The Indian Ocean World was an idea borne out by researchers in economic history and trade in the 1980s in response to the compartmentalization of specific area studies within the wider rubric of Asian civilisations and culture. Professor Kirti N. Chaudhuri’s books Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company (1978), and then Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean (1985), figured amongst the forefront of this new movement in historical thinking, undertaking detailed historical analysis, first of the English East India Company, and then a comparative cultural history of Asian material life and civilisation. Today, historians continue to hold on to the idea of an Indian Ocean world, although studies now follow a number of different threads, from themes like linguistics and creolization, to the seeds of national consciousness. By presenting a number of studies here, gathered into the themes of ‘Intermixing,’ ‘The World of Trade’ and ‘Colonial Paths,’ it is hoped we can render tribute to one of the outstanding historians in this field and reflect the plenitude of current research in this subject area.

Trade, Circulation, and Flow in the Indian Ocean World is a collection which covers a long time span and diverse areas around the ocean. Many of the essays look at the Indian Ocean before Europeans arrived, reminding the reader that there was a cohesive Indian Ocean. This collection includes empirical studies and essays focused on particular area or production. The essays cover various aspects of trade and exchange, the Indian Ocean as a world-system, East African and Chinese connections with the Indian Ocean World, and the movement of people and ideas around the ocean.

The Indian Ocean remains the least studied of the world's geographic regions. Yet there have been major cultural exchanges across its waters and around its shores from the third millennium B.C.E. to the present day. Historian Edward A. Alpers explores the complex issues involved in cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean Rim region over the course of this long period of time by combining a historical approach with the insights of anthropology, art history, ethnomusicology, and geography. The Indian Ocean witnessed several significant diasporas during the past two millennia, including migrations of traders, indentured laborers, civil servants, sailors, and slaves throughout the entire basin. Persians and Arabs from the Gulf came to eastern Africa and Madagascar as traders and settlers, while Hadramis dispersed from south Yemen as traders and Muslim teachers to the Comoro Islands, Zanzibar, South India, and Indonesia. Southeast Asians migrated to Madagascar, and Chinese dispersed from Southeast Asia to the Mascarene Islands to South Africa. Alpers also explores the cultural exchanges that diasporas cause, telling stories of identity and cultural transformation through language, popular religion, music, dance, art and architecture, and social organization. For example, architectural and decorative styles in eastern Africa, the Red Sea, the Hadramaut, the Persian Gulf, and western India reflect cultural interchanges in multiple directions. Similarly, the popular musical form of taarab in Zanzibar and coastal East Africa incorporates elements of Arab, Indian, and African musical traditions, while the characteristic frame drum (ravanne) of séga, the widespread Afro-Creole dance of the Mascarene and Seychelles Islands, probably owes its ultimate origins to Arabia by way of Mozambique. The Indian Ocean in World History also discusses issues of trade and production that show the long history of exchange throughout the Indian Ocean world; politics and empire-building by both regional and European powers; and the role of religion and religious conversion, focusing mainly on Islam, but also mentioning Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity. Using a broad geographic perspective, the book includes references to connections between the Indian Ocean world and the Americas. Moving into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Alpers looks at issues including the new configuration of colonial territorial boundaries after World War I, and the search for oil reserves.

This book breaks new ground by bringing together multidisciplinary approaches to examine contemporary Indian Ocean worlds. It reconfigures the Indian Ocean as a space for conceptual and theoretical relationality based on social science and humanities scholarship, thus moving away from an area-based and geographical approach to Indian Ocean studies. Contributors from a variety of disciplines focus on keywords such as relationality, space/place, quotidian practices, and new networks of memory and maps to offer original insights to reimagine the Indian Ocean. While the volume as a whole considers older histories, mobilities, and relationships between places in Indian Ocean worlds, it is centrally concerned with new connectivities and layered mappings forged in the lived experiences of individuals and communities today. The chapters are steeped in ethnographic, multi-modal, and other humanities methodologies that examine different sources besides historical archives and textual materials, including everyday life, cities, museums, performances, the built environment, media, personal narratives, food, medical practices, or scientific explorations. An important contribution to several fields, this book will be of interest to academics of Indian Ocean studies, Afro-Asian linkages, inter-Asian exchanges, Afro-Arab crossroads, Asian studies, African studies, Anthropology, History, Geography, and International Relations.

Throughout history, dominance of the Indian Ocean has been a critical factor in defining a nation's supremacy and power. It is well known that it played a major part in the success of the Portugese nation at the start of the sixteenth century. In this concise survey, Milo Kearney shows how the trading and imperial expansion offered by the Indian Ocean were exploited by many leading powers from the third millennium BC to the very recent past. The nations included range from the ancient Egyptians of the new Kingdom to the Han Chinese and, later, from the Moghul to the British Empire. Milo Kearney goes on to show what a critical territory the Indian Ocean was during the Cold War because of its rich supply for oil. The history of the Indian Ocean provides a snapshot of many of the key issues in world history, such as colonialism, trade and spread of cultures and religions. It is important reading for all students of world history.

The Indian Ocean world has a rich history of socio-economic and cultural exchanges across time and space. This book and its companion, Merchants and Ports in the Indian Ocean World, explore these connections around the wider Indian Ocean world. The book examines the many overlapping linkages that existed from the early modern period and into the colonial era. It offers a clear understanding of the economic networks that extended across the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic during the 19th century. With a critical historical lens, the volume discusses themes like the opium trade in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago – the biggest opium trade market at the time; the Safavid mission to Siam; and the economic relationship between Pondicherry and West Africa, via France. Rich in archival material, this book will be of interest for scholars and researchers of Indian Ocean history, maritime history, Indian history, economic and commercial history, South Asian history, and social history, anthropology, and trade relations in general.

An enthralling journey through 2,000 years of India’s steadfast relations with the seas. The Indian Ocean world’s significance in human history is impossible to dismiss. The 1,000-odd kilometres of the subcontinent’s coastline – which underpinned some of the world’s greatest empires and shaped countless human lives – therefore make for the perfect dock from which to embark on a journey through the centuries for a vital reappraisal of India’s history. In this eye-opening book, noted historian Radhika Seshan sets out to map our age-old connections with the seas, tracing maritime linkages from the Harappan period all the way to the long colonial era. Her re-examination of India’s past through the prism of water reveals the extent to which this conduit enabled trade and the movement of people, often leading to the establishment of crucial ports, communities, kingdoms and empires. The Chola, Chalukya and Vijayanagar empires, historic ports such as Muziris and Bharuch and accounts of travellers, explorers, merchants and monarchs who frequented India’s shores are explored here in vivid detail, with the sea providing a riveting backdrop of adventure, migration, invasion and rich cultural networks. While the arrival of the Europeans, the subsequent Raj and their consolidation of terrestrial networks marked the gradual decline of our maritime dominance, the seas hold sway over our geopolitics even today. Combining scholarly rigour with a storyteller’s flair, Empires of the Sea presents India afresh as a nation of pluralities made possible by virtue of its long-standing maritime relations with the world at large.