Published on Reviews in History (http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews)
Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian
Ocean, c1750-1850
Review Number:
1840
Publish date:
Thursday, 15 October, 2015
Author:
Pedro Machado
ISBN:
978-1107070264
Date of Publication:
2014
Price:
£65.00
Pages:
329pp.
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Publisher url:
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/economic-history/ocean-trade-south-asianmerchants-africa-and-indian-ocean-ici17501850?format=HB
Place of Publication:
Cambridge
Reviewer:
Gerard McCann
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 on 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.
The title of the book, originating in a 2005 SOAS doctoral thesis, is rather sweeping for a work whose
strength and claim to originality is its case study focus. Machado looks deliberately and industriously to the
economic lives of the Vaniya merchant caste from the small coastal enclaves of Diu and Daman in (then
Portuguese) western India and their relations with Mozambican customers, agents and providers in the
period 1750?1850. In so doing, he attempts to explain ?the layered and entangled histories of Africa and
South Asia? in an empirically substantiated and specific setting. Gujarati textile production and African
consumption are the beating heart of the story, and so too increasingly are slaves transported from southeast
Africa to India, Arabia and across the Lusophone world. This speaks to the kernel of the book: an exposition
of the dynamic world of regional and global trade via a thematic narrative centered on the quotidian
exchanges of South Asians and Africans. By following the routes, institutions and credit infrastructure of
astute Vaniya cloth merchants, who began to redirect their endeavours from the Red Sea to eastern Africa in
the early 18th century, this book cleverly reveals entangled regional economic histories.
Gujarati textiles were voraciously consumed in Southeast Africa in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Indeed, as Machado explains, they were central to the economy of Mozambique as a form of currency, as
well as desirable commodities in themselves. Crucially, he skillfully recognises Africans as drivers of this
economic zone, arguing that it was African demand that impelled Vaniya family businesses to create long
production chains of Gujarati weavers, creditors and African agents who transported products beyond the
littoral. Machado rightly flags excessive historiographical emphasis on Africans as producers, above all a
legacy of colonial experiences. By contrast, here we see that the diverse social and cultural meanings
inscribed on this cloth by African consumers were critical to the accumulative possibilities of Vaniya
merchants organising seasonal commerce and traversing Indian Ocean world(s) at large in this period.
This leads to the second major argument: that western Indian merchants were absolutely central in mediating
oceanic linkages to stimulate Afro-Asian interaction and wider regional economic dynamism as slaving
replaced ivory extraction as a key sector. Vaniya businessmen communicated African market knowledge
(especially seasonal changes in fashion) to weaving households in Gujarat who specialised in Mozambican
marketplaces. The cloth trade then financed complex credit lines which buttressed long distance trade in the
18th century, especially the reciprocal extraction of high quality ivory demanded in Kathiawar, Bhavnagar
and Surat and, from the 1750s?1780s increasingly, slaves for the western Indian Ocean and southern Atlantic
markets. Machado?s dense analysis and attractive prose cogently proves that Vaniya merchants, despite the
continued preference for ivory trade, ?virtually underwrote the expansion of slaving through their dominance
of the textile trade?and made possible the complex multilateral payments that were required in both the slave
and the ivory trade? (p. 3). By the late 18th century, the availability of New World silver charged this
expansionism of servility (given lower costs in the Indian Ocean and less abundant British anti-slaving
patrols than in the Atlantic). As such, by the 1820s this trade came to dominate the economy. It was the
capacity of Vaniya merchants to accept these New World dollars in exchange for Gujarati cloth that enabled
Atlantic slavers to operate in Mozambique and in turn financed domestic credit networks in western India.
Again Machado, ever conscious of connection, mobility and production across large spaces, nicely ties
together two oceanic worlds in addition to two continents.
The book makes a number of innovative claims that speak to a range of historiographical niches. There is a
convincing argument that the celebrated commercial vibrancy of Kathiawar, home to these Vaniya
merchants, was largely tied up in Gujarati textile consumption in Mozambique. Equally, the commercial and
distributive potential of southeast Africa was driven by an ?inter-regional oceanic embrace?, founded on
South Asian trust and reputational networks, concepts long at the centre of diasporic entrepreneurial
historical analysis (e.g. as discussed pp. 44?59). That is not to say that Empire is absent from the story,
indeed it is well integrated into the multi-layered narrative. From the late 18th century, Portuguese officials
expressed interest in promoting commerce in their separately administered Indian and African territories,
which led to a liberalisation of trade. Vaniya merchants were able to take advantage of this regime through
their ?selective engagement? with the Portuguese state (p. 9), notwithstanding waves of regulative restriction
by those anxious that Indian merchants undermined Portuguese patrimonial ambitions. It was, however,
increasingly, if grudgingly, admitted that the Portuguese presence in Mozambique, Diu and Daman was
?informed by the stark reality of their [Vaniya] vital contribution ? both in terms of their role in facilitating
commerce and their financial contributions through customs payments to state income? (p. 270). Vaniya
merchants played the imperial game with dexterity, exploiting their protection as imperial subjects alongside
customary mahajan (guild network) institutions. These two arenas of imperial subjecthood and diasporic
belonging acted as ?complimentary mechanisms? to entrench commercial advantage yet more deeply in
western India and southeast Africa.
As Machado makes clear, this ?raise[s] questions about the role of indigenous capital in sustaining and
undergirding imperial edifices in South Asia, Africa and elsewhere? (pp. 270?1). It was a situation also
preoccupying late 19th-century and early 20th-century merchant-adventurers in East Africa. Like Vaniya
traders before them, hugely successful Lohana and Ismaili businessmen like Nanji Kalidas Mehta, Manubhai
Madhvani and Allidina Visram adroitly utilised their position as Indian imperial citizens to protect property
interests and representative rights in early colonial Uganda and Kenya. Yet, at the same time, they
articulated Indo-centric and diasporic notions of their role as vanguard agents of modernity, active
throughout the territory long before any colonial official asserted any such progressive claim.(5) Machado?s
work thus provides fodder to those interested in interrogating the periodisation of the Indian Ocean as
European empires opened up a plethora of trading opportunities to Gujarati and Sindhi trading communities
who soon outcompeted Vaniya monopolists. This vitality of South Asian commerce and the ?vast array of its
waterways? thoroughly debunks ?an enduring teleology of the triumph of empire ? as signaling a break with
the past ? in which South Asian merchant networks were displaced and made subservient to the demands of
colonial masters.? Imperial consolidation was not the transformative moment, it rather partially conditioned
certain changes in the forms of an older ?bazaar nexus? (pp. 272?3).
This is a tight and disciplined book that sensibly does not extend its tentacles into this better trodden
historical terrain, rather it presents a rich and highly detailed portrait of earlier regional connectivity. Those
interested in the mechanics of 18th-century shipping and transportation will find much of revisionist and
empirical appeal in chapter two. This argues that Vaniya access to larger, long-distance vessels and skilled
navigators to service the mammoth Mozambican trade dictated comparative advantage over Arab, Swahili,
private European and African merchants. As important to this advantage was the ability to gather
intelligence on changing African taste and transmit such knowledge to specialist Gujarati weaving centres
like Jambusar, to which Machado transports the reader (pp. 142-149) in a fine example of his fluid style. The
sheer weight of trade by these Hindu communities in southeast Arica in the 18th century thus negates older
conceptions of the Indian Ocean as primarily an ?Islamic lake?, a view emerging more from the mid 19thcentury resurgence of Muscat and Zanzibar as powerful maritime entrepots (p. 71).
Yet this is a book that should animate not only those sailing the currents of effervescent Indian Ocean
historiography, but also global historians more generally. With a light-touch, but an incisive comparative
historiographical bedding, Machado draws others in. Stellar work by scholars such as Maxine Berg or
Giorgio Riello has shown how the tastes of 18th-century Europeans and their consumption of Asian luxury
commodities were central to the formation of new socio-cultural practices and the development of the global
economy at large.(6) This book convincingly shows how seemingly more marginal or subaltern economic
actors (especially Africans) also significantly conditioned the larger frames of commerce if one can get at
their histories. More than merely placing such interactions on a larger canvas, Machado?s central thesis is
that such ?inter-regional circuits of production, commercialization, exchange and consumer demand? shaped
the ?contours and parameters? of the global economy (p. 14). His integrated Mozambican, Gujarati, regional
and inter-oceanic scales of analysis provide an exemplary call to arms for an economic history produced in a
region and then used to test the largest scale historical arena. This engagement with debates about grand
global connection is a telling reason why a large audience should imbibe the thesis and think about how to
incorporate such zones into their globalisms.
The book?s rich detail compels in this regard, for instance in the aggregated data of ship voyages to
Mozambique by Vaniya merchants (pp. 188?190 and 227) or slave imports into Diu, Daman and Goa (pp.
250?1). The volume is consistently underpinned by copious archival endeavor in Panjim, Mumbai, Maputo,
Lisbon and London, a wealth of published primary records in Portuguese and English, and a deep trawl
through the pertinent secondary literature. Moreover, and very usefully, the work flags a number of
unpublished dissertations where much of the fine-grained, case study analysis resides. One wonders what
resources ? travelogues, financial records, etc. ? might exist in, say, Gujarat or the Indian union territory of
Daman and Diu. One might logically ask more generally how South Asian language sources, such as they
remain, would tessellate with the thesis presented. No doubt there is a distinct dearth of such material, but a
more explicit methodological reflection of the empirical boons, but also limitations, inherent in this study
would have helped orientate the reader in where to go next, as well as celebrate how far this book takes us.
Could such sources offer up more detail about how the imaginative worlds of these mobile mediators
impacted material lives, as is probed in the work of Nile Green or Engseng Ho?(7) For example, how did
faith affect the trust mechanisms and reputational networks on which Vaniya entrepreneurial success relied?
This is likely an impossible task with the source material at hand and not meant as a criticism of this book
given its remit and superb contribution. The work is strong in its institutional and economic analysis, and
contains choice nuggets of colourful biographical extracts from the archives (e.g. pp. 49?51). It could,
however, also serve as a new launch pad for integrated socio-cultural and economic histories of interregional trading and mobility.
The narrative ends with Vaniya displacement in the mid 19th century as Oman?s al-Busaidi dynasty
expanded control in the western Indian Ocean. By the 1840s Kathiawari Vaniya merchants were being
squeezed in eastern Africa by Kutchi Bhatiya competitors who enjoyed state patronage from Muscat and
soon Zanzibar, the relocated capital of the imperial sultanate from 1840. A wider range of Shia Muslim and
Hindu trading groups would exploit such new commercial opportunities as another form of imperial
expansionism ? that of the British ? enveloped the region in the late 19th century. This later period of AfroIndian oceanic connection has been re-invigorated in recent years by a range of new interventions, varied in
their conceptual, methodological and temporal focus. The frontier-building of the imperial Indian Ocean
sphere; racial divisiveness of colonial economy; universalistic transnational public cultures; and of course
the cross-racial solidarities (and tensions) of anti-colonial nationalism have received much attention,
especially through print culture, urban history and, more recently, literary analysis.(8) Less well covered has
been Machado?s period, a time before new Indian Ocean empires altered forms of peripatetic possibility and
scales of record keeping. He fills a major gap in the extant literature. But this is also a book about the way of
doing large-scale history. Pedro Machado wants to do ?global history from a regional perspective? (p. 13).
He is successful in elegantly relating particularist criss-crossing worlds of South Asian entrepreneurialism,
African consumption and the varied cargos of the western Indian Ocean. Like all the best scholarly works, it
will provoke and satisfy as we interrogate the global turn and its new thalassological avatars.
Notes
1. Dr Clare Anderson, ?Review of Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian
Ocean World? (review no. 738) <http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/738> [2] [accessed 24 July
2015].Back to (1)
2. Markus Vink, ?Indian Ocean Studies and the ?new thalassology??, Journal of Global History, 2
(2007), 41?62.Back to (2)
3. See, for example, Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean
World, 1790?1920 (Cambridge, 2012); Edward Alpers, East Africa and the Indian Ocean (Princeton,
NJ, 2007); Gwyn Campbell The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London, 2004).
For the late 19th and early 20th century S. Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of
Global Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2009), is also provoking debate amongst those disentangling Indian
Ocean worlds.Back to (3)
4. Dr Clare Anderson, review of Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian
Ocean World, (review no. 738).Back to (4)
5. See for example the memoirs Nanji Kalidas Mehta, Dream Half-Expressed: an Autobiography
(Mumbai, 1966); Manubhai Madhvani, Tide of Fortune: a Family Tale (Gurgaon, 2009) and M. G.
Visram, Allidina Visram: the Trailblazer (self-published, 1990).Back to (5)
6. For example, Maxine Berg, ?In pursuit of luxury: global history and British consumer goods in the
eighteenth century?, Past & Present, 182, 1 (2004).Back to (6)
7. Nile Green, ?Africa in Indian ink: Urdu articulations of Indian settlement in East Africa?, Journal of
African History, 53, 2 (2012); Enseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Geneaology and Mobility across the
Indian Ocean (Berkeley, CA, 2006).Back to (7)
8. James Brennan, Taifa: Making nation and Race in Tanzania (Athens, OH, 2012); Gaurav Desai,
Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India and the Afrasian imagination (New York, NY, 2013) and
the copious Indian Ocean/South African work of Isabel Hofmeyr stand out as particularly innovative
recent interventions; while Sana Aiyer, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA,
2015), which puts meat on the bones of an agenda set by Sugata Bose in A Hundred Horizons (2009),
deserves much merit.Back to (8)
The author is happy to accept this review and does not wish to comment.
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