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Sīrāfī, Abū Zayd al-. Accounts of China and India. Translated by Tim Mackintosh-­ Smith. Edited by Philip F. Kennedy. Foreword by Zvi Ben-­Dor Benite. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Tagliacozzo, Eric. In Asian ­Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2022. Tagliacozzo, Eric. The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Um, Nancy. The Merchant ­Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009. Vine, David. Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2009. Winchester, Simon. Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded; August 27, 1883. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Winterbottom, Anna, and Facil Tesfaye, eds. Histories of Medicine and Healing in the Indian Ocean World. 2 vols. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Wynne-­Jones, Stephanie, and Adria LaViolette, eds. The Swahili World. New York: Routledge, 2018.

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Index

Abeyasekere, Susan, 68 abolition, 81 Abraham Ben Yiju, 126–27 Aceh, 75–76 Aden, 24, 50, 81, 91, 93, 94 ­Afghanistan, 27 Africa, 10, 41, 47, 53, 83; East, 12, 13, 18, 23–24, 53–54, 55, 65, 69, 77, 88, 91, 93, 108, 125, 133, 140, 143; Horn, 54, 79–80; Northeast 110; partition, 69; Southern, 54, 56, 91; West, 50. See also Swahili Africans in Asia, 39, 71 Ahmadnagar, 39, 79–80 Ajanta Caves, Buddhist ­temple complex, 39 Akbar (Mughal emperor), 39, 63 Albius, Edmond, 81 Al-­Burûni, Abu al-­Raihân Muhammad ibn Ahmad (India), 27–28 al-­Busaidi, Said bin Sultan. See also Said bin Sultan Alexander the ­Great, 87 Ali (Malay guide) 133 Allen, Richard, 81 al-­Malabar, Zayn al-­Din, 26 Alpers, Edward, 2 al-­Sīrafī, Abū Zayd (Accounts of China and India), 22–23, 28–29 American Historical Review, 128 Americans: merchants, 69; ­whalers, 116 American University, 142 Amin, Idi, 70

Andaman Archipelago, 17 Anderson, Benedict, 94–95. See also print capitalism Anderson, Clare, 140 (Subaltern Lives), 132 Angkor, 34 annotated bibliography: as an assignment, 136, 137, 143 annotation software (Hypothes.is, Perusall), 124 Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India, (Government of India publication) 108 anticolonialism: armed strug­gle; nationalism, 93–97 anticontagionists/contagionists, 108 Arabia/Arabs, 12, 14, 18, 26, 41–42, 49, 53–54, 66, 71, 76, 77, 79, 91, 104, 107 Arabian Peninsula, 53–54, 78, 91 Arabian Sea, 15 Arabic language, 22–24, 26–30, 43, 55 Arab knowledge of the Indian Ocean, 13 archaeology, 33–36 architecture, 36–38 Armenians, 65, 94 Arnold, David, 103 art, 38–40 Artstor, 143 Asia, 55, 121; Central, 27, 49; East, 50; South, 53–54, 65, 71, 75, 115, 144; West, 54 Asians, in East Africa, 71 Aslanian, Sebouh, 65

Index Blackburn, Julia (Book of Colour), 125 Blench, Roger, 41 boats: types of, 11 Bo­dhi­sat­tva, 34 Bohoras, 80 Bombay (Mumbai), 53 Bombay, Sidi Mubarak, 133–34 Book of Curiosities, 13 boriti, 37, 54. See also mangrove timber Borneo, 38 Borubudur stupa, 34, 38, 41 Bose, Sugata (A Hundred Horizons), 2, 128 bound­aries: destabilization of, 4 Bourbon, 90. See also La Ré­union Brado Africano, O (newspaper) 94 Brah­mans, 29, 30 Brahmi script, 61 bri (­Belt and Road Initiative), 98. See also China British, 64, 67; and empire, 95, 104–5, 125 British East Africa, 69, 94. See also ­Kenya Colony British Indian Ocean Territory (Chagos Archipelago), 99 British Museum, 143 Brunei, 106 Buddhism/Buddhists, 25, 29, 30, 34, 38–40, 61 Burma (Myanmar), 51, 91, 115, 140 Burton, Antoinette, 147 Burton, Richard Francis, 62 Bwana Kitini, 43 Bwana Simba, 43

Assam, 90, 141 Atharvaveda (Hindu text circa 1000 bce), 103. See also u­ nder Hindu/Hindus Atlantic Ocean, 114; World, 5, 21, 45, 50, 73–75, 79, 81, 85, 103, 121 audience, 117, 131, 134–35, 139–41, 142–46 Australia, 9, 50, 51, 82, 92, 113 Austronesian, language 38; settlement of Madagascar, 61, 66 Aw, Tash (Harmony Silk Factory), 126 Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa (journal), 35 backward design (pedagogy), 5, 117 Bactrian script, 61 Baghdad, 79 Bahasa Indonesian (language), 34; and nationalism, 95 Baluchis/Baluchistan, 76, 77 Banaadir, Somalia, 111 bananas, 141 Banda Island, 110 Bandung Conference, 96 Bangladesh/Bangladeshis, 84, 111; War of ­Independence (1971), 107, 109 Banians, 80 Banu, Rahima, 111 Barendse, R. J., 2 Batajaya, Java, 51 Batavia, Java, 52, 68, 82 beads: glass, 49, 55 Beijing, 68 Belitung (Tang) Wreck, 35–36, 56 Bellin, Jacques-­Nicolas, 14 Bengal, Bengalis, 26, 49, 52–53, 57, 88, 125, 126 Bay of Bengal, 15, 16, 30, 111, 115 Berenike, 35, 51 Berlin Museum for Islamic Art, 13 Bhattacharyya, Debjani, 114 Bhojpuri (Hindi dialect), 42 Bidar, India, 39 Bihar, India, 52 Bijapur, India, 39 Bin Jelmood ­House Museum (Doha), 84 biography-­writing, 111, 131–34

cabotage, 11 Cairo Geniza, 61–62 Calcutta (Kolkata), 107, 109, 114 Calicut, 27 Cambay (Khambhat), 37, 88 Campbell, Gwyn, 128 camphor, 54 canoes, outrigger, 61. See also ships Cape Colony, 91 Cape Malays, 66. See also Malays; voc Cape of Good Hope, 9 Cape Town, 66, 82

192

Index ­Caribbean, 77, 82, 83, 90 cdc (Centers for Disease Control), 105 ceramics, 49 Ceylon, 29, 66–67, 141. See also Sri Lanka Chagos Archipelago, 99, 116; Archive, 142. See also British Indian Ocean Territories; Diego Garcia Chatterjee, Hermendra Nath, 109 Chaturvedi, Vinayak, 128 Chaudhuri, K. N., 2, 59 Chenghiz Khan (Mirak Babir), 79 Chibuene, Mozambique, 55 China: Imperial, 48, 50–53, 56, 61, 87–88; Ming Dynasty, 13, 30, 31, 88–89; New Order government, 68; ­People’s Republic rivalry with India, 98, 102; Qing Dynasty, 68; southern, 126; Tang Dynasty, 28, 61, 66 Chinese, 28; in India, 30; overseas, 67–68; in South East Asia, 25, 65–67, 93–94, 126 chloroquine, 106 Chola Kingdom, 88 cholera, 102, 106–9, 114 Christianity/Christians, 27, 80 Christie, James, 108 Churchill, Winston, 64 cinchona tree, 104–5. See also malaria; quinine cinnamon, 47 circulation socie­ties, 65; and transnationalism, 93 circumcision, 28 Cirebon Wreck, 35–36 climate change, anthropogenic, 102, 113–15 cloves, 47, 49, 51–52, 77, 112, 141 Cochin, 26, 74 coffee, 52, 77, 141 Cold War, 106, 135 Colleen, Lindsay (The Rape of Sita), 125–26 colonialism, 5, 90–91; and disease, 103–4; economics of, 92–93; and nationalism, 93–97 Columbus, Christopher, 21 commenda partnerships, 60 commodity chains, 48–51, 56, 58, 105, 140 Comorians / Comoro Islands, 94

concept fair (pedagogical tool), 143, 183–84 concubinage, 15, 65, 78–79. See also prostitution connected histories, 3 connectivity, 4 Conrad, Joseph (Lord Jim), 125 consumerism / consumer preference, 55–58 contagionists/anticontagionists, 108 contract laborers, 67, 69–70, 83–84 convicts, 82, 132 Cook, Thomas, 64 copper, 54 Coromandel, 16, 26, 49, 57, 120 “cosmopolitan creoles,” 65. See also Ho, Engseng cosmopolitanism, 27 cotton, 47 covid-­19, 102, 107, 109, 119 cowries / cowry shells, 49–50 cplp (Community of Portuguese ­Language Countries), 98 critical book review: as an assignment, 126–29. See also reading currents: of the Indian Ocean, 10–11, 15, 122 curry, 141 Curtin, Philip, 64, 75 cyclones, 112 Dampier, William, 75 Dangdut, 42 dates, farming, 78, 141. See also plantation agriculture Davidson College, 141 ddt, 106 debt bondage, 80 Deccani / Deccan Plateau, 39–40, 79–80 dhows, 18–9, 56. See also ships diaspora, 140: African, 71; Armenian, 65; Chinese, 67–68; Hadrami, 65; Indian, 68–71, 97–98; Malay, 65–67; Sindi, 65 diasporic consciousness, 125 Diego Garcia, 99, 142. See also Chagos Archipelago

193

Index Dien Bien Phu, 97 digital history, 84; humanities, 123–24, 131, 139–42 disease 5, 63–64, 102–13 Dodo (Raphus cucllatus), 101–2, 113–14, 116 Doha, 84 Doughty, Charles, 71 dukawallahs, 94 Durban, 70 Dutch, 42, 52, 58, 65, 87, 90, 104, 113; East Indies, 105, 110, 112

Fretilin (Revolutionary Front for an ­Independent East Timor), 98 Fujian Province, 30 Fulbright US Student Program, 131, 135–39, 145, 182n10 Gabriel (enslaved Habshi), 80. See also Jews Gama, Vasco da, 14, 19, 21, 87, 120 Gandhi, Mohandas, 70 Gan­ges River, 107 Gapminder, 106 Gede, ­Kenya, 34 gender relations, 92, 126, 141–42 genealogy, 65 Geniza archive, 61–62, 140 geography, 5, 9, 15–17, 121–23 Germany/Germans, 43; East Africa, 69 Getty Images, 143 Ghazni, 27 Ghosh, Amitav, 62; In an Antique Land, 125, 126–27, 136; Ibis trilogy, 53, 125; Sea of Poppies, 125 gis (geographic information system), 139 global history, 4, 149n3 Goa, 26, 80, 89 Goitein, Shelomo, 62 Golcanda, 39 gold: exchange of, 49, 54, 56; mining of 63 Google, 143; Google Books, 123–24, 134; Google Earth 122 ­Great Britain/United Kingdom, 71, 91, 99 ­Great Depression, 51, 78 Greek language 61; ­people, 27 Guangzhou (Canton), 28, 66, 88 Gujarat/Gujaratis, 13, 36, 37, 47, 52, 63, 88 Gulbadan Begum, Shahzadi, 62–63 Gulf (Persian/Arab), 10, 18, 24, 37, 41–42, 51, 55, 56, 71, 77–78, 83, 87, 89, 133, 136; wars, 99 gum Benjamin / copal, 54 Gurnah, Abdulrazak: By the Sea, 125; Paradise, 125

earthquake and volcanic activity, 16–17 East African Indian Congress, 70 Eaton, Richard, 75–76, 167n1 economics, 92–94. See also colonialism education: colonial, 93 Egypt, 13, 42, 51, 55, 62, 107, 115, 127 elephant hunting, 48–50 eic (East India Com­pany), British 52–53 El Niño, 16; El Niño–­Southern Isolation, 115 empire, 5, 9, 65, 87, 101–2, 111, 116 Eng, Tan Kwan (Gift of Rain), 126 ­English: ­people, 87, 90 environment, 5, 16, 49–50, 111 equinoo (Equatorial Indian Ocean Oscillation), 16 Eritrea, 96–97 Ethiopia, 91, 96 ethnocentrism, prejudice, 27–30, 31. See also “Other, the” Euro-­America, 51 ­Europe, 56, 60, 107; Eurocentrism, 4, 21–22, 30, 31, 102, 120 ­Europeans, 39–40, 63, 67, 69, 77, 79, 82–83 “fake news,” 123 Făxiăn (Chinese Buddhist monk), 30, 61 fiction: teaching history with, 53, 93, 125 First Opium War, 53, 67 foodways, 141 Foreign Office: British, 77 France/French, 52, 77, 82, 87, 91, 97; Vichy, 92 frankincense, 54 “­free laborers,” 82–83

Habshis, 80 Hadramaut/Hadramis, 44, 65, 93–94

194

Index Hajj, 24, 62–64; and cholera, 64, 107. See also pilgrimage Hathi Trust, 134 Heligoland, 91 Heng, Derek, 35–36, 66 Hijaz, 24, 64, 71 hijra/kinnar (third gender), 144 Hindi, 95 Hindu/Hindus, 25, 27–30, 37, 40, 70, 103. See also Atharvaveda Ho, Engseng, 65 Hong Kong, 53 Hooghly River, 114 Hooper, Jane, 125 Hoq Cave (Socotra), 61 Hormuz, 50 ­horses: trade of, 49 Hourani, George, 12 huáqiáo (“Chinese sojourner”), 68. See also Wang Gungwu Hurgronje, Christiaan Snouck, 64 Hypothes.is (annotation software), 124

Indonesia, 10, 13, 17, 41–42, 66, 68, 90, 93–96, 98; New Order government, 68 Indo-­Portuguese, 52. See also Portuguese: “black Portuguese”; Creole Indus Valley, 49 Inquisition, 80 interspecies histories, 116 iora (Indian Ocean Rim Association, 98, 174n24 Iran/Ira­ni­ans, 37, 55, 56, 71 Iran: The Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies, 35 Iraq, 55 iron, 54 Isfahan, Persia, 65 Islam, 25, 27, 29–30, 34, 37, 62–64, 80, 120–21; and credit, 60, 66; Monsoon Islam, 37; scholars, 80; Shia and Sunni, 29 Italy, 87, 91, 92 ivory, 47–49, 56, 140; caravans, 69 Jahangir, 39 Jamaica, 75 Jambusar, Gujarat, 57 Japan, 50, 83, 88, 91–92, 125 Java/Javanese, 14, 17, 25, 34, 51–52, 58, 61, 88, 104, 110 Java Sea, 9–10, 30, 56 Jawi, 24 Jeddah, 36, 63–64 Jenner, Edward, 110 Jesuits, 38 Jews, as traders, 61 Jivanjee, Alibhai Mulla, 70 Johnston, Sir Harry, 70 Johor, 24–25 junks, 19. See also ships

Ibn Battuta, 29–30, 103, 106, 144 Ikhlas Khan, 39 Île de France, 90. See also Mauritius Illustrated London News, The, 40 imperialism, 5, 132; British, 125; ­European, 77, 87, 89–90; Indian Ocean, 88–89; ­Japanese, 126; rivalries, 90–91 India, 10, 12, 14, 18, 29–30, 41–42, 48–53, 56, 61, 63–65, 79, 87, 89–90, 133; British, 91–93, 105, 107–8; rivalry with China, 98 Indian Ocean: defining the, 9–10 Indian Rebellion (1857), 124 Indians, 28, 43, 53; in Africa, 69–70, 97, 125; coolies, 69, 82–84; expulsion from Uganda, 70–71; as indentured laborers, 68, 90, 93–96, 98, 133; non-­resident, 68, 166n30; settler communities, 93, 95; as slaves, 76, 127; sojourners, 69; India Pale Ale, 141 Indigo, 47, 57 Indochina, 91

Kaaba, 62–63 Kachchh/Kachchhi, 13 kafala (Qatari l­ abor system), 84 kala pani (Hindu sea-­crossing taboo), 69 Kalimantan, 38 Kalinga, 25, 26

195

Index ­Kenya, 34, 42, 91, 92–95, 134; ­Kenya Colony, 69, 70; ­Kenyans, 136 Kerala, India, 176 Khambhat (Cambay), 37, 88 Khaybar, 71 Khojas, 80 Kilwa Kisiwani, 34; “The Ancient History of Kilwa Kisiwani” (Freeman-­Grenville, chap. 42), 43; Kilwa Chronicle, 22–25, 29 King’s African ­Rifles, 91 Kizimkazi mosque, 38 knowledge: as power, 10, 12; production of, 56, 148 Koch, Robert, 177n23 ­Korea, 102 Krakatau, 17, 101–2, 112, 116 Kroncong, 42

lit­er­a­ture: imaginative, 124–25 littoral socie­ties, 3, 10, 115 Low, Christopher, 108 Maalin, Ali Maow, 111 Maasai, 56 Macao, 53, 89 mace, 52 Madagascar, 14, 16, 18, 19, 38, 53, 55, 67, 91–93, 97, 116; and indentured ­labor, 83; peopling of, 61–65; and slavery, 77, 80 Mafia Island, 24 Maharashtra, 39 Mahdavi, Pardis, 84 Mahilaka, Madagascar, 55 Ma Huan (Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores), 31 Makassar, ­women’s mosque, 38 Makhdūm ­family, 26 Malabar, 26, 37, 51, 53, 66, 74 Malagasy: diaspora, 71; language, 38, 61 malaria, 102, 103–6, 115; Malaria Eradication Proj­ect, 106 Malaya/Malays/Malaysia, 25, 42, 65–67, 83, 94–95, 105, 115 Malay Annals, 24–26, 31 Malay Peninsula, 24, 88 Malcolm X, 62 Maldives, 14, 17, 50, 103, 106, 114 Malik Ambar, 39, 79–81 Maluku Islands, 47, 52, 77, 90, 110 Malwa, India, 52–53 Manda, ­Kenya, 34 Mangalore, India, 62 mangrove timber, 37, 54. See also boriti Manicka, Rani (The Rice ­Mother), 126 Mannar, Gulf of, 51, 107, 116. See also pearls manumission, 78, 79–81. See also slavery Mappilas, 16 mapping, 4, 10–15, 19–20, 40, 122–23; Chinese, 13; digital, 63, 107, 113, 139–40, 178n34; Indian, 13, 14; Indonesian, 13; ­European, 13–14 Margariti, Roxani, 122 marriage: temporary, 15, 29, 65

Labbai, 16 ­labor: bonded/coerced/indentured, 5, 73, 82–83, 101; contract, 69–70; migration, 5, 115; military, 67, 80 Laccadive Islands, 14 Lafayette College, 141 Lake Victoria, 69 Lambourn, Elizabeth (Abraham’s Luggage) 37, 62 Lamu, ­Kenya, 37; ­women’s mosque 38 Lanang, Tun Seri, 24, 26 language: creolization, 89–90, 167n45 La Ré­union, 77, 81, 82, 90, 91, 93 Larson, Pier, 71 lateen sail, 18 Latin, 55 LaViolette, Adria, 34 law: Islamic, 60 League of Nations, 91 learning: in groups, 145, 183n22; student-­ centered, 147 Leiden University, 143 leiwah (Afro-­Arab musical style), 41–43 Lim, Janet, 83, 140 Limbert, Mandana (In the Time of Oil), 136 Linschoten, Jan Huygen van, 14

196

Index Mui Tsai, 83, 171n38 Munch, Edvard, 113, 178n34 musical styles, 41–43. See also Dangut; ­Kroncong; Leiwah; Sega/Seggae; Qawwali Muslims: opposed to Portuguese, 26; travelers, 28–30 Mwana Mshamu (mosque), 38 Myanmar, 55, 83. See also Burma myrrh, 54 Mzee Mombasa, 42, 134

Mascarene Islands, 16, 53, 67, 71, 77, 81, 83, 125; See also La Ré­union; Mauritius Mathew, Johan, 141 Mauritius, 14, 42, 52, 70, 77, 82, 91, 99, 112, 113, 125, 144 Mayotte, 91 McCann, James, 175n3 McDow, Thomas, 3 McLeod, John, 80 McPherson, Kenneth, 2 Mecca, 24, 62–64 Mediterranean Sea, 12; Mediterranean ­Eu­rope/world, 21, 51, 56, 61, 87, 107, 114 Meier, Prita, 36 Melaka, 24–26, 31, 66, 88–89 Melaka Strait, 30, 88 merikani, 58 Merina, 38 mers (­Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus), 102, 109 ­Middle East, 64 Ming dynasty, 13, 30; voyages, 31, 67, 89, 98, 121. See also China: Imperial mining: diamonds, 93; gold, 55, 93; tin 67, 93 Mirak Babir (Chenghiz Kahn), 79 missionaries, 39, 79, 93 Mitchell, David (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), 125 Mitchell, Timothy, 115 mobility: ­human, 59–62, 71, 101, 139–40; and climate, 115; and disease, 107–8, 111 Mocha, 36 Mock Fulbright: as an assignment, 134–39 Mombasa, 24, 37, 69, 89 Mombasa railway, 69 Monde Illustré, Le (periodical) 40 monsoon winds, 11, 15–16, 59, 122 mosques: Kizimkazi, 38; ­women’s, 37–38 mosquitoes: Anopheles, 103, 105, 115, 175n9 Mozambique, 16, 24, 53, 67, 89–91, 94, 97, 98 Mozambique Channel, 16 Mughal Empire, 39, 62–63, 80 Muhammad, Prophet, 65

Nagasaki, Japan 125 nakhoda, 31, 66 Namban/Nanban folding screens, 39 Napoleonic Wars, 14, 91, 99 Natal, 70 National Geographic, 107 nationalism, 5, 70, 93–96, 136 nation state: limits of, 135 natu­ral disasters, 112–13 Nayang Chinese, 67–68. See also Chinese: overseas Ndzwani, 24 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 96, 97 Netherlands, 92 New South Wales, 50 Nicobar Archipelago, 17 Nobel Prize, 125 nonaligned movement, 96 North Amer­i­ca, 48–49, 107 Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), 92 North Sea, 91 Northwestern University: Humphrey ­Winterton Collection, 143; Knight Lab, 139 nutmeg, 47, 52 Nyame Akuma (periodical), 35 Nyasaland (Malawi), 92 Oceania, 9 Oman/Omani, 52, 56, 89, 93, 116, 136 Omeka (publishing platform), 140–42 opium, 48, 52–53, 67 Opium War, First, 53, 67

197

Index oral history, 43 ort (oral rehydration therapy), 109 Ortelius, Abraham, 14 Ostroff, Samuel, 115 “Other, the,” 27, 40 Ottoman Empire, 51, 88, 91, 108 Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, 36 oysters, 115. See also pearls

Portuguese, 24, 26–27, 31, 39–40, 42, 50, 51, 55, 66, 79, 87–89, 120–21; “black Portuguese,” 90; Creole, 133; language, 89–90 Prange, Sebastian, 37 print capitalism, 94–95. See also Anderson, Benedict prostitution / sex work, 28–29, 83–84, 92 Ptolemy, 12, 14 Punjab, 57

Pacific Affairs (periodical), 128 Pacific Ocean, 75, 114; islands in, 61, 83; Pacific World, 121 Pakistan/Pakistanis, 55, 84 Palembang, 88–89 Pamplemousse, Mauritius, 52 Paramesvara, 88 Parsis, 53 passports, 65, 71 Pate Chronicle, The, 43, 153, 159 patron-­client relations, 75, 77 Peabody, Sue (Madeleine’s ­Children), 81 pearling/pearls, 49, 50–51, 78, 107, 115–16 Pearson, Michael, 2, 3, 10, 15, 17 PechaKucha (assignment), 131, 142–46 pedagogy, 5, 117, 128–29, 131–46 Pemba, 24, 56, 112 pepper, 51, 141 Peranakans (Straits-­born Chinese), 68. See also Chinese: overseas periodization, 120–21 Periplus of the Erythraen Sea, 12, 30, 120 Persia/Persians 16, 27–28, 49, 61, 66, 97. See also Iran Perusall (annotation software), 124 Philippines, 9, 98 pilgrimage, 5, 62–64 piracy/pirates, 66, 89, 136 Pite, Rebekah, 141 Plague of Justinian, 120 plantation agriculture, 77, 90, 103–4 Pondicherry, 140 porcelain, Chinese, 55 Portugal, 27, 160n13, 150n3; empire, 89; decolonization, 97–98

Qatar, 83–84; Qatar Digital Library, 133 Qawwali, 42 Qing China, 68 Quanzhou, 31 quarantine, 108 Quilon (Kollam), 30 quinine, 104 race, 125–26 railways, 69, 92 reading: critical, 123–24; book reviews (as teaching strategies), 126–29 record-­keeping: of colonial subjects, 94 Red Sea, 10, 16, 63, 87–88, 89 reenslavement, 81 reflective writing: as an assignment, 117 Reid, Anthony, 15, 66 Reilly, Benjamin, 104 Reinel, Jorge, 14 religion, ­popular, 43 Ré­union, La, 77, 81, 82, 90, 91, 93 Reute, Emily, 133 rice, 53, 83 Rijksmuseum, 143 Risso, Patricia, 2 Robbins, Kenneth X., 80 rock crystal, 55 Ross, Ronald, 105 Rouphail, Robert, 125 roz nāma (sailing books), 13. See also mapping: Indian Rutgers University, 141 Saad, Elias, 23 Sahel, Western, 114

198

Index Said bin Sultan, 77–78, 133 sailing, 10–14 Samudra-­Pasai, 26 Sans­krit, 28, 55, 107 Saud, ­House of, 91 Saudi Arabia, 91, 97 sayyids, 65 Schwartzberg, Joseph, 13 sea cucumbers (trepang), 51, 116 seaweed, 116 Sega/Seggae, 41–42, 159 Sejarah Malayu / Malay Annals, 24–25 Sen, Tansen, 89 settlers: British, 93, 95 Seychelles, 14, 125 Sheriff, Abdul, 2, 18, 54 ships: shipbuilding, 18–19, 34, 39, 50. See also canoes, outrigger; junks; steamships shipwrecks, 35. See Belitung (Tang) Wreck; Cirebon Wreck Shiraz/Shirazi 23–24 Shironga (Mozambican language), 94 Siam/Siamese, 25, 97 sickle cell trait: and malaria, 104 Sidebotham, Steven, 35 Sidis/Siddis, 71, 80 silk, 57–58 Sind, 57; merchants 65 Singapore, 67–68, 83, 92, 106, 126, 140 Siraf, 16, 35, 37 slavery, 5, 142; defining, 73–78; ­Europeans and, 77; racialized, 76–77; as social ­process, 78–82. See also reenslavement smallpox, 101–2, 109–11, 116 Snow, John, 107–8 social order, 63 Socotra, 61 Soho, London, 107 soldiers, enslaved, 80 Somalia, 58, 111, 113 Somali Current, 16 source critique/evaluation, 5, 123–24, 132–34, 136–37

South Africa, 66, 67, 70, 83, 93, 94, 96–97 South Arabian (language), 61 Southeast Asia, 13, 15, 49, 61, 87–88, 92, 93, 105, 115, 126, 143; and indenture, 83; insular, 18, 37, 38, 44, 65–68; and slavery, 75–77, 81 South China Sea, 9, 10, 15, 98 Soviet bloc, 96 sports, professional, 136 Sri Lanka, 12, 14, 17, 29, 30, 41, 51, 66–67, 83–84, 90, 93 96, 98, 106, 115, 126. See also Ceylon Srivijaya, 25, 66, 88 steamships, 107 StoryMapJS, 139–40 Straits Settlements, 67–68 student engagement, 6, 111, 117 Suakin 36 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 3 Sufālah (Sofala), 54 Sufism, 42, 44 sugar, 77, 82–83 Sulu Zone, 81 Sumatra, 14, 17, 25–26, 51, 54–55, 88, 113 Sunda Strait, 17, 88 Swahili: coast, 53–54, 77, 89, 91; language, 95; ­people, 16, 17, 23–24, 37, 43, 57 syllabus: ­organization of, 120 Tagliacozzo, Eric, 62 Tanganyika/Tanzania, 34, 70, 91, 92, 95 Tang dynasty, 28, 61. See also China, Imperial tea, 52, 83, 92, 105, 141 teaching, online, 119, 123, 144–45 teak, 53–54, 140 technology (history of ) 18 Terqa, Mesopotamia, 51 “terraqueous” history, 115 textiles, 49; ­European, 58; Indian, 55–56, 58; Indonesian, 26, 58. See also merikani Thailand, 17, 53, 55, 97 Thomas F. Watson Fellowship, 135 Tibbetts, G. R., 12 timber (trade in), 49, 53

199

Index Timor-­Leste, 96–98 Tippu Tip, 124 Topasses, 90 Toussaint, Auguste, 2 Treaty of Paris, 91 Tropical Atlantic Plantation Complex, 75 tropical medicine, 104–5 tsunami, 17, 112–13 Tuḥfat al-­mujāhidīn, 26. See also al-­Malabarī, Zayn al-­Dīn Tun, Seri Lanang, 24, 26 typhus, 114

voc (Dutch East Indies Com­pany), 52, 66, 74, 77, 82, 125 Vries, Peer, 149–150nn3 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 133 Wang Gungwu, 68 ­whales, 116 White­house, David, 35 White-­ware, 56. See also ceramics who (World Health ­Organization), 106, 110–11 Wikipedia, 111, 134 ­women: in art, 40; enslaved, 78, 132; in ­house­holds, 36–37, 78–79, 90; indentured, 82, 132, 144; and nationalism, 97; as pilgrims, 62–63; as ship passengers, 19, 66. See also concubinage, prostitution, ­marriage, temporary world history, 3–4, 147, 149–50nn3 World War I, 50, 64, 91 World War II, 91–92, 93, 96 writing: for a broader audience, 117 Wynne-­Jones, Stephanie, 34

uae (United Arab Emirates) 84 Uganda, 69–70 Um, Nancy, 36 umland, hinterland, and foreland, 10–11, 17 umrah, 62. See also Hajj Undang-­undang Laut (code of maritime laws), 31, 66 underwater archeology, 56 Unguja, Zanzibar, 13, 38, 112 United Nations ­Organization, 91 United States of Amer­i­ca, 54, 73, 92, 98–99, 106 US Department of State, 135

Xu Dishan (Hsü Ti-­Shan) (“The Merchant’s Wife”), 126 xylophone, 41

vaccine hesitancy, 110 vanilla, 81, 93 varnish (vegetal), 54 Vassanji, M. G. (The Gunny Sack, 125; Uhuru Street, 125 Venice, 51 Viet Minh, 97 Vietnam, 96; North, 97, 98 Vine, David, 142 Visram, Allidina, 69 visual literacy, 33

Yemen, 52, 65, 91, 109 Yue ware, 56. See also ceramics Zanj, 29 Zanzibar, 13, 17, 23–24, 37, 38, 43, 52–54, 69, 91, 108, 112, 125, 133 Zheng He, 13, 19, 31, 89, 144 Zimbabwe Plateau, 54 zoonosis/zoonotic disease transmission, 102, 109

200