REview of 'Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c1750-1850 (original) (raw)

In a review in this very forum in 2009 Clare Anderson praised a shift in Indian Ocean studies. By looking not from land to sea but from ocean to coast, scholars are better able to immerse themselves in the variegated transactions, linkages and nodal points of this peripatetic maritime world, especially in the period before the region was more greatly territorialised by European empire in the latter 19th century. But Anderson also highlighted the pressing need for more 'rigorous incorporation of Africa' and littoral African communities into Indian Ocean Studies (1) as part of what Markus Vink terms the latest wave of 'new thalassology' in Indian Ocean historiography-the need to 'disentangle the complex strand of spatial categorizations and explore the permeable inner and outer boundaries of the Indian Ocean world(s)'.(2) Anderson's own work, like that of Ned Alpers, Gwyn Campbell, Michael Pearson, Sugata Bose and a new generation of scholars such as Thomas McDow, has been influential in this emerging trend.(3) It is the search for a more textured picture of the multivalent economic and cultural interactions that 'produce histories in rather than of the region'.(4) In this timely book by Pedro Machado of Indiana University, already himself an energetic new Indian Ocean thalassologist through a number of journal articles trailing this volume, we have an excellent and focused contribution that incorporates Africa and Africans, as well as better documented western Indian nodes and peoples, into this complex oceanic turn. It will surely be required reading for anyone interested in Indian Ocean and global history.