Results by title

An innovative collection of essays that foregrounds specific cargoes as a means to understand connectivity and mobility across the Indian Ocean world.

Scholars have long appreciated the centrality of trade and commerce in understanding the connectivity and mobility that underpin human experience in the Indian Ocean region. But studies of merchant and commercial activities have paid little attention to the role that cargoes have played in connecting the disparate parts of this vast oceanic world. Drawing from the work of anthropologists, geographers, and historians, Cargoes in Motion tells the story of how material objects have informed and continue to shape processes of exchange across the Indian Ocean.

By following selected cargoes through both space and time, this book makes an important and innovative contribution to Indian Ocean studies. The multidisciplinary approach deepens our understanding of the nature and dynamics of the Indian Ocean world by showing how transoceanic connectivity has been driven not only by economic, social, cultural, and political factors but also by the materiality of the objects themselves.

Essays by:

• Edward A. Alpers
• Fahad Ahmad Bishara
• Eva-Maria Knoll
• Karl-Heinz Kohl
• Lisa Jenny Krieg
• Pedro Machado
• Rupert Neuhöfer
• Mareike Pampus
• Hannah Pilgrim
• Burkhard Schnepel
• Hanne Schönig
• Tansen Sen
• Steven Serels
• Julia Verne
• Kunbing Xiao

Between 1500 and 1850, European traders shipped hundreds of thousands of African, Indian, Malagasy, and Southeast Asian slaves to ports throughout the Indian Ocean world. The activities of the British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese traders who operated in the Indian Ocean demonstrate that European slave trading was not confined largely to the Atlantic but must now be viewed as a truly global phenomenon. European slave trading and abolitionism in the Indian Ocean also led to the development of an increasingly integrated movement of slave, convict, and indentured labor during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the consequences of which resonated well into the twentieth century.

Richard B. Allen’s magisterial work dramatically expands our understanding of the movement of free and forced labor around the world. Drawing upon extensive archival research and a thorough command of published scholarship, Allen challenges the modern tendency to view the Indian and Atlantic oceans as self-contained units of historical analysis and the attendant failure to understand the ways in which the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds have interacted with one another. In so doing, he offers tantalizing new insights into the origins and dynamics of global labor migration in the modern world.

The history of US imperialism remains incomplete without this consideration of long-overlooked nineteenth-century American commercial and whaling ventures in the Indian Ocean.

Yankees in the Indian Ocean shows how nineteenth-century American merchant and whaler activity in the Indian Ocean shaped the imperial future of the United States, influenced the region’s commerce, encouraged illegal slaving, and contributed to environmental degradation. For a brief time, Americans outnumbered other Western visitors to Mauritius, Madagascar, Zanzibar, and the East African littoral. In a relentless search for commodities and provisions, American whaleships landed at islands throughout the ocean and stripped them of resources. Yet Americans failed to develop a permanent foothold in the region and operated instead from a position of weakness relative to other major colonizing powers, thus discouraging the development of American imperial holdings there.

The history of American concerns in the Indian Ocean world remains largely unwritten. Scholars who focus on the region have mostly ignored American involvement, despite arguments for the ocean’s importance in powering global connections during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Historians of the United States likewise have failed to examine the western Indian Ocean because of a preoccupation with US interests in Asia and the Pacific. Failing to understand the scale of American trade in the Indian Ocean has led to a fixation on European commercial strength to the exclusion of other maritime networks. Instead, this book reveals how the people of Madagascar and East Africa helped the United States briefly dominate commerce and whaling.

This book investigates how and why Americans were drawn to the western Indian Ocean years before the United States established a formal overseas empire in the late nineteenth century. Ship logs, sailor journals, and travel narratives reveal how American men transformed foreign land- and seascapes into knowable spaces that confirmed American conceptions of people and natural resources; these sources also provide insight into the complex social and ecological worlds of the Indian Ocean during this critical time.