Abstract
It seems that, every decade, someone feels inspired to write a survey of Indian Ocean history. K. N. Chaudhuri wrote his seminal work on the field in 1985; Kenneth McPherson followed it with his The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea in 1993; a decade later, in 2003, the field was treated to Michael Pearson's The Indian Ocean; and, in 2014, there was Edward Alpers’ The Indian Ocean in World History. 1 Eric Tagliacozzo's book thus adds to a now-venerable tradition of mapping out the broad contours of a field that is nearly 40 years old but has yet to really define itself. The book also comes at the tail end of a long string of publications by the author on different aspects of Asian maritime history. Tagliacozzo is a well-established historian of South East Asia and the Indian Ocean, and the author of two monographs – one on smuggling in the South China Sea and the other on the pilgrimage to Mecca from South East Asia. He has also co-edited a trilogy of collected essays on Asian history from an oceanic perspective under the title Asia Inside Out. 2
Tagliacozzo's In Asian Waters is a broad survey of Indian Ocean history, toggling between quick sweeps through long stretches of space and time and more focused discussions of particular places at specific historical junctures. The book unfolds over 14 chapters grouped into six parts, each of which takes on a particular theme: maritime connections, trade and empire, religion, urban transformation, the trade in natural resources, and the technologies of empire. Each part includes a brief preface and two chapters – in most instances, one that maps out the phenomenon over broad, connected spaces and another that anchors itself in a particular place and time, though looking outward towards a broader arena of connectivity. Within each chapter, Tagliacozzo combines synthesis, original research and ethnographic observations – no doubt a reflection of his interests in conversations between history and anthropology.
If the book's thematic coverage seems wide-ranging, its geographical focus helps moor the reader a little more. Although Tagliacozzo swims around the entirety of the Indian Ocean, his most consistent laps are in and around South East Asia. This is where the book very clearly distinguishes itself from the surveys that came before, the vast majority of which were principally set in the Western Indian Ocean. Tagliacozzo, however, anchors his writings on the coasts of Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia, with India and China both looming large in the background. He makes occasional gestures towards East Africa and South Arabia (and less so the Persian Gulf), but not enough to distract the reader from his principal arena. This comes as a relief: the field has no need for yet another survey of Western Indian Ocean history, and Tagliacozzo is well positioned to tell the story of the Indian Ocean from its eastern waters.
The book also sets itself apart from other large-scale histories of the Indian Ocean in its approach. Tagliacozzo eschews the periodizations that characterize most of the surveys that preceded him, and (perhaps wisely) avoids the task of proposing a grand narrative of Eastern Indian Ocean history. Instead, he showcases different ways of doing Indian Ocean history – different entry points into the history of maritime Asia, be it through the story of empire, trade, capitalism, technology or religion. His chapters individually showcase how one might write these histories at different scales, too, from the wide-lens macro scales that characterized surveys past down to scales that are far more local though always situated within broader contours. And in his ethnographic asides, Tagliacozzo tips his hat to the burgeoning anthro-historical literature on the region. Readers of In Asian Waters will walk away with a good sense of an Indian Ocean history that weaves together both past and present.
Tagliacozzo's approach is not without its costs, however. The book's thematic organization is useful in getting readers to think about the pathways through Indian Ocean history but makes the narrative far more difficult to pin down chronologically. Readers will have difficulty locating themselves in time, and will often find themselves grasping for a sense of how things change over time. I do not mean to suggest that Tagliacozzo offers a static picture of Indian Ocean history; things certainly change. What is unclear is when and how things change, which, given that this is a book that situates itself in roughly a millennium of history, is not a trivial point. The only clear turning point is the one Tagliacozzo discusses in Chapter 5, in which he considers the rise of European economic hegemony in the region – the primacy in international commerce followed by the move into market-oriented production. This is, by now, a story that historians of the region know well, and one wonders what other moments of transformation might be in this centuries-long history.
But perhaps Tagliacozzo's avoidance of chronological claim-making is the point. Indian Ocean history rarely lends itself well to a grand narrative, and In Asian Waters demonstrates that there are often just as many continuities as there are changes. With every tit from European companies and empire come two tats from the region's merchant communities and polities, all of whom very quickly adapt to the changed circumstances. Tagliacozzo could well have highlighted a narrative of divergence and peripheralization, but in doing so would have had to wilfully ignore the rich lifeworlds of Asian traders, to say nothing of the contingencies and epistemological failures of European colonialism in the region.
All told, In Asian Waters is a valuable synthesis of Indian Ocean history told from South East Asia, and an attractive invitation to oceanic history for an audience of Asian historians who are not well acquainted with the region's maritime history. Specialists in the field of Indian Ocean history might know the broad outlines of the story that Tagliacozzo tries to tell, but they, too, will undoubtedly learn a few things along the way. The prose is smooth and lucid, and the book's organization lends itself well to parting out – say, for different units in classes on Indian Ocean history or Asian history. In Asian Waters does not rewrite Indian Ocean history, nor is it likely to transform the conversation, but it is undoubtedly the best stock-taking that we have of the field, in all of its historical, thematic and methodological diversity.