scholarly journals Revisiting Corruption Theory on the Indian Ocean World: A Case Study of Slave Trade in the 19th Century Western Indian Ocean

2021 ◽  
pp. 101-130
Author(s):  
Hideaki Suzuki
Author(s):  
Philip Gooding

Central Tanzania is a heterogenous region in the interior of East Africa. Its history, politics, and cultures have been affected by numerous outside influences. These outside influences have primarily come in the form of migrants from elsewhere in the East African interior and the Western Indian Ocean world, and in the form of “proto-colonial,” colonial, and postcolonial governance structures, whose centers since the mid-19th century have been located in Tanzania’s coastal or island regions. Despite the apparent “newness” that each migrant group or governor instituted, Central Tanzania’s politics and cultures have shown a remarkable adaptability to new influences, whether that be to ivory traders arriving in the region during the 19th century or to colonial rulers attempting to govern it during the 20th. Additionally, Islam and Christianity have taken a variety of forms within Central Tanzania, none of which exactly correspond to the ideals of those who originally brought them to the region. The peoples of Central Tanzania have acculturated to outside influences and reconciled them with their preexisting and developing political and cultural structures.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Editors of the JIOWS

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.


Author(s):  
Lakshmi Subramanian

This chapter takes a stock taking exercise of the history writing on Gujarat and Indian maritime history over the last five decades. It identifies the major shifts and emphases that mark the nature of historical knowledge. What these hold for the discipline of history in general and how these inflect the case study of Gujarat in particular are examined. The intention of such a stock taking exercise is also to consider the importance of recovering and reading new and local archives and of incorporating new methods into standard historical work. The author also explores the most significant shifts that have emerged in the recent historiography of the Indian Ocean and of maritime Gujarat: study of law and piracy and Muslim seafaring and sailing practices in the western Indian Ocean.


2008 ◽  
Vol 82 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 47-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rik van Welie

Compares slave trading and slavery in the Dutch colonial empire, specifically between the former trading and territorial domains of the West India Company (WIC), the Americas and West Africa, and of the East India Company (VOC), South East Asia, the Indian Ocean region, and South and East Africa. Author presents the latest quantitative assessments concerning the Dutch transatlantic as well as Indian Ocean World slave trade, placing the volume, direction, and characteristics of the forced migration in a historical context. He describes how overall the Dutch were a second-rate player in Atlantic slavery, though in certain periods more important, with according to recent estimates a total of about 554.300 slaves being transported by the Dutch to the Americas. He indicates that while transatlantic slave trade and slavery received much scholarly attention resulting in detailed knowledge, the slave trade and slavery in the Indian Ocean World by the Dutch is comparatively underresearched. Based on demand-side estimates throughout Dutch colonies of the Indonesian archipelago and elsewhere, he deduces that probably close to 500.000 slaves were transported by the Dutch in the Indian Ocean World. In addition, the author points at important differences between the nature and contexts of slavery, as in the VOC domains slavery was mostly of an urban and domestic character, contrary to its production base in the Americas. Slavery further did in the VOC areas not have a rigid racial identification like in WIC areas, with continuing, postslavery effects, and allowed for more flexibility, while unlike the plantation colonies in the Caribbean, as Suriname, not imported slaves but indigenous peoples formed the majority. He also points at relative exceptions, e.g. imported slaves for production use in some VOC territories, as the Banda islands and the Cape colony, and a certain domestic and urban focus of slavery in Curaçao.


Itinerario ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Davies

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.


Author(s):  
Richard B. Allen

The African diaspora in the Indian Ocean is inextricably intertwined with slavery and slave trading in an oceanic world that encompasses southern and eastern Africa, the Red Sea, the Persian (or Arabian) Gulf, South Asia, the Indonesian archipelago, and parts of East Asia. A combination of factors, including the cost of free labor, high morbidity and mortality rates from diseases such as malaria and smallpox, and the perceived attributes of different African peoples spurred the exportation by Arab, Muslim, and Swahili merchants of an estimated 2.9–3.65 million men, women, and children from diverse populations in southern and eastern Africa, Madagascar, and the Horn of Africa to Arabia, the Persian Gulf, South Asia, and Southeast Asia between 800 and c.1900. European involvement in this transoceanic slave trade began during the early 16th century and continued well into the 19th century. This diaspora’s legacy includes the presence of communities of African descent in modern Iran, India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia.


Author(s):  
Stephanie Wynne-Jones

A Material Culture focuses on objects in Swahili society through the elaboration of an approach that sees both people and things as caught up in webs of mutual interaction. It therefore provides both a new theoretical intervention in some of the key themes in material culture studies, including the agency of objects and the ways they were linked to social identities, through the development of the notion of a biography of practice. These theoretical discussions are explored through the archaeology of the Swahili, on the Indian Ocean coast of eastern Africa. This coast was home to a series of "stonetowns" (containing coral architecture) from the ninth century AD onwards, of which Kilwa Kisiwani is the most famous, considered here in regional context. These stonetowns were deeply involved in maritime trade, carried out among a diverse, Islamic population. This book suggests that the Swahili are a highly-significant case study for exploration of the relationship between objects and people in the past, as the society was constituted and defined through a particular material setting. Further, it is suggested that this relationship was subtly different than in other areas, and particularly from western models that dominate prevailing analysis. The case is made for an alternative form of materiality, perhaps common to the wider Indian Ocean world, with an emphasis on redistribution and circulation rather than on the accumulation of wealth. The reader will therefore gain familiarity with a little-known and fascinating culture, as well as appreciating the ways that non-western examples can add to our theoretical models.


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