This book is the first to trace the unique monetary history of the Indian Ocean World. Long-distance trade across the region was facilitated by a highly complex multi-currency system undergirded by shared ideas that transcended ethno-linguistic, religious and class divisions. Currencies also occupied key roles in local spiritual, aesthetic and affective practices. Foregrounding these tensions between the global/universalistic and the local/particularistic, the volume shows how this traditional currency system remained in place until the middle of the twentieth century, and how aspects of the system continue to inform monetary practices throughout the region. With case studies covering China, India, the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, East Africa, Zanzibar, Madagascar and Mauritius from the thirteenth to the twenty-first centuries, this volume explores the central role currencies played in economic exchange as well as in establishing communal bonds, defining state power and expressing religious sentiments.

The first history of Lake Tanganyika and of eastern Africa's relationship with the wider Indian Ocean World during the nineteenth century.

This book examines trades in animals and animal products in the history of the Indian Ocean World (IOW). An international array of established and emerging scholars investigate how the roles of equines, ungulates, sub-ungulates, mollusks, and avians expand our understandings of commerce, human societies, and world systems. Focusing primarily on the period 1500-1900, they explore how animals and their products shaped the relationships between populations in the IOW and Europeans arriving by maritime routes. By elucidating this fundamental yet under-explored aspect of encounters and exchanges in the IOW, these interdisciplinary essays further our understanding of the region, the environment, and the material, political and economic history of the world.

The Arabian Seas is a magisterial work on the world political economy (trade, war, power) that explores the intersect of the worlds of Islam (including South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and East Africa) and the European world-economy (particularly the seafaring Portuguese, Dutch, and British) on the eve of the modern world system. It is likely to become a classic in its field and one of the pillars of the emerging literature in recent years that has begun to recast our understanding of the "early modern history" of Asia and the world economy, underlining the early and long predominance of Asia in the world economy and showing the long and deep ties between European and Asian economic and military interactions. This work centrally addresses current debates on the nature of the early modern world system and the relative strengths of East and West. There are no competitors for this book, but it may be compared with Braudel's masterful studies of the Mediterranean in the sense that it does for the Arabian Seas (Indian Ocean World) spanning South Asia, the Middle East, and the East African Coast and beyond what Braudel did for the Mediterranean.

The book integrates the latest scholarly literature on the entire Indian Ocean region, from East Africa to China. Issues such as India's history, India’s changing status in the region, and India's cross-cultural networking over a long period are explored in this book. It is organized in specific themes in thirteen chapters. It incorporates a wealth of research on India’s strategic significance in the Indian Ocean arena throughout history. It enriches the reader's understanding of the emergence of the Indian Ocean basin as a global arena for cross-cultural networking and nation-building. It discusses issues of trade and commerce, the circulation of ideas, peoples and objects, and social and religious themes, focusing on Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. The book provides a refreshingly different survey of India’s connected history in the Indian Ocean region starting from the archaeological record and ending with the coming of empire. The author’s unique experience, combined with an engaging writing style, makes the book highly readable. The book contributes to the field of global history and is of great interest to researchers, policymakers, teachers, and students across the fields of political, cultural, and economic history and strategic studies.

The Indian Ocean world has a rich history of socio-economic and cultural exchanges across time and space. This book and its companion, Connecting the Indian Ocean World explore these connections around the wider Indian Ocean world. The book looks at the extensive range of maritime networks that criss-crossed pre-modern Asia and the Indian Ocean region connecting ports, peoples and cultures. It explores the connected histories of these regions and the movement of merchants, commodities and money which created the multi-cultural and cosmopolitan port cities like Surat and Nagasaki. With contributions from Indian and Japanese scholars, the volume analyses travellers’ accounts and trade routes between Japan and India, offering insights into how maritime movement shaped culture, politics and the social life of people in the most populated and productive regions of the world in the early modern period. Rich in archival material, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of Indian Ocean history, maritime history, economic and commercial history, Asian and South Asian history and social anthropology.

Into our Labours explores the literary representation of work across the globe since 1850, setting out to show that the literature of modernity is best understood in the light of the worlding of capitalism. The book proposes that a determinative relation exists between changing modes of work and changes in the forms, genres, and aesthetic strategies of the writing that bears witness to them. Two aspects of the ‘worlding’ of modernity, especially, are emphasised. First, an ‘inaugural’ experience of capitalist social relations, whose literary registration sometimes makes itself known through a crisis of representation, as the forms of space- and time-consciousness demanded by life in contexts in which market-oriented commodity production has become the dominant form of social labour are counterposed with inherited ways of seeing and knowing, now under acute pressure if not already obsolete. Second, a moment corresponding to the consolidation, regularisation and global dispersal of capitalist development. Into Our Labours focuses on the naturalisation of capitalist social relations: forms of sociality and solidarity, ideologies of familialism, individualism and work, relations between the sexes and the generations. Arguing that the only plausible term for the vast body of literary work engendered by the worlding of capitalist social relations is ‘modernist’, the book proposes that it is then important to challenge the still-entrenched Eurocentric understandings of modernism. Modernism is neither originally nor paradigmatically ‘Western’ in provenance; and its temporal parameters are much broader than are usually assumed in modernist studies, extending both backward and forward in time.