Introduction: The Ocean and the Historian

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-11
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Graduate Student ◽  
Economic History ◽  
World System ◽  
Maritime History ◽  
Agrarian Question ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The University

I feel singularly privileged to write the introduction for the first of two special JIOWS festschrift editions honouring Michael Pearson’s contributions in the field of Indian Ocean studies. My association with Mike goes back to 1979/80 when I met him at the University of Viswabharati, where my mentor Ashin Dasgupta was working with him on an edited volume devoted to the history of India and the Indian Ocean. This was a time when as a young graduate student, I was being exposed to the hotly debated and discussed sub-field of maritime history. Several senior historians questioned the need to study maritime history outside the general frame of Indian economic history, by then an established field of enquiry, driven primarily by the agrarian question, poverty and the drain of wealth paradigm. I recall how, in course of my apprenticeship, I read a range of writings that looked at Asian trade and commercial exchanges that, although written largely out of European archives, dared to tell a very different story to the dominant one of European commercial and military hegemony. This was long before the heady debates of globalization, of Asia before Europe or indeed of the world system thesis that had entered the field; instead, we were chewing over the critiques of the peddler thesis put forward by Van Leur, and of the uncritical endorsement of colonial perspectives on Asian trade embodied in the writings of scholar administrator W.H. Moreland. It was here that Pearson and Dasgupta gave us the vital tools of our trade, to look beyond the official voices in the archive, to search for private adjustments and compromises that had so much more to say about the messy world of commercial and social transactions where to look for Weberian rationality or pure economic determinism was chasing a mirage.

Gujarat in the History of the Indian Ocean

2019 ◽  
pp. 52-67
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Maritime History ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
History Writing ◽  
New Methods ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean

This chapter takes a stock taking exercise of the history writing on Gujarat and Indian maritime history over the last five decades. It identifies the major shifts and emphases that mark the nature of historical knowledge. What these hold for the discipline of history in general and how these inflect the case study of Gujarat in particular are examined. The intention of such a stock taking exercise is also to consider the importance of recovering and reading new and local archives and of incorporating new methods into standard historical work. The author also explores the most significant shifts that have emerged in the recent historiography of the Indian Ocean and of maritime Gujarat: study of law and piracy and Muslim seafaring and sailing practices in the western Indian Ocean.

The Portuguese and the Indian Ocean : a review

Antiquity ◽  
1948 ◽  
Vol 22 (85) ◽  
pp. 4-7
Author(s):  
Elaine Sanceau
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Century Literature

It was from the Portuguese that Europe first learned something about India. Their 16th century literature abounds in information on the subject. Duarte Barboza, Tomé Pires, Castanheda, João de Barros, Gaspar Correa even, though he says that he will only write about the exploits of his countrymen, have each one given to the world many interesting facts regarding the ethnology, the customs and beliefs, and some account of the history of that baffling sub-continent which Portugal, of European nations, was the first to observe at close quarters.

Indian Merchants and the Western Indian Ocean: The Early Seventeenth Century

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashin Das Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Ocean Area ◽  
European Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Work Done

Researches in Indian economic history have stimulated curiosity about India's connections with the Indian Ocean area. Work done on European expansion in the non-European world has also contributed to the development of this area of enquiry. Recent writings on the Indian Ocean and the Indian maritime merchant have indicated important possibilities of further research. I shall first briefly consider some of these, and then pass on to an examination of a concrete historical problem where Indian economic history meets the history of European expansion and the two themes are held together by the Indian Ocean.

Contact and Transformation. The European Pre-Colonial Expansion in the Indian Ocean world-system in the 16th - 17th Centuries

Itinerario ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Kieniewicz
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Systems Approach ◽  
World System ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
European Expansion ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Overseas Expansion ◽  
Indian Ocean World

This article offers a preliminary outline of a theoretical concept to cover the precolonial phase of European overseas expansion. It considers the particular case of the Indian Ocean, which provides an exceptionally clear illustration of the need to link research into the expansion with the history of, and changes taking place within, the societies affected by it. What is necessary is to demonstrate the simultaneity and interaction of the region's social organi-sation with European Expansion. For this purpose I have used what may be called a systems approach.

Mughal India and Central Asia in the Eighteenth Century. An Introduction to a Wider Perspective

Itinerario ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jos Gommans
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
World Economy ◽  
World System ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Directed Attention ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
The World ◽  
The Indian Ocean

During the last two decades our historical ideas about the Mughal Empire have considerably altered. This change of attitude is due to two scholarly tendencies both of which have directed attention away from the Mughal court centres of Delhi and Agra. In an effort to illuminate the processes of Mughal decline, one approach has aimed to stress the emergence of eighteenth-century successor states which grew vigorously independent, but still remained under the sacrosanct umbrella of Mughal authority. Many studies of these new political configurations have seriously questioned the cliché de l'époque of a highly centralized Mughal polity, which now to have been faced with numerous limitations and ‘inner frontiers’. The disenchanting practice of permanent sedition and betrayal could never live up to the expectations of the Mughal ideal of harmony and legitimate obedience. In contrast to this view from below, another approach has tried to enlarge the scale by analysing the various ways in which India was incorporated into the world economy of the Indian Ocean. From this point of view Mughal India became the central part of a dynamic world system with various interactions and interdependencies between often highly urbanized and commercialized states.

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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