New Books in the Indian Ocean World

Mar 28 2025 140 ep. 63 mins 1.1k
New Books in the Indian Ocean World Podcast artwork

Interviews with scholars of the Indian Ocean World about their new books

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Bin Yang, "Discovered But Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, C. 1100-1620" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Mar 28 2025 50 mins  
Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c.1100-1620 (Columbia UP, 2024) examines China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean, especially as they relate to the Maldives. By weaving together the accounts of a 14th-century Chinese traveler (Wang Dayuan) to the archipelago, archaeological analysis of shipwrecks, maps by both the imperial court and Jesuits, record

V. Chitra, "Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Mar 23 2025 64 mins  
Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore (Cornell UP, 2024) reveals the ways that technical images such as weather infographics, sea-level projections, and surveys are fast remaking Mumbai's coasts and coastal futures. They set in place infrastructural interventions, vocabularies of development and conservation, and their lines and dots ins

Andrea Wright, "Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Mar 14 2025 32 mins  
Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea (Stanford UP, 2024) by Andrea Wright offers a critical and nuanced examination of the labor regimes that sustain the oil economies of the Arabian Peninsula. Challenging dominant narratives centered on state-building, elite wealth, and resource control, Wright focuses on the transnational laborers whose work has been essential to the

Lindsay O'Neill, "The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey Into and Out of Slavery" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Feb 21 2025 49 mins  
In 1716 two princes from Mpfumo—what is today Maputo, the capital of Mozambique—boarded a ship licensed by the East India Company bound for England. Instead, their perfidious captain sold them into slavery in Jamaica. After two years of pleading their case, the princes—known in the historical record as Prince James and Prince John—convinced a lawyer to purchase them, free t

Parisa Vaziri, "Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

Feb 09 2025 87 mins  
From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slav

Jorge Flores, "Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Jan 29 2025 56 mins  
Portuguese India was tiny—a handful of trading posts and enclaves, centered on the colony of Goa. The Estado da Índia faced the Mughal Empire and the Deccan Sultanates, large Muslim and Persian-based societies that ruled the subcontinent. How did Portuguese India survive? Well, by spying. Jorge Flores in his book Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World

China and the Indo-Pacific: Policies and Global Implications

Dec 27 2024 31 mins  
Why has the Indo-Pacific become the pre-eminent theatre of global geo-strategic and geo-economic competition? What is the interest and role of different actors such as China, Russia, the US, the EU and NATO in the region? How are small island developing states such as the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, and Vanuatu affected by challenges in the new security environment

Anne K. Bang, "Zanzibari Muslim Moderns: Islamic Paths to Progress in the Interwar Period" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Dec 18 2024 66 mins  
Zanzibari Muslim Moderns: Islamic Paths to Progress in the Interwar Period (Oxford UP, 2024) is a historical study of Zanzibar during the interwar years. This was a period marked by rapid intellectual and social change in the Muslim world, when ideas of Islamic progress and development were hotly debated. How did this process play out in Zanzibar? Based on a wide range of sources�

Sasikumar Harikrishnan, "Social Spaces and the Public Sphere:: A Spatial-history of Modernity in Kerala" (Routledge, 2023)

Nov 20 2024 77 mins  
What can social spaces tell us about social relations in society? How do everyday social spaces like teashops, reading rooms and libraries reify-or subvert-dominant social structures like caste and gender? These are the questions that Social Spaces and the Public Sphere:: A Spatial-history of Modernity in Kerala (Routledge, 2023) explores through a study of modern Kerala. Using ar

Adam Bobbette, "The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java" (Duke UP, 2023)

Nov 15 2024 43 mins  
In The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java (Duke UP, 2023), Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia's volcanoes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scientists became concerned with protecting the colonial plantation economy from the unpredictable bursts and shudders of volcanoes. Bobbette follows Javane