Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration and Early Modern State Formation

1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 340-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Host Society ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Asian Context

The idea of trader communities spread across the shores of the Indian Ocean, or along the caravan routes of the Asian heartland, is a familiar one. Once designated as the ubiquitous “pedlars” of the “traditional trade of Asia,” these traders have more recently been described using the term “diaspora”—a term not restricted in its application, needless to add, to the Asian context. In the hands of Philip D. Curtin, the idea of traders in a diaspora has become a simple but powerful tool to analyze the phenomenon of what he terms “cross-cultural trade.” What, then, is a diaspora? To Curtin, a diaspora is “a nation of socially interdependent, but spatially dispersed communities,” that are, moreover, separated from their “host societies” in each locus in which they are situated (Curtin 1984:5). He continues: “The traders were specialists in a single kind of economic enterprise, whereas the host society was awholesociety, with many occupations, class stratification and political divisions between the rulers and the ruled” (Curtin 1984:5).

Cosmopolitanism and Imagination in Nayaka South India

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jos Gommans
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
South India ◽  
Cotton Textile ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Johan Huizinga ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Abstract Questions arising from the so-called Brooklyn kalamkari, a seven-panel, hand-painted cotton textile, have confronted art historians for decades: what do we see, who produced it for whom, what does it mean? With royal court scenes from all over the Indian Ocean world, the Brooklyn kalamkari represents a uniquely cosmopolitan worldview from early-seventeenth-century South India. In this essay I discuss the makings of this particular worldview in the context of early modern processes of globalization and state-formation. By engaging with the work of Indologists Johan Huizinga, Jan Heesterman, and David Shulman on Indian kingship and theater, I then attempt to decode the local and the global, as well as the seen and unseen, meaning of this textile.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Europe

The introduction outlines previous definitions of the modern state as well as historians’ current explanations of state formation in early modern Europe and England. It demonstrates that earlier scholars have focused almost entirely on the state’s ability to engage in active warfare and have thus neglected an important aspect of the monopoly of violence, the restriction of non-state or illegitimate violence. The introduction also explores the medieval background of the coroner system, the mechanism designed to regulate violence in England and explains why the system had failed to achieve its proposed ends prior to the sixteenth century.

Sufi Cosmopolitanism in the Seventeenth-century Indian Ocean: Sharīʿa, Lineage and Royal Power in Southeast Asia and the Maldives

2018 ◽  
pp. 53-80
Author(s):  
A. C. S. Peacock
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
State Building ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Right ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Peacock’s chapter examines the circulation of Seventeenth-century Sufi scholars to the ‘contested peripheries’ of the Indian Ocean. He argues that notable Muslim Sufi shaykhs did not travel to maritime kingdoms such as Banten, Aceh, and the Maldives to learn from locals, but rather to propagate ‘shariʿa-minded piety’ focused on ‘commanding the right and forbidding the wrong’. Peacock describes how the ambitions of religious scholars like the Syrian Qādirī preacher Muḥammad Shams al-Dīn intersected with early modern state-building in the Indian Ocean world. This chapter chronicles how Shams al-Dīn not only gained great political influence in Aceh, but was even made the actual ruler of the Maldives after his followers overthrew the sultan there. Peacock concludes that the cosmopolitanism of Sufi itinerants relied less on the fusion of pre-Islamic and Islamic practices than on universalist agendas of social transformation founded upon prophetic Sunna and enacted through the mechanisms of political coercion.

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.

Maritime Diasporas in Asia before da Gama: An Introductory Commentary

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 385-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Clark
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Scholarship

AbstractThis preface introduces the five essays that comprise this special issue of JESHO. The author provides a synoptic overview of western scholarship on the Indian Ocean and on trade diasporas in order to situate the papers. This scholarship has only recently begun to recognize the important role of the Indian Ocean in early modern history, a change that the author traces to the work of K.N. Chaudhuri, Janet Abu-Lughod, and Philip Curtin. He concludes that the five papers in this special issue collectively mark an important step forward in the historiography of the Indian Ocean. Les cinq articles qui font partie du numéro du JESHO sont précedés d'une préface ou l'auteur donne une vue d'ensemble du travail scientifique occidental qui parle de l'océan Indien et des diasporas mercantiles. D'après l'auteur, le role capital de l'océan Indien au début de l'époque moderne commence à être mieux connu grace aux publications de K.N. Chaudhuri, de Janet Abu-Lughod et de Philip Curtin. Les cinq articles ci-compris représentent, donc, un pas en avant pour l'historiographie de l'océan Indien, selon cet auteur.

scholarly journals Indian Ocean Traffic: Introduction

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lola Sharon Davidson ◽  
Stephen Muecke
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Trade Routes ◽  
Cultural Contact ◽  
Cultural Implications ◽  
Ocean Region ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Privileged Site

Like the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean has been a privileged site of cross-cultural contact since ancient times. In this special issue, our contributors track disparate movements of people and ideas around the Indian Ocean region and explore the cultural implications of these contacts and their role in processes that we would come to call transnationalization and globalisation. The nation is a relatively recent phenomenon anywhere on the globe, and in many countries around the Indian Ocean it was a product of colonisation and independence. So the processes of exchange, migration and cultural influence going on there for many centuries were mostly based on the economics of goods and trade routes, rather than on national identity and state policy.

English Private Trade in the Western Indian Ocean, 1720-1740

2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 215-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Om Prakash
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Indian Ocean Trade ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Trading Network

AbstractThe paper first situates the trade carried on by private European traders in the overall framework of the Indian Ocean trade in the early-modern period. It then discusses in some detail the trading network of private English merchants in the Western Indian Ocean with special reference to the Surat-Mocha link in the 1720s and the 1730s. The evidence base is provided mainly by the private papers of Sir Robert Cowan, governor of Bombay between 1729 and 1734 and a major English private trader, operating in collaboration with Henry Lowther, chief of the English factory at Surat. Cette contribution replace tout d'abord les activités commerciales menées par les négociants européens dans le cadre général du commerce de l'Océan indien au cours de la période moderne. Elle examine ensuite avec quelque détail le réseau commercial établi par des négociants anglais privés dans le secteur occidentalde l'Océan indien, plus particulièrement les relations instituées entre Surat et Moka dans les années 1720-1730. Les données présentées ont été tirées principalement de la correspondance privée de Sir Robert Cowan, gouverneur de Bombay (1729-1734) et grand négociant privé, associé à Henry Lowther, responsable du comptoir de Surat.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document