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Ships Passing in the Night? Reflections on the Middle East in the Indian Ocean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2016

Fahad Ahmad Bishara
Fahad Ahmad Bishara*
Affiliation:
Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.; e-mail: fabishara@gmail.com
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Extract

The study of the Middle East is witnessing a sea change (excuse the maritime metaphor). The traditional geographic poles of Middle East studies (Turkey, Egypt, the Levant, and Iraq) stand firm, but are now facing a challenge from places once thought to be peripheral to the historiography: namely, South Arabia and the Gulf. The rising tide of scholarship on those areas is due in large measure to the opportunities that now present themselves in resituating them historically, and thinking about them as part of broader transoceanic worlds. This reorientation has made itself clear in the growing number of publications that wrestle with the Middle East's maritime frontiers—especially in the sister disciplines of history and anthropology. Here I limit myself to just one of those disciplines—history—and chart out the waves of contact between historians of the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. I offer no argument, but rather a survey of where the field has been and the opportunities that lie ahead.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , November 2016 , pp. 758 - 762
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 “Roundtable: The Indian Ocean and Other Middle Easts,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 34 (2014): 549–98.

2 Chaudhuri, K.N., Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

3 Hall, Richard, Empires of the Monsoon: A History of the Indian Ocean and Its Invaders (London: HarperCollins, 1998)Google Scholar; McPherson, Kenneth, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Curtin, Philip, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolf, Eric R., Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

4 Most recently, see Pearson, M.N., The Indian Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Alpers, Edward, The Indian Ocean in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

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6 This was not the first transnational turn in history. See “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111 (2006): 1441–64.

7 Aslanian, Sebouh David, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Um, Nancy, The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Margariti, Roxani, Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Onley, James, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Ho, Engseng, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Green, Nile, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the Western Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Ghazal, Amal, Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism: Expanding the Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (1880s–1930s) (London: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar; Bang, Anne, Sufis and Scholars of the Sea: Family Networks in East Africa, 1860–1925 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003)Google Scholar.

9 Casale, Giancarlo, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

10 Sood, Gagan, India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hopper, Matthew, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bishara, Fahad Ahmad, “Paper Routes: Inscribing Islamic Law across the Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean,” Law and History Review 32 (2014): 797–820 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 See Vora, Neha, Impossible Citizens: Dubai's Indian Diaspora (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; and Gardner, Andrew, City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community of Bahrain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also works by Caroline and Filippo Osella.

12 Vink, Markus, “Indian Ocean Studies and the ‘New Thalassology,’” Journal of Global History 2 (2007): 41–62 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.