Indian Ocean Studies

Indian Ocean Studies Book List

Forthcoming

Cover of 'Ethnicity, Identity, and Conceptualizing Community in Indian Ocean East Africa'

Ethnicity, Identity, and Conceptualizing Community in Indian Ocean East Africa
By Daren E. Ray

Drawing on archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, and documentary evidence, this book uses a cis-oceanic framework to focus on littoral communities. It clarifies the relationship between ethnicity and other kinds of identities by framing research questions around a language family instead of an ethnic, religious, or diasporic group.

Connecting Continents
Archaeology and History in the Indian Ocean World
Edited by Krish Seetah

Connecting Continents addresses two issues: how to promote collaborative research, and how to shape the research agenda for a region only recently attracting serious interest from historical archaeologists exploring the dynamics of migration, colonization, and cultural syncretism central to understanding human experience in the Indian Ocean basin.

Archaeology · Indian Ocean Studies · World and Comparative History

Cargoes in Motion
Materiality and Connectivity across the Indian Ocean
Edited by Burkhard Schnepel and Julia Verne

Cargoes in Motion considers both the materiality and special trajectories of cargoes across the Indian Ocean world in order to better understand the processes of exchange and their economic, social, cultural, and political effects on the region.

History | Modern | General · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social · Eastern Africa · South Indian Ocean Islands · Middle East · South Asia · Indian Ocean Studies

Available

Yankees in the Indian Ocean
American Commerce and Whaling, 1786–1860
By Jane Hooper

This unprecedented study of nineteenth-century American merchant and whaling activity in the Indian Ocean shows how it shaped later US imperial incursions in the Pacific and Caribbean. Sailors’ journals and other primary sources reveal American influence on the period’s global commerce, illegal slaving, and environmental degradation.

Cargoes in Motion
Materiality and Connectivity across the Indian Ocean
Edited by Burkhard Schnepel and Julia Verne

History | Modern | General · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social · Eastern Africa · South Indian Ocean Islands · Middle East · South Asia · Indian Ocean Studies

Pearls, People, and Power
Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds
Edited by Pedro Machado, Steve Mullins, and Joseph Christensen

Pearls, People, and Power is the first book to examine the trade, distribution, production, and consumption of pearls in the Indian Ocean over more than five centuries. Encompassing the geographical, cultural, and thematic diversity of Indian Ocean pearling, it deepens our appreciation of the historical dynamics of Indian Ocean worlds.

World and Comparative History · Indian Ocean Studies

Connecting Continents
Archaeology and History in the Indian Ocean World
Edited by Krish Seetah

Archaeology · Indian Ocean Studies · World and Comparative History

Buying Time
Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean
By Thomas F. McDow

Thomas F. McDow synthesizes Indian Ocean, Middle Eastern, and East African studies to explain how in the nineteenth century, credit, mobility, and kinship knit together a vast interconnected Indian Ocean region. McDow’s new historical analysis of the Indian Ocean reveals roles of previously invisible people.

Human Geography · Social History · 19th century · Eastern Africa · Middle East · Indian Ocean Studies · African Studies

Internal Frontiers
African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-Century South Africa
By Jon Soske

In this ambitious new history of the antiapartheid struggle, Jon Soske places India and the Indian diaspora at the center of the African National Congress’s development of an inclusive philosophy of nationalism. In so doing, Soske combines intellectual, political, religious, urban, and gender history to tell a story that is global in reach while remaining grounded in the everyday materiality of life under apartheid.Even

African History · Nationalism · South Africa · Race and Ethnicity · Indian Ocean Studies

Feeding Globalization
Madagascar and the Provisioning Trade, 1600–1800
By Jane Hooper

Between 1600 and 1800, the promise of fresh food attracted more than seven hundred English, French, and Dutch vessels to Madagascar. Throughout this period, European ships spent months at sea in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, but until now scholars have not fully examined how crews were fed during these long voyages. Without sustenance from Madagascar, European traders would have struggled to transport silver to Asia and spices back to Europe.

World and Comparative History · African History · Slavery and Slave Trade · Economic History · African Studies · Madagascar · Indian Ocean Studies

Cover of 'Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean'

Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean
Islam, Marriage, and Sexuality on the Swahili Coast
Edited by Erin E. Stiles and Katrina Daly Thompson
· Afterword by Susan F. Hirsch

A breakthrough study of the underexamined lived experience of Islam, sexuality, and gender on the Swahili coast.

Gender Studies · Islam · Religion · Eastern Africa · Indian Ocean Studies · African Studies · Swahili

Cover of 'European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850'

European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850
By Richard B. Allen

Between 1500 and 1850, European traders shipped hundreds of thousands of African, Indian, Malagasy, and Southeast Asian slaves to ports throughout the Indian Ocean world. The activities of the British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese traders who operated in the Indian Ocean demonstrate that European slave trading was not confined largely to the Atlantic but must now be viewed as a truly global phenomenon.

Slavery and Slave Trade · World and Comparative History · Indian Ocean Studies

Cover of 'Women and Slavery, Volume One'

Women and Slavery, Volume One
Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic
Edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller

The literature on women enslaved around the world has grown rapidly in the last ten years, evidencing strong interest in the subject across a range of academic disciplines.

Slavery and Slave Trade · Women’s History · Women’s Studies · Africa · Indian Ocean Studies · Atlantic Studies