With its conquest of the Arab lands in the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire (1300–1923) came to control some of the major entrepots of the Indian Ocean trade in the west. This expansion, however, also brought the Ottomans into confrontation with the Portuguese, who were seeking to establish a monopoly of the lucrative spice trade. In the first half of the 16th century, Ottoman involvement was limited to the western half of the Indian Ocean, but in the later 16th century, the Southeast Asian sultanate of Aceh forged an alliance with the Ottomans, which, if short-lived in practice, was to attain considerable symbolic importance in later times. Ottoman involvement in the Indian Ocean resumed in the 19th century, again as a reaction to European colonial activities. In the meantime, both commercial and religious links, in particular the hajj, meant that the Ottomans had a prominent role in the Indian Ocean despite only controlling limited littoral territories.
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The Ottoman Empire and the Indian Ocean
A. C. S. Peacock
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Japanese Textiles in East Africa
Hideaki Suzuki
Between the 1920s and 1980s, East African consumers were strongly attracted to Japanese textiles, especially cotton, and Japanese manufacturers paid careful attention to that market. The relationship between the both east and west ends of the historical Indian Ocean developed when Japan was in the industrialization phase, which was led by its textile industry at a time during the postabolition period when East Africans were developing a keen interest in the new fashions, which contributed to their keenness to create a new self-identification. Nonetheless, the situation cannot be understood simply by looking at the general relationship between Japan and East Africa. In fact, from the mid-1910s onward, there were many occasions when the Chinese market—the largest for all Japanese products, including textiles—boycotted Japanese products. Then came the Great Depression, when the creation of bloc economies and the raising of tariffs negatively affected Japan’s textile exports to its existing major markets such as the United States, India, and China. On the other hand, there was a space for Japanese textiles to enter the East African market under the free trade principle of the Congo Basin Treaties, which Japan ratified in 1919. Japanese textile exports to East Africa eventually peaked in 1935 but then declined until they ceased altogether during the 1940s as a consequence of World War II and the devastation of Japan immediately postwar. However, beginning in the 1950s, the trade revived and went on to again occupy a large market share, which it maintained until the early 1980s. The history of Japanese textiles in East Africa is more than simply one part of the history of Japan’s relationship with Africa; rather, it is a topic which embeds conjunctions and entanglements of local, regional, and global contexts as well as interaction between consumer and producer—and not forgetting the middlemen.
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Bengal Delta
Iftekhar Iqbal
Located between the foothills of the eastern Himalayas and the northern shores of the Bay of Bengal, the Bengal Delta has been for more than a millennium a major frontier region of the subcontinent, a gateway to the Indian Ocean and an evolving cultural hub. Because of its frontier location, the region has experienced the interplay of domination and independence from northern Indian imperial powers. Its location also allowed it to connect with the western Indian Ocean as well as the Southeast Asian and South China maritime spaces, making it a long-term player in international trade. These spatially induced political and economic experiences and a remarkable mobility of people and ideas from and into the region shaped a culture that was regionally rooted yet open to cosmopolitan ethos. It was not until the arrival of late colonial national imaginations when the Bengal Delta’s regional integration was put to the test, which resulted in its splitting into two parts: West Bengal of India and Bangladesh.
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Origins of British India
Tirthankar Roy
The origin of British India can be traced to warfare in 18th-century Europe and India, trade-related conflicts and disputes, and the East India Company’s business model. The state that emerged from these roots survived by reforming the institutions of capitalism, military strategy, and political strategy. As the 19th century unfolded and its power became paramount, the Company evolved from a trading firm to a protector of trade. The rapid growth of the three port cities where Indo-European trade and naval power was concentrated exemplifies that commitment. But beyond maintaining an army and protecting trade routes, the state remained limited in its reach.
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Regional Organizations and Geopolitics in the Indian Ocean
Derek McDougall
Regional organizations in the Indian Ocean need to be understood in their geopolitical context. The sense of “regionness” in the Indian Ocean is weak. There is some focus on the oceanic region as a whole, but also on the various sectors of the ocean: northwest, northeast, southwest, and southeast. India, China, and the United States are the most important of the major powers involved, with their interests and engagement extending across the whole ocean. Other extraregional powers include Japan, Russia, and the European Union (EU). Among the middle powers, the most important are France (especially in the southwest sector), Australia (southeast), South Africa (southwest), and Indonesia (northeast), with the United Kingdom also playing a role. Some Middle Eastern states (especially Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates [UAE]) are involved in the Indian Ocean because the northwest sector has a strategic significance for issues in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Then there is the “rest,” the range of Indian Ocean littoral and island states that are affected by developments in the Indian Ocean, especially in areas adjacent to their own territories.
There is only one comprehensive regional organization based on the whole Indian Ocean: the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA). There is also a comprehensive regional organization for the southwest sector: the Indian Ocean Commission (IOC). Most of the other Indian Ocean organizations focus on different kinds of maritime activities. The more significant regional organizations affecting the Indian Ocean are those relating to the adjoining regions but with some Indian Ocean involvement. These are the organizations relating to southern and eastern Africa, the Persian/Arabian Gulf, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
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The Chagos Islands and Indian Ocean Geopolitics
Steffen F. Johannessen
Located in the central Indian Ocean, the Chagos Archipelago was uninhabited until the late 18th century. Midway between India and Mauritius, the clusters of coral atolls were sighted and named by Portuguese pilots in 1512. From the mid-1700s, during the wars between France and Britain, the islands started gaining strategic importance as potential naval bases or supply stations on the India route. Claimed by France, and managed from the French colony of Mauritius, Franco-Mauritian colonizers imported enslaved laborers from Africa and Madagascar to produce copra and coconut oil for a favorable wartime market in Mauritius. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, sovereignty had shifted to British hands. After slavery was abolished, the coconut industries were supplied by Indian indentured laborers. Small societies developed around the island industries, which would continue to produce until the second half of the 20th century. To make way for a joint UK–US military base on the largest island, Diego Garcia, British authorities separated the Chagos Archipelago from the rest of their Mauritian colony and established the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) in 1965. To accommodate the US Pentagon’s base strategies, British authorities evicted the entire local population to Mauritius and the Seychelles between 1965 and 1973. By the mid-1980s the military base was fully operational. As a forward operations facility strategically located between East Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Indonesia, Diego Garcia became one of the United States’ most important overseas military bases. From its airstrip, bomber aircrafts attacking targets in Afghanistan and Iraq have lifted and returned. Located along central Indian Ocean shipping lines, the strategic value of the base also connects to the growing export economy of China and that of India, and these major regional states’ dependence on energy imports. The joint UK–US base is, however, highly controversial. International bodies have repeatedly called for full decolonization and the return of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius. Objections to the Indian Ocean militarization it represents have a long history, and exiled members of the Chagossian community have continuously fought for their right to repatriation. In other words, the history of the military base, now substantiated by disclosed files revealing how British and American authorities conspired and lied to create it—has become one of the most central threats to this central geopolitical establishment in the Indian Ocean.
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Merchants and Merchant Networks in the Indian Ocean: The Armenians
Santanu Sengupta
Among the major processes that characterized early modernity, the rise of the global oceanic routes and circulation across long distances has been considered crucial. This was facilitated by the formation of merchant networks like that of the New Julfan Armenians. Although the early modern Armenian diaspora in the Indian Ocean arena was a heterogeneous one, the majority of the merchants came from New Julfa, a township near Isfahan. The merchants and mercantile agents from New Julfa formed a massive network that facilitated the circulation of wealth, goods, personnel, information, and culture. Their operations expanded into the Indian Ocean world through the Eurasian caravan route from Narva to India. They were also active on the maritime route from Hormuz to the Philippines, giving the network an amphibious character. The members of the New Julfan network remained connected with each other across Europe, the Mediterranean zone, Russia, and South East Asia. This interconnectedness created a global network that facilitated the exchange of wealth, commodities and information. This makes the New Julfan network critical in understanding the dynamics of the mercantile economy of the early modern Indian Ocean world.
The Armenian network functioned across a range of polities, including the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Empire, Mughal India, and also the emerging European colonial regimes in the Indian Ocean littoral. This provides a privileged vantage point for understanding the political spectrum of the early modern Indian Ocean World, especially in a period that saw the emergence of the European colonial regimes. Armenians as cultural and political brokers in this pluralistic situation played a significant role in the shaping of the early modern milieu. Their diasporic cultural traits and practices added to the socio-cultural setting of the region. Their language and culture of correspondence, self-regulatory mechanisms, and their endeavor to build institutions like churches, schools, and a print culture in the port towns of the Indian Ocean littoral contributed not only to the history of the community but also to the socio-cultural dynamics of the Indian Ocean World.
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The Chagos Archipelago
Marina Carter
The Chagos Archipelago comprises fifty-five Indian Ocean islands on five coral atolls, which were little known and uninhabited until the 18th century. Small exploratory settlements were set up by the French and British from the 1770s, but the archipelago was not permanently occupied until after the Napoleonic Wars. Collectively—with Agalega—known as the oil islands because of the exploitation of coconut plantations, the atolls were leased and later sold to Mauritian and Seychellois settlers who employed slaves and later nominally “free” laborers to collect, dehusk, and press the coconuts to produce oil. Economically in decline for most of the 20th century, the Chagos archipelago was controversially detached from Mauritius during independence negotiations in the 1960s and reconstituted as the British Indian Ocean Territory. Some 1,500 islanders were displaced and, as Chagossians, have engaged in a series of legal battles to reclaim their homeland. Currently only one island on the southernmost atoll—Diego Garcia—is occupied, utilized as an American military base; it was declared a Marine Protected Area in 2010. Mauritius has been internationally recognized to have the strongest claim to sovereignty of the archipelago but some Chagossians are calling for independent statehood.
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Medieval Jewish Sources for Asian Trade
Roxani Eleni Margariti
Epigraphic materials, travel narratives, religious-legal literature, and documents of daily life produced by or for Jews between the 7th and the 13th centuries add significant dimensions to our understanding of the history of trade across Asia. Written in a variety of Jewish languages, these sources hail from places across the Afro-Eurasian geographical continuum and speak to the two well-known circuits of medieval trans-Asian trade: the Silk Road and its maritime Indian Ocean equivalent. While there has been a tendency to look at medieval Jewish sources scattered across Asia as vestiges of a unified trading diaspora, a consideration of these sources’ volume, chronology, and the circumstances of their production and use reveals several disjunctures and suggests a more fractured history of Jewish participation in Asia trade. Even so a survey of these sources illuminates a variety of topics that relate to Jewish mercantile activity along well-trodden avenues of exchange, transactions and relationships across confessional lines, and the structures and institutions of transregional commerce.
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Asian Piracy
Sebastian R. Prange
Piracy has been an important and persistent feature of Asia’s maritime history. In fact, the largest pirate organizations in all of history were found in Asia. Although often regarded as the antithesis of trade, piracy is actually closely related to the world of commerce. Pirates were themselves often traders (or smugglers) and relied on merchants to outfit their ships and sell their plunder. Despite the obvious and primary economic dimension of piracy, pirates were also political actors. This observation is significant because piracy has traditionally been distinguished from other forms of maritime predation (especially privateering, but also naval warfare) by stressing its supposedly inherently private nature. In Asia, however, the history of piracy is very much defined by its political contexts. Pirates themselves formed polities, whether as part of established coastal communities or in their endeavors to build their own states. What is more, as was the case in Europe, pirates often colluded with territorial states that used them as an instrument of state power, in order to harass and weaken their rivals. The political dimension of Asian piracy has long been overlooked due to the preponderance of European concepts and sources, which tend to depict all Asians involved in maritime predation as mere criminals. More nuanced studies of Asian pirates, especially when based on non-European sources, promise fresh insights into the commercial, social, and political worlds of maritime Asia.
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Ships and Shipwrecks in the Pre-Modern Indian Ocean
Pierre-Yves Manguin
The Indian Ocean and its adjoining seas, from the Middle East and East Africa to Southeast Asia, have been witness to the nautical ventures of most, if not all, major sea powers of world history. Progress in nautical archaeology in the past few decades has brought about a much better understanding of shipbuilding traditions of the Indian Ocean, until then limited to textual and ethnographic sources. Only a few shipwreck sites and terrestrial sites with ship remains have been studied so far along the shores of the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, or the Indian Ocean proper. Many more were found in recent excavations in the Southeast Asian seas, which were built along Southeast Asian or Indian Ocean shipbuilding traditions.
Two main technical traditions can now be clearly identified for pre-modern times: the Arabo-Indian sewn-plank ships of the western Indian Ocean, which survived into our times, and the Southeast Asian vessels that evolved from a distinctive sewn-plank technology to fully doweled assemblages, as could still be observed in Indonesian vessels of the late 20th century.
The still limited number of shipwrecks brought to light in the Indian Ocean as well as the considerable imbalance in archaeological research between the Indian Ocean proper and the Southeast Asian seas have hindered the advancement of the discipline. Considerable difficulties and interpretation problems have moreover been generated by biased commercial excavations and subsequent incomplete excavation records, not to speak of the ethical problems raised in the process. Such deficiencies still prevent solid conclusions being drawn on the development of regional shipbuilding traditions, and on the historical role of the ships and people who sailed along the essential Indian Ocean maritime networks.
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The Portuguese Estado da Índia (Empire in Asia)
Zoltán Biedermann
The origins of the Portuguese Estado da Índia—the sum of all Portuguese Crown possessions east of the Cape of Good Hope—can be traced back to the late 1400s, most importantly to the inaugural voyage of Vasco da Gama from Lisbon to Calicut (Kozhikode) in 1497–1498. After some initial hesitations, the Portuguese Crown created a governorship for India in 1505, with a seat at Cochin (Kochi) later transferred to Goa, to oversee commercial, military, administrative, and other activities in an increasing number of possessions along the shores of East Africa and Maritime Asia. Portuguese trading posts (feitorias), forts, and fortified towns across the region resulted from conquest or, more frequently, from negotiated agreements with local rulers, on whose cooperation the Portuguese generally relied. The Estado reached its apex in the second half of the 16th century, drawing vast resources from trade around the Cape and within Asian and African waters, while investing increasingly in military and religious campaigns in a variety of regions from southeastern Africa to the Moluccas (Malukus) and Japan. Despite significant losses to the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the English East India Company (EIC) during the 17th century, the Estado survived until the 20th century. Goa became a part of the Indian Union in 1961, and Macao integrated into the People’s Republic of China in 1999. The perceived decadence of the Estado during much of its history is at odds with its longevity and has prompted longstanding debates about the nature of Portuguese power in Asia; its reliance on trade, military might, and imperial ideas; and its intertwinement with Asian polities and societies.
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African Diaspora in Asia
Hideaki Suzuki
The presence of Africans in Asia and their migration around it is one of the least-studied subjects in all of Asian history. The same is true for studies of the African diaspora, but that does not mean that African migration lacks significance in either field. Existing scholarship reveals that Africans traveled to and settled in various regions in Asia, from the Arabian Peninsula to Nagasaki. While there were free African migrants in Asia, a larger number of them arrived as slaves, transported there by both local and European traders. Conditions for the forced immigrants varied and not all of them remained permanently un-free, with some even eventually coming to obtain political power. To understand their dispersal and presence in Asia does more than simply broaden our current understanding of the African diaspora; it also enables us to understand that the African diaspora is a global phenomenon. That improved understanding can in turn break down the geographical boundary of Asian history and connect it not only to African history but to European history too. To do that, the topic requires scholars to challenge the methodological limits of current historical studies.
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Unfree Labor in Colonial South Asia
Andrea Major
Various forms of labor obligation, coercion, and oppression existed in colonial India, but the supposed dichotomy between “free” and “unfree” labor was rarely absolute. European slave-trafficking, internal trades in women and children, domestic slavery, caste-based obligations for agricultural and other labor, and capitalist systems such as indenture represented distinct but overlapping forms of “unfree” labor in the South Asian context. Enslaved Indians were exported to various European colonial possessions in the 17th and 18th century or provided domestic services within the homes of both the European and Indian elites. Meanwhile, various preexisting local labor relationships such as begar, caste-based obligation, and debt bondage involved elements of coercion, control, and ownership that mirrored some of the characteristics of slavery. These underwent significant changes in the colonial period, as the colonial state both tapped into and sought to reshape the Indian labor market to suit the needs of the imperial capitalist economy.
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Commercial Networks Connecting Southeast Asia with the Indian Ocean
Tom Hoogervorst
Southeast Asian history has seen remarkable levels of mobility and durable connections with the rest of the Indian Ocean. The archaeological record points to prehistoric circulations of material culture within the region. Through the power of monsoon sailing, these small-scale circuits coalesced into larger networks by the 5th century bce. Commercial relations with Chinese, Indian, and West Asian traders brought great prosperity to a number of Southeast Asian ports, which were described as places of immense wealth. Professional shipping, facilitated by local watercraft and crews, reveals the indigenous agency behind such long-distance maritime contacts. By the second half of the first millennium ce, ships from the Indo-Malayan world could be found as far west as coastal East Africa. Arabic and Persian merchants started to play a larger role in the Indian Ocean trade by the 8th century, importing spices and aromatic tree resins from sea-oriented polities such as Srivijaya and later Majapahit. From the 15th century, many coastal settlements in Southeast Asia embraced Islam, partly motivated by commercial interests. The arrival of Portuguese, Dutch, and British ships increased the scale of Indian Ocean commerce, including in the domains of capitalist production systems, conquest, slavery, indentured labor, and eventually free trade. During the colonial period, the Indian Ocean was incorporated into a truly global economy. While cultural and intellectual links between Southeast Asia and the wider Indian Ocean have persisted in the 21st century, commercial networks have declined in importance.
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Jewish Merchants in the Indian Ocean Trade
Elizabeth Lambourn
The history of Jewish merchants in the Indian Ocean trade is a story in two parts. Before the modern period the scarcity of surviving material and textual sources causes this community’s history to wax and wane depending on the place and the period. Historians are left to grapple with the question of whether such microhistories can be read as paradigmatic. After 1500 a plethora of documents and material remains allow a far more detailed history and analysis, as well as across an expanded area. Especially after 1700, Jews from Europe and the Middle East entered colonial flows, joining long-standing Jewish communities along India’s western seaboard and in the Yemen, and in time establishing new businesses across the Horn of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Far East. Academic research into these networks is sparse and quite dated until the colonial period, when a new wave of work integrating Jewish merchants into larger narratives occurred.
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The Dutch East India Company in South Asia
Guido van Meersbergen
The Dutch East India Company (VOC, 1602–1799) developed into Europe’s largest commercial and colonial power in 17th-century Asia. Within its extensive intra-Asian trading network centered on Batavia (Jakarta), the Indian subcontinent and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) occupied a pivotal position. The VOC’s desire to tap into the exchange of Indian cloth for fine spices from the Maluku Islands first drove the Dutch to the Coromandel Coast, while Surat’s position as the preeminent maritime hub of the western Indian Ocean and Bengal’s status as a major exporter of silk and cottons attracted the Company to the Mughal Empire. Between 1638 and 1663, the VOC also displaced the Portuguese from their colonial holdings in Ceylon and the Malabar Coast, the world’s only source of high-quality cinnamon and an important producer of pepper, respectively. In Mughal India, the Dutch presence was limited to trading posts from which it conducted trade on conditions set by the imperial authorities, whereas along the Coromandel and Malabar Coasts the VOC possessed fortresses, and in Ceylon it acted as a territorial power exercising colonial rule over several hundred thousand Sinhalese and Tamil inhabitants. In all parts of South Asia, the Company’s position relied on and was maintained through diplomatic relations with local rulers. The various commercial, diplomatic, and colonial interactions gave rise to important forms of cultural exchange and knowledge production in the realms of art, religion, language, and botanical science, which testify to significant cross-cultural connections and mutual influences. The VOC maintained a dynamic trade in South Asia until the final quarter of the 18th century, when its Indian possessions were captured by the British first during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784) and again in 1795 to 1796 during the French Revolutionary Wars.
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Infrastructure, Circulation, and Ecology in the Maldives
Luke Heslop and Lubna Hawwa
In the Maldives, interconnected human and ecological systems of circulation both sustain and corrode social, cultural, and environmental life. Therefore, a focus on infrastructure in the Maldives requires conceptualizing infrastructure as an assemblage of more-than-human networks and interactions.
As well as being a known category of public good, infrastructure in the Maldives is also experienced as an accumulation of networks and meeting points between the ecological and subaquatic world, and the world dreamed of, designed by, and built by people. Infrastructure encompasses the relationship between the islands in the Maldives, island inhabitants, the sea, networks of people, and the movement of people through the islands over time. In taking such an approach, attention must be paid to the significance of the ocean and its reefs as unruly infrastructures that shape the permissibility of life on the archipelago.
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Commercial Laws of the Indian Ocean, 1400–1800 CE
Mahmood Kooria
Laws pertaining to commercial transactions in the Indian Ocean littoral emerged from diverse regional, political, religious, and philosophical orientations. While Muslim merchants dominated the oceanic waters up to the 15th century, European regimes attempted to assert their supremacy from the 16th century onward through various strategies such as treaty-making, diplomacy, and war. In both eras, a diverse array of legal systems contributed to the commercial frameworks in the oceanic littoral. These frameworks derived mainly from Islamic, Hindu, Christian, European, and Arabian legal systems, but regional and transregional Malay, Javanese, Indic, Persian, and Swahili frameworks also played a significant role. Jurists, rulers, companies, and traders from these various backgrounds made the commercial legal sphere of the Indian Ocean very complex and diverse, rooted in a long tradition yet breaking away from it with new forms, devices, institutions, and structures. While very few scholars have focused on the intricacies of commercial law in the Indian Ocean world between 1400 and 1800, the sources on this topic from multiple languages, regions, and collections are very extensive.
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The Appropriation of Islam in the Maldives
Boris Wille
The Maldives is one of four Muslim majority countries in South Asia. The contemporary Islamic Republic of the Maldives frames itself as a “100 percent Muslim nation.” The state religion is Islam, all 380,000 citizens are Muslims by law, and the practice of other religions is prohibited. Ever since the first Muslim exposure, probably in the 10th century, Islam has gradually evolved into a sociocultural configuration that affects most domains of archipelagic society and culture. It shapes foreign relations, informs legislation, and influences arts and architecture, as well as language and scripture. Scholarship of Islam and Islamization in the Maldives acknowledges the historical trajectories of the appropriation of Islam as well as its contemporary relevance in Maldivian identity and state politics.
