Sovereigns of the Sea

Sovereigns of the Sea
Author: Seema Alavi
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Total Pages: 478
Release: 2023-05-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9357080732

This definitive book on the Sultans of Oman is a thrilling historical account of their action-packed battles, daring expeditions, epic triumphs and ingenious politics in the long nineteenth century. It puts the optic of 'micro-history' on their fascinating lives as they navigated the geopolitics of their time and propelled the politics of the Western Indian Ocean. It offers a comprehensive and in-depth examination of the ambitions of the Omani patriarch Sultan Sayyid Sa?id and his four sons and shows how integral they were to the political culture of the region. Keeping a sensitive finger on the specific temporal and spatial moments in the maritime space that they navigated, it explores their key role in shaping the politics of the Ocean and nurturing the Omani Sultanate on their terms. The groundbreaking narrative sheds light on the role of the Sultans as agents of change, challenging the Eurocentric narrative that views the Indian Ocean as framed in the history of western imperialism and capitalism alone. In addition to its academic rigour, the book is easy to read and engaging, making it an ideal resource for students, scholars and anyone with an interest in the history of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East and South Asia. Its fresh perspective and insightful analysis make it an invaluable contribution to the fast-growing field of Indian Ocean Studies.

Early Global Interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean World, Volume I

Early Global Interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean World, Volume I
Author: Angela Schottenhammer
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2019-02-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319976672

This volume investigates the emergence and spread of maritime commerce and interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean World—the world’s first “global economy”—from a longue durée perspective. Spanning from antiquity to the nineteenth century, these essays move beyond the usual focus on geographical sub-regions or thematic aspects to foreground inter- and trans-regional connections. Analyzing multi-lingual records and recent archaeological findings, volume I examines mercantile networks, the role of merchants, routes, and commodities, as well as diasporas and port cities.

Writing Pirates

Writing Pirates
Author: Yuanfei Wang
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2021-06-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0472902482

In Writing Pirates, Yuanfei Wang connects Chinese literary production to emerging discourses of pirates and the sea. In the late Ming dynasty, so-called “Japanese pirates” raided southeast coastal China. Hideyoshi invaded Korea. Europeans sailed for overseas territories, and Chinese maritime merchants and emigrants founded diaspora communities in Southeast Asia. Travel writings, histories, and fiction of the period jointly narrate pirates and China’s Orient in maritime Asia. Wang shows that the late Ming discourses of pirates and the sea were fluid, ambivalent, and dialogical; they simultaneously entailed imperialistic and personal narratives of the “other”: foreigners, renegades, migrants, and marginalized authors. At the center of the discourses, early modern concepts of empire, race, and authenticity were intensively negotiated. Connecting late Ming literature to the global maritime world, Writing Pirates expands current discussions of Chinese diaspora and debates on Sinophone language and identity.

Reading from the South

Reading from the South
Author: Charne Lavery
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2023-08-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1776148398

This set of essays analyses the work of Isabel Hofmeyr, globally recognised as one of South Africa’s foremost literary and Indian Ocean scholars. The essays elucidate Hofmeyr’s path-breaking studies of transnational histories of the book, African print cultures, and cultural circulations in the Indian Ocean world. This book draws together reflective and analytical essays by renowned intellectuals from around the world who critically engage with the work of one of the global South’s leading scholars of African print cultures and the oceanic humanities. Isabel Hofmeyr’s scholarship spans more than four decades, and its sustained and long-term influence on her discipline and beyond is formidable. While much of the history of print cultures has been written primarily from the North, Isabel Hofmeyr is one of the leading thinkers producing new knowledge in this area from Africa, the Indian Ocean world and the global South. Her major contribution encompasses the history of the book as well as shorter textual forms and abridged iterations of canonical works such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. She has done pioneering research on the ways in which such printed matter moves across the globe, focusing on intra-African trajectories and circulations as well as movements across land and sea, port and shore. The essays gathered here are written in a blend of intellectual and personal modes, and mostly by scholars of Indian and African descent. Via their engagement with Hofmeyr’s path-breaking work, the essays in turn elaborate and contribute to studies of print culture as well as critical oceanic studies, consolidating their findings from the point of view of global South historical contexts and textual practices.

Exploring South Asian Urbanity

Exploring South Asian Urbanity
Author: Suchandra Ghosh
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2021-09-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000462366

This book looks at the typologies of cities and ideas of urbanity. Focusing specifically on cities in South Asia, it analyses the unique planning concepts, archaeology, art, culture, life, and philosophy of various cities of ancient and modern South Asia. The book explores the concept of urbanity and the idea of an ideal city; it interrogates general notions of urbanity by juxtaposing city life in various periods and geographies of South Asia. By analysing the demography, architecture, rituals, and culture of various cities, it looks at the different spatialities of these places in terms of their size, population, commerce, and philosophy as well as the reasons behind the transformation of these places into urban centres. Drawing from various archeological and literary sources, the volume includes rich details about heterogeneity, rituals, festivals, social stratification, penal systems, famines, and insurrections in ancient cities as well as modern cities like Lahore, Dhaka, and Calcutta, among many others in South Asia. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of ancient and modern history, archaeology, urban studies, urban and town planning, urban sociology, urban geography, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, ancient and medieval architecture, heritage studies, conservation studies, and South Asian studies.

Planetary Hinterlands

Planetary Hinterlands
Author: Pamila Gupta
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2023-12-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3031242432

This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and more-than-human lively processes and forms of care that go on even in sites defined by capitalist extraction and political abandonment. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the book rethinks hinterland materialities, affectivities, and ecologies across places and cultural imaginations, Global North and South, urban and rural, and land and water.

India in the Indian Ocean World

India in the Indian Ocean World
Author: Rila Mukherjee
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2022-03-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 9811665818

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.

Assured Self, Restive Self

Assured Self, Restive Self
Author: Prasanta Chakravarty
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2023-07-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9354359418

The book explores the encounter of the self with situations of crisis from diverse disciplinary and cultural perspectives from antiquity to contemporary times. A crisis is at once a historically situated phenomenon and a recurring idea of endangerment or a breakdown in creaturely living. By making our choices stark and difficult, crisis opens up the possibility for genuinely fresh and unexpected beginnings. At the most fundamental level, crisis is the disintegration of relationality among creatures. In fact, crisis is a battle of attrition with and within selfhood. It has the potential to turn into a norm in everyday interaction. It then stops being an exception and becomes the very condition of our living. Through the rubrics of the assured and the restive, the volume addresses how selfhood encounters and negotiates concentric circles of crisis in life and literature. Does the idea of crisis allow us to formulate the idea of self in a particular way? How do certain sources and resources within the self – stoic or heroic, political and creative – come into being during crisis? While some essays delve into questions of repose and sensuality by highlighting specific cases and trajectories from the subcontinent, others deal with questions of mythology, politics and art in a wider sense. One essay directly addresses the core literary question of the uncanny and its relation to selfhood. While specific concerns illuminate each essay, the volume speaks with a collective, global sense of crisis that faces humanity now and tentatively offers some prospects to deal with it.

Archives and Archiving in the 21st Century

Archives and Archiving in the 21st Century
Author: Radhika Seshan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2024-08-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040103294

Archives intersect with our lives in many ways. We have archives of our own, documenting family memories and histories. Then, there are larger archives that document different aspects of the past — memories, identities, location, time, and space. This volume explores changing notions of the archive in different areas, to trace the ways in which the archives continue to be used in history. It examines how history, the historian, and the archive interact in many ways to look at the past and record it. The chapters in this volume discuss an array of diverse and important themes regarding the making and usage of archives which include reconstructing pre-modern economic history from the Dutch archives; the role of India Office Records in the British Library; reading the Rungia Gosavi Affair in 1857 from colonial archives; and Uday Shankar’s Kalpana as archive besides the usage of archives to study nationalism, historiography and literature, water and Chola history, Mysorean invasions in Kerala, and cyberspace. The chapters also explore how archives impact and shape our investigations. First of its kind, this important work will be of interest to scholars and researchers of archival studies, research methodology, archaeology, Indian history, ancient history, medieval history, modern India, anthropology, and history in general.

Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought

Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought
Author: Dilip M Menon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2023-03-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000859495

This book imagines the ocean as central to understanding the world and its connections in history, literature and the social sciences. Introducing the central conceptual category of ocean as method, it analyzes the histories of movement and traversing across connected spaces of water and land sedimented in literary texts, folklore, local histories, autobiographies, music and performance. It explores the constant flow of people, material and ideologies across the waters and how they make their presence felt in a cosmopolitan thinking of the connections of the world. Going beyond violent histories of slavery and indenture that generate global connections, it tracks the movements of sailors, boatmen, religious teachers, merchants, and adventurers. The essays in this volume summon up this miscegenated history in which land and water are ever linked. A significant rethinking of world history, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially connected history and maritime history, literature, and Global South studies.