Sailing Ships, Naval Expeditions and ‘Project Mausam’

2020 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Himanshu Prabha Ray
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Underwater Archaeology ◽  
Practical Training ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
The World ◽  
The Indian Ocean

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.

Commodification and Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Indonesian Archipelago

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-124
Author(s):  
Ulbe Bosma
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
The World ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Slave Population

Abstract Slavery did not simply die slowly in the nineteenth century; in some parts of the world, it expanded. Engaging with the literature on slavery in the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, this article explains how a rising demand for forest and sea products, pepper and rice, together with a proliferation of firearms, kindled slave raiding and trading in the Indonesian archipelago. Enslavement happened both through capture and debt traps. This article offers an estimate of the number of annually enslaved in the Indonesian archipelago during the mid-nineteenth century and relates this to a conjectured total slave population of this particular region. The commercialization of slavery must have fundamentally changed the character of customary institutions of bondage. The article cites contemporary sources about the conditions of the captives and concludes with an explanation of how commercial slavery in this part of the world could continue into early years of the twentieth century.

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 Africa and the wider world: creole communities in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans

Tempo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-481
Author(s):  
Malyn Newitt
Keyword(s):  
Technology Transfer ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
The World ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Sub Saharan

Abstract: Portuguese creoles were instrumental in bringing sub-Saharan Africa into the intercontinental systems of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. In the Atlantic Islands a distinctive creole culture emerged, made up of Christian emigrants from Portugal, Jewish exiles and African slaves. These creole polities offered a base for coastal traders and became politically influential in Africa - in Angola creating their own mainland state. Connecting the African interior with the world economy was largely on African terms and the lack of technology transfer meant that the economic gap between Africa and the rest of the world inexorably widened. African slaves in Latin America adapted to a society already creolised, often through adroit forms of cultural appropriation and synthesis. In eastern Africa Portuguese worked within existing creolised Islamic networks but the passage of their Indiamen through the Atlantic created close links between the Indian Ocean and Atlantic commercial systems.

Sovereignty in a Minor Key

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-61
Author(s):  
Thomas Blom Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The World ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Theories Of Sovereignty ◽  
A Minor ◽  
State Form

Abstract Theories of sovereignty in the twentieth century are generally based on a teleological “out-of-Europe” narrative where the modern, centralized nation-state form gradually spread across the world to be the foundation of the international order. In this article, the author reflects on how the conceptualization of sovereignty may change if one begins a global account of modern sovereignty not from the heart of Western Europe but from the complex arrangements of “distributed sovereignty” that emerged in the Indian Ocean and other colonized territories from the eighteenth century onward. These arrangements were organized as multiple layers of dependency and provisional domination, captured well by Eric Beverley's term minor sovereignty. Thinking through sovereignty in a minor key allows us to see sovereignty less as a foundation of states and societies and more as a performative category, emerging in a dialectic between promises of order, prosperity, and law, and the realities of violent domination and occupation.

Uneasy Litter Mates: Population and Progress

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garrett Hardin
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
New World ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Human Species ◽  
The World ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Southern Iraq

In the fifth century B.C., Herodotus reported that there had been a time when a person could walk across North Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and be always in the shade of trees. No more: the land was well on the way to becoming the desert we know today. Herodotus generalized: "Man stalks across the landscape, and deserts follow in his footsteps." In the tenth century A.D., a Samanid prince identified four earthly paradises: the regions of Samarkand, southern Persia, southern Iraq, and Damascus. No one who has visited any of these sites now would dream of calling it a paradise. They have been cursed with wars, but warfare is only a secondary cause of their degradation. Throughout history human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonize—destroy—move on. When the Pollyannas write history they focus only on the first of these three actions, the desirable effects of which were most evident during the rapid colonization of the New World. In 1845 a now obscure American journalist coined a deathless phrase when he spoke of "the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." "Manifest destiny" is one of those catchphrases we love. We would not welcome the words of a journalist who identified colonization as but a prelude to destruction and abandonment. The restless "moving on" of the human species has depended on always having fresh land to move to. Optimists are not easily frightened by the results, of course: as late as 1980 one Pollyanna brightly explained how all turned out for the best in this best of all possible worlds: "Each year deserts the world over engulf an area the size of Massachusetts. A great deal of land lost is agricultural. . . . Fortunately, however, land is always being replaced or coming under cultivation to make up for land lost." An ecologist—ever guided by the question "And then what?"—would insist on a clarification of the above quotation: Does "always" mean "forever"? If so, it implies that there are no limits to earthly space. It is not surprising that ecologists are not the most popular of people in a growth-oriented economy.

scholarly journals Islam and matriliny along the Indian Ocean rim: Revisiting the old ‘paradox’ by comparing the Minangkabau, Kerala and coastal northern Mozambique

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 436-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liazzat J.K. Bonate
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
State Policies ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Administrative System ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
British Colonial

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.

Le Droit des Nations aux Indes Orientales Aux XVIE, XVIIE, XVIIIE siècles (1964)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. H. Alexandrowicz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
European Law ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Territorial Rights ◽  
The Law

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.

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