Abstract
In 1573, the famous Mughal emperor Akbar visited the west-central Indian coastal area around the Gulf of Cambay that his forces had recently conquered. The area included the ports of Cambay and Surat. Reportedly, Akbar had never before seen the ocean, and one could only wonder what he might have thought of its possibilities or limitations.1 Akbar’s familial heritage was Central Asian, and in India his experience was land-based power. Although Akbar extended his rule from coast to coast across India, from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal, his focus was on interior concerns. He built a good roadway system, bridges, and caravanserais for interior trade, just as his near contemporary Shah Abbas did in Safavid Persia.2 Yet India was already well connected by land and sea to the wider world, including the Persian Gulf. As we will see, Akbar’s successors would become more involved in maritime concerns.
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Notes
M. N. Pearson, “The Sixteenth Century,” in India and the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800, Ashin Das Gupta and M. N. Pearson (Calcutta, India: Oxford University Press, 1987), 79.
Stephen Frederic Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade 1600–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 37–42.
John R. Perry, Karim Khan Zand: A History of Iran 1747–1779 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 249.
A good source of information on Ottoman interests and policies in the Gulf region is Frederick F. Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). See also Anscombe’s chapter in this book.
Calvin H. Allen, Jr., “Sayyids, Shets and Sultans: Politics and Trade in Masqat under the Al Bu Saʿid, 1789–1914” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1978), 142–56.
The major source for this delegation and its journey is Abdul Qadir, Waqa’i-i mananzil-i Rum: A Diary of a Journey to Constantinople, ed. Mohibbul Hasan (Aligarh, India: Aligarh Muslim University, 1968).
Hamid b. Muhammad ibn Ruzayq, Al-fath al-mubin al-mubarhim sirat al-sadat Al bu Saʿidiyin (Cambridge University Library, Add. MS. 2892). There is also an English translation by G. P. Badger, under the title History of the Imams and Seyyids of Oman (London: Hakluyt Society, 1871).
Katib Chelebi, The History of the Maritime Wars of the Turks, Oriental Translation Fund 17, trans. James Mitchell (London, 1831; repr. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968). “Katib Chelebi” was a sobriquet meaning, “esteemed scribe.” The author’s name was Mustafa ibn Abdullah.
Evliya Efendi, Narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Joseph Hammer-Purgstall (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1834; repr. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968), 138.
A famous example of a study of the British East India Company records from inside the company is J. G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman, and Central Arabia, 2 vols. in 5 parts (Calcutta, India: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1908–1915; repr. Farnsborough, UK: Gregg, 1970).
A highly detailed study based largely on Dutch, Portuguese, and English archives is R. J. Barendse, The Arabian Seas: The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002).
Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat c. 1700–1750 (Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner, 1979).
Patricia Risso, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 65.
Patricia Risso, “Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Piracy: Maritime Violence in the Western Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf Region during a Long Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 12 (2001): 304–05.
Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 131.
Kate Brittlebank, Tipu Sultan’s Search for Legitimacy: Islam and Kingship in a Hindu Domain (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Ibid., 65, referring to Stewart Gordon, “Legitimacy and Loyalty in Some Successor States of the Eighteenth Century,” in Kingship and Authority in South Asia, 2nd ed., J. F. Richards, ed. (Madison, WI: Department of South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1981).
Mohibbul Hasan, History of Tipu Sultan (Calcutta, India: The World Press Private Ltd, 1971), 129–30.
Patricia Risso, Oman and Muscat: An Early Modern History (London: Croom Helm and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 151.
Thabit A. J. Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, and Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth Century Basra (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 27. Tipu employed a Jewish broker at Basra, perhaps confirming that Indian expatriates were not in that line of work at that particular port. (Hasan, History of Tipu Sultan, 346.)
Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities 1500–1730 (Washington, D. C.: Mage Publishers, 2006), 271.
Calvin H. Allen, Jr., “The Indian Merchant Community of Masqat,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 44 (1981): 39–40.
James Onley, “Britain’s Native Agents in Arabia and Persia in the Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 1 (2004): 21–23.
Anh Nga Longva, Walls Built on Sand: Migration, Exclusion, and Society in Kuwait (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 19–22.
As an example of the basis for the military reputation in 1698–99, Baluchi tribesmen raided Kirman, in southeastern Iran, that was then under the weak control of the Safavid dynasty. The Baluchis posed a threat both to the city of Yazd and to the port of Bandar Abbas, over three hundred miles away. (Roger Savory, Iran under the Safavids [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], 241.) The depth and breadth of the Baluchi incursion foreshadowed an Afghani assault in 1722 that would bring an end to Safavid power.
Beatrice Nicolini, Makran, Oman and Zanzibar: Three-Terminal Cultural Corridor in the Western Indian Ocean (1799–1856), trans. Penelope-Jane Watson (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004), 4–23.
Robert Geran Landen, Oman Since 1856: Disruptive Modernization in a Traditional Arab Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 89–91.
Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 204–05.
Unless otherwise noted, the statistics in the following two paragraphs come from Andrzej Kapiszewski, Nationals and Expatriates: Population and Labour Dilemmas of the Gulf Cooperation Council States (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2001), 39, Table 1.4; 65, Table 3.3 and Figure 3.1.
For a detailed account of minorities in Oman, see J. E. Peterson’s two articles: “Oman’s Diverse Society: Northern Oman,” The Middle East Journal 58, no. 1 (Winter 2004), 32–51 and “Oman’s Diverse Society: Southern Oman,” The Middle East Journal 58, no. 2 (Spring 2004), 254–69.
Anthony H. Cordesman, Saudi Arabia Enters the Twenty-First Century: The Military and International Security Dimensions, vol. 1 (Westport CT: Praeger, 2003), 52.
Barbara D. Metcalf, “Islamic Arguments in Contemporary Pakistan,” in Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan, Barbara D. Metcalf (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2004), 237.
Metcalf’s chapter originally appeared in William R. Roff, ed., Islam and the Politics of Meaning (London: Croom Helm and Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1987).
Barbara D. Metcalf, “‘Traditionalist’ Islamic Activism: Deoband, Tablighis, and Talibs,” in Islamic Contestations, 277. This chapter originally appeared in Craig Calhoun, Paul Price, and Ashley Timmer, eds., Understanding September 11 (New York: The New Press, 2002).
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© 2009 Lawrence G. Potter
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Risso, P. (2009). India and the Gulf: Encounters from the Mid-Sixteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Centuries. In: Potter, L.G. (eds) The Persian Gulf in History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230618459_11
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