Gujarat in the History of the Indian Ocean

2019 ◽  
pp. 52-67
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Maritime History ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
History Writing ◽  
New Methods ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean

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.

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.

Gene flow and demographic history of the mangrove crab Neosarmatium meinerti: A case study from the western Indian Ocean

2010 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lapo Ragionieri ◽  
Stefano Cannicci ◽  
Christoph D. Schubart ◽  
Sara Fratini
Keyword(s):  
Gene Flow ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Mangrove Crab ◽  
History Of

Indian Merchants and the Western Indian Ocean: The Early Seventeenth Century

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashin Das Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Ocean Area ◽  
European Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Work Done

Researches in Indian economic history have stimulated curiosity about India's connections with the Indian Ocean area. Work done on European expansion in the non-European world has also contributed to the development of this area of enquiry. Recent writings on the Indian Ocean and the Indian maritime merchant have indicated important possibilities of further research. I shall first briefly consider some of these, and then pass on to an examination of a concrete historical problem where Indian economic history meets the history of European expansion and the two themes are held together by the Indian Ocean.

Counterpoint: Reassessing Ulughkhānī’s Arabic history of Gujarat

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-161
Author(s):  
Jyoti Gulati Balachandran
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Red Sea ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context

AbstractDespite his familiarity with the well established Indo-Persian history‐writing traditions, ‘Abdullāh Muḥammad al-Makkī al-Āṣafī al-Ulughkhānī ‘Ḥājjī al-Dabīr’ (b. 1540) chose to write his history of the Gujarat Sultanate and of other Indo-Muslim polities in Arabic. Ulughkhānī consulted several Persian chronicles produced in Delhi and Ahmedabad, including Sikandar Manjhū’s Mir’āt-i Sikandarī (composed c. 1611) that has served as the standard history of the Gujarat Sultanate for modern historians. Despite its ‘exceptionalism’, Ulughkhānī’s early seventeenth-century Ẓafar al-wālih bi Muẓaffar wa ālihi has largely been seen as a corroborative text to Persian tawārīkh. This article re-evaluates the importance of Ulughkhānī’s Arabic history of Gujarat by situating the text and its author in the social, political and intellectual context of the sixteenth-century western Indian ocean. Specifically, it demonstrates how the several historical digressions in the text are not dispensable aberrations to his narrative but integral to Ulughkhānī’s expansive social horizons at the time of robust commercial, pilgrimage, diplomatic and scholarly connections between Gujarat and the Red Sea regions.

Introduction: The Ocean and the Historian

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-11
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Graduate Student ◽  
Economic History ◽  
World System ◽  
Maritime History ◽  
Agrarian Question ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The University

I feel singularly privileged to write the introduction for the first of two special JIOWS festschrift editions honouring Michael Pearson’s contributions in the field of Indian Ocean studies. My association with Mike goes back to 1979/80 when I met him at the University of Viswabharati, where my mentor Ashin Dasgupta was working with him on an edited volume devoted to the history of India and the Indian Ocean. This was a time when as a young graduate student, I was being exposed to the hotly debated and discussed sub-field of maritime history. Several senior historians questioned the need to study maritime history outside the general frame of Indian economic history, by then an established field of enquiry, driven primarily by the agrarian question, poverty and the drain of wealth paradigm. I recall how, in course of my apprenticeship, I read a range of writings that looked at Asian trade and commercial exchanges that, although written largely out of European archives, dared to tell a very different story to the dominant one of European commercial and military hegemony. This was long before the heady debates of globalization, of Asia before Europe or indeed of the world system thesis that had entered the field; instead, we were chewing over the critiques of the peddler thesis put forward by Van Leur, and of the uncritical endorsement of colonial perspectives on Asian trade embodied in the writings of scholar administrator W.H. Moreland. It was here that Pearson and Dasgupta gave us the vital tools of our trade, to look beyond the official voices in the archive, to search for private adjustments and compromises that had so much more to say about the messy world of commercial and social transactions where to look for Weberian rationality or pure economic determinism was chasing a mirage.

scholarly journals Reflections on the History of the Indian Ocean: the sources and their relation to local practices and global connectivities

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne K. Bang
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Past ◽  
Local Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean

This paper discusses the interpretation of sources for Indian Ocean history, from the point of view of translocal interpretations beyond the locality of the source. The article presents three cases, all deriving from the Muslim South-Western Indian Ocean. The argument is made that the ambiguity of the sources, and the interrelationship between the various locations related to the source, affect not only the historians interpretation but also the sense of the past held by people in these locations.

Diversity and distribution of avian haematozoan parasites in the western Indian Ocean region: a molecular survey

Parasitology ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 139 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
FARAH ISHTIAQ ◽  
JON S. BEADELL ◽  
BEN H.WARREN ◽  
ROBERT C. FLEISCHER
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Parasite Community ◽  
Indian Ocean Region ◽  
Molecular Survey ◽  
Limited Sampling ◽  
Avian Blood ◽  
Ocean Region ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean

SUMMARYThe genetic diversity of haematozoan parasites in island avifauna has only recently begun to be explored, despite the potential insight that these data can provide into the history of association between hosts and parasites and the possible threat posed to island endemics. We used mitochondrial DNA sequencing to characterize the diversity of 2 genera of vector-mediated parasites (Plasmodium and Haemoproteus) in avian blood samples from the western Indian Ocean region and explored their relationship with parasites from continental Africa. We detected infections in 68 out of 150 (45 3%) individuals and cytochrome b sequences identified 9 genetically distinct lineages of Plasmodium spp. and 7 lineages of Haemoproteus spp. We found considerable heterogeneity in parasite lineage composition across islands, although limited sampling may, in part, be responsible for perceived differences. Two lineages of Plasmodium spp. and 2 lineages of Haemoproteus spp. were shared by hosts in the Indian Ocean and also on mainland Africa, suggesting that these lineages may have arrived relatively recently. Polyphyly of island parasites indicated that these parasites were unlikely to constitute an endemic radiation and instead probably represent multiple colonization events. This study represents the first molecular survey of vector-mediated parasites in the western Indian Ocean, and has uncovered a diversity of parasites. Full understanding of parasite community composition and possible threats to endemic avian hosts will require comprehensive surveys across the avifauna of this region.

Ottoman Guerre de Course and the Indian Ocean Spice Trade: The Career of Sefer Reis

Itinerario ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-79
Author(s):  
Giancarlo Casale
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
Global Commerce ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Demand ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Spice Trade ◽  
Rising Power

The middle decades of the sixteenth century witnessed one of the most dramatic and unexpected transformations in the history of long-distance intercontinental commerce: the revival of the transit spice trade through the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, following a period of nearly fifty years during which it had been redirected almost in its entirety through the Portuguese-controlled route around the Cape of Good Hope. And yet, while modern scholars have been aware of this sea change in global commerce for generations, the reasons behind it still remain a subject of debate. Numerous explanations have been proposed, ranging from changes in the international demand for spices to corruption within the Portuguese administration. Until now, however, none has taken into account what may be the most important factor of all: the rising power of Ottoman corsairs, whose predatory raids against Portuguese targets were instrumental in subverting the Estado da India's system for controlling trade in the western Indian Ocean.

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