scholarly journals The Age of Revolution in the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, and South China Sea: A Maritime Perspective

2013 ◽  
Vol 58 (S21) ◽  
pp. 229-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Anderson

AbstractThis essay explores the history of empire and rebellion from a seaborne perspective, through a focus on convict-ship mutiny in the Indian Ocean. It will show that the age of revolution did not necessarily spread outward from Europe and North America into colonies and empires, but rather complex sets of interconnected phenomena circulated regionally and globally in all directions. Convict transportation and mutiny formed a circuit that connected together imperial expansion and native resistance. As unfree labour, convicts might be positioned in global histories of the Industrial Revolution. And, as mutinous or insurgent colonial subjects, they bring together the history of peasant unrest and rebellion in south Asia with piracy in south-east Asia and the Pearl River delta. A subaltern history of convict transportation in the Indian Ocean thus has much to offer for an understanding of the maritime dimensions of the age of revolution.

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-476
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Cross

Abstract This article examines the global history of the Age of Revolution through the lens of the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes (1785–94). Established in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the company was not only a commercial entity but also an integral part of a diplomatic strategy for reestablishing the postwar Franco-British relationship. The geopolitical context of the Indian Ocean world forced French political and commercial actors to imagine forms of imperial and commercial power that frequently placed French interests under British protection, often in ways that provoked significant opposition in the metropole. Amid ideologies of competition, Anglophobia, and militarism, the case of the Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes reveals how both state and private actors struggled to promote wide-ranging commercial collaboration between France and Britain in the 1780s and 1790s in ways that often anticipated later partnerships between the two empires. Cet article examine l'histoire globale de l’ère de la Révolution française à travers le prisme de la Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes (1785–94). Etablie après la guerre d'indépendance américaine, la compagnie n’était pas seulement une entité commerciale, mais une partie intégrante d'une stratégie diplomatique pour rétablir les relations franco-britanniques. Le contexte géopolitique de l'océan Indien exigeait que les acteurs politiques et commerciaux français imaginent de nouvelles formes de pouvoir impérial et commercial. Celles-ci plaçaient fréquemment les intérêts français sous la protection britannique, souvent d'une manière qui provoquait de fortes résistances dans la métropole. Dans un contexte idéologique de compétition, d'anglophobie et de militarisme, le cas de la Nouvelle Compagnie des Indes révèle que des acteurs aussi bien étatiques que privés essayaient de promouvoir une vaste collaboration commerciale entre la France et la Grande-Bretagne dans les années 1780 et 1790, en anticipant souvent les partenariats ultérieurs entre les deux empires.


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):  
Samia Khatun

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.


Author(s):  
Roy Livermore

Tuzo Wilson introduces the concept of transform faults, which has the effect of transforming Earth Science forever. Resistance to the new ideas is finally overcome in the late 1960s, as the theory of moving plates is established. Two scientists play a major role in quantifying the embryonic theory that is eventually dubbed ‘plate tectonics’. Dan McKenzie applies Euler’s theorem, used previously by Teddy Bullard to reconstruct the continents around the Atlantic, to the problem of plate rotations on a sphere and uses it to unravel the entire history of the Indian Ocean. Jason Morgan also wraps plate tectonics around a sphere. Tuzo Wilson introduces the idea of a fixed hotspot beneath Hawaii, an idea taken up by Jason Morgan to create an absolute reference frame for plate motions.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-81
Author(s):  
Shane J. Barter

Abstract Studies of coffee production and consumption are dominated by emphases on Latin American production and American consumption. This paper challenges the Atlantic perspective, demanding an equal emphasis on the Indian Ocean world of Eastern Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. A geographical approach to historical as well as contemporary patterns of coffee production and consumption provides an opportunity to rethink the nature of coffee as a global commodity. The Indian Ocean world has a much deeper history of coffee, and in recent decades, has witnessed a resurgence in production. The nature of this production is distinct, providing an opportunity to rethink dependency theories. Coffee in the Indian Ocean world is more likely to be produced by smallholders, countries are less likely to be economically dependent on coffee, farmers are more likely to harvest polycultures, and countries represent both consumers and producers. A balanced emphasis of Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds allows us to better understand coffee production and consumption, together telling a more balanced, global story of this important commodity.


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.


Author(s):  
Stewart A. Weaver

‘First forays ’ considers several notable figures in the history of exploration including: Harkhuf, who in 2270 bce explored the Nile River; Pytheas of Massalia, who around 325 bce sailed out north of the Bay of Biscay and circumnavigated the British Isles; Alexander the Great who introduced the Greeks to Arabia and India; Zhang Qian, in 139 bce, who provided the geographical stimulus to the further opening of the Silk Road; Ptolemy, whose second-century treatise Geographia encouraged exploratory ambitions for centuries to come; thirteenth-century Friar William of Rubruck; the traveller Marco Polo; and the accidental explorers Zheng He, who lead maritime expeditions through the Indian Ocean, between 1405 and 1433, and Moroccan pilgrim Abu 'Abdallah ibn Battúta.


Parergon ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-276
Author(s):  
John H. Pryor

Antiquity ◽  
1948 ◽  
Vol 22 (85) ◽  
pp. 4-7
Author(s):  
Elaine Sanceau

It was from the Portuguese that Europe first learned something about India. Their 16th century literature abounds in information on the subject. Duarte Barboza, Tomé Pires, Castanheda, João de Barros, Gaspar Correa even, though he says that he will only write about the exploits of his countrymen, have each one given to the world many interesting facts regarding the ethnology, the customs and beliefs, and some account of the history of that baffling sub-continent which Portugal, of European nations, was the first to observe at close quarters.


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