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The Dutch Oceanic Empire in the Indian Ocean: the emergence of a “system”
Eric Tagliacozzo Cornell University The Dutch as an oceanic empire arrived mid-stream in the history of Europeans sailing the Indian Ocean — after the Portuguese, but before the English and French had taken hold as forces to be reckoned with on a systemic scale. Although the Portuguese presence was earlier, by the middle decades of […]
Export Led Growth in Arabia from the Middle Ages to WWI: Trading dates, pearls, and slaves with Africa to India
Bob Allen New York University – Abu Dhabi Three instances of export led growth in Arabia involved the export of a primary product and the import of slaves to provide the labour force to produce it. In the Middle Ages the boom in date production centred in al-Hasa, portentous for the future of Saudi. In […]
Slavery and Slave trading Scholarship in the Indian Ocean: Some Lessons from the Atlantic
David Eltis Emory University Only in the last five years has a significant scholarly effort gotten off the ground to pull together systematic information on the age-old traffic in people in the Indian Ocean World. By contrast, usable databases on slave trafficking in the Atlantic date at least from Philip Curtin’s foundational work, The Atlantic […]
Tracing “la Traite” in the Indian Ocean
Margaret Schotte York University “Sailing with the French”, a SSHRC-funded, traces more than 1200 voyages of the Compagnie des Indes, both the movements of ships to and within the Indian Ocean, and the movements of individuals from port to port. The goal is to uncover previously anonymous individuals and to map their lives. The rich […]
Acceleration and Assurance: Why the Indian Ocean Shiptracks are the Opposite of the Eurasian Wheeltracks
Pamela Kyle Crossley Dartmouth Critiques of the notion of a “maritime silk road” are well-developed and have established that not only was there no Silk Road on water, but there was no Silk Road anywhere as it had been imagined by nineteenth century Europeans. Yet point by point comparisons of the Indian Ocean to a […]
The Western Ocean before the West: The Indian Ocean in the Chinese Geographical Imagination
Timothy Brook University of British Columbia. Through the 12th to 14th centuries, Chinese mariners traded into the Western Ocean, as they called the Indian Ocean. distributing Chinese manufactures from Pegu to Hormuz. That history is not easy to reconstruct, given the lack of documentation. Much easier to chronicle is the eruption of state intervention for […]
