Religion and Early Trade in the Western Indian Ocean: Ideology and Knowledge Exchanges Across the Indian Ocean World

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-83
Author(s):  
Eivind Heldaas Seland
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Editorial Introduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Editors of the JIOWS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Shed Light

The editors are proud to present the first issue of the fourth volume of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies. This issue contains three articles, by James Francis Warren (Murdoch University), Kelsey McFaul (University of California, Santa Cruz), and Marek Pawelczak (University of Warsaw), respectively. Warren’s and McFaul’s articles take different approaches to the growing body of work that discusses pirates in the Indian Ocean World, past and present. Warren’s article is historical, exploring the life and times of Julano Taupan in the nineteenth-century Philippines. He invites us to question the meaning of the word ‘pirate’ and the several ways in which Taupan’s life has been interpreted by different European colonists and by anti-colonial movements from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. McFaul’s article, meanwhile, takes a literary approach to discuss the much more recent phenomenon of Somali Piracy, which reached its apex in the last decade. Its contribution is to analyse the works of authors based in the region, challenging paradigms that have mostly been developed from analysis of works written in the West. Finally, Pawelczak’s article is a legal history of British jurisdiction in mid-late nineteenth-century Zanzibar. It examines one of the facets that underpinned European influence in the western Indian Ocean World before the establishment of colonial rule. In sum, this issue uses two key threads to shed light on the complex relationships between European and other Western powers and the Indian Ocean World.

English Private Trade on the West Coast of India, c. 1680–c. 1740

Itinerario ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Davies
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The West ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
West Coast Of India ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Indian Ocean World

This article explores the private trade networks of English East India Company merchants on the west coast of India during the first half of the eighteenth century. Existing studies of English private trade in the Indian Ocean have almost exclusively focused on India's eastern seaboard, the Coromandel Coast and the Bay of Bengal regions. This article argues that looking at private trade from the perspective of the western Indian Ocean provides a different picture of this important branch of European trade. It uses EIC records and merchants' private papers to argue against recent metropolitan-centred approaches to English private trade, instead emphasising the importance of more localised political and economic contexts, within the Indian Ocean world, for shaping the conduct and success of this commerce.

Burcad Badeed as Grounds and Method in Literary Expressions of Somali Piracy

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-51
Author(s):  
Kelsey McFaul
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Maritime Piracy ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
The Relationship

The emergence of maritime piracy in the western Indian Ocean captured global attention from 2007 to 2012, resulting in simplistic and racialized representations of piracy in news and other media. In 2011, two diasporic Somali writers published literary works intervening in this representation: Nuruddin Farah’s novel Crossbones and Ubax Cristina Ali Farah’s essay “Un sambuco attraversa il mare” [“A dhow is crossing the sea”]. This essay reads Farah and Ali Farah’s alternative narratives of piracy through the Somali phrase burcad badeed, which both translate as ‘sea bandits’ or ‘pirates.’ As a method burcad badeed first historicizes contemporary piracy within the longue durée of the Indian Ocean world. Second, it draws on the ocean as an analogy and aggregator of dispersed forms of knowledge, thereby inviting comparative reading across conventional boundaries of generation, language, and form, and making visible practices of collective, embodied, and polyvocal knowledge production. Finally, burcad badeed complicates the distinctions between land and sea which undergird legal definitions of piracy to focalize particular landscapes: Namely the beach and the relationship between coast and hinterland. The beach foregrounds the ecological devastation to which piracy is a response, while the relationship between coast and hinterland frames practices of movement, complex racializations, and senses of belonging in Somalia and on the east African coast.

Australianama

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samia Khatun
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asian ◽  
South Asian Diaspora ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Asian Diaspora ◽  
Broken Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonized by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of 'Muslim-majority' countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic-Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonized by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of non-white people. Australianama challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonized. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonized geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonized tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future.

Intersections: Peoples, ports and trade in seventeenth-century Surat and Madras

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-122
Author(s):  
Radhika Seshan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
North India ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World

The article discusses the ways in which, in the seventeenth century, as India drew the attention of more Europeans, both as private traders and as part of larger east India companies, networks of contacts were established. Two ports in particular, Surat and Madras (now Chennai), became points of intersection of Europeans and Asians, through the multi-pronged trade networks that linked these two ports to other ports in the Indian Ocean world, through traders from across regions. Focus is on the English in particular, as their main port of trade for Mughal North India was Surat, and Madras, their first fortified establishment on the coast of India.

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