Indian Ocean Histories

Rila Mukherjee is a professor, Department of History, University of Hyderabad, India. She works on spatial categories in the eastern Indian Ocean, especially in the northern Bay of Bengal, comprising the coasts of northern Odisha and West Bengal in India, littoral Bangladesh and Arakan. Her most recent publications are the co-edited Subversive Sovereigns Across the Sea: Indian Ocean Ports-of-Trade from Early Historic Times to Late Colonialism (2017); the book chapter ‘Silver-Links! Bagan-Bengal and Shadowy Metal Corridors: 9th to 13th Centuries’ in Yian, Miksic and Aung-Thwin (eds), Bagan and the World: Early Myanmar and its Global Connections (2018); and articles in Topoi, the International Journal of Maritime History, and Asian Review of World Histories. Radhika Seshan is a professor and the head of the Department of History, Savitribai Phule Pune University, India where she has worked since 1996. She is the author of Trade and Politics on the Coromandel Coast (2012) and Ideas and Institutions in Medieval India (2013). Her most recent publications are the edited volumes Narratives, Routes and Intersections in the Pre-Modern Asian World (2016) and Re-searching Transition in Indian History (co-edited with Shraddha Kumbhojkar, 2018).

List of figures. List of tables. List of contributors. Preface.
Introduction: Indian Ocean histories.



Part I: Historiographies, methodologies and scale in the Indian Ocean
1. The Indian Ocean: global nexus (1500–1800). 2. The sodden archive: Africa, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.



Part II: Case studies
3. The Kakatiyas, Motupalli and the Southern Bay of Bengal linkages. 4. Regional identities, maritime networking and Islamic conversions in fifteenth-century Java. 5. Brokers and go-betweens within the Portuguese State of India (1500–1700). 6. South Asian settlers at Batavia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 7. Physicians, surgeons, merchants and healers: production, circulation and reconfiguration of knowledge in eighteenth-century Portuguese India. 8. Indian seamen (lascars), shipboard labor regime and the East India Company in the first half of the nineteenth century.



Part III: New histories
9. Hazards and history on the Western Australian coast: the ‘Pearling Fleet Disaster’ of 1887. 10. Landscape, Rajah and wax prints: contemporary archaeologies of India in Mozambique. 11. Littoral shell tracks: tracing Burma’s transregional pearl histories.



Part IV: Reminiscences
12. Michael Naylor Pearson: the discipline of history, the sea and the man. 13. Afterword.



Index.