Abstract
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The Trading World of the Indian Ocean, the blurb explains, ‘is a comprehensive examination of the development of the maritime trade routes that ultimately placed India firmly at the forefront of the international commodity market.’ It is an edited collection of essays in a branch of historical scholarship that has seen an explosion of new work in the last two decades. An up-to-date selection, therefore, is timely. Some of the contributions in this volume are overviews of mainstream topics, whereas others represent new research on lesser known themes.
The historiography of the Indian Ocean began with a series of books on the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English East India companies published about 50 years ago. The main focus of this set was Europe–Asia trade. The works of a later generation of scholars, especially those of K.N. Chaudhuri, Ashin Dasgupta, Om Prakash and Sinnappah Arasaratnam, shed more light on Asian merchants and on the divisions and segments within the vast geographical area that the Indian Ocean represented. With this shift of attention from the foreign to the indigenous elements, more research began to be done on commodities, regions and actors who were not directly linked to Europe–Asia trade. A major area of focus was the South Asian merchant or merchant group, and the European ‘private’ enterprise engaged in intra-Asian trade. Much of the new research compiled in this volume is a product of that shift.
The book is the outcome of a large and ambitious collaboration. The project was led by Om Prakash, one of the architects of Indian Ocean studies. The huge scale of the work testifies to the editor’s energy and his encompassing vision of the field. The book is divided into 10 parts and 20 chapters of varying length contributed by 16 authors. The editorial introduction forms Part I. Unlike in other edited collections, the introduction does not just contextualise and summarise the rest of the book, but offers a systematic review of the whole scholarship. It is one of the finest summaries of the field I have read.
The two chapters constituting Part II (Ranabir Chakravarti on the western seaboard and Hermann Kulke on the Bay of Bengal) deal with the pre-European era. Part III consists of two chapters on Portuguese trade, contributed by Kartikeya Kohli and Pius Malekandathil. Part IV, with chapters by Ghulam Nadri and Lakshmi Subramanian, study the Indian merchant in seventeenth and eighteenth century western India. The chapters in Part V (Bhaswati Bhattacharya and Barbara Watson Andaya) deal with the eastern seaboard and the link between Coromandel merchants and the Malay world. Part VI consists of three chapters on the eastern segment of the Ocean; Merennage Radin Fernando on the early modern Malay world, James K. Chin on the Hokkien merchants in the South China Sea, and Roderich Ptak on the Ryuku network in Japan. Part VII considers private trade (Søren Mentz and Leonard Y. Andaya). Part VIII is formed of two studies on the Armenian merchants (Bhaswati Bhattacharya and Søren Mentz). A single study of Asian shipbuilding by Pierre-Yves Manguin forms Part IX. The final part contains two studies by Michael Pearson on ‘life at sea’ and ‘religion and the sea’.
The collection has four significant strengths. First, the majority of the essays are clustered by regions. Given that the Indian Ocean world was ‘segmented’, the design allows the reader to see more clearly those segments on which new work has appeared, the Armenians and the Gujarat–Africa connection being two examples. Second, the quality of archival work is uniformly impressive, testifying not only to the high standard set by the pioneers, but also the huge value that European trade archives continue to add to this particular intellectual enterprise. Third, the detailed bibliographical note accompanying each chapter shows how research programmes have adapted to new sources. And fourth, the geographical scope of the work is wide. The essays on East and Southeast Asia reveal lesser known links between segments in the eastern half of the Ocean. The shorter introduction to each one of the 10 parts sets out in precise terms the historiographical context of the individual chapters.
The book has a weakness too, which it shares with many excellent works in the emerging discipline, ‘global history’. One part of this discipline is comparative and deals with mainstream questions in economic and business history, such as, whether pre-modern commerce led to modern economic growth or not, and why its growth potentials varied in quality and scale between regions. This part of global history has seen animated debates in the recent times, but it involves working with simplified notions of pre-modern commerce. Another very different part of global history deals with commercial linkages as such, and goes to great lengths to show the diversity and complexity of these linkages. To the former tradition, the latter may seem to be uncompromisingly empiricist, even characterised by a resistance to generalise beyond what the archives directly tell us.
This book belongs in the second of the two styles of global history. Its strength lies in description of complexity of trading links. It is a poor guide to comparative history. A big book, it does not tell us what the big questions are that Indian Ocean studies as a field should seek to answer. Nor does it suggest how complexity might resolve into intelligible patterns that help us understand transformation in levels of living or in business organisation. It is not a work that the student of history, let alone a curious layman, can easily understand. It reads like a conversation among archives experts.
But, then, this limitation does not apply to the book as such, it stems rather from a dangerous cleavage within global history. If measured against what the book set out to do, namely, represent the state of the art on Indian Ocean studies, this is a remarkably successful effort and the product of a team-work of outstanding calibre.