Fall 2008

History - 392.001

The Indian Ocean in World History

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the rapidly growing field of Indian Ocean studies. Our approach will be to study the Indian Ocean as one of the oldest maritime highways connecting diverse regions, cultures and civilizations. The time period for the course will roughly coincide with the emergence of Islam in the seventh century C.E. to the intrusion of various European powers into the region and the subsequent emergence of the global economy and colonialism in the nineteenth century. In studying the Indian Ocean world within the framework of global history, particular attention will be paid to the role of port cities and their networks and especially to a variety of sea-borne long distance merchant communities (such as the Maghribi Jews of the Medieval period, Julfan Armenians, Sephardic Jews, and a variety of Indian merchant communities in the Early Modern period) who facilitated the circulation of commodities, cultures, and ideas and in doing so helped to give shape to the Indian Ocean as a "unified" aquatic space in world history. We will rely on a variety of texts including primary sources such as travel literature, scholarly studies of the economic history of merchant communities, as well as Amitav Gosh's extraordinary novel of medieval life in the Indian Ocean, entitled In an Antique Land. The format of the course will be lecture and discussion.