Monsoon Voyagers:
An Indian Ocean History
In this book, I follow the voyage of a single dhow, the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around the Persian Gulf and Western Indian Ocean, from 1924 to 1925. Through an account of the voyage, I unpack a much broader history of circulation and exchange across the Arabian Sea in the time of empire. From their offices in India, Arabia, and East Africa, Gulf merchants used the technologies of colonial capitalism—banks, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, and more—to remake their own regional bazaar economy. In the process, they remade the Gulf itself.
Scale and orientation are central to the story I tell here. Drawing on the Crooked's first-person logbooks, along with letters, notes, and business accounts from a range of port cities, I narrate the still-untold connected histories of the Gulf and Indian Ocean. The Gulf's past, I suggest, played out across the sea as much as it did the land. And by reading the history of the Gulf from the vantage point of the Indian Ocean, we can tell new stories, explore new processes, and expand the horizons of Gulf and Middle Eastern history.
A Sea of Debt:
Law and Economic Life in the
Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950
In this legal history of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, I examine the transformations of Islamic law and Islamicate commercial practices during the emergence of modern capitalism in the region. During this time of expanding commercial activity, a broad community of Arab, Indian, Swahili and Baloch merchants, planters, jurists, judges, soldiers and seamen forged the frontiers of a shared world. The interlinked worlds of law and trade that these actors created, the shared commercial grammars and institutions that they developed and the spatial and socio-economic mobilities they engaged in endured until at least the middle of the twentieth century. My book examines the Indian Ocean from Oman to India and East Africa over an extended period of time, drawing together the histories of commerce, law and empire in a textured history of capitalism in the Islamic world.
A Sea of Debt was awarded several honors, including the J. Willard Hurst Prize (Law and Society Association), the Jerry Bentley Prize (World History Association) and the Peter Gonville Stein Award (American Society for Legal History).