The Indian Ocean in the Long Eighteenth Century

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Prasannan Parthasarathi ◽  
Giorgio Riello
Author(s):  
Nancy Um

In the early decades of the eighteenth century, Yemen hosted a lively community of merchants that came to the southern Arabian Peninsula from the east and the west, seeking, among other products, coffee, at a time when this new social habit was on the rise. Shipped but not Sold argues that many of the diverse goods that these merchants carried, bought, and sold at the port, also played ceremonial, social, and utilitarian roles in this intensely commercial society that was oriented toward the Indian Ocean. Including sumptuous foreign textiles and robes, Arabian horses, porcelain vessels, spices, aromatics, and Yemeni coffee, these items were offered, displayed, exchanged, consumed, or utilized by major merchants in a number of socially exclusive practices that affirmed their identity and status, but also sustained the livelihood of their business ventures. These traders invested these objects with layers of social meaning through a number of repetitive ceremonial exercises and observances, in addition to their everyday protocols of the trade. This study looks at what happened to these local and imported commodities that were diverted from the marketplace to be used for a set of directives that were seemingly quite non-transactional.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-61
Author(s):  
Thomas Blom Hansen

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.


Author(s):  
Sue Peabody

During Furcy’s lawsuit more than half a century after the fact, two receipts were offered as proof that his mother, Madeleine, had been sold as a child slave by Portuguese traders in the French trading center at Chandernagor in Bengal, India, in the 1760s. Although these receipts may be forgeries, they offer plausible details consistent with the prevalence of children in the Indian Ocean slave trade in the eighteenth century. Frequent famines caused parents to pawn their children into debt bondage. European traders took slaves, including kidnapped children, from the Indian subcontinent to overseas colonies, thus separating families permanently. Madeleine’s mistress, Anne Despense de la Loge, was an unusual single French woman living in Chandernagor, who may have been part of an informal religious community.


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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
Johan Wahyudi ◽  
Dien Madjid

This study discusses the social dynamics of a kampong in Batavia during XVIII to XIX centuries. Pekojan has already emerged as the center of commerce for Arabs and Muslim Indians community since the 16th century. By the eighteenth century, many Arab immigrants from Hadramawt (Southern Yemen) settled here. Its initial landscape can be traced by the theory of the coming of Islam in the Archipelago. One of the theories says that it was driven by international trade by the Arabs, which also carried Islam along with them. The Hadramis went through the naval journey passing the Indian Ocean to the Malaka Strait. They stopped over in Singapore then went on to Batavia, especially Pekojan. This study found Pekojan became a place where Arab culture and ideas were constructed yet negotiated within a local context. There prominent ulamas, merchants, writers, educators, the initiators of independence, the benefactors, and artists socialized under close racial surveillance of the Dutch East Indies government. 


Author(s):  
Michael Laffan

This introductory chapter documents what is known of the process of Islamization across Indonesia and argues that the present knowledge is informed in large part by the acceptance of the retrospective framings and validations of seventeenth-century Sufi teachings that emphasized a mystical connection between the Prophet and a learned elite patronized by regal authorities. Numerous difficulties beset any attempt at plotting a straightforward history of the conversion and Islamization of Indonesia's many diverse peoples up to the middle of the eighteenth century. What does emerge is a sense that certain key courts took on the mantle of defenders of Islam and regularly sought validation from beyond their shores, most preferably from the person of the Prophet's lineal descendants in Mecca and the scholars associated with them. Regardless of how it was achieved or subsequently justified, Islamization brought the power of international connections that linked the Indian Ocean and China Sea ever more closely together.


1982 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hermann Kellenbenz

This is the first part of a study made in my seminar on the relations between the German ports Hamburg and Bremen and the trading centres in the area of the Indian Ocean. The study covers the whole period from the end of the eighteenth century until the beginning of the First World War. For reasons of time and space this paper is limited to the first part of the study which deals with the period up to 1870.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-113
Author(s):  
Ilicia J. Sprey

This study, building upon earlier works published from 2011 to the present, focuses on sixteenth through eighteenth century Cochinchina’s upstream-downstream networked relations and how they contributed to the re-development of the region’s economy and consequently its political and social development, with particular emphasis on its coastal ports and related trade under the Nguyễn. These relations revolve around tightly connected interactions among diverse groups including long-term resident diasporic Fujian merchant communities, newly introduced Chan Buddhist monks, maritime-based Chinese pro-Ming piratical syndicates, local Cham raiding cohorts, and the alien Nguyễn clan who in 1600 claimed political authority over the Vietnamese littoral’s central coastal region (Trung Bộ) and extended central lands (Miền Trung). The partnerships the Nguyễn established with each of these groups (merchants, monks, pirates, upstream and downstream multiethnic communities) enabled the major ports of Đà Năng, and particularly, of Hội An, to thrive and produce the income needed to support both the Nguyễn bureaucracy and its military conquest of the southern third of the littoral. Over the course of the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries, the Nguyễn co-opted the cultural, spiritual, and maritime-based power and influence exercised by each of each these groups in an initial effort to fulfill its dynastic ambitions that remained unfulfilled until 1802. This work moves beyond other regional studies by using the approach proposed in Michael Pearson’s writings regarding the Indian Ocean ports-of-trade littoral and extending them eastward, to the further edges of the Indian Ocean borderless world, and applying them to the complex interactions of the Vietnamese littoral populations-coastal urban and hinterland - as they contributed to the development of the central Vietnamese littoral’s ports-of-trade and of Nguyễn authority and power in this era.


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