Persians, Pilgrims and Portuguese: The Travails of Masulipatnam Shipping in the Western Indian Ocean, 1590–1665

1988 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Bay Of Bengal ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Maritime Trade ◽  
Western India ◽  
Grain Trade ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
A Minor ◽  
The Relationship

The Coromandel port of Masulipatnam, at the northern extremity of the Krishna delta, rose to prominence as a major centre of maritime trade in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Its growing importance after about 1570 is explicable in terms of two sets of events: first, the consolidation of the Sultanate of Golkonda under Ibrahim Qutb Shah (r. 1550–1580), and second, the rise within the Bay of Bengal of a network of ports with a distinctly anti-Portuguese character, including the Sumatran centre of Aceh, the ports of lower Burma, of Arakan, as well as Masulipatnam itself. Round about 1550, Masulipatnam was no more than a supplier of textiles on the coastal network to the great port of Pulicat further south, but by the early 1580s its links with Pegu and Aceh had grown considerably, causing not a little alarm in the upper echelons of the administration of the Portuguese Estado da Índia at Goa. The ‘Moors’ who owned and operated ships out of Masulipatnam did so without the benefit of carlazes from the Portuguese captains either at São Tomé or at any other neighbouring port, and while developing an intense trade within the Bay of Bengal, strictly avoided the Portuguese-controlled entrepot at Melaka. The Portuguese in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were heavily involved in it in western India and a recent study has marshalled evidence from Portuguese sources on the mechanics of that trade in a port on the Kanara coast.2 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the entry into the Indian Ocean of the large Chartered Companies, evidence on the grain trade is substantially increased, enabling us to see it in sharper focus in the broad canvas of Asian trade. the port was no more than a minor nuisance, and in the engagements that ensued, the Portuguese frequently had the worst of it, subsequently negotiating to recover prisoners lodged at Masulipatnam or at the court in Golkonda.2 However, by about 1590, the tenor of the relationship between the viceregal administration at Goa and the court at Golkonda had begun to show signs of change

The Archaeological Record of Indian Ocean Engagements in the Red Sea

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eivind Heldaas Seland
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Red Sea ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter reviews the evidence, nature, and development of maritime contacts in the Red Sea and from the Red Sea into the western Indian Ocean from the Neolithic until the start of the Islamic period, c. 4000 BCE–700 CE. In addition to summarizing and highlighting recent archaeological research and ongoing scholarly debates, emphasis is placed on identifying and explaining periods of intensified as well as reduced interaction, and on the relationship between internal Red Sea dynamics and contacts with the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean worlds in light of climate, natural environment, hinterland interest, and a changing geopolitical situation.

scholarly journals Convicts, Commodities, and Connections in British Asia and the Indian Ocean, 1789–1866

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (S27) ◽  
pp. 205-227
Author(s):  
Clare Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Bay Of Bengal ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Company Governance ◽  
Convict Transportation ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article explores the transportation of Indian convicts to the port cities of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean during the period 1789 to 1866. It considers the relationship between East India Company transportation and earlier and concurrent British Crown transportation to the Americas and Australia. It is concerned in particular with the interconnection between convictism and enslavement in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Examining the roots of transportation in South Asia in the repressive policies of the East India Company, especially in relation to its occupation of land and expropriation of resources, it moves on to discuss aspects of convicts’ lives in Moulmein, Singapore, Mauritius, and Aden. This includes their labour regime and their relationship to other workers. It argues that Indian convict transportation was part of a carceral circuit of repression and coerced labour extraction that was intertwined with the expansion of East India Company governance and trade. The Company used transportation as a means of removing resistant subjects from their homes, and of supplying an unfree labour force to develop commodity exports and to build the infrastructure necessary for the establishment, population, and connection of littoral nodes. However, the close confinement and association of convicts during transportation rendered the punishment a vector for the development of transregional political solidarities, centred in and around the Company's port cities.

Genetic variation of Parapenaeopsis sculptilis (Decapoda, Penaeidae) and reassessment of the phylogenetic relationships within the genus Parapenaeopsis based on mitochondrial DNA variation

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
M. M. Mahbub Alam ◽  
Snæbjörn Pálsson
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Variation ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Bay Of Bengal ◽  
Phylogenetic Relationships ◽  
Population Genetic ◽  
Haplotype Diversity ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Dna Variation ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Population Genetic Variation

The genus Parapenaeopsis is an important group of marine shrimps for wild capture in the Indo-West Pacific region. Phylogenetics of penaeid shrimps is still a debatable issue. This study focuses on the phylogenetic relationships among seven species within the genus Parapenaeupsis, the population genetic variation of Parapenaeupsis sculptilis along Bangladesh coastline of the Bay of Bengal and the phylogeography of P. sculptilis in the Indian Ocean region by analysing cytochrome oxidase subunit 1 barcode (CO1) sequence. No population structure was detected in P. sculptilis collected from two sampling sites along the Bangladesh coastline (AMOVA and Φ ST = ‑0.014, p > 0.05; F ST = 0.061, p = 0.04), which expanded first around 73 (CI: 36‑119) kyr ago. The genealogical relationships in Bangladesh P. sculptilis population are shallow with haplotype diversity (h) of 0.58 and nucleotide diversity (π) of 0.0014. The different P. sculptilis samples from Bangladesh, India and Mozambique of the Indian Ocean revealed connectivity between western Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. The phylogeny within the genus Parapenaeupsis showed a polyphyletic relationships for P. hardickwii and its taxonomy needs to be reevaluated. The study will help for genetic upgradation in aquaculture and monitoring of the population genetic diversity of P. sculptilis.

The Use of Comorian Documents

1985 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 349-355
Author(s):  
Martin Ottenheimer
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Maritime Trade ◽  
Volcanic Origin ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Long Period ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Oral Information ◽  
Comoro Islands

The Comorian archipelago is located at the northern end of the Mozambique channel in the western Indian Ocean. Of volcanic origin, the archipelago consists of four major islands and several smaller ones which, for many centuries, have been the sites of ports for ships from Asia, Africa, and Europe. They played an especially prominent role in the networks of maritime trade in the Indian Ocean during the fifteenth century and were involved in the maritime trade much earlier. As one would expect of people involved in trade over a long period of time, Comorians have been keepers of records. Thus, the Comoro Islands have become a rich source of both written and oral documents.Some of the numerous documents that have been discovered on the islands have served as the basis of the published histories of the Comoros. Others have been published themsleves and all have provided valuable information about life in the islands. Many documents, however, still remain unpublished. I have had the opportunity to collect numerous documents over the nearly twenty years that I have been gathering information about the Comoro Islands, and this collection continues to grow today. When I am not in the islands, Comorians send or bring documents to me in Kansas which I copy or record before returning them to their owners. During my trips to the islands I have taped oral information, photographed data of historical significance, hand-copied documents, and have been given or lent rare publications.

Shipping Subsidies and Railway Guarantees: William Mackinnon, Eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean, 1860–93

1987 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Forbes Munro
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Western India ◽  
Foreign Competition ◽  
British India ◽  
Public Funds ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Persian Gulf

This article reassesses Sir William Mackinnon's role in the evolution of Victorian imperialism in Eastern Africa. It rejects the view that Mackinnon's activities in Eastern Africa were motivated by a desire for self-glorification and attempts, by contrast, to demonstrate the relevance of business considerations. A search for shipping subsidies and railway guarantees, spreading out from British India, accompanied the Mackinnon Group's development of steamshipping and mercantile interests in Africa, in support of investments in the Persian Gulf and western India. Promotion of these interests drew Mackinnon into schemes to lease the Sultan of Zanzibar's mainland territories and to consolidate British rule in the Transvaal by the construction of a railway from Delagoa Bay. During the 1880s the Group's shipping and commercial operations were threatened by the rise of foreign competition. Behind the formation of the Imperial British East Africa Company lay the hopes of Mackinnon and his business associates that public funds could be attracted to the defence of the Group's interests in Eastern Africa and to the reconstruction of its shipping services in the western Indian Ocean.

The Rice Trade in Eastern India 1650–1740

1988 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 531-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Arsaratnam
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Western India ◽  
Eastern India ◽  
Quantitative Evidence ◽  
Food Grains ◽  
Indian Ocean Trade ◽  
Grain Trade ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Asian Mainland

The historical literature on Indian Ocean trade has now come to recognize the importance of food-grains as an ingredient of that trade. In the western part of the Ocean (the Arabian Sea), its eastern part (Bay of Bengal) and within the Southeast Asian mainland and islands, there is every evidence of a substantial movement of food-grains from surplus areas to deficit areas. Though the scale and frequency of this trade may not be relatively as important in the regional economy as Braudel has outlined for the Mediterranean (with the assistance, it must be admitted, of superior quantitative evidence), it was nevertheless one of the commodities that entered into the commercial processes of different regions of the Ocean. The evidence for the study of the grain trade is, as with all Asian trade in the early modern period, fragmentary and episodic. As intrinsic to the sector of trade embracing Asian merchant shippers and consumers, it shares the disadvantages of paucityof evidence of that whole sector. Again, as with Asian trade as a whole, the grain trade comes into view only when Europeans have entered into that trade and have left glimpses of it in their records.The Portuguese in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were heavily involved in it in western India and a recent study has marshalled evidence from Portuguese sources on the mechanics of that trade in a port on the Kanara coast.2 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the entry into the Indian Ocean of the large Chartered Companies, evidence on the grain trade is substantially increased ,enabling us to see it in sharper focus in the broad canvas of Asian trade

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.

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.

scholarly journals A Central Indian Ocean Mode and Heavy Precipitation during the Indian Summer Monsoon

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (6) ◽  
pp. 2055-2067 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei Zhou ◽  
Raghu Murtugudde ◽  
Dake Chen ◽  
Youmin Tang
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Summer Monsoon ◽  
Indian Summer Monsoon ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Heavy Precipitation ◽  
Central Indian Ocean ◽  
Monsoonal Precipitation ◽  
Monsoon System ◽  
The Indian Ocean

A central Indian Ocean (CIO) mode is found to play a critical role in driving the heavy precipitation during the Indian summer monsoon (ISM). It is typically denoted with a combination of intraseasonal sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies and intraseasonal wind anomalies over the central Indian Ocean, and it preserves the mechanistic links among various dynamic and thermodynamic fields. Like a T junction, it controls the propagation direction of the intraseasonal variabilities (ISVs) originating in the western Indian Ocean. During the ISM, the CIO mode creates an environment favorable for the northward-propagating mesoscale variabilities. These results unveil the relation between the subseasonal monsoonal precipitation and the CIO mode in the ocean–atmosphere system in the Indian Ocean. The identification of the CIO mode deepens our understanding of the coupled monsoon system and brightens the prospects for better simulation and prediction of monsoonal precipitation in the affected countries.

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