Search

This article takes a single genre of the Persian Gulf pearl dive—the chau manual, used to determine the weight-based value of a pearl—and draws on it to think about circulation and commodification in the Indian Ocean world. In reading the chau manual, as well as other writings, it highlights the active processes by which economic actors in the region thought about, and indeed produced, capitalism at sea. As technologies—as means of doing—chau manuals allowed pearl merchants to move from the specificities and idiosyncrasies of nature to the abstractions of the market. More generally, texts like these formed part of the infrastructure through which circulation took place in the maritime marketplace. By thinking through these marketplace genres, we can gain a more textured sense of the processes of knowing, measuring, abstracting, and circulating that underpinned the maritime—a process of active economic thinking that went into the making of global capitalism in a corner of the Indian Ocean world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the contours of debt and labor in the early twentieth-century Persian Gulf pearl dive. It examines the barwa , a declaration exchanged by nakhoda s (dhow captains) about the amounts that divers owed and the terms by which they might be hired out. By looking both through and at the barwa, we find a window into the Indian Ocean maritime bazaar, and into the artifacts through which mobile and itinerant laborers were bound to the dhow and its captain. Maritime actors used these papers to navigate the boundary between person and property, and between free and unfree, all within a changing commercial and legal world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collection of essays in this volume examines forms of business documentation in the late Persianate world and the Indian Ocean, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Looking upon business in its broadest sense, the themes range from property disputes within families to inter-polity and inter-imperial deals, all of which is captured within the notion of the bazaar. Presenting documents and documentary forms written in Persian, but also the associated languages of Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi and Rajasthani, the articles collectively enrich the idea of the Persianate, delineating its specific dispensations within regional contexts, and also its boundaries and limitations. This is also a contribution to the study of Persographia, in this case Persianate rather than just Persian writing. The articles study specific language combinations, lexical elements and usages that came to be deployed in different areas and the legal cultures they provide evidence for. [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]

This paper engages in a microhistory of international law, grounded in the contests surrounding the Muscat Dhows case brought by Great Britain against France in 1905. At the heart of the case was the question of whether the French consul had the right to grant flags and navigation passes to dhows from the southern Omani port of Sur that were suspected of transporting slaves. The case became foundational to studies of the law of the sea, and the ruling is still cited in footnotes in law school textbooks. Buried in the case's proceedings, however, are a series of petitions by the dhow captains that give historians a window into the legal imaginaries of Indian Ocean mariners in an age of empire. Through a close reading of the petitions, I explore how captains located themselves within an imperial legal geography, and appropriated legal technologies—passes and flags—to help them shape the legal possibilities of a changing political and economic seascape. I argue that the claims the captains articulated and the practices they engaged in at sea reveal a maritime legal culture at work, one animated by a long history of encountering regional and global empires at sea. Their documentary practices illuminate how they engaged in and domesticated a body of international law, and illustrate how the regime manifested itself in an ocean that ran thick with legal idioms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]