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Fahad Ahmad Bishara, "Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History" (U California Press, 2025)
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A
Go beyond the verses and achieve a deeper understanding of Scripture with the Rebind Study Bible App. An audio experience of the Bible interwoven with expert commentary. The Rebind Study Bible App reads Scripture to you, enriching your comprehension with insights from the world renowned New International commentary on the Old and the New Testament in an accessible podcast episode format.
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B
Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. Matthew chapter 6. Each day will have its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
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A
Use the Rebind Study Bible App's chat function to ask questions and get answers in real time. That's thought provoking discussion and analysis rooted in decades of research and wisdom from more than 40 scholars at your fingertips. The Rebind Study Bible App is a new way to experience the Bible with enhanced depth, at your own pace in the moments you have. Search the Apple App Store for Rebind Study Bible or go to rebind app.com newbooks network for a free seven day trial. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Production. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
My goal with Monsoon Voyagers is to open up the container of the nation and to let its content spill out and reconnect with its component parts. In other parts of the Indian Ocean.
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C
As empires rose and fell like the tide, one modest dao kept moving. Today, we cross the Indian Ocean with historian Fahadhushara and his new book Monsoon Voyagers An Indian Ocean History, published by University of California Press in October 2025. We board a vessel the crew called the Crooked, sailing from Kuwait in the Gulf to India and back in 1924-1925. Reading a Captain's log alongside letters, contracts, maps, even pawns and more. We watch Gulf merchants wire sale and bargain their way to into colonial capitalism while keeping the streetwise vernacular of the bazaar. But first, a bit about the Author Fahd IB Shara is an Associate professor of History at the University of Virginia, currently at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. He's the author of the multiple prize winning book A Sea of Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, which I translated into Arabic in 2023. In Monsoon Voyagers, he builds a micro history from deck level notes to tell an ocean wide long duray narrative. I'm your host Ahmed Al Muzmi, Assistant professor of History at United Arab Emirates University. Our void will track the DAO's route. Each port of Call opens a core theme in the book, accompanied by a postscript of a primary source from the world of Monsoon Voyagers. Monsoon Voyagers doesn't just tell a vivid imaginative narrative, it teaches. Each Port of Call chapter can work as a standalone module and the brief inscription interlude double as turnkey primary source labs perfect for document analysis, quick mapping and mini quant work with weights, measures and credit instruments among others. It invites undergraduates into a connected oceanic world and the big questions of world history, while graduate students get a method how to read vernacular archives across scales and languages to design their own trans regional archive driven projects. A quick heads up traditional local musical interludes will punctuate our voyage as chapter markers you can use to pause and reflect as we sail from Kuwait to Shatt Al Arab, then out across the Gulf to Oman, Karachi, Gujarat, Bombay and the Malabar Coast. We will return via Muscat and Bahrain, dropping anchor once more in Kuwait. Fahad, welcome aboard.
- [05:28]
B
Yeah, thanks for having me Ahmed.
- [05:30]
C
Of course, my pleasure. And I'm really excited to start this voyage along with our listeners of New books in the Indian Ocean World podcast. To start our voyage, let's learn more about the making of Monsoon Voyagers. Before you met the Indian Ocean in books, you met it at home. Your grandfather Isa Yagub Shara, who was born in 1919 and passed away in 2020, was an Okhada charting winds, ties and trade like your protagonist Al Fayr Qawi. How did that maritime inheritance mold your imagination and inform the way you see the Indian Ocean world. Is there a particular memory or story that opened that horizon for you?
- [06:11]
B
Yeah, sure. So, as you said, my grandfather was a Nukada. He wasn't an especially talkative person when came to his past, his sailing past with family. He did give interviews on television and we would watch them from time to time when we were kids. But the memory, the memory that stands out the most about my grandfather was actually much later, in the 1990s, early 1990s, they'd found his old ship in. In a harbor in Dubai. And. And then the Kuwaiti government bought it and had it refurbished. And now it sits at the. The National Science center in Kuwait, but. Scientific center. And that, that time when they found the ship and they were refurbishing it, I remember my father taking us to go look at that ship and sort of, me and my sisters sort of hopping around on the deck and I remember thinking like, oh, this is. This is pretty interesting. And then there was a ship right there who was trying to explain things to me. And I was too young, not really interested enough to, to really grasp it, but that seed was sort of planted there, I guess. And I went to college later and, and then I started studying the Middle east, and then later in. In graduate school started studying the Middle East. It felt that that history, that particular dimension of Gulf history, was really missing from our understanding of the Middle East. And so that, I suppose, was the product of my childhood and my being around my grandfather.
- [07:47]
C
Are you saying you're part of a generation that was disconnected from this maritime inheritance?
- [07:52]
B
Absolutely. I mean, I had a sense that my GR was a ship captain. I knew that he was a ship captain, of course, but I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know what these other places were like when they would say things like Bombay or Zanzibar or Calicut. I didn't know where those places were and I didn't know what connection we had with them. You know, we grew up, of course, the, the Arab. The Arab world was much more a part of our orbit. Beirut, Cairo, Riyadh, places like that. But then also, of course, Europe and the United States. My geography or my geographic orientation was westwards from the Gulf and not eastwards from the southwards. So I had no sense of what these histories were like or what these worlds meant. And I don't think that any of us really did. It was not something that we were taught as you know, Ahmed, you grew up in the Gulf as well. We are given a very Sort of potted narrative, the maritime past. They would say things like our forefathers were fishermen, pearl divers and, and traders. But they would never tell us what any of that. And when you would go and you would see these things presented at museums, they'd be presented in the most generic of ways. And so none of us really had a sense of what that world meant and what its content was and what that content meant for who we were.
- [09:13]
C
Let's talk about the framing of Monsoon Voyager. Why a micro history at sea? What kind of single doubt reveal that national or imperial histories that we have missed about the Gulf and the Indian Ocean world?
- [09:26]
B
That's a great question. So why a micro history at sea? In writing from a micro historical perspective, I'm trying to get at a historical world, a geography that other scales don't quite capture. I wanted to recreate the life worlds of captains, of merchants, of sailors, brokers, of all of their associates. And these spill out beyond the containers of the nation, as we all know. They spill out beyond the containers of the area studies frameworks that we all world grew up with and are trained in. Only the oceanic container, the Indian Ocean container can, can fit this world. But why micro? The micro scale allowed me to tell this world from the perspective of the people who inhabited it. It allowed me to sketch out this geography as they lived it and they worked it and they inhabited it. It also allowed me to engage with their materials much more closely. It allowed me to explore what those materials say, what they can tell us, what they can't tell us, all of those things. So it's a micro perspective on an Indian Ocean scale, micro historical sensibility brought to the Indian Ocean. And so it's a micro history at sea, or a micro history on the move, whatever you want to call it. Or I should say that I'm not the first person to do this sort of. In the Atlantic historiography there is a lot of work on the voyages of different slave ships. The Diligent, the o', Hare, lots of, lots of ships like that. The. There's a whole genre of voyage narratives and literature, of course, and I read those for a very long time and was always captivated by, fascinated by them. And I was very deeply steeped in that genre of literature as I was writing soon Voyagers. But I just want to point out that, you know, Monsoon Voyagers may be one of the first of its kind for the Indian Ocean, but it's not the first micro history on an oceanic scale. It's not the first book to make the point that we can write about oceanic phenomena from the standpoint of a ship. For a long time in Indian Ocean history, we wrote about the, the area from the top down, from the perspectives of European empires and trading companies, and sketched out this world in very abstract ways. Even as we filled in a lot of. Of course, that that's not been the case for the last 15 or 20 years, I would say, really since Aung Sang Ho's Graves of tarim shigada boses 100 horizons, people started thinking about different ways of writing this Indian Ocean world. The. The contribution that I think here is to take a very particular set of materials and use to tell a story of oceanic circulation and connectivity from the perspective of the people who engaged in those sorts of circulation and more than that, to draw out their own writings and conceptual frameworks for understanding this world and for engaging in this world, using that to tell an Indian Ocean history. And that's why I was adamant that this book began titled An Indian Ocean History rather than a Gulf History or, or a History of a Ship or whatever you're going to call it. It is very much an Indian Ocean history, but it is one Indian Ocean. So the invitation is to readers in my academic community to, to take up the opportunity to write other oceanic micro histories. And there are lots of people out there who are doing terrific.
- [12:53]
C
Right. Going back to your grandfather Isa, I've said that he was an okada, but in many ways he is protagonist in Feitachawi. And as you know, coming from the Gulf, most of the histories that we have are histories of great men or chiefs or sheikhs and so on. Why choose a typical Nokada as a protagonist? And how does that reset Indian Ocean and Middle east historiography?
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B
So there, there are lots of answers to that question in Indian Ocean history. We see lots of nokidas around, we encounter them everywhere in the archive. And people write about, people mention nokhadas in their work. But we seldom any sense of what these nawakida are doing. There's now a separate literature in the Gulf, Arabic language literature and people who are writing in English on the sort of maritime culture of the Gulf, maritime heritage of the Arabian Peninsula. And that literature is obsessed with nawachida and their activities. But with very few exceptions, it's not plugged into any history. Suspended in time, suspended in some pre oil past. We don't really get a sense of where we are. So, so I chose to write about Al Fayla Chawi. I write, I spell his name Alphaoui, because That's the proper spelling. But you would. You would pronounce it Al Fayd al chawi. So as I speak, I'm going to say Al Fayd al Chawi. I chose to write about al Fayla chawi for a few different. My grandfather, as you said, is Anokh, and he would have been the much more obvious choice. And I think most people who knew that I was writing this book, at least people back home in Kuwait, expected that I was going to be writing about my grandfather and were disappointed and confused when they heard that I wasn't going to be right. There are a few different reasons why I didn't want to write my grandfather. First, it's too close to home. There's a bit. A bit of baggage there that I didn't necessarily want to address. And anyway, my grandfather was one of the later Noah. He sailed in the 1930s and 1940s until the 1950s. And there's a. It's a different time. The other reason I chose to write about was that the family opened up their collection, and it was an incredibly rich collection. And we'll talk about that soon, I hope. As soon as I saw the materials that they had held onto and the materials that. That the Nuhida Abdul Majid Al Fayr had generated, I knew that I had to write about this guy. I knew that he was going to be my subject. And then later on, over the course of my conversations with the family, when I learned that he was related to the other Nochida who was present in the book, Mansoor Al Khariji, that became even more fortuitous. Serendipitous. Al Khariji wrote a manuscript that detailed different principles of navigation and trade, and the family had that manuscript. Al Khariji was also, somewhat famously, the Nohida that traveled with Wilfred Thesiger in the Gulf. And so once I learned that there was a connection between these two, I thought, listen, this is too delicious to pass up. I had to write about. By grounding the story in, I could have chosen many Nawachi that just happened that that was the collection I ended up reading. And it was just so rich. And all of these things came together, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity any. By grounding the story in Feawi. I got to do a few different things First, I got to take these people, these Nawachida that people knew about and wrote about, at least in the local scholarship in the Gulf. But I got to take them and plug them into the currents of history through which they sailed. And as we wrote about these nawachada, we often wrote about them in really ahistorical ways. Either there are these caricatures that British officials would encounter at sea, often in relation to the slave trade or piracy or some illicit activity, or they were, you know, these great heroes of the nation that were totally stripped of any historical reality. And so writing about El Feli Shawi was an opportunity for me to take these figures, these nawachada, and ground them in the actual world which they second. And most importantly, the writing, writing the. The story around Al Fayd Chawi and writing the story around Al Nuhida allowed me to move the narrative from one place to another. And that was critical for to tell the story, to tell this Indian Ocean story was that I would be able to move from place to place. And the movement was not for the sake of movement. Of course, Daos move and in Indian Ocean history were obsessed with circulations and movements and mobilities. But for me, it was through their movement that I could sketch out this bigger world to which the Gulf historically belonged. Or I should say, one of the worlds to which the Gulf historically belonged. Of course, the Indian Ocean world. When we write Middle Eastern history, the Gulf is largely absent. It is really just an unimportant, important appendage of the historiography of East. Historiography of the Middle east, with very few exceptions, is dominated by the Ottoman Empire and post Ottoman societies. Anything medieval, of course, is a little bit more widespread. The Gulf does have a place in medieval Indian Ocean historiography. Even then, it's quite marginal to the story of medieval Indian Ocean history, with the exception of Baghdad, Basra, the Abbasids and things like that. But even then, the actual Gulf is not especially present in modern Middle Eastern historiography. It's even more absent. The Gulf only appears after the rise of oil, as though the pre oil past was, you know, and no man's land historically. By bringing the Gulf into this Indian Ocean world, I wanted to show that the pre oil past. In the pre oil past, the Gulf did belong to a dynamic historical arena. And that historical arena did leave a deep imprint on Gulf society, economy and politics. They're deeply entangled in one another and that we could begin to ask new questions of the Gulf and sketch out new narratives and describe new processes and think about new periodization. Now, not everybody agrees with me that the Gulf was necessarily a part of the Indian Ocean world. And I would never make the claim that the Gulf was solely a part of the Indian Ocean world. There's a group of historians, a rather large group of historians, that that would want to claim the Gulf for the Middle east and situate it more firmly in the literature on the Arabian Peninsula. I'm not denying that the Gulf is a part of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf societies were also Arabian Silver Society, but that's not the point. The point isn't to say that it's an either or. The point is to think about the kinds of questions that we can ask of Gulf society and Gulf history and to think about the historiographical frontiers that we can open with our research. And I felt that there was a whole world of the Indian Ocean and Gulf that had yet to be explored. And writing with these Nawachhida, writing with Al Fayla Chawi, sketching out his world as he lived it and as he worked it, allowed me to think about those sorts of things. At the same time, for Indian Ocean historians, this is also Indian Ocean history actually is largely ignorant of the Gulf. They do not. Indian Ocean historians, with few exceptions, do not really think very much about what's happened in Gulf in recent decades. Maybe in the past couple of decades. South Arabia, Yemen especially, has become more popular to write about. Over the last 10 years, we saw a resurgence in literature on the Omani empire in the Indian Ocean, and I was one of the people to write about that. But the rest of the Gulf is largely disconnected from the Indian Ocean world in Indian Ocean historiography. And so for Indian Ocean historians, this is also an invitation to think about the Gulf part of the Indian Ocean world. And through the Nohida, through I could tie the Gulf more firmly into this Indian. And then, of course, there's the really, really rich material that the Nochida himself left behind, which tells us all sorts of things about the Indian Ocean that.
- [20:47]
C
We opened the book with. The documentary practice that you found in the collection you've mentioned. And the claim reframes the DAO's Roznama as a documentary practice spanning manuals, contracts, bureaucratic papers, what did this hybrid archive reveal to sailors that state records could not?
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B
So let me answer that question first by telling you what the rusname looks like. For the most part, part, Dorus Nama as a genre is incredibly boring to read. The log of the journey itself is incredibly dry. We imagine ship's logs to be deeply interesting, full of observations of things that are happening on the ship and things that are happening at shore. Something like a diary of the captain. It couldn't be further from that as a genre it literally just marks where the ship is at in space and time and tells you what the weather conditions are like and tells you what the water. Not much than that. The only other detail that the captain might offer from time to time is whether a cargo was loaded or unloaded. And there's times where they tell you what the cargo is, and there are times where they don't tell you what the cargo is. Sometimes they'll mention seeing another ship. Depending on the rusnama that you're reading, the captain might give you the name of the captain whom he encountered, but most of the time they don't tell you that either. And that's essentially it. Once in a while they'll tell you that something major happened if a sailor died or marked the day. But for the most part, it is incredibly dry, terse, repetitive. These ruznamas had been published before. There's a maritime historian of Kuwait and he spent an entire career, and deeply indebted, he spent an entire career transcribing these rusnamas and publishing these rusnamas. And so we have a collection of a dozen, maybe 15 Rusnamas that are published by the center for Research and Studies on Kuwait. So this is not new as a source. These rusnamas had been published from the early 90s onwards. The difference, though, was that the manuscript, the one that was in Feiri Chawi's collection, had all sorts of other notes, aside from the lag of these notes scattered throughout it, that were in many ways much more interesting than the lagavidj itself. These never made it into the published version, for reasons I can't explain. It may be that Al Hijji just didn't think they were important. It may be that there were other editorial decisions that were made along the way that he had nothing to do anyway. These notes that are scattered through the. These are notes on different forms of contracts, templates for different kinds of contracts, models for different kinds of agreements, forms and templates for different kinds of letters, bureaucratic documents, notes on navigation, copies of navigational principles, diagrams, sometimes maps of different ports, all sorts of things. And. And as you read these, you get a much more textured sense of a world of paper that moves onto and off the deck of the Dao as it moves from place to place. The different contracts the nokhida entered into, the different letter forms that the Nochida engaged in, but also all of the things that the nochida read on navigation, all of the different ideas that the Nochida had on measurement of different goods on Measurement, different aspects of the journey, journey, conversions of currencies, conversions of goods, all sorts of different things. This, for me, was a picture of the Nochida as a thinker, the Nochida as a reader and a thinker. This is thinking on the fly. We, we often, when we write intellectual history, we engage with treatises, things like that, you know, ready publications that exhibit fully thought out ideas. This is not that. This is thinking on navigation and thinking the business of the dao that we see in these different notes that are scattered throughout the Rznama. All told, collected together, we can, we can think about a. The Nohida as an intellectual, but we have to do the work of piecing these different parts of it together and connecting it to the actual work of navigation and the work. SAM.
- [25:50]
C
Our voyage starts in Kuwait, a northern gulfport driven by pearling and trade in the 1920s. The harbor hums with provisioning. Rice sacks thud coir rope coils, water casks cling along the planks. An okhada scans for crew, or as Coitis called him, Feluchawi, keeps a ledger that opens like a small stage. Chairs, advances and risk step on and off. It's also a portable office. Routes, accounts, letters, model contracts, sketches, poems and prayers. The harbor lies inside British imperial waters, but the work moves through merchant networks and local nominations, knowledge and a steady negotiation with empire. Before we start sailing in the Gulf and across to the Indian Ocean, please paint us a picture of Kuwait and the Gulf at that time. How did caravan routes, migrants and important ship materials make a desert port like Kuwait into a global hinge?
- [26:56]
B
That's a great question. And I would say that even thinking of Kuwait as a desert port, a reflection of our own geographical orientation. If we think from the land, Kuwait is at the edge of what we would consider to be the Middle East. But if we're thinking from the sea, Kuwait is a maritime port. It's not a, it's not a desert. So rather than think of Kuwait as a remote corner of an inhospitable desert, which of course, Ahmed, you don't do that, but I think that in the literature on the Gulf, if we think of the Gulf geographically, it is on the periphery of the Middle east, and beyond it is some other container, we need to reorient ourselves geographically. If we think from the water, it, it is not the periphery of anything. It's quite central to this arena. So rather than think of Kuwait as at the periphery of a desert, I wanted to write about Kuwait as part of already knitted into this Indian Ocean world as bridging between this Indian Ocean world and the Arabian Peninsula. I wanted to think of it in motion from the beginning of the story. So from the outset, we have ships coming in and going out. We have camel caravans coming in and out from the desert desert. We have goods coming in and out. We have porters moving throughout it all. This is a world in motion. And this is a town embedded in a world of circulation. And I wanted to write about it. It's also, and this is an important point, it's also a nation of migrants. Kuwaitis are people who arrived in the place from elsewhere. The original inhabitants of the. Of the area all came from different places. And the town's inhabitants arrived in waves over the course of decades and centuries. Centuries. We've forgotten a lot of this, but that's a different question. This world of circulation left its imprint on the organization of the town, the urban topography, the different neighborhoods and the people who were living in those neighborhoods. How these neighborhoods were often divided by professional classes related to this world of shipping. The merchant neighborhoods, the Nawakada neighborhood, the sailor neighborhood. There are shipyards up and down the coast of Kuwait that are deeply part of the fabric of the town. There are marketplaces scattered throughout Kuwait. And so sketching out this town, I wanted to show the ways in which this oceanic world, but also the. The world of the desert trade, the desert hinterland, left its imprint on the ways in which this town was. Was shaped. And it is this world that Al Fayla Chawi belongs to. Actually, Al Feluchawi does not belong to this world at all. In some ways he belongs to, as the name suggests, he belongs to or he comes from the of. It's a small island off the coast of Kuwait, a way station, historically, from ancient times. A way station between Mesopotamia, Dilmun, Indus river valley civilizations. A place where Alexander the Great supposedly left a. A garrison. We have ancient Greek ruins on Velje. It's a historical island. It's also very much a part of the orbit of Kuwait. And it is connected to other places like the island of Khadij in the near island of Kharaj, where Al Fayuchawi actually comes from. And his who is his teacher and later his father in law, he also comes from. So in the town of Kuwait, we meet Ferichawi's employer. We see the process by which this Nuhida and other Nawakida are hired. We see the process by which these Nawakhida end up hiring sailors. We see all of the bonds of credit and debt that tie them to the Kuwaiti marketplace place. And we see this dao enterprise come into being amidst this world of circulation.
- [30:46]
C
Let's talk about the change that connected all of this trade debt, something that you've written, your first book on. Debt here isn't a morality tale just like the first book. It's infrastructure, right? How did advances bind crew and merchant into one working enterprise? Are mariner debt best understood as coercion, or as you say, wealth and people binding firms together?
- [31:10]
B
That's an excellent question, Ahmed. The debt, as you know, was pervasive in this Indian Ocean world. And I say as much in my first book called the Sea of Debt, and there as here. I make the claim that debt is not something that we ought to think of as pernicious. It's not meant to exploit mariners. It can be exploitative at times, of course, and there are times where it does become exploitative. But for the most part, we ought to think of it maybe less as debt and more as credit. Credit enables economic activity. Credit enables a world of commerce and labor to happen. Now, these two are, of course, related to one another. Credit and debt are two sides of the same coin. Credit here, or debt, depending on your perspective, binds laborers to the enterprise. It binds mariners to the dao enterprise and binds the nohida to a merchant. So the merchant loans money to the nokhida, who then loans money to the mariners. They're all bound together in this. This dao enterprise, in what we might think of as a firm. And this is the way in which you build a core of people that's able to manage your vessel. And this is how you build a crew, essentially. And if you're a merchant, if you're a mohudda, you want good mariners, and so you. You seek out the best ones, and you give them advances of money, and sometimes you give them gift, you give them other inducements. Oftentimes you give them larger loans so that you can bind them to the enterprise, so that you can attract them to the enterprise. And this keeps people a part of the enterprise from one season to another, not because they're trying to work off a debt. There's not an expectation that you're going to repay the debt, but that it binds you into these ties of obligation with your creditor, who is also your employer through the big employer, the merchant. All of these people are embedded in the marketplaces of Kuwait. Oftentimes when they're getting credit, they're not getting credit in terms of cash. They're just Getting access to the merchants stores, Their families are getting access to the merch stores. Sometimes they're getting cash, sometimes they're getting sacks of rice, which they then sell for cash, especially if we're talking about itinerant sailors. But for the most part, these sailors are drawn from the community itself and are embedded in the marketplace. Their families are embedded in the marketplace. So rather than think of these people as being in debt to one another, we ought to think of them as having ongoing accounts with one another, and these ongoing accounts with one another, these books that they keep with another. This is part of how the Dao enterprise functioned, and this is a form of building wealth in people. What mattered for a dao enterprise, the success of a dao enterprise, was the people on board the ship. If you were going to be a successful merchant, if you're going to be a successful nohida, you had to have people around you. And so you used credit to bind good people, valuable people around you. That was the principal form of wealth.
- [34:11]
C
You structured the the book Monsoon Voyagers across ports, of course, call that are separated by interludes that you call inscription, consisting of debts, passage guides, letters, transfers, conversions, maps, poems and accounts. And all of them are mini archives. How do they help us see the Dao world as paper thick and culture rich?
- [34:36]
B
Thanks for that question, Ahmed. I wanted to use these inscriptions to dive more deeply into the paper world of the Dao, to think about all of the legal and bureaucratic forms that made the voyage. This is, in part, my own interests or inclinations as a historian. I'm somebody who's deeply drawn to paper and to bureaucracy. I often think about these things, legal forms. I love thinking about those sorts of records. But at the same time, I wanted to think about the archive, the dao. Now, I didn't want to do it all in one go. I could have written a chapter in which I unpack all of these things together. Instead, I chose to spread it out over the book, to write a postscript to each chapter, which we later called inscription, and to use those postscripts to think about individual pieces of paper and the bigger questions and issues that individual pieces of paper could raise, to think about law and the marketplace and capitalism and all of the historiographical stuff that excites historians but doesn't necessarily excite the general reader. And like I said, I could have done that in one chapter, but I decided to spread it out. I experimented at first with just having a postscript on one piece of paper, and it worked. And so I stuck with it, I should say this idea was not necessarily mine. I borrowed the method from Greg Denning, the brilliant historian and anthropologist who wrote on Pacific societies. And in his book Islands and Beaches, which is about encounters in the Pacific and cultural encounters in the Fake, Denning has these postscripts to his chapters where he talks about the chapters talk about society and culture in the Marquesas Islands. And in the postscript, Denning reflects on encounters between anthropology and history as discipline. And I thought, oh, this is really brilliant and it works really well. I wonder if I can use the same sort organization. I hadn't seen much of it elsewhere, so I. I was drawn to it as a way of organizing my thinking. But at the same time I understood that not everyone was going to be drawn to this idea of a world mediated by paper. Not everyone was going to necessarily care about the archive as such. And as a historian, I deeply care about the archive, the materials that we use to write our histories, and I think we need to take those seriously as part of the narrative. At the same time, not everyone is going to necessarily be interested in thinking about the Nochida as an intellectual reader. These are things that excite historians, maybe, but don't necessarily excite other people who are reading the book. So I wanted to bracket those off from the. The rest of the conversation while still weaving them deeply into it. So people who don't want to read about those things can just read the voyage and the stories of these different port cities without necessarily getting deep into the archive. For me, this is an integral part of the book, and it's where I make the point and at a central point to the book, that the Nohida is an intellectual thinker in his own right. He's a maritime minochio, for those who get the reference.
- [37:43]
C
The crooked noses into open water north to the Shattal Arab doves gather of al FA prows pointing up river toward date country. We are now at Basra's orbit. Villages of palms, estates and wharves Freighted contracts make dates. The crooked or Al Awai moves north from Kuwait to Basra. The main commodity here is dates, something that we would think is traded from time immemorial. How did dates become a modern commodity by the turn of the 20th century? How did telegraph, rail and steam reshape dao commerce without replacing it?
- [38:58]
B
That's an excellent question. You know, I didn't have any suppositions about what the date trade would look like when I started writing this. I didn't really know very much about the Date trade at all. I knew that dates were important and that I knew and I knew that daos carried dates from the Gulf to India. But beyond that, I couldn't have told you too much more about it. The dates were the main export from the Gulf to the Indian Ocean world. And the principal cargo of daos was something that historians generally grasp. What we didn't necessarily grasp was the ways in which this date trade had totally changed by the second half of the 19th century with the coming of steamships, telegraph technologies, all of these other technologies. And by the early 20th century, banking. This had become some sort of, we might say, like agrarian capitalism. The dates had become completely commodified and were marked for certain markets abroad. There was constant communication of prices from different places. This was a scale and scope of the day trade that we hadn't seen before. Of course, southern Iraq, the largest date producing region in the world and a historical exporter of dates. But we never fully grasped what that business looked like and how it was connected to these different markets, marketplaces. For me, the challenge as a historian was how are you going to tell the story of the date trade? How are you going to make it come to life? This is where a different collection of materials comes into the picture. The business collection of Muhammad bin Abdullah, who's a merchant, shiri merchant, residing in Basra, does business in the Shatt Al Arab, has business associates from all over the Indian Ocean, Russian world. He's Kuwaiti, family in Kuwait, has business associates there, has business associates up and down the coast of India. His collection is just full of orders, letters, receipts, orders coming in and out of Basra. This network of associates up and down the coasts of the Indian Ocean world who are writing to him with different orders, with information on market conditions, with prices. His collection includes account ledgers, receipts, money orders. It's a whole business architecture archive and it's deeply embedded in this world of the date business, which he was, of course, a major part of. Through his business archive, through his collection, we are able to grasp the different varieties of dates that are being produced and exported, where they're going to, how they're organized into shipments on daos and steamers. We're able to get a sense of how these merchants are connected to brokers in different parts of the Indian Ocean world. But, but also people in the Shatt Al Arab itself were securing orders for the merchants, orders of dates to be exported abroad. Their relationships to different growers, farmers, peasants, falaeen. We see the ways in which the Shatt was bound into this Indian Ocean world through the activities of merchants like Maitru.
- [42:02]
C
You wrote merchants from around the Gulf sought to own land in the shop during Basra's grave. Gilded Age. Let's talk a bit about Basra's Gilded Age. What do those mansions and groves that you described beautifully say about Gulf capital on the Scheldt?
- [42:16]
B
There's a long history of merchants from the Gulf come to buy agrarian land along the shelt. This is a good investment for your merchant. Part of the bedrock of the Gulf economy, we might say the date export. If you are somebody who has wealth, who has capital to invest, then you would do well to invest it in land. Date producing land along the Shatt Al Arab. We often when we think of the Gulf and the Gulf maritime economy, we focus overwhelmingly on the pearl dive. And the pearl dive is important and pearls as a form of wealth capital is incredibly important. The day trade is equally important. And agrarian land along the shuttle is equally important to the economy of the Gulf and to the maritime economy of the Gulf. The ship owning merchants of the Gulf, the trading families of the Gulf, were not trading in pearls, such as some of them were. But the vast majority were trading in agrarian products produced in the Shatt Al Arab. Dates being kiyom. As the date trade takes on new forms in the second half of the 19th century, as Basra enters what Camille Cole calls a gilded age, Kuwaiti merchants and other merchants from around the Gulf begin to flock to Basra. As wealth is being produced in the pearl trade and through other means around the Gulf, they all invest capital in land. Along the shelt we see the emergence of the small farming along the coast or along the banks of the Shatla Arab. And these are controlled by large land owning merchants and their agents who hire peasants to work the land and produce dates. And every summer and fall daos would call there to load dates for markets in India and South Arabia and elsewhere. So this is a way in which wealth circulated and would continue to accumulate. And a crew on the banks of the Shatt Al Arab. There are merchant families that were especially active in this and were active from very early on. One family that was especially visible to this was the Al Ibrahim family. The Al Ibrahims, they have records of purchasing land along the SH from very early on, from the. From the early 1800s. We have records of land deeds involving them purchasing, purchasing property from their neighbors, inheriting property from others, all sorts of ways in which they amass this wealth in different parts. The Shatta Arab, especially the village of Dora, to the point that these become the Ibrahims, become the principal landowners in the Shatt and become something like merchant princes of the Shatt. And Dora specifically becomes called Dorat Ibrahim. This landowning all of the people that these merchants landowners had at their command also gave them political authority. They're able to mobilize people. They had dependence and they had labor and that they could mobilize at different moments. And the Ibrahims of course were famous in that after Sheikh Mubarak of Kuwait killed his brothers, took over the emirate, the Yusuf Ibrahim specifically were because of the the amount of dependence that they had command over. The Ibrahims were also very active in politics. Yusuf Al Ibrahim, the sort of scion of this family in the late 19th century, sisters had married the rulers of Kuwait. When Barak Al Sabah, the ruler of Kuwait in the 1890s, when he murdered his brothers so that he could take over the rulership of Kuwait, Yusuf Ibrahim challenged him and tried to launch failed invasion of Kuwait and then also petitioned the Ottoman Empire to intervene in their affairs. This is something that is recalled by Fred Anscombe in his book and also in the work Camille Cole. So these people who are owning land along the sh and who are growing dates, this isn't simply an economic investment, business investment, investing in land along the Shatt was also an investment in your own political authority on the.
- [47:08]
C
The cricket clears, the bar turns east, the Gulf opens, flags, papers, patrols the 19th century paper regime sorted legitimate commerce from so called piracy. The book is not only situated in the voyage that takes place between 1924 to 1925 but but also tells a broader and deeper and longer history of the Indian Ocean world from medieval time onward to the 20th century. Let's talk about 18th century Gulf violence as we encounter in the chapter the Gulf. How do Safavid, Zand, Ottoman and others retreats set the stage for local entrepreneurs to rise?
- [47:57]
B
Thanks for that question, Ahmed. The story of the sort of late 17th and early 18th century gulf is still largely unclear to us, but we can think of it in this sort. You have these empires, the sort of Muslim gunpowder empires, the Safavids, the Ottomans that are expanding in the area by this point in time they are mostly concerned with inline affairs in places like the coast, in places like Basra. For the Ottomans, they for various reasons delegate authority in the hands of local. This creates an open for different groups around the Gulf to assert their authority in different ways. And this is the moment in the in the 18th century when we see the arrival and spread of groups from central Arabia and elsewhere. The Etoob in the Gulf, they settle in the west in Zubara on the western coast of Qatar. They settle in Kuwait. They eventually take Bahrain from vassals of the Safavids and they, they spread themselves out along the co coast of the Gulf on the Persian side. And we have to remember that this is not, these are not two coasts. This is one continuous coast. Of course, there are other Arab tribes that are settling, coming in from inland and settling on the coast, moving from the, what's today the Arab coast to the, the Persian coast and settling there. So you have this spread of tribes in different places and this, this moment in which different, different people are trying to assert themselves on the shores of this body of water. As they do so, they come into conflict with other entities and with one another and they engage in different forms of violence against one another. Sometimes these are land wars. More often this is raiding by sea. They send out ships, they attack one another's ships in different places. They try to assert control over coastlines and sea lanes in this place. And this is how we see the emergence of these different, of these different political entities. And this is how we might think of the, the political culture of the Gulf taking shape during this time period. So as these different groups are asserting themselves on the coast and, and competing with one another for control of shorelines, of shipping lanes and things like that, you have other groups that are emerging. Among these groups are groups that are emerging that are more successful than others, expanding their authority from inland to the coast and beyond or along the, the different coasts. There are people who have their eyes on different forms of political expansion and they come into contact with another entity that is emerging in the region that, whose presence is being felt in the region. Of course, the English East India Company. English East India Company had been there from the 1600s. They had trading factories in Basra, in Benjamin Abbas, different places in the Gulf, like others before them, of course, like the Portuguese, like the Dutch. And as the activities of the English East India Company are expanding in the Gulf, they're coming into conflict with or encounter with these, these expanding entities in the region. The Arabis of Oman and later the, the Qasimis of what's the Desharjah and Ras Al Khaimah, who also have presence on the opposite shore in, in Ninja and the Surround. The East India Company officials would write to one another, captains would write to officials in India and would constantly remark on acts of violence that were taking place between different tribes in the Gulf. If you read the East India Company material from late 18th century in the region. This is just, it's just rife with one battle after another, one report of violence after another. Most of the time these don't involve East India vessels, except. Except when they do, and at different moments in the 1790s, different groups around the Gulf, and specifically the Qasim, end up attacking East India Company vessels. The accounts of these attacks are quite graphic and they sent shockwaves through the East India Company official community. People in India were shocked at what was happening and were pressing East India Company officials to respond. Meanwhile, you have another emerging political entity, the Busaidi Empire, Oman and East Africa. And the East India Company is doing lots of business with the Busaidis, engaging in lots of treaties with the Busaidis. And the Busaidis have their sights on expansion in the Gulf itself as well. So these twin impulses, the impulse of the Busaidis to expand and the impulse of the East India Company to seek out revenge for attacks on its shipping, these converge in two military expeditions, naval expeditions organized jointly by the Omanis and the East India Company against the Qawasim in the early 1800s, resulting ultimately in the bombardment of Ras Al Khaimah and the dismemberment of the Qasimi fleet. This left the Omanis unchallenged as the principal hegemons in the Gulf and also ushered in a new era in Gulf history in which the East India India Company and later the British Government of India took on the responsibility of ensuring a maritime peace. This also ushered in a new era in which the East India Company and later the British Government of India took on the responsibility of policing acts of violence in the Gulf, interjecting itself in the political affairs of the Gulf and in the conflicts that were so much a part of 18th century Gulf political. After the second bombardment of Ghaz Al Khaimah, after the expedition against the Qasim, the British imposed the Maritime Truce 1820 and then renewed it several times until they got to the perpetual peace of the 1850s. I think it was 1856 if I'm not mistaken. The idea behind these was to impose a new bureaucratic regime on shipping in the Gulf. And this brings us back to the Dao Daos. After the Qasim Daos were flagged as suspicious. They were suspected of engaging in activism, acts of piracy, they were suspected in running slaves. And of course this was the moment in which the British government in the Indian Ocean, you know, very deep in its anti slavery crusade. And so then the 1820 truce actually defined piracy as not Just violence at sea, but also as engagement in the slave trade, which it's patently not. These are. These are two different things. And imposed a bureaucratic regime onto ships where. Wherein they had to carry certain kinds of passes, they had to clear particular bureaucratic hurd, they had to. They had to fly particular flags in order to pass through these different areas safely without being accosted by British vessels on the seas. So it imposed a new regime onto the dhow trade in the Gulf and brought the Gulf more firmly into the political orbit of British India. Despite this bureaucratic regime that the British impose onto these. These vessels, vessels, of course, all sorts of different trades continue on as usual. And Dao captains very quickly figure out how to engage with this bureaucratic regime, how to draw different kinds of documents onto the vessel, how to wield different kinds of bureaucratic instruments, to engage with empire and to engage with the sort of bureaucratic requirements of empire. They build a documentary repertoire. They are able to take this imperial law and make it portable on the decks of daos. This becomes most clearly visible in the early 20th century when there's a. An international court case, actually that happens, takes place between Britain and France and Turd at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague in the Netherlands. And the subject is the right of France to grant French flags and passes to Daos from Oman, from a particular port in Oman and Sur. And whether these Dao captains are using these flags and passes as a cover for the slave trade, for their engagement in slave trading activities using French subjecthood and these bureaucratic indicators of French subjecthood as a way of clothing themselves in. In the garb of French protection as they're being chased by British vessels who suspect them of engaging. This particular becomes a case of truly global proportions. And for me, what's interesting about the case is less the outcome of it, although the outcome is quite interesting. This is a case that sediments into the law of the sea as we know it. But what's really interesting to me is it showcases the international legal consciousness of these Dao captains who become very clearly aware that they are sailing in a sea of empires and that they have to thread the needle of the Dao through the fabric of different empires and they're able to understand the jurisdictional gaps that are there between different imperial authorities and they're able to exploit these different gaps to their advantage. Sam.
- [58:39]
C
The Strait of Hormuz narrows behind Balochistan, Sindh and India ahead between coast and blue water. Now knowledge moves notes star tables, rules of thumb and questions around who Owns the sea. Muslim jurists from imams such as the architect and chief Qadhi of the Arabi empire, Al Shakhsi, once argued that the sea cannot be enclosed. On the other hand, early modern debates about open and closed seas echo here as well, now patrolled by empires. So how do early modern legal debate still matter for Daos like, like the crooked and for later claims to territorial waters.
- [59:18]
B
So this regime of, of empires and imperial seascapes, of flags, of passes, of all of these things have not their roots, but have earlier echoes in Dao's encounters with the Portuguese and the. The cartage system that the Portuguese tried to impose on local ship the Indian Ocean. For listeners who are unaware of this history, one of the things the Portuguese tried to do when they entered into the Indian Ocean to, to control and to monitor it, was they forced local merchants and captains to carry these safe conduct pass, these, these cartages to protect them at sea. To protect them from whom? Or to protect them from the Portuguese themselves as a form of organized violence on the high seas, buying protection from the mob against the mob itself. So the regime that we see with the British and with the French, we might say that it has its roots in this sort of one of the discourses that marks the 17th century. A discourse of who or debate about who has the right to control the seas. As the Portuguese are expanding their claims to dominion over the seas, are being challenged by other European challengers, the Dutch specifically, who also want in on the Indian Ocean action and are trying to figure out ways to get in. Now the Dutch are sailing in and they're attacking Portuguese ships and they're taking them as prize. And the Portuguese claim that the Dutch have no right to be there because these are seas under Portuguese dominion. Now, the Dutch East India Company, after one particular incident, the incident Santa Catarina, a Portuguese ship that was captured by the Dutch, they hire this young lawyer from the Netherlands, Hugo Grotius. And Hugo Grotius defends the Dutch East India Company's right to attack Portuguese vessels by saying essentially that the Portuguese have no right to claim the seas and that by claiming the seas as their dominion, they're actually violating both natural law and the law of nations. Nobody has the right to enclose the sea. Nobody has the right to claim dominion over the seas. Now, what does this have to do with Daos? Well, one of the things that Grotius claims in Mari Liberum is that we have evidence of nobody having the right to claim dominion over the seas because these Arabs and Indians and Chinese have been sailing the seas for many, many centuries and not one of them had ever tried to make a claim to dominion over the seas. And thus it is contrary to natural law, law of nations, et cetera, et cetera. So he recogn recognizes civilizations in the Indian Ocean that preceded the Europeans. Meanwhile, at the same time, there are other people in the Indian Ocean, around the Indian Ocean that are thinking about these questions. The Omanis who are also out there attacking Portuguese vessels for different reasons, not because they want to expand their dominion into the Indian Ocean world, but for. For various other reasons. And the Omanis Omani jurists in the Ya' Arabi empire the the most effectively encounters and engages the Portuguese jurists from the Ya'll be empire. And here I think about the writings of Said and Hamiz Al Shakhsi try to make claims at different points that the Portuguese are fair game for attack for jihad for a few different reasons. One, that there these are people who are, who are cutting off paths at sea, cutting off routes at sea and thus violating people's rights to trade. And so they converge on similar similar ide of freedom of movement, of mobility on the high seas, but also articulate notions that nobody has the right to claim shorelines, to claim the sea as a matter of natural law itself. And so you see in this moment a convergence of these different discourses. And that's what I was trying to get at in the chapter is to show the convergence of these different discourses from between the Europeans and these Gulf jurists on questions of the sea and what to do about conventions, control over the season.
- [64:14]
C
The Menorah lighthouse blinks. It is coming. Karachi moving to Karachi. Why was Karachi the first big date market? Could you please walk us through a day in 1922? Maybe from the lighthouse to telegraph, where imperial infrastructure meets monsoon.
- [64:31]
B
So Karachi is a really interesting port city sailing from the Gulf to India. It's actually the first outpost of industrial capitalism. Sailing from the Gulf in the 1920s, Karachi would be the first outpost of industrial capitalism that the Nawaka counter from the lighthouse, as they sail into the harbor, they would encounter sail into this wharf space, a built environment that was meant to accommodate ships coming in and ships going out. And most importantly for the export of grains from the hinterland of Karachi, from the Punjab and from the Indus river valley. At this point in history, Karachi was the most important and busiest grain exporting port anywhere east of the Suez. And this is something I hadn't realized before writing about it. As I was researching it, I was just stunned to learn how important it was as a site of grain export. So the nawakhida that stopped there are stopping first because there's a whole community of Gulf merchants and their associates in the port city who are ready to receive cargoes of dates, who are ready to give these nawakhida information for onward journeys, all sorts of at the same time, Karachi was where these ship captains could load their holds with cargo cargoes of rice, grain, flour, all sorts of things, pulses to take back to the Gulf. The industrial agriculture of the hinterland of Karachi completely reshapes the foodways of the Gulf as it emerges in the late 19th, early 20th century, access to large quantities of rice and grains and pulses at cheap prices because they're produced on such large scales, connected to Karachi, connecting the hinterlands to Karachi by way of railways. All of this infrastructure meant to process, process and sort and export large amounts of grain would have an enormous impact on food and the consumption of food and the re export of food in the Gulf. It is also a major draw for Gulf merchants, those who are doing business in the grain trade and the day trade. Of course, you're not never just doing business in one. The money that you're making off of dates, you're investing in other things you're using to purchase other goods that you're then selling in the Gulf and you're sending off with other captains. These merchants cluster around Karachi and the neighborhoods of the bazaar, along the major road in the bazaar, Karachi, that extends inwards from the port, Bandar Road, of course, Bandar meaning port. And on either side you have these different neighborhoods of merchant. These Gulf merchants establish offices there. They take advantage of Karachi's place at the terminus of these railway lines, coming from the interior place where steamships would call at a place where the central node of the telegraph network in the Indian Ocean. And they use this to communicate. Communicate prices and send goods to their associates in the Gulf and in other parts of the Indian Ocean world, communicate prices of foodstuffs essentially.
- [67:34]
C
In this world, of course, Arabic or Islamic law were not the only operation. But you had also other languages. So what did bilingual contracts in Arabic and Gujarati and English and mixed courts mean for Kuwaiti captains calling in India?
- [67:49]
B
Yeah, that's an excellent question. Karachi is also one of the first places where Gulf merchants and captains would counter this juridical regime expanding outwards from British India. Their principal associates in Karachi were Gujarati merchants. There was an enormous community of Gujarati merchants who were residing in Karachi and doing business out of there. And so you have A lot of these contracts between Gulf merchants and Gujarati merchants, but also Gulf merchants and Gujarati captains. It's not just Gulf nawakhida that were operating in the shores of the Gulf. Gujarati captains from places like the coasts of Gujarat would also carry goods between the Gulf and Karachi. They would even call it the Shatt al Arab, pick up dates there and ship them elsewhere. So you have these bilingual contracts that emerge between Gulf merchants and their non Arab associates that would include language in Arabic and Gujarat. Of course, layered on top of these legal arrangements was a whole British Indian judicial legal regime. Courts contract. These. These are people who are engaging with banks. And in Karachi, these merchants would have access to all sorts of courts which they could use to raise claims against their colleagues if they need to, and even raise claims against colleagues in the Gulf. Small claims courts in Karachi that they would use, but also other courts as well. Another aspect of Karachi that I didn't necessarily explore in the book but come to realize is a fascinating aspect of that port city is that it was the penal outpost for the Gulf for much of the late 19th and early 20th century. Meaning that people who were tried and jailed in the Gulf, if they were not. If they were not jailed locally, they would be sent to Karachi. So Karachi is bound into this world and really into this Gulf world in really fascinating ways and in ways that we haven't fully appreciated as historians. The histories that we have written of Karachi have not really thought very deeply about this Indian Ocean world in which Karachi was embedded. But Karachi was really a metropolis for Indian Ocean merchant and a principal site of the grain trade. It was the Chicago of the Indian Ocean world.
- [70:04]
C
So these Kuwaiti captains and merchants worked without the frame of the big firms. So how did letters, cables and bank traps coordinate action across all of these ports?
- [70:14]
B
That's a great question. So much of what we have from these merchants are their letters to one another. And these letters are letters, as I've said, in which they're receiving orders, in which they're placing orders, in which they're sending money back and forth, in which they're making requests of one another, asking for favors of one another. And we see this network of Gulf merchants and their non khaleeji colleagues emerge. Their business associates emerge. For the most part, these merchants did not operate in firms. They did not even operate in formal partnerships. There were formal partnerships as well. Al Matrouk, who we talked about in Basra, had a partner in Karachi, Al Kharafi and Al Matrouk. Al Kharafi had a formal partnership in which they would send goods with to one another. They would do business with one another, and they would settle accounts with one another and split profits at the end of the end of a trading season, keep ongoing accounts. For the most part, the. These merchants, Gulf merchants in Karachi and in other parts of the Indian Ocean simply acted as agents for one another. They would do business on one another's behalf as favors to one another. So they were not just informal friends. It was something a little bit more formal than that. There were actual requests that had a legal weight to them, but they didn't enter into formal partnership contracts with one another. They. They kept things open, ended with one another, and they relied very much on the letter as the principal medium through which they would communicate orders and communicate instructions to one another. The letter, as I discuss in the inscription to the Karachi chapter, the letter had particular form, the business letter. There was a. It was a genre of writing, it had conventions, it had a structure to it. And anybody who was involved in these sorts of agency relationships knew how to adhere to the conventions of letter writing. You would make reference to letters received and you would say, I read the instructions therein and I understood them. And then you would go on to repeat what those instructions were. And then you would give instructions of your own and you would give updates and, and all of the things. And then you would also communicate prices to one another at the very end of the letter. Now, there are also price circulars that. That these Gulf merchants would circulate to one like a price list, essentially, that they would circulate to one another. It was like a form that they would fill out and that all they had to do was fill in the different prices for different goods. But for the most part, prices were communicated through these networks, through correspondence. And it's in this correspondence that we see this Gulf commercial society come into being. It becomes most clearly visible.
- [73:37]
C
As the sun rose on November 14, Al Fayrekawi and his crew made landfall on the northern stretch of the Kunkan coast. By the afternoon, they could see their next port of call. We arrived safely at Bombay, the Nokhada route, and we have not seen anything reprehensible in God's brain bounty. The crew of the Crooked marveled at the sight of Bombay. It was the ultimate metropolis, far outstripping Basra, Karachi or any other port city. On their voyage, the city teemed with life and hummed with activity. The front page of the newspaper that day, it overflowed with notices of steamships coming and going to the Gulf, Aden, Singapore and beyond. Of Banks opening branches, branches in Bombay from places as far afield as Taiwan and Japan, of law offices, of jewelers and tailors. Even from where they anchored in the Daos Basin, the crew of the Crooked could see the marvels that were out on display along the waterfront. Beautifully written by you, Fahad. Can you please say more about how Feluchawi's time was spent in Bombay?
- [74:43]
B
El Felachawi reaches Bombay. He encounters the heart of industrial capitalism in the ocean. Bombay is the major metropolis in the Indian Ocean. Any merchant who has any mercantile aspirations is either in Bombay or has an agent in Bombay, has somebody who is doing business on his Bombay. Bombay is where textiles are produced on an industrial scale. That's a separate history. Bombay is where the Indian heartland is connected to the Indian Ocean by way of rail and steamships. Bombay is the administrative center of much of the Indian Ocean. The Bombay Presidency encompasses. Bombay itself, encompasses Karachi and even aden in the 19th century. Most of the officials, British officials that end up around the Indian Ocean are appointed by the government of Bombay. So Bombay is a natural place for most Indian Ocean merchants to have a present. Gulf merchants are no exception to this. There are lots of different Gulf merchants who end up in Bombay for lots of different reasons. In the book, when we reach Bombay, we meet the figure of Mohamed Salim Sderrawi. Hamed Salam Sdirawi is a Kuwaiti merchant in Bombay. But more than that, he is the agent for Kuwaiti merchants and the Kuwaiti ruling family in Bombay. He places orders on their behalf. He coordinates on all sorts of matters, on commercial matters, on judicial matters. Sderawi is the go between for all sorts of judicial matters, on all sorts of administrative matters. The the most prominent feature of his work though, is in banking. Sderawi has accounts in all of these different banks in Bombay. And he mobilizes funds from these banks to help with purchases by Gulf merchants around the Indian Ocean. They make purchases from others. They write to Sderawi with different money orders saying transfer money from this account to that account so they can pay their. Their associates. And Isdhrawi does the work of moving money from one account to the other. He is constantly lubricating and re lubricating the wheels of credit upon which so much of Gulf mercantile activity in the Western Indian Ocean relied. He is the banker to the Gulf community and that is why he is in Bombay now. He's of course not the only Gulf merchant in Bombay. There are lots and lots of. And they're involved in many different activities. Many of the Gulf merchants in Bombay are involved in the pearl trade. They are selling pearls to their business associates, to Gujarati merchants, to other merchants in Bombay, which was the main market for pearls in India itself. Gulf pearls would often be sold in in Bombay, these pearl merchants would also take these pearls and use them as collateral to raise loans from banks. And they would take those loans from banks and channel them to their partners in the Gulf who would then reparsel that credit out to the Nuakida and to the divers. And so in these ways, even the Gulf pearl dive is connected to the infrastructures of colonial capitalism. The western Indian Ocean all through Bombay, which is such a critical node. Karachi is the Chicago of the Indian Ocean world. The principal grain exporting site. Bombay, the New York of the Indian Ocean world and certainly the New York of the Gulf. It's such a critical part of their world cannot be understated. It.
- [78:51]
C
Account settled, the cricket heads south to Malabar Forest. Turns to plank fiber to rope measures to money brokers translate woods and weights into prices. From the world of banks to the world of the forest and the calico chapter we shift from shipyard raw material export. How did imperial forestry and conservation agendas collide with the dao demand?
- [79:14]
B
From Bombay, El Felechawi sails on to Calicut. Like many other Gulf dhows, most of the time they will have already sold off their date cargo somewhere between Karachi and Bombay. They're very seldom carrying too many dates to Calicut. They may if they needed to, but they'll find some sort of cargo go to carry from Bombay onward to Calicut. The reason they want to go to Calicut is this Calicut and the Malabar Coast. Calicut is the principal source for timber and choir rope, sort of coconut fibers spun into rope that they use to build dhows. There's an enormous dhow building industry in the Gulf, but there are no local sources of shipbuilding timber. There are plenty of sources of shipbuilding timber in the hinterland of Calicutique. The kinds of timber that withstand understands the heat of the Gulf, the heat of the Indian Ocean. The best kind of timber for building ships. Calicut timber was sought after from all over the Indian Ocean and even the other parts of the Islamic world. We have accounts of the Ottomans in the Red Sea procuring timber from Calicut to build their their fleet. So those who wanted to build ships could find no better place to get the raw materials for doing that than Calicut. This is why Gulf daos called there. When they arrive there, they have business associates that they're doing business with. They have local brokers, Malabari brokers and agents that they do business with. And over time there's a Kuwaiti merchant that actually sets up shop there, Yusuf Uslager, who has relatives, his uncles were doing business in Basra. And so this is a one of these trans regional merchant families of the Gulf. Asleger receives she ships coming from abroad and procures orders of shipbuilding timber from the ahead of time. So when they come, they're able to to load these, take them back to the Gulf. Every time a dao calls at Calicut, a teak tree falls somewhere in the interior. And these orders are communicated into the interior through networks of brokers and agents. And then you have cutters in the interior of Malabar who are felling trees and floating these logs down the Beypor river till they get to the mouth of the Beipor river at Calicut. And there, merchants, Gislegar and his associates would earmark these for export on the decks of dhows to their associates around the Gulf, who would principally use them for building ships, but also use them in other forms of construction as well. At the same time, Noah Khida, who would call at Malabar, would be interested in other other products as well. Malabar was the place from which they would, they would pick up cargoes of say, pepper, of ginger, of cardamom, of all the different spices that we so very closely associate with Gulf cuisine. These came from the Malabar coast, sometimes from Calicut itself, sometimes from places like Mangalore. They also lorded enormous shipments, Indian tamarinds or brindleberry, which they called sbar, and then coffee from the Malabar coast, which was consumed in, in enormous quantities in the Gulf. So Malabar was the place from which we see the natural world meet the marketplace. And we see the infrastructures of the marketplace being imposed on the world of nature. We see this moment of contact between what historian William Conan calls first nature and second nature.
- [82:40]
C
The crooked ride the fair wind into open ocean. Now we are in the middle of the Arabian Sea sea on the return crossing. No port in sight, just endless waters and the sky. Did pilus local knowledge trump imperial chart when navigating the crossing across the Indian Ocean or along the coast? And how was that expertise valued?
- [83:01]
B
So when a dao like sails out from Malabar or wherever it is that they're leaving from on in India, when they sail out from there and they're returning to the Gulf, this is the moment in which they cross the open sea. Until that point in the journey, they're mostly staying within sight of the coast, the lose side of the coast from time to time. But here is where we have a week, two weeks, sometimes three weeks without seeing land at all. They're completely surrounded by the open water and they're left to figure out where they are. It's at this point in the Rusnama where the entries look really different. They become much longer, and they're not much longer because there are tons of observations that the captain is making. We really don't have much of a sense of what they're observing when they're out in the open sea at all. We know through different interviews, oral histories, we know what the rhythm of life on board the ship was when they were out on the open sea. It was quite routinized. But the reason these runamen entries are longer is because the captain is spending all of his time trying to figure out where they are at sea and he's trying to calculate their position at sea. And he does so by means of different mathematical formula. He is measuring the speed at which the. The Dao is sailing in knots, literally by throwing a knotted rope over the side of the ship and counting, of course, uses a sextant to measure the position of the sun, has different data points available to him, and through different trigonometric formula is able to figure out his longitude. Latitude is pretty easy to figure out because you figure out latitude by measuring your place vis a vis the sun. That's not hard. Longitude is much hard. And we know from the histories of navigation in Europe that there were all sorts of technological advancements that were necessary before longitude could be measured with any accuracy. By the time we get to captains like Alfred El Chawi, longitude is principally measured through or arrived at through mathematical formula. It is approximated. It's not 100% accurate, but it's close enough. And so here, as the Dao is crossing the open water, they are using these different mathematical tools that are at their disposal to be able to do that. The other thing that captains are using are tools that were developed to assist the British Navy in their expansion around the world. Nautical almanacs. Nori's nautical tables was a staple of any doubt. Any ship captain knew how to use Norrie's nautical tables to his advantage. And that is a set of tables that help them correct the angle of the sun, the declination of the sun, and help them arrive at more accurate estimates of where they were through the mathematical formula they engaged in. They also used admiralty. They bought these admiralty charts, sometimes from stores in India, just as Often they bought them from one another. And Al Fayla Chawi has lots of these in his collection. The families held on to them and thankfully for us, Fel Chawi, the captain makes inscriptions on these, on these maps, these admiralty charts, letting us know where he bought them from and when he bought. And so we get a sense of a nautical knowledge that was entangled in an imperial nautical epistemology, meaning that the Arab navigational tradition which we had so often written about as though was cleaved off from everything else. An hermetically sealed Arab nav navigational tradition that includes such towering figures as Ahmad IBN Majid, Sayman Al Mahri, people like that. We see that by the time we get to the late 19th, early 20th century, we see the ways in which it becomes entangled in an imperial form of knowledge about the seas, which is not to diminish from that tradition or to. To somehow belittle it and say that Arabs had lost their, their nautical prowess or navigational traditions in any way. But this is a natural course of history in that the as the arena of knowledge transforms, so too do the different plot points arena, so too the nested forms of knowledge. There's no way we can think of these captains as somehow sealing themselves off from the world. We know that that's not true of the merchants, nor is it true of the captains themselves. They read things. They read things and they learn new ways of sailing and they KN new ways of calculating their position and they incorporate those into their repertoire. Sam.
- [88:20]
C
I wonder how was daily life for the crew during the voyage? We just heard a part of the Sengeni send off tradition. I would like to learn more, more as the listeners about the music that we've been listening and it's role, the poetry, the shanties, choreographing labor and emotion around the voyage.
- [88:42]
B
So at different points in the voyage there are routinized performances, ritualized performances for the sending off of the ship, for the return home, things like that. And these are led by the shipboard musician, the naham. And we, we have thankfully lots of studies of nahams, mostly involving the pearling nahams, fewer revolving around the. The ones in the long distance dao trade. Though we do have some accounts in Al Fayd Ali's notebook. We see that this man has copied copious amounts of poetry and that he ascribes some of it. He and Mansoor Al Khariji in his notebook ascribe some of it to particular individuals who are on the dao. We see that they are poetry that Much of this poetry is anthologized from the medieval Islamic, from especially Andalusia, but other parts of the Islamic world. Medieval poetry, that seems to have resonances. It seems to still be enjoyed by different audiences. We see slight variations in the poetry itself, indicative of the variations that one might see when these poems are being performed, performed on the deck of the ship. So you have these greatest hits, might call them, of Arab poetry. You have these shipboard musicians. People know this poetry. People know what to expect. So these shipboard musicians would sing these poems and improvise at different times. And a lot of this was for the purposes of entertainment. When you're doing these long crossings or even when you're sang with inside of land, life on the ship can be kind of boring. It's not always action all the time. And so to keep sailor spirits up, you have these ships, shipboard musicians, and the better you are as a shipboard musician, the more money you can command. Of course, you get tips from the sailors and things like that. But at the same time, there was work to be done on the dao, and the work to be done on the dao of hoisting sails, especially maneuvering the sails, maneuvering all of the different yards on the ship. This had to be done according to a particular rhythm. And to do this, to set a rhythm to the work, you had songs, you had chanties that they would set Singh, led by the naham, who would sing these songs out. And at different moments, you knew to pull or you knew to push, or you knew to do whatever it is that you needed to do. So music was very much a part the rhythm of work on the dao, but it was also a form of entertainment on the dao itself. And we're lucky to have people like Al Khariji and who were so enamored with this music that they decided to copy down the things that they had heard.
- [91:25]
C
Sa land rises ahead. The crooked makes a month's coast. The Hajar rain suddenly dominates the coastline, altering the feel and tactics of coastal sailing. How did Omani and Gulf newspapers, carried by steam and sail, turn coffee houses and dhow decks into a shared political classroom? Can you tell us how Masqat sat at the hinge of an Omani zanzibari public sphere, I.e. press, scholars and merchants shuttling Texan capital?
- [92:40]
B
So we've established now that these nawakida are readers, readers of poetry, readers of manuals, readers of all sorts of texts being produced around them. They're also readers of news. And as they enter into ports like Muscat. And I use Muscat as an example here. But it's of course not the only place where they would have encountered news. They're hearing news of things that are happening in different parts of the world. They are reading newspapers that are arriving in those port cities. They would be hearing news from ships coming back from Zanzibar, from people coming back from Zanzibar who are carrying newspapers with them. Their paths would sometimes intersect with Gulf dhows that are coming back from Zanzibar and carrying newspapers in this. In places like Muscat, we can see the ways in which this world of trade intersects with a world of thought, a world of thought about politics. There are moving scholars, journalists, writers of different sorts who are traveling through this world on these daos, but also on steamships through other means, communicating news from around the world. And Gulf Nawakida are avid consumers of this news. They are politically conscious people and they're plugged into circuits of circulation of information about political transformations that are happening. A lot of these have to do with empire and the place of empire in this world. In this time period in the 1920s, in the 1930s, the British Empire in the Indian Ocean is going through a series of convulsions. There are different political movements in India, in the Gulf, in East Africa, People who are expressing ideas of Arab nationalism, anti colonialism, People who are expressing ideas of. Of self determination, ideas about a new political order that might emerge after empire. People like Al Fayda Chawi are not ignorant of this. They are actually quite plugged into this and they read all about these sorts of things. So in places like Muscat, and again, I just use Muscat as an example, you could have. We could have said the same about Kuwait, Calicut, Zanzibar, Bahrain, any one of these places. In places like Muscat, though, we have these coffee shops where these captives would congregate. Trade information about their experiences about markets, but also about politics.
- [95:06]
C
At first light on Bahrain's shore, the crooked drift and the long rising chants of the bell diver singer carry over still water. Now that the crooked has reached Bahrain, let's talk about pearl reforms when they collided with shipboard accounting during the 1920s, when shares and debts are reckoned in ink and politics. Tell us, Fahid, why did the 1920s spur link reforms that included new books, rules on advances, spark no Khadi's backlash and even migration to other ports in the gulf? And what does this teach us about authority at sea and ashore?
- [96:23]
B
So until this point in the narrative, we haven't seen in any deep British intervention in the world of the DAO itself. There are all sorts of regulations on dao movement, of course, that we've covered. But in the financial arrangements on board the deck of the Dao, we haven't really seen much in terms of British involvement in these sorts of things. When Al Fayla Chawi reaches Bahrain, this is in the thick of British reforms to the pearl diving industry there. And so he's hearing all of the about the ways in which British officials on that island are trying to remake the Gulf pearl dive. Now, Gulf pearling dhows are of course, very different from the kinds of dhows that the Feluchaoui sailed. But the financial arrangements are not all that dissimilar. You have a merchant who finances a captain who then loans out money to mariners to bind them to the ship enterprise. It's very much the same sort of thing, except the nature of profit making and profit sharing on board. The pearling dao is a little bit different. The form, terms of loans and accounting and all of these things are broadly similar. By the time Alfetchawi reaches Bahrain, British officials are beginning to think of these as first of all, oppressive and second of all, contrary to an imagined political economy of Bahrain that places British officials at the head and tries to secure Bahrain's finances on a firmer footing through various reforms to the customs house, to all sorts of things. Essentially what they're trying to do is pull the Bahraini economy out of the. The embedded marketplace. They're trying to disembed it from the marketplace and have it operate according to principles that more clearly reflect ideas of British political economy that are extant at the time. And so Ferechawi in Manama is seeing all of this happen as he stays there, and he's there for quite a while actually to unload cargoes. And I mean, it's not clear exactly what he's doing. We imagine that he's un. Unloading cargoes and picking some up to return to Kuwait with. But he's clearly observing everything that's happening. And there's an enormous reaction from among Nawakhida and mariners in Bahrain. Some Nawakhida pack up and leave to Qadar. Mariners riot in the marketplace because the British are imposing limits on how much they can borrow, all in an attempt to supposedly to get them out of debt and have them work for a wage and things like that. It's a total misreading of how the Gulf merits economy functions. And it's here that we see the British attempts to thrust themselves into regulating this maritime economy and we see the reaction to it. And that reaction to it is in part motivated by Nawakhida and mariners who have a better sense of how their maritime economy works than the British do. But also these circuits of anti colonial thought, Arab nationalist thought that we had just been talking about with Muscat, that are also making their way to Bahrain by way of newspapers and all sorts of things that are stirring up suspicions about what the British might be trying to do there.
- [99:59]
C
We've dropped anchor back in Kuwait. Wendao's voyage opens a wider view. Monsoon Voyagers shows the Gulf as a busy node in global history, built by people who manage risk, paperwork, capital, law and wind across borders. You show us that pearling did not vanish overnight, even as oil beckoned. Please explain.
- [100:20]
B
So when Al Fayd Aloui returns to Kuwait, they go through the sort of routine business of unloading cargoes. These cargo cargoes make their way into the marketplace. Different people have different claims on them. It sets in motion all of this machinery in the local marketplace. All of these different merchants, shopkeepers, even women who are purchasing bolts of cloth. They're seamstresses, they're dressmakers, things like that. They sometimes run their own small shops. This whole local ecosystem, economic ecosystem is reignited with the return of daos like of course then the mariners are paid their, paid out for the, the summer and Felachawi goes, spends some time with his family, all of these other things. Meanwhile, there are things that are changing in the world around them. There are lots of transfer, political transformations that are taking place around the Indian Ocean. Emirate of Muhammad, for example, is, is no longer the, it's absorbed by the Persian state. All of the small native princes in India over time on, are absorbed by the growing government of India. Lots of different political transformations that are taking place. In Kuwait itself there are transformations that are taking place, of course, there are attempts at regulating the dao industry, but recognition that there's another resource that's on the horizon, of course, oil. In Gulf history we've made too much of a distinction, a binary between pre oil and post oil. We have of course, this intermediate, immediate period between the two in which people like Alfeil Chawi continue to sail actually well into the arrival of oil. And people like my grandfather also sail into the arrival of oil. My grandfather didn't stop sailing until the, the 1950s. Some of these nawaka, the transition into oil work not as oil workers themselves, but as captains of oil barges. Many of their sailors begin to take up oil work, but continue to do things like dive and sail. So we have a moment in which the Gulf maritime economy and these emerging oil economies are overlapping with one another. But over time, what we see is the petering out of the maritime economy simply because the draw of work in oil was too irresistible for most people, especially from the laborers themselves. The mariners could find steadier work and steadier income by working for oil companies, companies than they could with the daos. With the daos and the dao business, it was all done on profit share. It was all a singular enterprise. And there were stakeholders in the enterprise just like everybody else. Profits, income variable from one season to another. Not so in an oil work where you were paid a wage. In oil work, you didn't have to be away for very long periods of time. You could stay close to your family. People knew where you were. It was just generally considered. Considered to be more stable, steadier, and safer. Overall, of course, people continued to sail just as they continue to dive for pearls. It's just that the incentive to do so diminished gradually over time. And by the time my grandfather stopped sailing in the 1950s, it wasn't because he no longer wanted to sail or because he was looking for oil work. It was, in his own words, because he could no longer find sailors who were willing to sail for him. In the 1940s, this was already obvious that it was becoming harder and harder, harder to find them. And so Nawakhida would cast their net further and further out. They would hire sailors from Oman, from Yemen, from other places to man their crews. And over time, it just became too difficult to do.
- [104:02]
C
So let's return to Fathil Khair that we started the conversation with. Why does the celebrated museum that you talked about feel like a fish out of water when we encounter the Dao? What gets lost when a living vessel becomes a static artifact? And where do you see triumph at sail's late stage? And where do you see loss sitting in?
- [104:22]
B
So the Fath Al Khayr, which was the ship that my grandfather kept, the one that was so deeply embedded in my own memory from my childhood, returned to Kuwait, and it was being refurbished, and I spent my time on its deck. That I take as a symbol for where this maritime past stands vis a vis the narratives that places like Kuwait. Wait, tell about themselves. When we talk about daos, we often in the Gulf, hold up the Dao as a symbol of the nation. We hold it up in Kuwait. It's on virtually every form of currency that we have, it's on the emblem of the state. We see it when you're in Bahrain, when you leave the airport, there are. There are dhows there. There are model dhows everywhere you go in the Gulf. The problem is that these are empty vessels. We have stripped them of any. Any vestige of their oceanic past. It's totally, totally. We have no sense of how these ships actually worked, the worlds to which they belong, the geographies that they inhabited, much less the life worlds of the people who were involved in that. Those oceanic pasts sit uneasily with story that the nation tells about itself, that at its core, it's a terrestrial story of the nation state. These nation states of the Gulf have cut off this oceanic past and taken only the form without any content drawn on. Greg Denning I say we have in the Gulf, when we consume these symbols of. In the Gulf, when we consume these symbols of the maritime past, the daos and all of the rest of it, we are essentially just tourists to ourselves. We are consuming the form without any content, without any real sense of the history. It is simply the most superficial consumption of it possible. And the Fat Al Khair is a perfect example of this. It was moved from the shipyards where it was being refurbished, where it sat for a little while, to the National Scientific center, or the Scientific center. And it sits outside the Scientific center in. In a basin. It is looking decrepit, dried out. You're not allowed to touch the thing, you're not allowed to get on the thing. There is very little information that you get about what this thing actually was, where it went, who it belonged to, what, and absolutely nothing about the. The historical world to which it belonged, which, like, it's even impossible to tell that story within a national narrative that is so closed off from the rest of those worlds. To tell that story, we would have to tell a story of Kuwait that's bound up in places like Iraq, Iran, India, East Africa. That's not a story that these states want to tell about themselves or that these people even want to tell about themselves. And so we're left with these empty vessels that actually tell us nothing about the past. Meanwhile, the other materials that do tell us about the histories of these vessels in the worlds to which they belonged sit in family collections totally disconnected from the vessel itself. These are detritus of that past. We're left with these pieces of a past that we're unable to make sense of, because the framework for telling the history of the nation no longer allows us to Monsoon Voyagers might be book is an attempt to bring those histories back to life, to rejoin the vessel with the archive, to re enliven those geographies, to rejuvenate those geographies, to tell that story to the reader. That allows vessels like the Fathil Khair to make sense, to have a past, to have depth, to have a life, and allows us to make sense of these nations, of these port cities as port cities, to reconnect them to the maritime past to which they belonged. That maritime past that was so important for how people in that past understood themselves, the ways in which we imagine history today, the histories of places in the Gulf, the histories of places like Kuwait, makes it impossible to understand an oceanic, to understand that these histories were actually deeply entangled with the histories of other places, with communities in other places, with with processes and other places. The national paradigm for writing history cleaves off places like Kuwait from the ocean. The ocean does not belong in the container of the nation.
- [108:50]
C
Wonderfully said Fahed, history truly comes alive when we follow those voices across time and space, as you've shown us. Well, our voyage sadly through Monsoon Voyagers comes to an end. Thank you so much, Fahad for guiding us us on this journey and sharing your insights across the monsoon seas.
- [109:08]
B
Thanks, Ahmed. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this book, which was truly a labor of love for me. I was sad to have to let the book go. I was sad to have to wrap it up because I so deeply enjoyed writing it and I hope that my readers can sense the love that I have for the topic. And it's not simply a love for my own family history, nor is it a celebration of some past, but it's an attempt to recover a past that's so deeply important and yet we managed to lose along the way.
- [109:40]
C
If you enjoyed this voyage, read Monsoon Voyagers An Indian Ocean History, published by University of California Press. Share the episode and until next time, fair winds.
- [109:56]
B
It.