Africans in the Indian Ocean World

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Arabian Gulf ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
High Morbidity ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Persian Gulf ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
The 19Th Century

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.

scholarly journals Coffee: An Indian Ocean Perspective

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-81
Author(s):  
Shane J. Barter
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Coffee Production ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
History Of ◽  
Coffee Farmers ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World

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.

Forty Years On

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-51
Author(s):  
Edward A. Alpers
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
East Africa ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Almost forty years ago, the author published an article on Gujarat and East Africa from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Although several other scholars had written serious historical works either about or including Indian traders in eastern Africa in the modern period, at the time it was a pioneering piece for historians of East Africa. While the author has written and continues to write about the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean world and, more recently, the islands of this vast oceanic space now referred to as Indian Ocean Africa, he has not again written anything specifically about Gujarat and the Indian Ocean, nor about Gujarati traders in East Africa. This chapter attempts to review the last forty years of scholarship written in English on Gujarat and the Indian Ocean with a focus on transregional trade and traders. What is hoped from this overview is a sense of how current debates have developed over these decades and where further research is called for.

A Material Culture

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Wynne-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Alternative Form ◽  
Significant Case ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World

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.

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States: Conflict and Competition in the Indian Ocean World of Trade before the Sixteenth Century

2008 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-577 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roxani Eleni Margariti
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Red Sea ◽  
Persian Gulf ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Persian Gulf ◽  
Indian Ocean World

AbstractThe prevailing image of the Indian Ocean world of trade before the arrival of western Europeans and Ottomans in the region in the sixteenth century is one of a generally peaceful, conflict-free realm dominated by cosmopolitan traders who moved easily across boundaries of geography, ethnicity, language, and religion. This paper modifies this picture by examining the evidence for conflict and competition between pre-modern maritime polities in the western end of the Indian Ocean. In the fifth/eleventh and sixth/twelfth centuries maritime polities on the islands of Kish in the Persian Gulf and Dahlak in the Red Sea antagonized Aden's supremacy as the region's most frequented entrepot. In the subsequent three centuries, the Ayyubids and Rasulids of Yemen also strove to control maritime routes and networks.L'historiographie en vigueur de l'Océan Indien à l'époque précédant la venue des Ottomans et des Européens au XVIème siècle, décrit une aire commerciale généralement paisible parcourue aisément par des négociants cosmopolites par-delà les obstacles géographiques, ethniques, religieux et linguistiques. Cette contribution modifie cette image par un examen des témoignages des Vème/XIème et VIème/XIIe siècles qui attestent les conflits et rivalités des cités portuaires de Kish en la Golfe de Perse, de Dahlak en la Mer Rouge contestant la suprématie d'Aden, l'entrepôt le plus fréquenté. Durant les trois siècles suivants, les Ayyûbides et Rasûlides du Yémen s'efforcèrent également de contrôler les routes et réseaux maritimes.

scholarly journals Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the ‘Early Modern’: Historiographical Conventions and Problems

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Gwyn Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
African History ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
The People ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Indian Ocean World

European-inspired scholarship underscores conventional academic consensus that African commercial entrepeneurship disappeared with the European voyages of discovery, and subsequent implantation of the Potuguese, Dutch, English, and French commercial empires. Thus the people of eastern Africa are portrayed largely as technologically backward and isolated from the main currents of global history from about 1500 until the onset of modern European colonialism from the close of the nineteenth century. This article argues that the conventional view needs to be challenged, and that Eastern African history in the period 1500-1800 needs to be revised in the context of an Indian Ocean world economy.

A Material Culture: Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Wynne-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Eastern Coast ◽  
African Continent ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Trading Economy ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Trading Networks

Africa’s eastern littoral borders the Indian Ocean, providing the setting for the settlements, people, and language known collectively as Swahili, which have been a key part of that ocean’s trading networks for at least two millennia. Graeco-Roman sailors visited the now-forgotten metropolis of Rhapta, and their voyages were recorded in the narratives that later became the first-century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Casson 1989). Traces of that early contact survive in the form of beads and coins, yet are limited in number and diffuse in nature (Chami and Msemwa 1997a; Horton 1990). From the seventh century onwards, a series of more permanent settlements began to monopolize this trade; by the eleventh century some of these had grown into towns that were able to control and provide a focus for the mercantile opportunities of the Indian Ocean. The trading economy of Swahili towns was based on the wealth of the African continent—gold and ivory were particularly valuable exports—and underlain by a mixed economy and diverse population of fishers and farmers, traders and craft-workers (Horton and Middleton 2000; Kusimba 2008). By the ‘golden age’ of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Swahili were an African society of considerable cosmopolitanism and fame, with towns like Kilwa Kisiwani known throughout the medieval world (Sutton 1993, 1997). Swahili archaeology is focused, conceptually and methodologically, on the series of stone towns that grew up along Africa’s eastern coast from the end of the first millennium AD. These towns developed as key nodes in both local and international networks of interaction, and became the conduits through which the African continent traded and communicated with the wider Indian Ocean world. The material settings of the towns, and particularly the distinctive tradition of coral architecture they contain, embody their cosmopolitanism, with this locally derived building tradition creating unique urban spaces that nevertheless reference the Islamic architecture of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf (Garlake 1966). Archaeology on this coast is still relatively new, dating back only to the 1950s and 1960s, and to the pioneering work of researchers convinced they had discovered evidence for Arab trading stations on the coast of eastern Africa (Kirkman 1964).

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 Book of Books

Australianama ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Samia Khatun
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asia ◽  
English Language ◽  
Mining Town ◽  
Broken Hill ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Australian History ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
A Site ◽  
History Books

Examining past ‘misreadings’ of a copy of Kasasol Ambia in the Australian mining town of Broken Hill that has long been mislabeled a Quran in Australian history books, this chapter challenges one of the central problems of English language historiography today: The systematic subjugation of colonised knowledges to produce dead objects and artifacts. Examining the Indian Ocean geography that the Kasasol Ambia circulated I piece together the contours of colonial-modern historical storytelling in South Asia and Australia. Placing Australia within histories of the Indian Ocean world, I approach this arena as a key terrain of Anglo empires and a site of ongoing epistemic struggle. Showing that the Kasasol Ambia can offer clues for how to use colonised people’s knowledge traditions to think, theorise and understand the Indian Ocean world, this chapter develops a framework for producing anti-colonial knowledes about the region.

Regional Organizations and Geopolitics in the Indian Ocean

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek McDougall
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Arabian Gulf ◽  
The United States ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Regional Organization ◽  
Regional Organizations ◽  
The Indian Ocean

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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