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What did the practice of law look like on the high seas? This has been a matter of some discussion among legal historians, with the bulk of the evidence coming from encounters between European ships in the Atlantic and Asia. This article takes a different tack, taking as its starting point a series of contracts copied into the logbook of the early-twentieth century Arab dhow captain (nakhoda) 'Abdulmajeed Al-Failakawi. Although some of these appear to have been contracts that the nakhoda entered into or witnessed, most were contractual templates that presented formulas for a variety of written obligations between members of the Indian Ocean maritime community. In reading these formulas alongside contracts left behind by Al-Failakawi and other Indian Ocean nakhodas, I reflect on how law circulated by members of an itinerant society of mariners that sought to forge the contours of a commercial world on their ships and across the waters, and weave it through an imperial seascape. I explore how workaday forms of law and legal epistemologies circulated around the maritime marketplaces of the Indian Ocean world, at the margins of a colonial and imperial political economy, through actors who read across different genres of literature, and who moved between the multiple roles of captain, navigator, supercargo, and scribe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article invites readers to rethink the work that routes can do in world history by braiding together the spatial and historical imaginaries of an itinerant community: the dhow captains (nakhodas) of Kuwait. Through a close reading of two genres of nakhoda writings, logbooks and nautical manuals, it explores the deliberate process by which they constructed their movement across the sea. It suggests that for dhows, travel across the Indian Ocean was a voyage through world history itself—a route along a recent and distant past, entangled with an imperial present. Through these materials historians can move towards a sense of space and time that foregrounds the imaginative processes that produce the Indian Ocean as an historical arena on the part of those who spent their lives traversing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]