Abstract
Piracy in the Indian Ocean, unlike in the Atlantic, has remained a subject of limited scholarly interest. Not unsurprisingly, the small body of published research on pirates in this oceanic world also tends to focus on the Anglo-American buccaneers who established a presence in Madagascar between the 1680s and 1720s. In this richly textured study, Lakshmi Subramanian sets out to expand our understanding of piracy in the wider Indian Ocean world by examining the nature and dynamics of this activity along the northern reaches of India’s west coast during the early nineteenth century. In so doing, she makes a noteworthy contribution to our knowledge of this phenomenon in the Mare Indicum and the means by which the East India Company sought to establish and consolidate its position and authority in Cutch and Kathiawar during the early nineteenth century.
Subramanian opens her study work with a discussion of the questions and issues that shape the arguments that she develops in five subsequent chapters, the first of which focuses on the historical geography of India’s northwestern littoral and historiographical perceptions of pirates, especially in the Atlantic. Chapter two considers the various and often contradictory ways in which the East India Company thought about issues of maritime jurisdiction and sovereignty between 1790 and 1805. Her third chapter explores how officials in the Bombay government employed ethnographical knowledge to develop a fuller understanding of piracy along the Cutch and Kathiawar coasts and the debate that this knowledge generated within official circles about the nature and importance of sovereignty, law, and custom in dealing with what was seen as a serious menace to this region’s coasting and cotton trades. Chapter four discusses piracy as a form of subaltern resistance in an age of maritime radicalism and argues that piracy in this littoral region was not so much about authority or jurisdiction at sea as it was a manifestation of changing economic and political realities brought about by the company’s hegemonic aspirations in this part of India. In her concluding chapter, Subramanian engages in a thoughtful discussion of the issues and problems that historians must face when they attempt to reconstruct the history of piracy in the Indian Ocean on the basis of documents generated mostly by colonial officials. A brief epilogue draws together the various elements of her study by arguing that piracy along the northern reaches of India’s west coast during the early nineteenth century must be viewed as a complex phenomenon in which the politics of predation can only be understood by carefully considering the role that local and regional networks of labour, information, and social support played in shaping developments during an era of significant political and economic change.
Subramanian’s study breaks new ground in piracy and Indian Ocean studies in a number of ways. Her determination to examine piracy along India’s western littoral in light of existing scholarship on such activity in the Atlantic world while appreciating that this activity could and did differ from that in the Atlantic speaks to an ability to bring a much needed comparative perspective to studying this phenomenon and encourage historians to transcend the ‘tyranny of the particular’ that so often characterises Atlantic and Indian Ocean studies. Equally laudable is her detailed reconstruction of this activity along the Cutch and Kathiawar coasts, a reconstruction that not only embraces and seeks to elucidate the socio-cultural, economic, and political complexities of this phenomenon, but also underscores the need, articulated originally by Michael Pearson, to consider the role that littoral areas played in shaping Indian Ocean history in general and Indian Ocean maritime history in particular. Her careful consideration of the ways in which company officials acquired and subsequently made use of ethnographical knowledge illustrates the rewards that can come from applying innovative conceptual approaches to complex socio-political phenomena. Lastly, her thoughtful discussion of the issues that can surround the use of colonial archives to reconstruct complex and often problematic phenomena should become required reading for anyone setting out to reconstruct the history of the colonial experience in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and Pacific worlds.
While there is much to commend about this study, there are also several editorial and conceptual issues that should have been addressed. Foremost among these is the absence of at least one good map containing the kind of information that would help readers to locate the regions, localities, polities, etc. under consideration and appreciate how these various entities were related to one another in space and time. A related concern is the need for the author to summarise relevant developments at strategic points in the text. The author’s detailed reconstruction of the complexities of socio-cultural, economic, and political life along the western Indian littoral is clearly one of this book’s strengths, but these same complexities can easily confound readers who are not already well-informed about the details of India’s geography or the British experience in western India during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While the study argues that piracy was a serious problem along the western Indian littoral, there is no real sense of the scale of this problem: e.g., how many ships were attacked or captured by pirates at different points in time during the period under consideration? While I appreciate the difficulties of extracting this kind of quantitative data from the archival record at Subramanian’s disposal, a more fully developed sense of the scale of this predation is crucial to better understanding its impact on coastal trade, commerce, and political life. The author’s assertion that piracy along the Cutch and Kathiawar coasts was not entrepreneurial in the way that it was in Southeast Asian or South China seas likewise needs to be developed more fully, especially since she argues that this activity had a significant regional economic and political impact. Addressing these concerns would have made an impressive study even more accessible and compelling.