Prasannan Parthasarathi

The Indian Ocean in the Long Eighteenth Century

This article considers the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth century, a period often seen as a moment of transition for the Ocean as an economic space. It argues that notwithstanding the increasing European presence, the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean world remained quintessentially Asian. The trade of cotton and the flow of American silver expanded an already developed system of trade and exchange. This article concludes by reflecting on the chronological and spatial boundaries of the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth century and considers the field of Indian Ocean studies in relation to global and Atlantic histories.

Migrant Workers in the Middle East: Introduction

Transnational labor migration is one of the most visible features of our globalizing world. The International Organization for Migration estimates that there are 214 million migrant workers crossing national borders in the world today. Migration both in and to the Middle East constitutes an important part of this movement of laborers and has deep roots. In the mid-fifteenth century, workers across a broad spectrum of occupations, including stevedores, boatmen, and bakers, trekked from areas in eastern and central Anatolia to the new imperial Ottoman capital, Istanbul, where they lived and worked for months and even years. Workers from outside the Middle East also have been part of the fabric of life in the region for several centuries, the slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa, which long supplied labor for a variety of purposes, being one of the most notable. Migrant workers took on new significance in the twentieth century, especially after the oil price hikes of 1973. Today the nations on the Arabian Peninsula, the destination for most workers, have the highest ratio of migrants to locals in the world.

The State and Social History

Social history emerged in the 1950s and 1960s out of two contradictory impulses. On the one hand, social historians sought to recapture the lives and experiences of the working class and other dispossessed groups. At the same time, social history was connected by a number of its early practitioners with major political projects. It was very self-consciously part of a larger analysis of a capitalist system with the aim of transcending that system and establishing socialism. It thus took seriously the analysis of state power. There was some tension between a social history that sought to reconstruct the lives and experiences of the dispossessed and one that was politically engaged, which came to be resolved from the 1970s increasingly in favor of the former. As a consequence, the state came to be increasingly ignored in social historical studies. The purpose of this paper is to suggest some lines of enquiry that will bring the state back into social history. At the same time, it recognizes that ours is an increasingly global era and that cultural practices and meanings are indispensable to historical inquiries. Therefore, it argues that the state must be conceptualized in a far broader, that is global and comparative as well as cultural, context.

Textiles and Silver: The Indian Ocean in a Global Frame

The chapter examines the textile trade in the Indian Ocean between 1600 and the present day through a global lens. The seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries marked the heyday of the Indian Ocean trading system, with the textile world of the Indian Ocean reaching into East Asia, Europe and the Atlantic—the silver from these three areas helping to fuel commerce. From the early nineteenth century to 1913, the Indian Ocean trading system was eclipsed as cloth consumption habits were reshaped globally. In the final period, from 1913 to the present, cloth production expanded in the Indian Ocean—although the region’s coherence as a trading system was lost through nationalism and, more recently, globalization; its regional economy is now enmeshed in a global trading order.