Shadows of Sovereignty

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Benton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Flexible Framework ◽  
Multiple Meanings

While highlighting the importance of protection to European ventures in the Indian Ocean, historians have tended to overlook its central role in structuring cross-polity relations in the Atlantic world. References to protection pervaded mutual security arrangements and anchored alliances across Atlantic regions. Rulers’ offer of protection to old and new subjects reinforced the legitimacy of imperial claims in the Americas. These multiple meanings of protection made the term politically useful and rhetorically irresistible. This chapter analyzes the way protection talk both structured alliances and created a flexible framework for cross-polity relations in the Atlantic world. It then suggests that meanings of protection began to shift in the early nineteenth century, when the term increasingly signaled more robust claims to sovereignty. The chapter honors Jerry Bentley’s insight that cultural encounters represented rich sites of political innovation in the early modern world.

scholarly journals Globalisation and Difference: Cosmopolitanism Before the Nation-State

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Akhil Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Limited Perspective ◽  
The Indian Ocean

In this paper, I have tried to reflect on what cosmopolitanism might mean in a very different era of globalisation than the present. Although cosmopolitanism, as an expansive and sociable vision, is often contrasted with the geographically limited perspective and claustrophobic affinities of nationalism, the term originates in a historical period before the rise of nationalism in Europe. I argue that the residents of the civilisations around the Indian Ocean in the medieval and early modern world were cosmopolitan even by the standards of the high modernist meaning of the term. Not only did a range of people transact and translate across different languages, but they also knew how to conduct themselves in different cultural settings with people of different religious beliefs, while respecting the disparate religious, social, and cultural practices of their neighbours.

scholarly journals Towards a global perspective on early modern slave trade: prices of the enslaved in the Indian Ocean, Indonesian Archipelago and Atlantic worlds

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Matthias van Rossum
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Body ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
Trade Prices ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
First Time

Abstract Despite the growth of studies on slavery and slave trade outside the Atlantic world in recent years, especially in the early modern Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, our knowledge of regional price levels and their development remains surprisingly underdeveloped. This article questions how the price of enslaved people developed in the multi-directional and multi-faceted Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago slave trade, how this compared to the Atlantic world and what this tells us about slave trade and slavery in different parts of the world. Drawing on evidence from a large variety of sources, mainly from the Dutch Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago world, this article expands the body of data significantly and provides for the first time a reconstruction of the level of slave trade prices and their development in several important supplying and demanding slave trade regions in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago world and compares these to the development of slave prices in the Atlantic slave trade.

Opening to the East: Shipping Between Europe and Asia, 1770–1830

2013 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 625-661 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter M. Solar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Cost Reduction ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Price Differentials ◽  
Shipping Costs ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Cost

Shipping costs between Europe and Asia were reduced by two-thirds between the 1770s and the 1820s. Copper sheathing and other technical improvements which allowed ships to make more frequent voyages over longer lifetimes accounted for part of the cost reduction. British hegemony in the Indian Ocean, which ended an eighteenth-century arms race, accounted for the rest by allowing the substitution of smaller ships which cost less to build and required fewer men per ton. These changes were at least as important as the elimination of monopoly profits in narrowing intercontinental price differentials during the early nineteenth century.

Free and coerced migrations: the Atlantic in global perspective

2004 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-328
Author(s):  
DAVID ELTIS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Large Element ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Distinguishing Features

What distinguished the mass transatlantic migration that occurred between Columbian contact and the early nineteenth century from the movements of peoples around the globe that occurred both before and after this phenomenon? Two central distinguishing features were the large element of coercion in the movements across the early modern Atlantic world, and the central importance of identity in shaping both the direction of migration and its composition. On the first of these, coercion was a sine qua non, not only of the well-known slave trade, but also of the much smaller migrations of convicts and – given the temporary, if voluntary, signing away of the migrants' freedom – indentured servants and contract labourers. On the second, the question of who became slaves was determined by the refusal of Europeans to enslave other Europeans.

Ideas, Not Interests or Institutions, Caused the Great Enrichment

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Deirdre N. McCloskey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Percent Increase ◽  
The Indian Ocean

AbstractThe question is why the Great Enrichment of 4,000 or 10,000 percent increase in material scope per person, 1800 to the present, awaited 1800. The answer lies with ideas, ideologies, sociology, habits of lip, conversation, ethics – in short, how people viewed each other. They began rather suddenly in northwestern Europe from 1600 or so to view each other as having liberty and dignity, which is to say the legal ability to have a go and and social honor in doing so. Not that material causes do not matter. But none of material causes are unique to Europe or the modern world – coal was use anciently in China on a large scale, trade was larger in the Indian Ocean than anywhere until the nineteenth century, property rights were fully protected under Roman law, and yet none of these places had a great enrichment. There is nothing unscientific about emphasizing ideas. The unscientific attitude would be to assume, as economists are inclined to do, that

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.

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