Introduction

Author(s):  
Greg Forter

The Introduction lays the theoretical groundwork and historical frame for the main chapters. It engages debates on materialist vs. poststructuralist approaches to postcolonial studies; on the utopian imagination; on expanding the black Atlantic frame of reference to include the Indian Ocean; on the Anglophone biases of postcolonial studies and how these implicate the discipline in contemporary capitalism; on the genesis of the historical novel in the nineteenth century; and on the cycles of finance capital to which the postcolonial inflection of historical fiction is a response. Theorists discussed include Giovanni Arrighi, Ian Baucom, Walter Benjamin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Frederic Jameson, and Georg Lukács.

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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 436-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liazzat J.K. Bonate

The coexistence of Islam and matriliny has been viewed as a ‘paradox’ because of strict patriliny that Islam prescribes. This article attempts to disentangle this enigma by comparing the Minangkabau, Kerala and coastal northern Mozambique that represent the most well-known cases of simultaneous practice of Islam and matrilineal kinship, which initially was a result of peaceful Islamisation through Indian Ocean networks. In the nineteenth century, the Dutch and British colonial regimes helped matriliny to survive, despite all the efforts of the Islamists to the contrary, by codifying local juridical rules. The Portuguese integration of the local matrilineal nobility into their colonial administrative system preserved matriliny within the local Muslim order. Nowadays these communities are influenced by modernisation, nation-state policies, and Islamic reformist movements, but matrilineal principles still regulate the use of the ancestral land.


Author(s):  
C. H. Alexandrowicz

This chapter challenges the projection of nineteenth-century assumptions onto the historical reality of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries by arguing that the earlier transactions between European and Asian powers took place under the rubric of the law of nations. The classical European authors founded their theories on natural law and considered the family of nations universal, and Europeans acquired territorial rights in Asia in accord with principles of European law, through conquest or treaties of cession. The law of nations in Europe at this time was still in formation, and juridical developments were affected by the practice of states in the Indian Ocean. The chapter considers uncertainties and debates around sovereignty (vassals, suzerains, trading companies), territorial title, and maritime law, particularly in the controversy between Grotius and Freitas, and the rise of discriminatory monopolistic treaties that restricted Asian sovereigns’ ability to deal with more than one European power.


Author(s):  
Karin Elizabeth Speedy

The sugar crisis of 1860 in Reunion motivated the migration of thousands of Réunionnais to New Caledonia. Along with sugar planters, wealthy enough to transport their production equipment as well as their indentured workers, significant groups of both skilled and unskilled labourers made their way from Reunion to the Pacific colony in the second half of the nineteenth century. In previous publications, I have focused my attention on the sugar industry and the immigration of the rich planters and their coolies. While I have drawn attention to the heterogeneity of the sugar workers and have signalled the arrival and numeric importance of tradespeople, manual and low skilled workers from Reunion, I have not yet described these immigrants in detail. This is because this group has been largely ignored by history and details surrounding their circumstances are scant. In this paper, I discuss the background and origins of these people and highlight some of the fascinating stories to emerge from this migration to New Caledonia and beyond.


2020 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Himanshu Prabha Ray

In recent years, sailing ships of the Indian Navy have been increasingly involved in diplomatic missions and cultural voyages across the world, in addition to their primary purpose of providing practical training in navigation techniques and seamanship. These three-masted barques built at the Goa Shipyard and used by the Indian Navy are very different from wooden sailing vessels that traversed the Indian Ocean in the premodern period prior to the development of steamship navigation in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, these distinctions have often been blurred as these modern naval ships have been utilised to recreate historical ‘expeditions’ such as the much-celebrated Chola invasion of Srivijaya in the Indonesian archipelago. Nor is India the only country to be involved in promoting this ‘popular history’ for contemporary geopolitical interests, as is evident from China’s efforts to rebuild ships used in the Voyages of Admiral Zheng He across the Indian Ocean. What gets short shrift in the process is investment in research in underwater archaeology and the discovery and preservation of shipwreck sites. This article highlights the urgent need for interdisciplinary research in premodern shipping and seafaring activity beyond the rhetoric of valorising national heroes.


1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. D. D. Newitt

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Fiona Price

The historical novel has often been defined in the terms set by Walter Scott’s fiction, as a reflection on a clear break or change between past and present. Returning to the range of historical fiction written before Scott, Reinventing Liberty explores this often neglected and misunderstood genre by reconstructing how conservatives and radicals fought through the medium of the historical past over the future of Britain. Aware of the events of the Civil War and 1688, witness to the American and French Revolutions, Scott’s precursors realized the dangers of absolutism, on the one hand, and political breakage, on the other. Interrogating the impact of commercial modernity, the works considered here do not adopt the familiar nineteenth-century Whig narrative of history as progress but instead imagine and reimagine the possibilities of transition. As such, they lay the groundwork for the British myth of political gradualism, while problematizing the rise of capital.


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