The wooden dhow, with its characteristic lateen sail, is an appropriate icon for the early trading world of the Indian Ocean. It was based on free trade unhindered by monopolies or superpower domination and pre-dated 'globalisation' by thousands of years. It carried a motley crew of sailors, traders and passengers, and many commodities, but the dhow was not merely an inanimate transporter of goods and people, but an animated means of social interaction. The dhow was at the mercy of the seasonal monsoons, but mercifully this very fact multiplied opportunities for social interaction between the sailors and traders with their hosts around the rim of the Indian Ocean, giving birth to cosmopolitan populations and cultures. The dhow was thus a vehicle for a genuine dialog between civilizations. The global world of the Indian Ocean had matured by the fifteenth century. Islam was the most widespread religion along its rim, but it had spread not by the sword but through peaceful commerce. The heroes of this world were not the continental empires but a string of small port city-states, from Kilwa in East Africa to Melaka in Malaysia. Nor was their influence confined to the littoral, but penetrated deep into continental hinterlands economically, socially and culturally. Into this world two major incursions occurred from opposite directions, the Chinese expeditions in the early fifteenth century and the Portuguese at the end of it. The contrast could not have been more stark between the Indian Ocean tradition of free trade that the Chinese espoused, despite their enormous strength, and the Vasco da Gama epoch of armed mercantilism that ultimately led to colonial domination. This sweeping and vividly written popular history of the dhow cultures contains dozens of color illustrations and many maps and is set to become the benchmark history of the early Indian Ocean.

The wooden dhow, with its characteristic lateen sail, is an appropriate icon for the early trading world of the Indian Ocean. It was based on free trade unhindered by monopolies or superpower domination and pre-dated ‘globalisation’ by thousands of years. It carried a motley crew of sailors, traders and passengers, and many commodities, but the dhow was not merely an inanimate transporter of goods and people, but an animated means of social interaction. The dhow was at the mercy of the seasonal monsoons, but mercifully this very fact multiplied opportunities for social interaction between the sailors and traders with their hosts around the rim of the Indian Ocean, giving birth to cosmopolitan populations and cultures. The dhow was thus a vehicle for a genuine dialog between civilisations. The global world of the Indian Ocean had matured by the fifteenth century. Islam was the most widespread religion along its rim, but it had spread not by the sword but through peaceful commerce. The heroes of this world were not the continental empires but a string of small port city-states, from Kilwa in East Africa to Melaka in Malaysia. Nor was their influence confined to the littoral, but penetrated deep into continental hinterlands economically, socially and culturally. Into this world two major incursions occurred from opposite directions, the Chinese expeditions in the early fifteenth century and the Portuguese at the end of it. The contrast could not have been more stark between the Indian Ocean tradition of free trade that the Chinese espoused, despite their enormous strength, and the Vasco da Gama epoch of armed mercantilism that ultimately led to colonial domination. This sweeping and vividly written popular history of the dhow cultures contains dozens of color illustrations and many maps and is set to become the benchmark history of the early Indian Ocean.

Until recently, the dhow, a traditional Arab sailing vessel, operated according to the principles of free trade, carrying a motley group of sailors, traders, passengers, and cargo to ports within Africa, India, and the Persian Gulf. The dhow was a vibrant means of social interaction, and the goods it carried embodied a great deal of social and cultural meaning. One could say the dhow gave birth to a number of cosmopolitan peoples and cultures, establishing and maintaining a genuine dialogue between civilizations.By the fifteenth century, the global world of the Indian Ocean had matured, and Islam was the dominant religion. It had spread not by sword but by peaceful commerce, and the heroes of this world were not continental empires but a string of small port city-states that stretched from Kilwa to Melaka. Their influence penetrated deep into continental hinterlands economically, socially, and culturally. Two major incursions turned this world upside down from opposite directions: the Chinese expeditions launched at the beginning of the fifteenth century and the Portuguese explorations conducted at its close. The contrast could not have been starker between the dhow's long-standing tradition of free trade and Vasco da Gama's epoch of armed trading, which ultimately led to colonial domination. Abdul Sheriff unravels this rich and populous history, recasting the roots of Islam in the region and in the story of the peaceful dhow.

This book is a study of the seafaring communities of the Arabian Gulf and Oman in the past 150 years. It analyses the significance of the dhow and how coastal communities interacted throughout their long tradition of seafaring. In addition to archival material, the work is based on extensive field research in which the voices of seamen were recorded in over 200 interviews. The book provides an integrated study of dhow activity in the area concerned and examines the consciousness of belonging to the wider culture of the Indian ocean as it is expressed in boat-building traditions, navigational techniques, crew organisation and port towns. People of the Dhow brings together the different measures of time past, the sea, its people and their material culture. The Arabian Gulf and Oman have traditionally shared a common destiny within the Western Indian Ocean. The seasonal monsoonal winds were fundamental to the physical and human unities of the seafaring communities, producing a way of life in harmony with the natural world, a world which was abruptly changed with the discovery of oil. What remains is memories of a seafaring past, a history of traditions and customs recorded here in the recollections of a dying generation and in the rich artistic heritage of the region.

Drawing upon Arabic literary sources, iconographic evidence and archaeological finds, this book examines trade, port towns, ship construction, seamanship, ship typology and their historical development in the Western Indian Ocean, focussing on the Medieval Islamic period but including earlier sources.

Few images are as evocative as the silhouette of the Arab dhow as, under full sail, it tacks to windward on glittering waters of Red Sea before moving across the face of the rising or setting sun. In this authoritative new book, Dionisius A. Agius, one of the foremost scholars of Islamic material culture, offers a lucid and wide-ranging history of the iconic dhow from medieval to modern times. Traversing the Arabian and African coasts, he shows that the dhow was central not just to commerce but to the vital transmission and exchange of ideas. Discussing trade and salt routes, shoals and wind patterns, spice harvest seasons and the deep and resonant connection between language, memory and oral tradition, this is the first book to place the dhow in its full and remarkable cultural contexts.

This book breaks new ground by bringing together multidisciplinary approaches to examine contemporary Indian Ocean worlds. It reconfigures the Indian Ocean as a space for conceptual and theoretical relationality based on social science and humanities scholarship, thus moving away from an area-based and geographical approach to Indian Ocean studies. Contributors from a variety of disciplines focus on keywords such as relationality, space/place, quotidian practices, and new networks of memory and maps to offer original insights to reimagine the Indian Ocean. While the volume as a whole considers older histories, mobilities, and relationships between places in Indian Ocean worlds, it is centrally concerned with new connectivities and layered mappings forged in the lived experiences of individuals and communities today. The chapters are steeped in ethnographic, multi-modal, and other humanities methodologies that examine different sources besides historical archives and textual materials, including everyday life, cities, museums, performances, the built environment, media, personal narratives, food, medical practices, or scientific explorations. An important contribution to several fields, this book will be of interest to academics of Indian Ocean studies, Afro-Asian linkages, inter-Asian exchanges, Afro-Arab crossroads, Asian studies, African studies, Anthropology, History, Geography, and International Relations.

This book is a multidisciplinary study of the Indian Ocean region, bringing together perspectives from the disciplines of history, defense and strategic studies, cultural and religious studies, and environmental studies. From the earliest exchanges through Sumerian and Harappan trade, to emerging geopolitical alliances in the twenty-first century, this volume demonstrates both the continuity and change of the region as well as its unity and diversity. The expanse of this ocean and its littoral rim is connected through the social imaginary, which enables these processes. It is with the stories of the peoples inhabiting this rim that this book is concerned—told both through micro studies of the everyday lives of the region’s people and through macro studies centered around civilizations, empires, nation-states, and climate change.

The Arabian dhow, with its characteristic features, is one of the evocative images of the Gulf, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. This book features over two hundred interviews with shipwrights and seamen in the Arabian Gulf and Oman. It compares information given firsthand with the literature already written on the dhow and on Arab seafaring.

"Providing numerous case studies ranging across the Indian Ocean--across disparate time periods and historical and ethnographic approaches--Sounding the Indian Ocean: Musical Circulations in the Afro-Asiatic Seascape brings together the disciplines of Indian Ocean and music studies. As glimpsed above in the Sufi and Catholic networks connecting South and Southeast Asia, the chapters in this volume explore how music helps materialize networks of connection across the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) and in several of its distinct locales. Our focus is not simply the well-worn tropes of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism, however, nor a definition of the IOR as a site for the harmonious mixing of populations (though some of our chapters do one or both of these). Rather, we show how music contributes to placemaking in distinct 'Indian Ocean worlds' (Srinivas et al. 2020). Instead of defining music's value in its ability to provide either narratives of identity formation or the celebration of mixture, Sounding the Indian Ocean explores the role music plays in both boundary-formation and boundary-crossing in Indian Ocean contexts, past and present"--