New Books in the Indian Ocean World
Episodes
Indology in Canada Conference: A Conversation with Dagmar Wujastyk
01 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Introducing a new conference to showcase the breadth and vitality of Canadian research on premodern India. We discuss the vision behind the conference...
Tulasi Srinivas, "The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty" (Duke UP, 2025)
26 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty (Duke UP, 2025), Tulasi Srinivas offers a pathbreaking ethnography of contemporary India...
Osamu Kitayama and Jhuma Basak, "Psychoanalytic Explorations into the Primal Relationship in Japan and India" (Routledge, 2025)
10 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the New Books Network, I sat down with the contributors of Psychoanalytic Explorations into the Primal Relationship in Japan and I...
Daneesh Majid, "The Hyderabadis: From 1947 to the Present Day" (Harper Collins, 2025)
09 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
From the annexation of the princely state of Hyderabad in September 1948 to the formation of Andhra Pradesh in 1956 and the eventual creation of Telan...
Lisa Björkman, "Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
17 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai (U Minnesota Press, 2025), Lisa Björkman invites our attention to political form and how ...
Sourit Bhattacharya, "Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising" (Orient BlackSwan, 2024)
13 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising (Orient BlackSwan, 2024) by Sourit Bhattacharya introduces a new method of decolonial read...
P. C. Saidalavi, "Seeking Allah's Hierarchy: Caste, Labor, and Islam in India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
04 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Why Muslims in South India observe hierarchical intra-communal relationships despite the egalitarianism of their religionIn Seeking Allah’s Hierarc...
Jacqueline Couti and Anny Dominique Curtius, "Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
03 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings (Liverpool UP, 2025) bridges the gap between the Car...
Namit Arora and Romila Thapar, "Speaking of History: Conversations about India’s Past and Present" (India Allen Lane, 2025)
22 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean to be a historian? How do you try to explain the past when sources are lacking? And how do we talk about history when it’s so poli...
Ishita Dey, "Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal" (Routledge, 2025)
21 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal (Routledge, 2025) by Ishita Dey is an ethnographic work on excess. Based on a decade-long fieldwork of a sin...
Imran Mulla, "The Indian Caliphate, Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince" (Hurst, 2025)
15 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In 1924, the Republic of Turkey voted to abolish the Ottoman caliphate, ending a 400-year-long claim by the Ottomans that they were the leaders of the...
Nile Green, "Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook on Sri Lanka in the Islamic Indian Ocean" (U Texas Press, 2026)
07 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Sri Lanka has long sat astride the monsoon winds between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea – a small island at the centre of a very big story. F...
Rituparna Patgiri and Gurpinder Singh Lalli eds., "Food, Culture and Society in India: Social, Political, Economic and Cultural Perspectives" (Berghahn Books, 2025)
13 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Exploring the entangled relationships between food, culture and society in India, this edited collection Food, Culture and Society in India: Socia...
Isabelle Guérin et. al., "The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism" (Stanford UP, 2023)
29 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism (Stanford UP, 2023), the authors Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar and G. Venkatasubramani...
Fahad Ahmad Bishara, "Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History" (U California Press, 2025)
27 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1924, the Al-A‘waj, also known as the Crooked, set sail from Kuwait on a trading journey around the Persian Gulf, through the Strait of Hormuz...
Anand P. Vaidya, "Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India" (Cornell UP, 2025)
13 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India (Cornell UP, 2025), Anand P. Vaidya tells the story of the making and unmaking of Indi...
Fahad Ahmad Bishara, "Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History" (U California Press, 2025)
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Monsoon Voyagers follows the voyage of a single dhow (sailing vessel), the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around...
C. Yamini Krishna, "Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
01 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is about the reciprocal relationship betwe...
Hindutva and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India
24 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Kenneth Bo Nielsen is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and leader of the Centre for South Asian Democracy. M. Sud...
Abhimanyu Kumar and Aletta André, "The House of Awadh: A Hidden Tragedy" (HarperCollins India, 2025)
23 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Begum Wilayat Mahal, the self-proclaimed heir to the House of Awadh, has fascinated journalists and writers for decades. She claimed she was Indian ro...
Ghazala Wahab, "The Hindi Heartland: A Study" (Aleph Book Company, 2025)
18 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Hindi heartland, comprising Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh, covers nearly 38 per cent o...
Rehan Abeyratne, "Courts and LGBTQ+ Rights in an Age of Judicial Retrenchment" (Oxford UP, 2025)
16 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Democratic backsliding, culture wars and partisan politics in the past two decades has seen the regression of human rights protections in the courts ...
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, "Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone" (Columbia UP, 2025)
08 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why is it so difficult to account for the role of identity in literary studies? Why do both writers and scholars of Indian English literature express ...
Jürgen Schaflechner, "Hinglaj Devi: Identity, Change, and Solidification at a Hindu Temple in Pakistan" (Oxford UP, 2018)
03 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
About two hundred kilometers west of the city of Karachi, in the desert of Baluchistan, Pakistan, sits the shrine of the Hindu Goddess Hinglaj. Despit...
Eric T. Jennings, "Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean" (Yale UP, 2025)
02 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Vanilla is one of the most expensive of flavorings—so valuable that it was smuggled or stolen by pirates in the early days—and yet it is everywher...
Erin M.B. O'Halloran, "East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World Between the Wars" (Stanford UP, 2025)
02 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Between the First and Second World Wars, activists across the British Empire began to think about what their homes might look like as independent nati...
Subah Dayal, "Between Household and State: The Mughal Frontier and the Politics of Circulation in Peninsular India" (U California Press, 2024)
30 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Subah Dayal recently joined the New Books Network to discuss her new work Between Household and State: The Mughal Frontier and the Politics of Ci...
Rosinka Chaudhuri, "India's First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire" (India Viking, 2025)
25 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1831, the India Gazette wrote about a group of radical young thinkers that it credited for an upheaval in social and religious politics in Calcut...
Nidhi Mahajan, "Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean" (U of California Press, 2025)
13 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean (U of California Press, 2025) follows sailors from the Gulf of Kachchh in India as they voyage ...
Devika Shankar, "An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development at the Edge of British India, 1860-1950" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
12 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ecological and political instability have time and again emerged as catalysts for risky development projects along India's south-west coastline. In ...
Rose Casey, "Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style" (Fordham UP, 2025)
12 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style (Fordham UP, 2025) analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to reveal con...
Robert Ivermee, "Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India" (Oxford UP, 2025)
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This is a powerful new account of a chapter in history that is crucial to understand, yet often overlooked. For 150 years, from the reign of Louis XIV...
Laura Murphy, "Freedomville: The Story of a 21st-Century Slave Revolt" (Columbia Global Reports, 2021)
30 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A celebrated revolution brought freedom to a group of enslaved people in northern India. Or did it? Millions of people around the world today are ens...
Timothy Barnard, "Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942" (NUS Press, 2019)
26 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Imperial Creature: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942 (National University of Singapore Press, 2019), Timothy Barnard explor...
Nicholas P. Roberts, "A Sea of Wealth: The Omani Empire and the Making of an Oceanic Marketplace" (U California Press, 2025)
16 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A Sea of Wealth: The Omani Empire and the Making of an Oceanic Marketplace (U California Press, 2025) is a sweeping retelling of the Omani position ...
Audrey Truschke, "India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent" (Princeton UP, 2025)
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
I’m Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. On this show, we interview authors w...
Ronald C. Po, "Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties" (Liverpool UP, 2024)
06 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Liverpool UP, 2024) offers a vivid look at China's dynamic and longstanding ...
Anne M. Blackburn, "Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties Across the Indian Ocean: A Pali Arena, 1200-1550" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)
01 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries new kingdoms emerged in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia. Sovereignty in these new kingdoms was ex...
Ankur Barua, "The Hindu Self and Its Muslim Neighbors: Contested Borderlines on Bengali Landscapes" (Lexington, 2022)
30 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Hindu Self and its Muslim Neighbors, the author sketches the contours of relations between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal. The central argument ...
Surindar Nath Pandita, "डान् क्विक्षोटः Don Quixote" (Pune, 2024)
09 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The present book contains a facsimile edition of a unique modern Kashmiri translation of five chapters from Cervantes’s famous Don Quijote. In this...
NATO, the Indo-Pacific, and the Future of Burden-Sharing: A Conversation with Brian Blankenship
07 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Brian Blankenship comes back to the New Books Network to talk about what his book, The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy in US Al...
Vappala Balachandran, "India and China at Odds in the Asian Century: A Diplomatic and Strategic History" (Hurst, 2025)
05 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
China and India have had a tense relationship, disagreeing over territory, support for each other’s rivals, and even, at times, leadership of the “...
Titas Chakraborty, "Empire of Labor: How the East India Company Colonized Hired Work" (U California Press, 2025)
15 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.f...
Bin Yang, "Discovered But Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, C. 1100-1620" (Columbia UP, 2024)
28 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c.1100-1620 (Columbia UP, 2024) examines China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean,...
V. Chitra, "Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore" (Cornell UP, 2024)
23 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore (Cornell UP, 2024) reveals the ways that technical images such as ...
Andrea Wright, "Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea" (Stanford UP, 2024)
14 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 regime...
Lindsay O'Neill, "The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey Into and Out of Slavery" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
21 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 Englan...
Parisa Vaziri, "Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
09 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 su...
Jorge Flores, "Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
29 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
China and the Indo-Pacific: Policies and Global Implications
27 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 differe...
Anne K. Bang, "Zanzibari Muslim Moderns: Islamic Paths to Progress in the Interwar Period" (Oxford UP, 2024)
18 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Zanzibari Muslim Moderns: Islamic Paths to Progress in the Interwar Period (Oxford UP, 2024) is a historical study of Zanzibar during the interwar ye...
Sasikumar Harikrishnan, "Social Spaces and the Public Sphere:: A Spatial-history of Modernity in Kerala" (Routledge, 2023)
20 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What can social spaces tell us about social relations in society? How do everyday social spaces like teashops, reading rooms and libraries reify-or su...
Adam Bobbette, "The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java" (Duke UP, 2023)
15 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Scott J. Weiner, "Kinship, State Formation and Governance in the Arab Gulf States" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
13 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Tribe-state relations are a foundational element of authoritarian bargains in the Middle East, and in particular in the Gulf States. However, the stru...
Andrea Benvenuti, "Nehru's Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy" (Oxford UP, 2024)
24 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1955, the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries flock to the small city of Bandung, Indonesia, for the first-ever Afro-Asian conference. India ...
Sharad Chari, "Apartheid Remains" (Duke UP, 2024)
13 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Over the course of the 20th century, the South African state attempted to construct a “White Man’s Country” on the African continent using the b...
Arang Keshavarzian, "Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East" (Stanford UP, 2024)
21 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Persian Gulf has long been a contested space--an object of imperial ambitions, national antagonisms, and migratory dreams. The roots of these cont...
Jonathan Connolly, "Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
13 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Jonathan Connolly traces the normaliz...
Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow, "A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History: Ten Design Principles" (Duke UP, 2024)
25 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History: Ten Design Principles (Duke UP, 2024) is a guide for college and high school educators who are teac...
Sudev Sheth, "Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
13 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Running and securing an empire can get expensive–especially one known for its opulence, like the Mughal Empire, which conquered much of northern Ind...
Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil, "The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging" (Oxford UP, 2024)
01 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Indian state of Kerala is one of the largest blocs of migrants in the oil economies of the Arab Gulf. Looking closely at the cultural archives p...
Sudev Sheth, "Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
24 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this colorful book, historian Sudev Sheth traces how a family of diamond dealers deployed wealth to play off political leaders and survive the coll...
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640" (U Texas Press, 2024)
26 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sanjay Subrahmanyam presents a hist...
Knut A. Jacobsen, "The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Diasporas" (Oxford UP, 2023)
22 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Knut A. Jacobsen's edited volume The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Diaspora (Oxford UP, 2023) presents the histories and religious traditions of...
Karen C. Pinto, "Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2016)
16 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The history of Islamic mapping is one of the new frontiers in the history of cartography. Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration (University of Chic...
Rishad Choudhury, "Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture After the Mughals, 1739-1857" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
14 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture After the Mughals, 1739-1857 (Cambridge UP, 2023), Rishad Choudhury presents a new history...
Adam Mestyan, "Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East" (Princeton UP, 2023)
01 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2023), Adam Mestyan (Duke Uni...
David S. Powers and Eric Tagliacozzo, "Islamic Ecumene: Comparing Muslim Societies" (Cornell UP, 2023)
16 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The essays in Islamic Ecumene: Comparing Muslim Societies (Cornell UP, 2023) address the ways in which Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia and from su...
Abdul Galil Shaif, "South Yemen: Gateway to the World?" (Authorhouse UK, 2022)
12 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Abdul Galil Shaif's book South Yemen: Gateway to the World? (Authorhouse UK, 2022) tells the story of South Yemen. The book traces the history of th...
Xavier Luffin, "Another Look at Congolese History: Arabic and Swahili Documents in the Belgian Archives" (Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 2020)
09 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Another Look at Congolese History: Arabic and Swahili Documents in the Belgian Archives (Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 2020), edited b...
Fae Dussart, "In the Service of Empire: Domestic Service and Mastery in Metropole and Colony" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
07 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Despite recent research, the 19th-century history of domestic service in empire and its wider implications is underexplored. In the Service of Empire...
Nur Sobers-Khan et al., "Beyond Colonial Rupture: Print Culture and the Emergence of Muslim Modernity in Nineteenth-Century South Asia" (2023)
04 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Scholarly discussions on Islam in print have focused predominantly on the role of Urdu in the development of North Indian Muslim publics (Dubrow, 2018...
Sayan Dey, "Performing Memories and Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures across the Indian Ocean" (Anthem Press, 2023)
27 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Usually, discourses on the planetary evolution and the movements of slaves remain restricted within the narratives and scholarships of the Trans-Atlan...
Nader Kadhem, "Africanism: Blacks in the Medieval Arab Imaginary" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)
25 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Anti-blackness has until recently been a taboo topic within Arab society. This began to change when Nader Kadhem, a prominent Arab and Muslim thinker ...
Jarmo T. Kotilaine, "Sustainable Prosperity in the Arab Gulf: From Miracle to Method" (Routledge, 2023)
22 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Tracing the development journey of the Arabian Gulf region with a forward-looking perspective, Sustainable Prosperity in the Arab Gulf: From Miracle...
Laleh Khalili, "Corporeal Life of Seafaring" (MACK, 2023)
11 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The body of the seafarer is a fulcrum upon which global systems of power, longstanding maritime traditions, and gendered and racialised pressures all ...
James White, "Persian and Arabic Literary Communities in the Seventeenth Century: Migrant Poets between Arabia, Iran and India" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
29 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A wealth of scholarship has highlighted how commercial, political and religious networks expanded across the Arabian Sea during the seventeenth centur...
Boyd Cothran and Adrian Shubert, "The Edwin Fox: How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization, 1850-1914" (UNC Press, 2024)
02 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It began as a small, slow, and unadorned sailing vessel—in a word, ordinary. Later, it was a weary workhorse in the age of steam. But the story of t...
Seema Alavi, "Sovereigns of the Sea: Omani Ambition in the Age of Empire" (India Allen Lane, 2023)
28 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It’s one of the strange artifacts of history that Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania, was once controlled by the Sultanate of Oman. In 1832, then S...
Brian Ulrich, "The Medieval Persian Gulf" (ARC Humanities Press, 2023)
27 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Persian Gulf today is home to multiple cosmopolitan urban hubs of globalization. This did not start with the discovery of oil. The Medieval Persi...
Stefan Helmreich, "A Book of Waves" (Duke UP, 2023)
16 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In A Book of Waves (Duke UP, 2023), Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological ...
Guillemette Crouzet, "Inventing the Middle East: Britain and the Persian Gulf in the Age of Global Imperialism" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
13 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The “Middle East” has long been an indispensable and ubiquitous term in discussing world affairs, yet its history remains curiously underexplored....
Peter Good, "The East India Company in Persia: Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Eighteenth Century" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
10 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1747, the city of Kerman in Persia burned amidst chaos, destruction and death perpetrated by the city's own overlord, Nader Shah. After the violent...
Divya Cherian, "The Owl and the Occult: Popular Politics and Social Liminality in Early Modern South Asia" (2023)
09 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Divya Cherian about her article "The Owl and the Occult: Popular Politics and Social Liminality in Early Modern South Asia" publis...
Kalyani Ramnath, "Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962" (Stanford UP, 2023)
27 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For more than a century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading g...
Samson A. Bezabeh, "Djibouti: A Political History" (Lynne Rienner, 2023)
27 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Wedged between Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, at the intersection of the world’s busiest shipping routes, Djibouti has long been a global geostrate...
Alice Wilson, "Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman" (Stanford UP, 2023)
26 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Dhufar Revolution was fought between 1965–1976, in an attempt to depose Oman's British-backed Sultan and advance social ideals of egalitarianism...
Lucia Carminati. "Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859-1906" (U California Press, 2023)
24 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Lucia Carminati's book Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859-1906 (U California Press, 2023...
Christopher D. Bahl and Stefan Hanß, "Scribal Practice and the Global Cultures of Colophons, 1400–1800" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
16 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Scribal Practice and the Global Cultures of Colophons, 1400–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) is the first to chart the global diversity of colophons...
India's Development Diplomacy and Soft Power in Africa
28 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Kenneth King (University of Edinburgh) & Meera Venkatachalam (University of Mumbai), discuss their recently co-edited volume, India'...
Steve Mentz, "An Introduction to the Blue Humanities" (Routledge, 2023)
27 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (Routledge, 2023) is the first textbook to explore the many ways humans engage with water, utilizing literary,...
Hassan S. Khalilieh, "Islamic Law of the Sea: Freedom of Navigation and Passage Rights in Islamic Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
12 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The doctrine of the modern law of the sea is commonly believed to have developed in Renaissance Europe. The role of Islamic law of the sea and customa...
Nile Green, "How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding" (Yale UP, 2023)
08 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The nineteenth century saw European empires build vast transport networks to maximize their profits from trade, and it saw Christian missionaries spre...
Radhika Seshan and Ryuto Shimada, "Connecting the Indian Ocean World: Across Sea and Land" (Routledge, 2023)
02 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Indian Ocean world has a rich history of socio-economic and cultural exchanges across time and space. Connecting the Indian Ocean World Across S...
Markus Virgil Höhne, "Between Somaliland and Puntland: Marginalization, Militarization and Conflicting Political Vision" (Rift Valley Institute, 2023)
28 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On February 6, 2023, fighting erupted around Las Anod, a city in the eastern parts of the de facto independent state of Somaliland. This still-ongoi...
Marielle Risse, "Houseways in Southern Oman" (Routledge, 2022)
15 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Houseways in Southern Oman (Routledge, 2022) explores how houses are created, maintained and conceptualized in southern Oman. Based on long-term res...
Nicholas W. S. Smith, "Colonial Chaos in the Southern Red Sea" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
12 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today, the countries bordering the Red Sea are riven with instability. Why are the region's contemporary problems so persistent and interlinked? Throu...
Rob Marchant, "East Africa’s Human Environment Interactions: Historical Perspectives for a Sustainable Future" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
06 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
East Africa’s Human Environment Interactions: Historical Perspectives for a Sustainable Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) is an ambitious integra...
Anne Gerritsen and Burton Cleetus, "Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World: Medicine, Material Culture and Trade, 1600-2000" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
29 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World: Medicine, Material Culture and Trade, 1600-2000 (Bloomsbury, 2023): Introducing mater...
Burkhard Schnepel and Julia Verne, "Cargoes in Motion: Materiality and Connectivity across the Indian Ocean" (Ohio UP, 2022)
27 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Cargoes in Motion: Materiality and Connectivity across the Indian Ocean (Ohio University Press, 2022) is an innovative collection of essays that for...