From Imperial Port City to Logistics Hub: The Production of Strategic Space in Djibouti (1859–2020)

This article examines what I call the production of strategic space, or the process whereby a particular place, the Republic of Djibouti, and its capital, the port city of Djibouti, became strategically valuable to different states over time, including the French Empire, the United States, and China. Throughout the period from 1859 to the present day, Djibouti’s strategic value has fluctuated as states reacted to different political and economic contexts. These events constantly shifted state interests, re-configuring their conceptions of the importance of Djibouti’s territory. As a result of this process, spaces within Djibouti became strategic relative to other spaces. In particular, the port has been more important to the French authorities and other outsiders than the desert hinterland, which was treated mainly as a useless wasteland. The various authorities organized space within Djibouti to reflect these government priorities, which had a profound impact on its inhabitants’ mobilities, economic opportunities, and political freedoms. The ordering of space within Djibouti reflected state interests, exposing the relationship between geography and power, strategy and spatial organization.

The “Pleasures of the Garden:” The Mobility of Plants, People, and Power in the Dutch Indian Ocean Empire

This article combines methodological approaches from global history and food history to demonstrate the multi-direction interactions between mobile people, plants and material culture and the creation of a new global food culture in Batavia, the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company. It reconstructs the global world of Batavia in the eighteenth century and shows how the horticultural, cooking and eating practices of its inhabitants revealed the port city’s connections with distant shores. Batavia was populated by a minority of Europeans, together with more numerous Chinese migrants from Fujian and enslaved people from across the Malay-Indonesian archipelago and the Coromandel, Malabar and Bengal regions of India. Food producers and consumers, traders, and enslaved cooks and cultivators from all these places contributed a diversity of culinary influences that were re-assembled into cooking and eating practices, many of which had never before existed in the same culinary context. While the article uses sources produced by Dutch-speaking colonists, it reads them against the grain in order to reconstruct this diversity of actors, spotlighting the role of enslaved cooks as mobile circulators of knowledge.

South Asian Ports and Water Scarcity in the Eyes of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century European Visitors

This article addresses problems of freshwater scarcity in port cities in the wider Indian Ocean region in the early modern era. It focuses on the historical dimensions of an urgent problem, namely the unequal access to and distribution of water in an increasingly globalized world. Focusing on European travelogues (mainly from Germany, England and France), I argue that these observers discussed structures of conflict and collective action regarding natural resources because they faced similar issues in their home countries. They recorded the particular spatial orders of port cities that were often arranged according to structures of water supply, different relations of power with regard to water management and finally the coping strategies of Europeans and local populations when it came to the uses and distribution practices of fresh water. The observations of European visitors cannot be taken as an accurate picture, since they are shaped by their own experiences and reflect their education and mindsets, their possible access to certain information and their expectations of a possible readership at home. Nonetheless the authors knew that water shortages made a degree of co-operation among seemingly distinct groups necessary.

Cradles of Diaspora: Bombay, Aden, and Jewish Migration across the Indian Ocean

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, migrant communities of Middle Eastern Jews emerged across the vast space between Shanghai and Port Said. The present article points to two crucial knots in the creation of these far-reaching Jewish diasporas: Bombay and Aden. These rising port cities of the British Raj were first stations in the migration of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews, and they presented immigrants with new commercial, social, cultural and spatial horizons; it was from there that many of them proceeded to settle elsewhere beyond the Indian Ocean. Using the examples of two prominent families, Sassoon in Bombay and Menahem Messa in Aden, the article considers the role of these places as the cradles from which Jewish diasporas emerged.