scholarly journals Revisiting Michael Pearson’s Indian Ocean Littoral

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rila Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Social History ◽  
Common Heritage ◽  
Shared History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Longue Durée

This essay rethinks Pearson’s formulation of littoral society in two essays he wrote in 1985 and 2006. While the first made a case for coastal history, the second continued the theme into the littoral, the strip between land and sea. Pearson foregrounded the universality of a clearly discernible littoral culture on coastlines along and across the Indian Ocean. This translated consequently into a shared history and a common heritage across the ocean’s diverse shores. At a time when maritime historians were writing what were essentially land-based histories on ocean spaces, Pearson’s social history of the littoral over a longue duree was a significant intervention.

Hinterland: The political history of a geographic category from the scramble for Africa to Afro-Asian solidarity

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Matthew Unangst
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Longue Durée

Abstract This article traces the history of one geographical concept, hinterland, through changing political contexts from the 1880s through the 1970s. Hinterland proved a valuable tool for states attempting to challenge the global territorial order in both the Scramble for Africa and the postwar world of nation-states. In the context of German territorial demands in East Africa, colonial propagandists used hinterland to knit together the first longue-durée histories of the Indian Ocean to cast Zanzibar as a failed colonial power and win control of the coast. In the 1940s, Indian nationalists revived hinterland as a concept for writing about the Indian Ocean, utilizing the concept to link areas far from the ocean to an informal Indian empire that could be rebuilt to its premodern glory through naval expansion. In both contexts, hinterland provided a geographical framework to challenge British dominance on the Indian Ocean. The shifting meaning and usage of the term indicates continuities in territoriality between the Scramble for Africa and postwar internationalism.

The Indian Ocean across la Longue Durée.

1986 ◽  
Vol 26 (101) ◽  
pp. 251-255
Author(s):  
Malyn Newitt
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Longue Durée

Social and Environmental History in the Anthropocene

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Warde
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée

This chapter takes seriously the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’—the concept of the period of history from which human activities have had global effects on the environment—and looks at it historically, across the longue durée, noting that the environment is itself a concept with a history of its own. The chapter argues that environmental history is very largely entwined with social history and that this poses a challenge for historians. Should we think of ‘the social’ and ‘the environmental’ as two different (albeit connected) spheres, or should we reconceptualize what ‘society’ and ‘environment’ might mean, both historically and for the future?

Michael Pearson: A Bibliography

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-103
Author(s):  
Editors of the JIOWS
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western India ◽  
Best Effort ◽  
Limited Space ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Since the late 1960s, Michael Pearson’s work has been at the forefront of thestudy of the Indian Ocean World. Pearson’s unparalleled contribution to thefield has long been recognized by his pears. In 1981, the famed historian ofGoa, Teotonio R. de Souza, wrote in an introduction to one of Pearson’s booksthat it ‘will stand out as the best effort on the part of a non-Indian historianto do justice to the Indian component of Indo-Portuguese history.’ In 2004,Pearson spoke to this acclaim in an interview with Frederick Noronha, a journalist-publisher based in Goa. He said: ‘Certainly this is what I have wantedto achieve when I write about the Portuguese in India: to locate them in theIndian context in which they operated and by which they were constrained.This is a deliberate attempt to counter the triumphalism, and even racism, ofmuch Portuguese writing on their empire.’ But Pearson’s influence was notlimited to Goa and the coastal western India. Across nearly four decades ofwork, Pearson was always a leader in developing the longue durée approach tostudying the Indian Ocean World.To honor this influence, the editors of the Journal of Indian Ocean WorldStudies have compiled an exhaustive bibliography of Michael Pearson’s work.They have also appended short descriptions to some of his most importanttexts. Limited space meant that abstracts could not be attached to each reference. The editors decided that where they existed, abstracts written by Pearson or his co-editors would be prioritized. They then selected some of his works without abstracts to write their own abstracts or mini reviews (indicated with **). Particular prominence has been given to some of his earlier, lesser-known works. The intention was to use the space to reflect the diversity of Pearson’s research, while highlighting some of its core themes.

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.

Australianama

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samia Khatun
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asian ◽  
South Asian Diaspora ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Asian Diaspora ◽  
Broken Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonized by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of 'Muslim-majority' countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic-Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonized by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of non-white people. Australianama challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonized. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonized geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonized tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future.

The Paving Stone Theory of World Tectonics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Livermore
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Plate Tectonics ◽  
Earth Science ◽  
Transform Faults ◽  
Plate Motions ◽  
Euler’S Theorem ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Entire History ◽  
The Indian Ocean

Tuzo Wilson introduces the concept of transform faults, which has the effect of transforming Earth Science forever. Resistance to the new ideas is finally overcome in the late 1960s, as the theory of moving plates is established. Two scientists play a major role in quantifying the embryonic theory that is eventually dubbed ‘plate tectonics’. Dan McKenzie applies Euler’s theorem, used previously by Teddy Bullard to reconstruct the continents around the Atlantic, to the problem of plate rotations on a sphere and uses it to unravel the entire history of the Indian Ocean. Jason Morgan also wraps plate tectonics around a sphere. Tuzo Wilson introduces the idea of a fixed hotspot beneath Hawaii, an idea taken up by Jason Morgan to create an absolute reference frame for plate motions.

The Subaltern Critique of Dominant Historiography and a Case for Retrieving a Historiography of Dalit Literary Traditions in India

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Vandana
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
The Third World

In order to retrieve literary history in India, teleology operates on three levels: ancient, medieval and modern. As per the longue duree approach to the study of history, history is not an event or an object, but like the concept of time, is a configuration and a process. The history of the longue duree gives priority to long-term monumental historic patterns, moments and shifts in society, that is, the slow-paced structural processes which tend to have strong historical consequences. Similarly, languages and literatures, too, marked by historical catastrophes, undergo a process of sedimentation. For this reason, instead of a single literary history of South Asia, Sheldon Pollock proposes the concept of ‘literary cultures’ which allows room for ‘historical individuation’ of each culture rather than homogenising them merely for the sake of historical analysis. The basic questions that I have tried to look into through this study include: Why is it problematic to retrieve literary history in India? Why is it essential to have an alternative literary historiography of Dalit literature? How does Dalit subalternity differ from colonial subalternity? How the Dalit voice is disintegrated from within because of the prevalence of graded inequality? What constitutes the politics of history writing and canon formation in the third world countries like India where retrieving subaltern literary trends remain a problematic discourse?

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