The Arabian Peninsula occupies a critical position at the intersect of several major Old World landmasses. Inland aridity and a major coastal perimeter have long made maritime activities critical to Arabia’s cultural trajectory. A wealth of recent studies, not previously synthesised, suggest not only that the peninsular littoral offered a rich resource base for thousands of years of human occupation in the region, but also that Arabia witnessed some of the world’s earliest seafaring and maritime exchange activities, and played a role in Bronze Age maritime trade that has often been underestimated. Maritime activities were closely linked to developments in agriculture, which not only fuelled trade and exchange, but were also impacted on by the dispersal of domesticates along early maritime corridors. While regional specialisation has to some degree prevented consideration of the maritime prehistory of the peninsula as a whole, it is clear that there are interesting parallels, as well as important differences, between cultural trajectories in different parts of the peninsula.

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Shell Middens, Ships and Seeds: Exploring Coastal Subsistence, Maritime Trade and the Dispersal of Domesticates in and Around the Ancient Arabian Peninsula

Drawing on a remarkable data set compiled from ships’ logs, journals, factory correspondence, ledgers, and reports that provide unusually precise information on each of the 4,572 voyages taken by English traders of the East India Company (hereafter EIC), we describe the EIC trade network over time, from 1601 to 1833. From structural images of voyages organized by shipping seasons, the authors map (over time and space) the emergence of dense, fully integrated, global trade networks to reveal globalization long before what is now called “globalization.” The authors show that the integration of the world trade system under the aegis of the EIC was the unintended by‐product of systematic individual malfeasance (private trading) on the part of ship captains seeking profit from internal Eastern trade.

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Malfeasance and the Foundations for Global Trade: The Structure of English Trade in the East Indies, 1601-1833

Current discussions about globalization often ignore the flows of capital that travel south to south and the routes, geographies, and imaginaries mapped by theseflows andbynewmigratorymovements. Studies have focusedon increased inequalities, on the emergence ofnewcenters andperipheries, aswell as on local creativities and resistance. Postcolonial scholars have looked at practices of cross-cultural translation, of vernacular cosmopolitanism, and at diasporic formations. Their research has expanded the repertory of archives, histories, and disciplines. Yet current East Asian–African exchanges have gone largely unexplored. The Indian Ocean has long been the site of these exchanges, building formal and informal connections between the African continent and East Asia. Studying these routes of trade and cultural connections would yield, I want to argue, another map of the world in which the West is provincialized, to paraphrase Dipesh Chakravorty.

Writing on Water: Peripheries, Flows, Capital, and Struggles in the Indian Ocean

This article presents a case study of Goan Mozambicans — a diasporic group created out of the itinerant quality that characterized Portuguese (de)colonization in the Indian Ocean. Many chose to emigrate from Portuguese India to Portuguese Africa between the 1920s and 1950s. That some Goans chose to stay while others left in the aftermath of Mozambican independence (1975) is also tied to this migratory history. An ethnographic life history approach is employed to access individual varied experiences of migration. Findings will suggest that Goan Mozambicans occupied an ambiguous position in the colonial order of things, and identify them as local cosmopolitans in postcolonial Mozambique.

The Disquieting of History: Portuguese (De)colonization and Goan Migration in the Indian Ocean

Why did sustained industrialization and modern economic growth first take off in western Europe and not elsewhere? Attempts to address this historical conundrum have spawned a large literature related to the theme of “European exceptionalism.” It champions the view that Europe, in particular northwest Europe, had superior, and in some cases exceptional, economic conditions and social institutions long before its economic take-off in the modern era. This widely prevalent and often contentious view has recently been contested by a new wave of historians and specialists on Asia such as Ken Pomeranz, Bin Wong, and Prasannan Parthasarathi. They marshalled evidence to show that living standards in the advanced parts of China and India were on a par with those of northwest Europe in the eighteenth century. The revisionists have also put forward various hypotheses to reinterpret the traditional story of the “rise of the West and the fall of the Rest” in terms of factor and resource endowments, the impact of Western colonization and, most importantly, historical path dependencies. This chapter provides a broad but selective survey of the major hypotheses and evidence regarding historical comparisons of the economic performances of India and China versus western Europe. We begin with a review of the latest research on the comparison of real wages across Eurasia, which reveals that living standards in the advanced parts of China, Japan, and India as measured by real wages seem to have been closer to the lagging parts of Europe – namely, southern and central Europe – than to northwest Europe, as was claimed by the revisionists

Europe in an Asian mirror : the great divergence

security system is the vulnerability of her coast. The weakness emerged with the decay of the ancient Hindu maritime tradition ending with the Cholas in the 12th Ccntury. Islam, did nothing to sustain the curiosity of the Indian people about lands beyond her coast. The Moghuls always feared overland invasion from Persia. Imperial Britain found no European naval power strong enough to disturb them. The

D.P. Das

Papers

India and the Indian Ocean