Locating The Indian Ocean: Notes On The Postcolonial Reconstitution of Space

Journal of Eastern African Studies
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Locating the Indian Ocean: notes on the

postcolonial reconstitution of space
Jeremy Prestholdt
To cite this article: Jeremy Prestholdt (2015) Locating the Indian Ocean: notes on the
postcolonial reconstitution of space, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 9:3, 440-467, DOI:
10.1080/17531055.2015.1091639
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Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2015
Vol. 9, No. 3 , 440–467, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1753 1055.2015.109163 9
Locating the Indian Ocean: notes on the postcolonial reconstitution of

space†
Jeremy Prestholdt*
Department of History, University of California, San Diego, USA

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 14:13 20 December 2015
(Received 3 February 2015; accepted 31 August 2015)
The networks of human relation that define the Indian Ocean region have
undergone significant reconfiguration in the last half-century. More precisely, the
economic insularity of the region has diminished while the postcolonial nation
has both restricted movement and reoriented the political imaginations of people
along the rim. At the same time, the Indian Ocean has been revivified as a unit
of social exchange and analysis, particularly since the end of the Cold War. This
article explores the meaning of Indian Ocean Africa in the context of a
multipolar world by focusing on how the dictates of nations have transformed
the region and how the petroleum economy as well as shifting means of social
engagement have engendered new linkages. The essay argues that although the
postcolonial era affected the closure of certain historical routes of connectivity,
relationships structured by contemporary nations and air travel, among other
things, have encouraged perceptions of regional coherence. What we might term
basin consciousness has begun to reverse the introverted politics of the early
postcolonial era and animate the Indian Ocean as an idea.
Keywords: Indian Ocean; nationalism; Cold War; post-Cold War; historical
imagination
The Indian Ocean region is a matrix of historical connectivities and a valuable heur-
istic device. However, developments over the past half-century have affected the integ-
rity of the Indian Ocean as a field of maritime-linked social systems. More precisely, in
a postcolonial epoch marked by the container ship and air travel, the port cities that
once defined the human geography of the rim lost their central roles as nodes of trans-
oceanic interface. Simultaneously, postcolonial nations both restricted movement and
†
The special thematic section that follows – including the papers by Jeremy Prestholdt, Preben
Kaarsholm, Scott Reese, Jatin Dua, Stephanie Jones, and David Anderson and Jacob McKnight
– has its background in two workshops that were held at Roskilde University in November 2013
and May 2014 on ‘Pirates, preachers and politics: Security, religion and networks along the
African Indian Ocean coast’. The two workshops were organized jointly by the AEGIS colla-
borative research group on ‘Africa in the Indian Ocean’ and Roskilde University’s research pri-
ority programme on ‘The Dynamics of Globalisation, Inequality and New Processes of
International Interaction’. Among the participants and discussants who contributed to these
two lively and inspiring workshops were Anne K. Bang, Felicitas Becker, James R. Brennan,
Francesca Declich, Isabelle Denis, Nikolas Emmanuel, Tobias Hagmann, Stig Jarle Hansen,
Sarah Hillewaert, Anna Leander, Bjørn Møller, Gorm Rye Olsen, Rosa Maria Perez,
Samadia Sadouni, and Kadara Swaleh.
* Email: [email protected]
© 2015 Taylor & Francis

Journal of Eastern African Studies 441
reoriented the sociopolitical imaginations of people along the rim. If petroleum and
the nation transformed coastal societies, and the sea has receded as a primary
conduit of human interface, what meaning does the Indian Ocean region have in
the post-Cold War era?
Though the economic insularity of the region has diminished, since the end of the
Cold War the Indian Ocean has been revivified as an important unit of social exchange
and analysis. Alternative connectivities have emerged, some more substantive than
earlier engagements, and an array of centripetal forces have fostered a new sense of
equivalence affecting both individual and collective relationships. The study of this
reconstitution of the Indian Ocean rim in the context of a multipolar world offers
an opportunity to both reconsider basic assumptions about the region as a field of
interaction and discern continuities and discontinuities across multiple epochs. This
essay offers a thumbnail sketch of the postcolonial Indian Ocean region, with empha-
sis on Indian Ocean Africa. Specifically, it focuses on two lacunae of Indian Ocean his-
toriography: how nations transformed the region and how the rise of the petroleum
economy engendered new modes of linkage. It concludes that although the postcolo-
nial era has seen the closure of certain routes of connectivity, the development of new
maritime and non-maritime linkages across the sea revived perceptions of regional
coherency. In short, the convergences of the past half-century have reconstituted the
region, both integrating and transcending it as a physical space while reanimating it
as an idea.
Coherency, connectivity, closure

Before the mid-twentieth century the Indian Ocean rim exhibited a coherence suffi-
cient to define it as a unit, a “world” in Kenneth McPherson’s terminology.1 Research
by archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, geographers, and literary critics have
presented this world as a cultural continuum constituted by exchange, belief, taste,
and other practices, and facilitated by maritime mobility.2 As K.N. Chaudhuri
explained in his masterful survey of the region, the Indian Ocean evidenced elements
of cohesion in its economic exchanges, climate, movement of people, shared religion,
and means of travel. Perhaps most importantly, Chaudhuri emphasized that despite
social diversity, relations across the Indian Ocean basin were meaningful for those
at its shores.3 Elaborating on this point, Michael Pearson has argued that port cities
such as Mandvi, Muscat, and Mombasa shared more features with each other than
they did with their own hinterlands. More precisely, they were nodes of, in Kai
Kresse and Edward Simpson’s words, the “related but different social worlds” of the
Indian Ocean basin.4 As Chaudhuri and others have demonstrated, at least four con-
stants provided a superstructure for these related social worlds since the sixteenth
century: significant human interaction across the sea; Islam as a centripetal force;
South Asia as an economic core; and dominance of the sea by external empires.5
Because of the region’s historical coherence, the Indian Ocean is also a heuristic
device, one that has allowed us to consider human experience beyond the boundaries
of the continent and nation.6 As a paradigm, Indian Ocean studies highlights fea-
tures of human interaction that cannot be easily grasped from continental or
national perspectives. As a heuristic device, the basin is particularly apropos to
the current era of globalization, one steeped in oceanic metaphors such as “flow”,
“currents”, “fluidity”, and so forth.7 Moreover, in both scholarly and strategic
thought the Indian Ocean has become an important object of reflection, particularly
442 J. Prestholdt
since the end of the Cold War. The idea of the Indian Ocean has gained relevance
beyond these spheres as well, as I will demonstrate in the final section. The ocean is
an increasingly powerful field of the imagination: a discursive anchor for new
relationships, a vessel for the articulation of transnational identities and community
beyond the nation.8
Yet, emphasis on regional coherence is not without drawbacks. The language of
“flows” often conceals the ways in which the ocean and the states along its rim have
been significant barriers to mobility. Terrestrial states, as William Bissell reminded
us, have restricted economic interaction and cultural currents. Thus, rather than
flows alone, it is the shifting apertures, closures, and frictions that define the contours
of the Indian Ocean.9 Like other geographical coordinates, the Indian Ocean as a unit
of analysis also forces an interpretive sieve: in order to assess specific networks of

relation we neglect important linkages beyond them.10 The economies and cultures
of the Indian Ocean rim have affected and been affected by an ever-increasing
breadth of societies. The interpenetration of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean
basins provides the deepest historical example.11 From the early sixteenth century
the societies and economies of the Indian Ocean rim likewise became linked to an
emerging Atlantic economy. European and American trade with the Indian Ocean
basin not only created significant wealth for merchants and investors, but it also
engendered relationships of trans-regional interdependence.12 For instance, the slave
trade in West and Central Africa depended on European access to South Asian
cloth. Thus, American plantations, European trading firms, Indian weavers, and
African consumers integrated American, European, and West African economies
with that of the western Indian Ocean.13 The reconstitution of the Indian Ocean as
a “British lake” only deepened the interdependence of the Atlantic and Indian
Ocean basins.14
Marcus Vink has suggested that the boundaries of the Indian Ocean have been far
more indistinct than contiguous landed territory – and they have been in constant
flux.15 For instance, European empires established settler societies that evidenced
the interlacing of Atlantic and Indian Ocean sociocultural forms. Creole islands con-
stituted by Africans, Malagasy, South Asians, Europeans, and others, but modeled on
the Caribbean plantation complex, dotted the southwestern Indian Ocean region.16
The most striking example of the blurred boundaries between the Atlantic and
Indian Ocean basins is South Africa’s Western Cape region. From the mid-seventeenth
century Cape society evidenced various creole forms. Enslaved Malagasy, South
Asians, eastern Africans, and Javanese labored in European-style vineyards owned
by Dutch settlers.17 Dutch took on words from Malay, Indo-Portuguese, and multiple
eastern African and Khoisan languages, which contributed to a new language: Afri-
kaans. Rather than a dividing line between oceanic spaces, the Cape embodied the
two basins’ interface.18
Colonialism facilitated new forms of integration in the Indian Ocean region, but,
as we will see in the next section, it also enforced closures and reconfigured the econ-
omies of the wider basin. The end of empire had equally dramatic effects on the
societies of the region. As independence movements and nations emerged from
European colonies, people along the Indian Ocean rim were forced to reimagine
spatial relationships within new parameters of citizenship. Just as important, diplo-
macy did not follow patterns of historical connectivity. Postcolonial states built alli-
ances linked to imagined communities grounded in race or shared colonial
experiences, including Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, and the Non-Aligned
Movement.19 This sociopolitical and economic reorientation has produced a quand-

ary for Indian Ocean historiography. Historians of the region have been hesitant to
conceptualize the structural shifts of the past several decades within a regional
longue durée. This, at least in part, is a consequence of the fact that if political
imagination and trade are privileged as indicators of coherency, the end of empire
represents a significant zeitbruch.20
The end of colonial rule was not the only means by which spatial relationships were
restructured in the second half of the twentieth century. Much as regional political rea-
lignments represent a break in time, the history of maritime travel reveals other signifi-
cant transitions. Indeed, a consideration of transoceanic mobility offers yet another
mode of conceptualizing historical change. If social linkages define the Indian
Ocean rim, and we conceptualize historical epochs by means of human mobility, we

can sketch two overlapping eras across the broad arch of Indian Ocean history: a
long epoch of the sail followed by a comparatively short era of fossil fuels.21 The
sail and fossil fuels have differently shaped human interaction and the movement of
commodities. The sail first constituted the Indian Ocean as a zone of social interface.
It facilitated regional economies, botanical exchanges, and cross-cultural influences.
From the sixteenth century, European naval technology made possible the first
trans-Indian Ocean empire as well as the greater integration of the Indian Ocean
rim with other world regions.
At the dawn of the second epoch, which began in earnest in the latter nineteenth
century, coal revolutionized mobility. Steamships loosed the societies of the Indian
Ocean rim from the rhythms of the monsoons. Since steamship service integrated
distant reaches such as Natal into older networks, coal effectively expanded the
Indian Ocean region. Just as important, railways stretched far inland, linking
port cities with small communities and burgeoning cities across the interior. As
James L. Gelvin and Nile Green argue, steam (along with print) facilitated new
social imaginaries validated by a range of new social practices.22 Petroleum
extended the effects of coal. By the 1950s oil had begun to unmoor Indian
Ocean societies from the ocean itself. Petroleum reoriented the regional economy,
containerization refashioned vessels, and air travel collapsed space more dramati-
cally than had earlier forms of transit, facilitating more direct and immediate
human relations across the region. The ease and rapidity of mobility in the age
of air travel integrated the far reaches of the ocean basin even while it more
firmly linked these societies with the wider world. Finally, the global demand for
oil positioned the Persian Gulf as an economic nucleus of energy, finance, and con-
sumer culture, thus reorienting migration and engendering links with the world’s
most powerful nations.23
To illuminate the shifting relationships among societies along the Indian Ocean
rim, this essay explores both shifting political imaginations and changing modes of
connectivity over the past several decades. First, it considers the effects of colonial
and postcolonial political structures on regional coherency. Then, it addresses the
repercussions of the petroleum revolution for societies along the rim. It concludes
by suggesting that since the end of the Cold War the confluence of these sociopolitical
forces has not led to the disintegration of the region either as a concept or field of
relation. Rather, inter-state relations, trade, air travel, and nostalgia for a maritime
world have led to a resurgence of basin consciousness at the level of the state, social
group, and individual.
444 J. Prestholdt
Sea, empire, nation

Empires, and the nations that emerged from them, reconstituted political space. The
landed state has long been an arbiter of economic exchanges, human mobility, and
political possibility. Relations within the Indian Ocean region have perhaps always
been contingent on the complicated politics of coastal polities.24 Yet, colonial rule
created new barriers to regional mobility. In the nineteenth and early twentieth
century, empires enforced closures in service of internal security interests and as
part of a global regime of migration control. At the same time, “imperial globaliza-
tion” created new possibilities for movement.25 The modern era saw a marked increase
in the movement of people within the Indian Ocean region. But these migrations,
unlike many earlier patterns of movement, were to a great degree choreographed by
imperial policy-makers.26 In short, empire redrew the geography of the Indian

Ocean, encouraging connections sometimes related to precolonial channels of connec-
tivity but often oriented by new dictates.27
Empire became such an important collective experience for people throughout the
region that anti-imperial agitation was one of the earliest global political movements.
Overlapping and competing universalisms shaped the imaginations of people along
the Indian Ocean rim long before the modern colonial project, but in the first two
decades of the twentieth century a variety of cosmopolitan discourses emerged.28 As
Mark Ravinder Frost has shown, before 1920 multiple strains of thought coalesced
as anti-imperial movements that ranged from Pan-Islamism to supranationalism.29
For several decades universalist anti-colonial agitation and territorial nationalism
ran along converging tracks. In the most extreme case, outlined by Faisal Devji, the
cross-fertilization of anti-imperialisms shaped an Indian deterritorialization of Islam
that embraced elements of nationalism but abandoned conventional definitions of
the sovereign state in favor of a global Muslim political community.3 0 In a more
general sense, Islamic reformism (nahda) and Arab nationalism offered solidarity
and expansive intellectual networks.3 1 As James R. Brennan and Isabel Hofmeyr
have shown, the notion of a Greater India, or a transoceanic South Asian political
community, gained popularity among diasporic Indians in the first half of the
century. Moreover, as Sana Aiyar’s work demonstrated, for many diasporic Indian
political thinkers the division between “homeland” and “hostland” was remarkably
imprecise.3 2 Socialism and Communism also inspired notions of community that cap-
tivated people along the ocean’s rim. Some nationalists even saw the national and
international as converging projects: national liberation was the first step to building
a larger socialist political community.3 3
By the early 1950s the possibilities of transcolonial community narrowed signifi-
cantly as macrospatial relations were again reconceptualized. The system of nations
that emerged from the era of decolonization represented a shift in the geographical
and conceptual divisions of humanity. Colonial boundaries remained, but permu-
tations of nationalist thinking and definitions of citizenship were increasingly
narrow.3 4 Even ideologies that seemed to open channels of solidarity, such as socialism
and Pan-Arabism, came to be structured by introverted nationalisms. Across the
Indian Ocean region, the postwar era was marked by the dominance of territorial
nationalisms. As a result, trans-regional engagements, both economic and diplomatic,
were rarely predicated on the notion of the Indian Ocean as a coherent socioeconomic
space. Instead, multilateral engagements such as the 1955 Bandung meeting and the
Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference were grounded in a common experience
of colonialism and a valorization of the nation – shared experiences of colonialism, not

shared histories.3 5 Moreover, the end of empire created new frictions and disjunctures,
from the partition of India to the Zanzibar Revolution.
Those groups that boasted transoceanic genealogies and networks but were
embedded in local social relations (local cosmopolitans in Engseng Ho’s terminology)
faced an uncertain status in new nations.3 6 This was in part a result of the privileges
enjoyed during the colonial era. Regimes of social classification varied across colonial
environments, but the distinction between native and nonnative was a fundamental, if
imprecise, colonial administrative convention that favored the latter.3 7 The privileges
that nonnatives accrued often appeared to ally them with the departing colonial gov-
ernments. This did not augur well for local cosmopolitans. Since anti-colonial rhetoric
emphasized the reclamation of indigenous rights, nationalist politics frequently linked

race and ethnicity to continental geography. Additionally, in many of the colonies that
rimmed the Indian Ocean, nationalist political thinkers envisaged introverted states
that emphasized a continental orientation. For example, in eastern Africa many
local cosmopolitans considered nonnative – South Asian, Arab, and even Swahili
(who were classified as native but popularly perceived as nonnative) – found them-
selves in a political quandary, which encouraged claims of autochthony and nativist
authenticity.3 8 Christopher J. Lee has suggested that such compounding quandaries
of social identity and nationality evidenced tensions of postcoloniality, or conditions
and conflicts situated between the inheritance of colonialism and possible futures.3 9
The effects of decolonization on local cosmopolitans were uneven. People of
Hadrami descent offer a case in point. In Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, where
Arabs were classified as “Foreign Orientals,” many Hadramis joined nationalist move-
ments and found important positions in nascent states. In contrast, postcolonial India
deported Hyderabadis of Hadrami descent alongside other Arabs in 1948.40 In the
early 1960s Kenya, coastal African nationalists vilified Hadramis. In the context of
a fractured coastal separatist movement led in part by Arabs, many nationalist
opponents of secession threatened to claim Arab property at independence.41 In Zan-
zibar, various strains of nativist territorial nationalism similarly derogated Arabs, both
Omani-Zanzibar and Hadrami.42 The 1964 revolution ultimately forced many Hadra-
mis into exile.
Post-revolution Zanzibar offers an example of not only how many postcolonial
nations viewed local cosmopolitans but also how states turned away from historical
oceanic linkages. Less than four months after the revolution, Afro-Shirazi Party
(ASP) nationalists formed a union with Zanzibar’s continental neighbor, Tanganyika.
In a highly symbolic gesture, ASP leaders banned all sailing vessels from entering
Zanzibar that had visited an Arab port in the previous 12 months. The new Zanzibari
political elite curtailed the island’s historic maritime orientation, championed an expli-
citly African identity, and later appealed to East Germany, the Soviet Union, and
China in an effort to build alternative political and economic networks.43 Beyond
Zanzibar, the projection of American, Soviet, and Chinese power into the Indian
Ocean region created possibilities for connectivity beyond the region. It also engen-
dered closures and exacerbated regional frictions.44 Civil wars in Yemen, Mozambi-
que, and elsewhere occasioned the indirect involvement of the Soviet Union, China,
and the USA. Decolonization and the postcolonial nation thus reconfigured real
and imagined transoceanic space in important ways.45
While mobility between some points within the Indian Ocean decreased in the
postcolonial era, migration to or from previously unlikely destinations surged in the
446 J. Prestholdt
era of petroleum. East Africa, once an important destination for Arab migrants, was
no longer a significant destination for southern Arabians. At the same time, Indian
Ocean Africa’s coastal cities have drawn millions of migrants from across the
African continent.46 South Asian migrants have been drawn to a handful of southern
Arabian states as well as to many other nations around the world (see below). These
patterns of migration illuminate one of the most crucial developments of the postco-
lonial era: each point along the Indian Ocean’s rim has been increasingly integrated
with a greater diversity of domestic, regional, and global relations.47 Mombasa,
Kenya’s second largest city and once the most powerful city-state on the Swahili
coast, offers an instructive case study.
In the early twentieth century, a new deep water port at Kilindini made Mombasa
East Africa’s primary gateway. It also dramatically changed the demographics of the
city. Laborers from across Kenya and Tanzania traveled to the port. Economic
migrants from southern Arabia and South Asia also came to Mombasa in search of
opportunity, but by 1969 up-country Kenyans, who had represented only a minority
of Mombasa’s population in the early twentieth century, made up 76% of urban resi-
dents.48 Since employers favored up-country laborers, many coastal people, including
Mijikenda, Swahili, and Arab, found themselves alienated from the new economy. In
the postcolonial era, these groups suffered from a range of discriminatory practices
and, in part as a result of internal divisions, mustered no concerted political voice.49
Faced with few opportunities at home, many coastal Kenyans quit Mombasa for
Nairobi as well as more distant destinations such as Dubai, Riyadh, and London.
By the mid-1990s, most Swahili and Arab families I came to know during fieldwork
in Mombasa received remittances from relatives abroad.
Simultaneously, Islam and the Swahili language, both of which only made signifi-
cant inroads in the colonial era, continued to gain purchase beyond the coast in the
postcolonial era.50 For instance, Maasai conversions to Islam grabbed national head-
lines in 2000 when several Maasai Muslim leaders embarked on a twenty-two day
walk to Mombasa as a means of raising funds for an Islamic center.51 In the case of
the Swahili language, the colonial administration encouraged its use and it was recog-
nized as an official language of Kenya after independence. Now, most Kenyans speak
the language of the coast, albeit with embellishments from English, Kikuyu, and other
languages.52 Moreover, as young Mombasans have migrated to Nairobi in search of
employment, Kenya’s landlocked capital has been increasingly infused with cultural
elements of the coast region. Over the past several decades the social landscape of
Mombasa has shifted, while young Mombasans have been pulled inward toward
Nairobi, outward across the Indian Ocean as well as to the centers of the global
economy.
In the age of air travel diasporas have remained important. Postcolonial states both
control and encourage migration, and expatriates send home valuable remittances. In
Somalia, conflict and the absence of a state has forced a remarkable global dispersion.
The post-1991 Somali diaspora – representing roughly 14% of Somalia’s population –
offers an important window on the relationship of dislocation to shifting demo-
graphics within the Indian Ocean region. When war broke out in Somalia many
elites fled to former colonial metropoles, the Gulf States, and Yemen. However, the
majority of Somali refugees crossed into Kenya. Over the following decades,
Somalis also pioneered entirely new channels of migration, traveling to South
Africa and braving the treacherous waters of both the Gulf of Aden and the Mediter-
ranean.53 At the same time, the weakening of al Shabaab in the wake of the 2011
Kenyan invasion encouraged a return of many Somalis, particularly from Kenya and
the UAE, to Mogadishu and other cities. These lateral movements as well as Somali
investment abroad suggest that the transborder and transoceanic links that Somalis
have developed within the Indian Ocean basin will remain important in the foreseeable
future.54
The dire circumstances of war in Somalia also led to strengthened social and econ-
omic links within the well-worn routes of the Indian Ocean. Barawans (Bravanese) of
Hadrami descent fled to Yemen at the outbreak of the war, reluctantly retracing the
routes of their ancestors.55 Many other ethnic Barawans escaped to Mombasa in the
early 1990s. Barawans have traded along the Kenyan coast for centuries and many
had settled in Kenya before the war. Thus, when the Somali Civil War began, many
Barawans had close ties – even familial links – with Swahili and Arab Kenyans.
This relationship would intensify. Unlike most other Somalis, Barawans settled perma-
nently in the Swahili quarters of Mombasa. After more than two decades in
Mombasa, the Barawan community has become difficult to discern. When the war
in Somalia ends and Barawans return to Somalia, the ties with Mombasa will likely
remain strong. The traumas of war have therefore expanded historical connections
within the Indian Ocean region even as Somali refugees transcend them. In the
post-Cold War era, conflict and statelessness has forced a new geography of closure
as well as connectivity.
Ocean, oil, air

Trade is yet conducted by sea. People and ideas still cross the ocean. But few people
travel by sea. Just as coal unmoored the Indian Ocean from the monsoon regime, pet-
roleum engendered new forms of time-space compression, radically altering how
people along the rim interact.
Of course, the sail neither disappeared rapidly nor completely. East Africa offers a
prime example of its persistence. After the First World War, colonial policies sought to
limit the use of medium-sized sailing vessels, as they proved more difficult to regulate
than steamships. Nevertheless, the sail remained a cheap and reliable means of moving
goods, particularly over relatively short distances. As Erik Gilbert has demonstrated,
the sail even experienced periods of resurgence in the twentieth century.56 Nonetheless,
steamers and their need of deep water berths altered the landscapes of port cities.57 For
example, in Mombasa the deep water berths at Kilindini, which became operational in
1926, almost entirely displaced the old port at the heart of the city. By the 1970s, the
demands of ever-larger ships, including container ships, necessitated the expansion of
Kilindini’s port facilities once again.58 Only in the 1990s was trade at Mombasa’s old
port reinvigorated, largely as the result of commercial links with Mogadishu. Irregular
direct trade orchestrated by Somalis in Kenya became a key means of delivering basic
consumer goods to Somalia’s capital.
From the 1960s, the Indian Ocean became both a primary medium for the trans-
port of oil and a primary source for this critical fuel of the global economy.59 The
windfall of oil wealth lifted southern Arabia and the Persian Gulf from marginality,
and in the process the Gulf has reoriented the Indian Ocean region. In recent
decades the region has seen patterns of migration that are both novel and recall
earlier inter-Indian Ocean migrations. More precisely, the greatest number of migrants
have been South Asian. In 2001 the Indian migrant populations in southern Arabia
and the Gulf – the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait – dwarfed other
448 J. Prestholdt
migrant communities. They also outnumbered concentrations of Indian expatriates in

other parts of the world. There are now roughly three and a half million South Asian
“guest workers” in the Gulf. More than 80% of the people living in the UAE and Qatar
are expatriates – that number is 68% in Kuwait – and the vast majority hail from
within the Indian Ocean region. Likewise, almost 70% of Dubai’s population is
South Asian, half of whom are Indian.60 While essential to Gulf economies, these
migrant laborers are increasingly important to the Indian national economy since
they remit about 4$US billion per year.
A cursory notice of the changing route maps of South Asian airlines attests to
migration patterns and contemporary India’s economic relationship with the Gulf.
In 1960, Air India did not operate a regular flight to the Gulf. Its closest destinations
were Aden, Cairo, and Beirut. Forty-five years later, Air India no longer serviced
Aden, Cairo, Beirut or anywhere else in the Middle East beyond the Arabian Penin-
sula. Nearly one third of all Air India flights were to Gulf States.61 The air route
maps tell another story as well: that of circulation. Unlike historical patterns of econ-
omic migration, “guest workers” cannot settle in the Gulf. They are short-term
laborers, destined to return home when their contracts expire. Thus, rather than a
trade diaspora in formation, the movement of South Asians to the Gulf represents
a people in perpetual motion. This circulation binds India to the Gulf in profound
ways, but it is different than the regional diasporas of earlier epochs.62
Air travel has repeated historical itineraries and fostered new connectivities. It has
also had a dramatic leveling effect on space. As air travel became more common,
travelers could transcend land and sea with ease, in some instances reaffirming histori-
cal links. For instance, in the 1990s Oman and Zanzibar were for the first time in
decades directly connected by a Muscat-Zanzibar flight operated by Gulf Air. Yet,
in the era of the transoceanic flight, travel became less a process than a transitory
event. The “airborne world” created far more immediate links between locales,
while it erased the connectivities created by the circuitous routes of sailing vessels
and steamships.63 Perhaps most important, air travel contributed to a diversification
of itineraries for people along the ocean’s shore. In the era of air travel, a journey
from Aden to landlocked Moscow was now no more time consuming than was
travel to Moroni.
Air travel has more firmly integrated the distant reaches of the Indian Ocean rim
and linked the societies along the rim with the wider world. No city better encapsulates
this fact than Dubai. Since the 1990s Dubai has become the financial nucleus of the
Indian Ocean region, a magnet for business, labor, and consumers as well as a
crucial air transport hub.64 Much like nineteenth century Bombay, Dubai’s position
as a transit point and commercial emporium has boosted its cultural influence.65
Because of Dubai’s relatively lax entrance regulations and the fact that air routes
through it are often cheaper than direct Europe-Africa, Africa-Asia, or East
Asia-Europe travel, people from many parts of the world visit the city and indulge
in its consumer delights. Yet, Dubai’s emergence as a hyper-consumerist metropolis
has arguably had its most profound cultural effect along the Indian Ocean rim. For
instance, over the past two decades Gulf women’s fashions have gained unprecedented
and surprisingly uniform popularity from Cape Town to Mombasa and Penang. In a
matter of weeks, popular women’s fashions in Dubai now reach the ends of the Muslim
Indian Ocean region.
Forms of road travel made possible by petroleum have been almost as significant as
air travel for the cultures of the Indian Ocean rim. For example, along the East African
coast motor vehicles have supplanted virtually all other means of transport where
travel by road is feasible. By the end of the 1980s, travel by sea between Kenya’s
coastal cities of Mombasa, Malindi, and Lamu – or to Tanga and Dar es Salaam in
neighboring Tanzania – was unusual, despite the fact that journeys by road were
long, uncomfortable, and often dangerous. In East Africa, travel by sea only thrived
where other means were available, such as between islands and across the Kenya-
Somalia border. The maritime culture that A.H.J. Prins described in his classic
study of Lamu at mid-century therefore only persisted in the guise of small jahazi
that ply short haul routes or provide day trips to tourists.66
While air and road travel have superseded oceanic sojourns, the Indian Ocean
has maintained one critical role: the conveyance of commodities. Almost 90% of
goods are shipped by sea, and the routes of the northern Indian Ocean are the
most important corridors in the world. At present, nearly half of the world’s con-
tainer traffic traverses the Straits of Malacca, while about 20% of global trade
passes through the Gulf of Aden.67 As I suggested above, since the 1960s oil has
consisted of an important percentage of this cargo. By the 1970s, for example, oil
already accounted for 60% of all maritime cargo, and by 2011 roughly 70% of
the world’s oil supply traversed the Indian Ocean.68 Therefore, the most important
economic use of the Indian Ocean in recent decades has been as a medium for trans-
porting oil.
Because of the global economy’s dependence on oil, the Indian Ocean region has
became geostrategically critical to nations within and beyond it. Not surprisingly,
according to a recently leaked communique, US policy-makers view the Persian
Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Arabian Sea as vital to American security.69 Since at
least the 1970s, American foreign policy has prioritized the protection of western
Indian Ocean sea lanes. Since so many variables can affect the extraction and convey-
ance of oil – factors ranging from terrestrial politics to piracy at geographical choke-
points – American foreign policy-makers have come to see the Indian Ocean region as
a very fractured whole. This perception is shared by many other states, including India,
a nation poised to once again define the region.70
In recent decades, Indian foreign policy has shifted away from both a Nehruan lib-
erationist agenda and a narrow concern with internal affairs. It has come to embrace a
maritime Grand Strategy that seeks to make India a significant regional and sea
power.71 India’s economy is now dependent on foreign oil, and this has facilitated a
new set of relationships with other states in the region, particularly in the past two
decades. In addition to dependence on oil from the Gulf, India purchases significant
quantities of coal from South Africa, Indonesia, Australia, and Mozambique.72
India also depends on liquefied natural gas from Qatar, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
The fact that India relies on Indian Ocean sea lanes for these resources has given
rise to a series of bilateral agreements with governments across the region.73 In its evol-
ving “neo-Curzonian” policy, India envisions a more complete integration of the econ-
omies of South Asia and the wider oceanic basin through its use of “soft” power. But
India also intends to show that it can defend its interests by kinetic power, if necessary.
In sum, Indian policy-makers are reimagining the region as “India’s Ocean,” a unitary
vision of the basin that aspires to situate India as its dominant economic and political
player.74
The importance of Indian Ocean sea lanes to India, the USA, China, and other
nations was made plain by responses to piracy. When small bands of ransomers
based along the northern Somali coast began to threaten the sea lanes of the
450 J. Prestholdt
Arabian Sea, the world responded in unprecedented ways. Piracy, of course, is not
new to the Indian Ocean. The Straits of Malacca and Hormuz have historically
been attractive haunts for sea raiders. The phenomenon of piracy in Somali
waters, however, was uncommon prior to 2004.75 Nevertheless, by 2008 the threat
of piracy in the Arabian Sea created a crisis bordering on moral panic, which cen-
tered on the relationship of coastal populations to global trade and the sea.
Somali piracy was the result of a number of interrelated circumstances on land
and at sea. Since the early 1990s, internal strife in Somalia has created unprece-
dented unemployment while the lack of a viable central government opened Soma-
lia’s extensive coastline to illegal dumping and trawling. In the early years of the war
many young people turned to fishing since it was one of the few remaining ways to
earn a living. However, with no state to regulate foreign fishing vessels, trawlers
from Japan, Taiwan, Russia, South Korea, and other countries decimated fish
stocks. This left a significant portion of the male population in many coastal
towns destitute. In response, local fisherman began to attack illegal trawlers and,
in some instances, detain their crews. When foreign fishing companies began to
pay for the release of ships held in Somalia, a lucrative enterprise was born that
would soon bear little relation to anti-trawling efforts.76 Given that about 21,000
vessels pass through the Gulf of Aden every year, piracy offered an economic oppor-
tunity like none other in Somalia. Organized outfits began working out of several
coastal towns, northeastern Puntland in particular. Some even morphed into inter-
national criminal syndicates that linked armed coteries to investors in Somalia and
financiers in Dubai, Nairobi, and London. By 2008 Somali pirates and their finan-
ciers had made the ocean into a sphere of interaction closely watched around the
world.77
The threat that pirates posed to shipping drew a martial response of greater pro-
portions than either the UN Operations in Somalia (early 1990s) or the African
Union Mission in Somalia (2008–present). Perhaps never before had so many
global powers faced a common enemy and acted in relative concert. Anti-piracy
efforts included warships from every major navy in the world. Notable in this
respect was the Combined Task Force 150 – constituted in 2001 to monitor the
Horn of Africa region in service of the War on Terrorism – under American
control, boasting vessels from 25 nations. The European Union naval coalition,
dubbed Operation Atalanta, similarly included representatives from 27 nations.
NATO’s counter-piracy task force in Somali waters, Operation Ocean Shield, even
extended the battle to land after gaining permission from Somalia’s government to
conduct terrestrial operations against pirates. Important regional powers, including
Iran and India, engaged pirates as well. Indeed, for many countries interested in exert-
ing greater influence in the region, the problem of piracy encouraged a global projec-
tion of national military power.78 Piracy therefore offered a space for common action
as a result of common interest in Indian Ocean sea lanes.
Piracy in the Arabian Sea seemed to validate a widely held belief, at least in the
West, that the Indian Ocean basin is a region in crisis. For several years before and
after 11 September 2001, US policy-makers pathologized the western Indian Ocean
region as a hotbed of jihadism. Al Qaeda operatives in Kenya and Pakistan, affiliates
in Yemen and Somalia, and attacks in Khobar and Mumbai seemed to confirm fears
of rising regional terrorism. The American military was particularly concerned about
the use of sea lanes by jihadists. In the wake of the US invasion of Afghanistan, many
policy-makers believed that jihadists escaping southwest Asia would attempt to travel
by sea to the Horn of Africa. In 2002 the US military created a regional force to
address this projected movement. Stationed in Djibouti, the American contingent
was dubbed the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa. The migration of
jihadis across the Arabian Sea proved meager, but concerns about terrorism in
eastern Africa remained, particularly with the rise of Somalia’s al Shabaab. The
group’s ability to launch attacks in neighboring nations, including the 2013 assault
on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall, forays into coastal Kenya in 2014, and the 2015
student massacre in Garissa, deepened US security concerns. In addition to maintain-
ing a significant naval presence in Somali waters, the US military has conducted
numerous operations against al Shabaab in southern Somalia. Such actions have
included covert ground operations as well as drone strikes, one of which killed the
planner of the Westgate Mall attack.79

In future, piracy and jihadism may be only minor geostrategic concerns. Many
analysts now believe that in addition to the critical importance of the Indian Ocean
region as a source and means of transporting oil, the projection of Indian power,
the influence of China and its “String of Pearls” strategy of naval stations, and possible
frictions between India and China are reconfiguring the region’s geopolitical chess-
board.80 According to journalist Robert Kaplan, competition among old and emer-
ging powers, alongside the crises of terrorism and piracy, have positioned the Indian
Ocean at “center stage for the challenges of the twenty-first century.”81 While
Kaplan and others paint a compelling picture, increasing interdependence within
the region seems more likely than conflict. India has sought alliances across the
region, which may increase competition with China. But given India’s dependence
on foreign resources, at present it has few incentives for a confrontation that might
limit access. China’s rhetoric of a “harmonious ocean” may indeed be a platitude,
but since China’s designs on the region are more economic than hegemonic it
would gain little from provoking India. Moreover, China and India are important
trade partners. Both nations are investing in naval power, yet both also see their inter-
ests as best served through policies of soft power, not war.82
The view of the region as an integrated whole is not limited to the most powerful
nations. In the context of global liberalization, smaller states have also envisioned
new forms of regional cooperation. As I suggested above, in the decades after inde-
pendence the new nations of the Indian Ocean rim developed allegiances that
hinged on corporate experiences of colonialism and a mutual respect for national
sovereignty. Economic and other transnational organizations were usually continen-
tal in orientation (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is a notable excep-
tion). After the end of the Cold War this changed. In 1997 Mauritius, South
Africa, Singapore, Kenya, Oman, India, and Australia created the Indian Ocean
Rim Association for Regional Cooperation (IOR-ARC), which hoped to stimulate
investment and trade across the Indian Ocean basin. Soon, other important
states, including Madagascar and Tanzania, joined the association. Though the
initial impetus for the IOR-ARC came from Australia’s “Look West” economic
strategy, the association was founded both as a means for less advanced economies
to stimulate economic growth and more developed economies to benefit from
regional markets. Most importantly, its orientation is explicitly oceanic: only “sover-
eign states of the Indian Ocean” can be members. The IOR-ARC therefore evi-
denced a strong interest in building transoceanic regional ties.83 In the mid-1990s,
states across the Indian Ocean rim embraced a common set of interests within a
shared geographical frame.
452 J. Prestholdt
Reimagining the Indian Ocean

The IOR-ARC and the geostrategic concerns of the USA, India, and China offer key
examples of what Kären Wigen aptly referred to as “basin thinking”, or the perception
of the rim as an integrated whole.84 Basin thinking was a common feature of European
imperial policy-making in the Indian Ocean region. Portugal and Britain, for example,
saw the region as a broad field of interaction, which both sought to dominate. In the
Cold War era American policy-makers embraced this conceptualization of oceanic
space, as did many academics.85 This lens contrasted with the perspectives of many
nations around the Indian Ocean rim, which, as I suggested above, eschewed basin
thinking after independence.86 Yet, since the end of the Cold War the perception of
Indian Ocean rim as a space of meaningful connection has reemerged in significant
ways – and not only through the prism of national policy or academic research.
One of the most fascinating developments of the past two decades is the reimagi-
nation of historical relationships across the rim by social groups and individuals within
the region. As Erik Gilbert demonstrated through his analysis of nostaligic evocations
of the dhow, emic perceptions of an Indian Ocean region have surged in recent
decades. These both conform and contrast with state initiatives.87 The mounting inter-
est in linkages among rim societies by people both within and beyond the region high-
lights a general frame of perception that we might call basin consciousness.88
Conventional forms of policy-oriented basin thinking and popular perceptions of
regional coherency can be distinct, but their mutual influence in the post-Cold War
era suggests, following Gilbert, a conceptual frame that often blurs distinctions
between etic and emic concepts of the Indian Ocean. Contemporary basin conscious-
ness, a diffuse mode of thought that reflects historical connectivities and the legacies of
basin thinking but also informs other imaginations of linkage, is shaping transoceanic
relations on multiple scales.
In South Africa, basin consciousness has gained relevance within the post-apart-
heid heritage economy of the Cape. For instance, many Cape Coloured people feel
a strong sentimental connection to Southeast Asia. This is the product of a compli-
cated past and contemporary interpretation. In the era of Dutch rule, about a
quarter of slaves delivered to the Cape were taken from Southeast Asia, primarily
from the Indonesian archipelago. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ethnic
terms such as Javanese, Bugis, and Timorese were applied to slaves at the Cape. At
times, the more general term Malay was used as well. In the era of British rule,
South African links to Southeast Asia were minimal. However, in the twentieth
century the word Malay gained new gravity as the Apartheid government, and
many Coloured people, marshaled the term “Cape Malay” to reference Muslim iden-
tity and extra-African ancestry.89 “Malay” therefore became a prestige claim. It was a
marker of distinction within a system of racial stratification rather than a means of
establishing linkages with independent Southeast Asian nations. Indeed, when the
Prime Minister of Malaysia appealed to Cape Malays in 1961 to “return” to Malaysia
and cast aside the bonds of Apartheid, his call was largely ignored.90 However, with
the end of Apartheid a surge in heritage interest fueled a desire on the part of many
Cape Coloured Muslims to explore historic links with Southeast Asia. Genealogical
research, tours of Southeast Asia, and the marketing of Cape Town’s creole past to
tourists deepened this sentimental connection. Since 1994 Malaysian institutions,
including the Malaysian government, have sponsored conferences to concretize
links between Cape Malays and Malaysia. An Indian Ocean community is thus
being forged from the historical legacies of slavery, colonialism, and racial
discrimination.91
A more unexpected reimagination of oceanic space has emerged in the context of
Chinese-Kenyan relations. Over the past decade, the memory of Zheng He’s fifteenth
century sojourns across the Indian Ocean region has gained new life in the context of
Chinese investment in Kenya. As elsewhere in Africa, Chinese interests in Kenya have
grown significantly since the end of the 1990s, partially as a result of oil prospects at the
coast and a planned pipeline from South Sudan to the Lamu Archipelago. The
budding China-Kenya relationship took on a cultural dimension in 2005 when oral
traditions from Shanga, a small island town in the Lamu Archipelago, traveled
beyond the island. Local histories claim that certain families are descended from ship-
wrecked sailors of Zheng Ho’s fabled fleet. Chinese geneticists investigated the claim
and, through DNA samples taken from Shangan families, discovered that six Shang-
ans were of distant Chinese ancestry. The Shangans soon became known as the “Lamu
Chinese.” With fanfare, the Chinese government invited a “Lamu Chinese” young
woman, Mwamaka Sharifu Lali, to Nanjing to attend celebrations of the six hun-
dredth anniversary of the Zheng He voyages.92
The positive attention given to the “Lamu Chinese” encouraged Peking University
to mount a joint project with the National Museums of Kenya in an effort to discover
more about China’s historical relationship with Kenya. The archaeologists excavated a
site near Mambrui on Kenya’s northern coast, which they determined was the location
of the medieval Malindi visited by Zheng He. They discovered many Chinese
materials, which is not unusual in coastal Kenya, but some of the finds may be
linked to the Zheng He visit. Thus, the implications of the finds could prove quite
different from other Chinese materials unearthed along East Africa’s shores. As the
lead Kenyan archaeologist suggested, such historical evidence of Chinese-Kenyan
linkage could “give politicians a reason to say: ‘Let’s look East’ because we’ve been
looking that was throughout the ages.”93 Kenya’s leaders are indeed looking east,
and they will likely continue to do so. In 2013 China approved a $US 5 billion devel-
opment loan to Kenya and won the tender to build the first berths at Lamu Port. Soon
thereafter China pledged to fund the upgrade and expansion of Kenya’s rail system, an
infrastructure project that would dwarf any undertaken since independence.94
Converging economic and geopolitical interests, leavened with a sense of nostalgia
for the historic Indian Ocean system, have heightened basin consciousness. Exhibi-
tions and celebrations commemorating the voyages of Zheng He – including the
Chinese-sponsored International Academic Forum in Memory of Zheng He’s
Expedition – offer vivid examples of a broad interest in China’s historical links to
societies across the region. While some may conclude that this is simply a manifes-
tation of China’s “middle kingdom complex”, the import of such strategies seems
equally external. In short, these are ways in which China has sought to reimagine
its relationship with other regions and nations. Such basin thinking is explicitly geopo-
litical. Similar exhibitions in the Gulf have highlighted the long term connections
between southern Arabia and China. In Oman, official emphasis on the country’s mar-
itime history has also shaped an Omani national identity that, as Erik Gilbert demon-
strated, emphasizes Oman’s historical place in the Indian Ocean region.95
Basin consciousness has gained ground in Zanzibar as well. Given the island’s
potential for tourism and the necessity of economic diversification in the 1990s, Zan-
zibar’s creole past became a strategic marketing tool. In the mid-1990s the government
that once viewed local cosmopolitans with suspicion began to promote Zanzibar’s
454 J. Prestholdt
cosmopolitan past. Zanzibar’s Festival of the Dhow Countries, now the most cele-
brated annual cultural event in East Africa, is the culmination of Zanzibar’s emergent
identity, one that references and reimagines a maritime past. In reviving dhow imagery
as the crystallization of a historical Indian Ocean world, Zanzibaris have developed a
basin consciousness that accords with currents of thought in China, Oman, the UAE,
and Kenya.96
These examples, as well as that of fiction writing, academic research, and the arts
further evidence a resurgent basin consciousness. Basin consciousness has myriad
underwriting forces, but one common denominator is the collective desire to revisit
an interconnected past that resonates with the concerns of our time. In this way, it is
a crucial dimension of the contemporary search for equivalence, what Kai Kresse
and Edward Simpson defined as ways of “seeing the familiar in the strange, or the
same in the other.”97 While contemporary forms of equivalence echo earlier examples,
the patterns of linkage and cooperation that have emerged of late, from the IOR-ARC
to Chinese investment in Kenya, represent departures from the more immediate past.
It is in part because of these new engagements that people within and beyond region
are reinventing the Indian Ocean as an idea.
Conclusions
What does the Indian Ocean mean in the era of the postcolonial nation and a global
petroleum economy? The networks of human relation that define the Indian Ocean
region have undergone significant reconfiguration over the past sixty years. The
Indian Ocean basin has long affected and been affected by wider trans-regional
relationships, and this process of extraversion accelerated in the twentieth century.
While colonialism reoriented regional economies toward metropoles, the rise of the
oil economy and the discovery of nearly half of the world’s recoverable reserves in
the Persian Gulf ensured the centrality of the Indian Ocean region to the global
economy. The region has, in this sense, expanded. The stretching of the Indian
Ocean beyond its former boundaries has not, however, resulted in the obliteration
of regional integrity. Rather than precipitating the decline of the Indian Ocean
system, the forces of the postcolonial world reconstituted the region. People still inter-
act across oceanic space, even if the sea is no longer a primary medium for human
interaction. Islam is yet a powerful centripetal force in the digital era. South Asia
remains an economic fulcrum of the region, one poised to become an important
player in the emerging multipolar world. And the sea is still dominated by external
powers, notably the USA and China.
At the same time, post-Cold War era basin consciousness, at the level of the state,
social group, and individual, is reversing the introverted politics of the early postcolo-
nial era. National sovereignty and the interests of states remain paramount, but
policy-makers as well as ordinary citizens have become more invested in transnational
relationships. As a result, the historical geography of human connectivity is writing
itself back into the story of the Indian Ocean, albeit often through the vehicle of the
nation. The surging interest in equivalence is part of a general desire for transnational
communion, but there is more to it than that. The renaissance of basin consciousness
highlights historical memories and shared tastes cemented over generations, centripe-
tal social forces that span oceanic time and space. While these centripetal forces are
not as powerful as they once were, Dubai has become the trendsetter in Muslim
women’s fashions along the Indian Ocean rim. Given their faith and sense of
connection to Arabia, young Zanzibaris are more likely to learn Arabic than relevant
regional lingua francas such as French or Portuguese. Singapore continues to draw
South Asian migrants, in part because of official policies, in part because it remains
central to the imagination and aspirations of Tamils, in particular. Religion, language,
and genealogy have left profound stamps on Indian Ocean rim societies, and these
both re-member and reinforce historical relationships. In the era of the Internet, pat-
terns of connectivity and perception formed over the longue durée yet shape human
desires, interests, and actions.
Because historical routes of oceanic connectivity are the bedrock upon which con-
temporary cognitive maps of the Indian Ocean region are layered, it is tempting to see
basin consciousness as residual, a remnant of a time when the ocean was a medium of
human interface. To the contrary, that history has gained new relevance and meaning
for Indian Ocean rim societies. States, social groups, and individuals have reinvigo-
rated historical geographies for the purposes of new economic relationships, contem-
porary political calculuses, and changing communal identities. During particular
conjunctures, such as the late colonial era and the years following the end of the
Cold War, people along the rim have imagined the Indian Ocean region as both an
alternative social identity and vital political lever. But they have done so differently,
for different reasons, and with varied consequences.
The Indian Ocean port city is practically a memory, yet the cosmopolitan ideal
that it evokes is increasingly relevant to our world. Despite the disjunctures of the post-
colonial era, the imagination of the Indian Ocean as a distinct region has become
more, not less important. The nation and oil, like previous stimuli, produced closures,
connectivities, and frictions as well as new ways of conceptualizing global connectivity.
We should write these processes of historical reconfiguration in concert since together
they reveal the Indian Ocean’s shifting centripetal forces anchored not simply in
economy and genealogy but also in historical memory and perceptions of affinity.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank those who commented on versions of this essay presented to the
Chr. Michelsen Institute, Witwatersrand Institute for Social and Economic Research, University
of California-Los Angeles, Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies, the Graduate Institute of
International and Development Studies, Roskilde University, University of Warwick, Univer-
sity of Basel, and the University of Warsaw. Special thanks to Edward A. Alpers, David Ander-
son, Andrew Apter, Gopalan Balachandran, Anne K. Bang, Daniel Branch, James R. Brennan,
Gwyn Campbell, Jatin Dua, Pamila Gupta, Patrick Harries, Isabel Hofmeyr, Preben Kaar-
sholm, Christopher J. Lee, Ghislaine Lydon, Giorgio Riello, the editors of JEAS, and two anon-
ymous reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. McPherson, The Indian Ocean.
2. Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean; Sheriff and Ho, eds. The Indian Ocean; Ray and
Alpers, eds. Cross Currents and Community Networks; Bose, A Hundred Horizons; Kearney,
The Indian Ocean in World History; Hall, Empires of the Monsoon; Ray, “Seafaring and
Maritime Contacts.”
456 J. Prestholdt
3 . Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe.

4. Kresse and Simpson, “Between Africa and India,” 1; Pearson, “The Idea of the Indian
Ocean,” 10. See also Becker and Cabrita, “Introduction: Performing Citizenship”;
Reinwald, “Space on the Move.”
5. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation; Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History; Roy, India in
the World Economy; Metcalf, Imperial Connections; Lombard and Aubin, eds. Asian
Merchants and Businessmen; Roy, “India at the Crossroads in the Indian Ocean.”
6. Burton, Kale, Hofmeyr, Anderson, Lee, and Green, “Sea Tracks and Trails.” On the ocean
writ-large as a heuristic devise, see Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basin as Frameworks of
Historical Analysis”; Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean; Buschmann,
“Oceans of World History”; Andaya, “Oceans Unbound”; Mack, The Sea; Hofmeyr,
“African History and Global Studies.”
7. Gupta, “Introduction,” 3 –4; Lewis, “Dividing the Ocean Sea”; Wigen, “Introduction.”
8. Vergès, “Writing on Water.” For earlier examples see Larson, Ocean of Letters and Ho,
“Empire through Diasporic Eyes.”
9. Bissell, “Burning the Mabanda.”
10. Wigen, “AHR Forum: Oceans of History: Introduction”; Wheeler, “Rethinking the Sea”;
Pearson, “Studying the Indian Ocean World.”
11. Gelvin and Green, eds. Global Islam; Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterra-
nean; Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration; Fawaz and Bayly, eds. Modernity and
Culture; Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony.
12. Desai, “Oceans Connect”; Alpers, East Africa and the Indian Ocean, ch. 1.
13 . Riello and Ray, How India Clothed the World; Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich
and Asia Did Not; Barendse, The Arabian Seas: The Indian Ocean World of the Seven-
teenth; Wallerstein, “The Incorporation of the Indian Subcontinent”; Toussaint,
L’Océan Indien.
14. Bondarevsky, “Turning the Persian Gulf into a British Lake”; Hofmyr, “The Black Atlantic
Meets the Indian Ocean”; Bishara, “Sea of Debt.”
15. Vink, “Indian Ocean Studies”; Pouwels, “Eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean to 1800.”
16. Larson, Ocean of Letters; Vaughn, Creating the Creole Island; Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, and
Indentured Laborers.
17. Harries, “Negotiating Abolition”; Hooper and Eltis, “The Indian Ocean in Transatlantic
Slavery”; Alpers, Ivory and Slaves.
18. Harries, “Middle Passages of the Southwest Indian Ocean”; Ross, Cape of Torments;
Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa; Ward, “‘Tavern of the Seas’?”; Ward, Networks
of Empire; Worden, “VOC Cape Town as an Indian Ocean Port.”
19. Prashad, The Darker Nations; Lee, ed. Making a World After Empire.
20. Lee, “The Indian Ocean during the Cold War,” 524–525; Cooper, “Possibility and
Constraint”; Gilbert, “Coastal East Africa.”
21. Pearson, The Indian Ocean. On the gradual and uneven transition from sail to oil see
Bhattacharya, “The Indian Ocean in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”;
Gilbert, Dhows; Madureira, “Oil in the Age of Steam.”
22. James L. Gelvin and Nile Green, “Introduction,” in Global Islam. On spatial imaginations
facilitated by steam, see Pietsch, “A British Sea.”
23 . Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History, ch. 6; Erik Gilbert termed this flow of migrant
labor to the Gulf, rather than away from it, a ‘great reversal’. “Coastal East Africa and the
Western Indian Ocean,” 3 0. On earlier patterns of labor importation in the Gulf see Hopper,
“Slaves of One Master.”
24. Pearson, “Littoral Society.”
25. Hopkins, “Rethinking Decolonization,” 216.
26. McKeown, “Global Migration”; McKeown, Melancholy Order.
27. Bang, “Cosmopolitanism Colonised?,” 168, 187; Simpson and Kresse, “Introduction,”
Struggling with History; Clarence-Smith, “The Rise and Fall of Hadhrami Shipping.” On
circumscribed mobility in the imperial Indian Ocean see Anderson, Subaltern Lives.
28. Green, Bombay Islam; Vergès and Marimoutou, “Moorings.”
29. Frost, “In Search of Cosmopolitan Discourse”; Frost, “‘Wider Opportunities.’”
3 0. Bose, A Hundred Horizons, 275; Devji, “A Shadow Nation”; Dodson and Hatcher, Trans-
Colonial Modernities in South Asia.
3 1. Ghazal, Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism; Willis, “Debating the Caliphate.”
3 2. Aiyar, “Anticolonial Homelands across the Indian Ocean.” Brennan, Taifa; Hofmeyr,
Gandhi’s Printing Press; Hofmeyr, “Universalizing the Indian Ocean”; Brennan, “Con-
structing Arguments and Institutions of Islamic Belonging”; Hawley, ed. India in Africa;
Harper, “Empire, Diaspora and the Languages of Globalism,” 142.
3 3 . Manela, The Wilsonian Moment.
3 4. Gupta, “Mapping Portuguese Decolonisation in the Indian Ocean”; Amrith, “Tamil Dia-
sporas across the Bay of Bengal.”
3 5. Gupta, “The Song of the Non-Aligned World.”
3 6. Ho, “Names Beyond Nation,” 28–29; Ho, The Graves of Tarim.
3 7. Lee, “The ‘Native’ Undefined,” 462–463 ; Salim, “Native or Non-Native?”
3 8. Glassman, “Creole Nationalists and the Search for Nativist Authenticity”; Prestholdt,
“Politics of the Soil”; Brennan, “Lowering the Sultan’s Flag”; Salim, “The Movement
for Mwambao.”
3 9. Lee, “Between a Movement and an Era,” 19; Brennan, Taifa; Glassman, War of Words;
Sumich, “Tenuous Belonging”; Gupta, “The Disquieting of History”; Houbert, “The
Indian Ocean Creole Islands.”
40. Abushouk and Ibrahim, eds. The Hadrami Diaspora in Southeast Asia; Warburton, “The
Hadramis”; Freitag and Clarence-Smith, eds. Hadhrami Traders, Scholars, and Statesmen.
41. Prestholdt, “Politics of the Soil”; Brennan, “Lowering the Sultan’s Flag”; Stren, Housing
the Urban Poor, 3 1–3 2.
42. Glassman, War of Words; Lofchie, Zanzibar.
43 . Burgess, “Mao in Zanzibar”; Gilbert, “The Dhow as Cultural Icon,” 69; Bissell, “Casting a
Long Shadow”; Monson, Africa’s Freedom Railway; van Ness, “China and the Third World.”
44. Lee, “The Indian Ocean During the Cold War”; Kumar, “The Indian Ocean.”
45. Imam, “The Indian Ocean and Decolonization”; Shubin, The Hot ‘Cold War’; Weitz,
“Continuities in Soviet Foreign Policy”; Bissell, “Soviet Use of Proxies in the Third
World”; Bowman and Clark, eds. The Indian Ocean in Global Politics; Kearney, The
Indian Ocean in World History, chap. 8.
46. Cooper, On the African Waterfront; Brennan, Taifa. On Arab migration to East Africa see,
Vianello, “One Hundred Years in Brava”; McDow, “Arabs and Africans.”
47. Caplan and Topan, eds. Swahili Modernities.
48. Stren, Housing the Urban Poor, 14–19.
49. Kai Kresss terms the position of Muslims in postcolonial Kenya a ‘double-periphery’: per-
ipheral to both the postcolonial state and the larger Umma. Kresse, “Muslim Politics in
Postcolonial Kenya.” See also Eisenberg, “Hip-Hop and Cultural Citizenship”; Seesemann,
“Kenyan Muslims.”
50. Becker, Becoming Muslim in Mainland Tanzania; McIntosh, The Edge of Islam; Nzibo,
“Islam and the Swahili-speaking communities of Nairobi.”
51. “It’s ‘Allahu Akbari’ as Islam spreads across maasailand.” Standard, January 11, 2011.
52. Khalid, The Liberation of Swahili from European Appropriation; Mazrui and Shariff, The
Swahili.
53 . Bjork and Kusow, From Mogadishu to Dixon; McGown, Muslims in the Diaspora; Sadouni,
“‘God is Not Unemployed.’”
54. Sheikh and Healy, “Somalia’s Missing Million.”
55. Vianello, “One Hundred Years in Brava.”
56. Gilbert, Dhows.
57. Broeze, McPherson, and Reeves, “Engineering and Empire.”
58. Pearson, “Littoral Society,” 3 67; Fremont, “Global Maritime Networks”; Levinson, The
Box.
59. Kearney, The Indian Ocean.
60. Rajan, “New Trends of Labour Migration from India to Gulf Countries”; Kaplan,
Monsoon, 12.
61. Al-Rasheed, Transnational Connections and the Arab Gulf.
62. Kamrava and Babar, Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf; Gardner, City of Strangers.
63 . Brown, The Economic Geography of Air Transportation; Graham, Geography and Air
Transport.
458 J. Prestholdt
64. Katodrytis, “Metropolitan Dubai and the Rise of Architectural Fantasy”; Davis, “Fear and
Money in Dubai”; Ali, Dubai.
65. Green, Bombay Islam.
66. Prins, Sailing from Lamu.
67. Kaplan, “Center Stage for the 21st Century.”
68. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 3 7; Kaplan, Monsoon, 7.
69. Bouchard and Crumplin, “Neglected No Longer,” 47.
70. Kaplan, Monsoon; Green and Shearer, “Defining US Indian Ocean Strategy”; Rumley,
Doyle, and Chaturvedi, “‘Securing’ the Indian Ocean?”; Bouchard and Crumplin, “Two
Faces of France.”
71. Balachandran, “Sovereignty, Subjectivity, Narrations”; Menon, “Finding South Asia on a
Map.”
72. Vines and Oruitemeka, “Engagement with the African Indian Ocean Rim states”; Kaplan,
“Center Stage.”
73 . Hofmeyr, “Africa as a Fault Line in the Indian Ocean.”
74. Kaplan, Monsoon, 183 –184; Scott, “India’s ‘Grand Strategy’ for the Indian Ocean”; Berlin,
“The rise of India and the Indian Ocean.”
75. Alpers, “Piracy and Indian Ocean Africa”; Prange, “A Trade of No Dishonor.”
76. Dua, “A Sea of Trade and a Sea of Fish”; Weldemichael, “Maritime Corporate Terrorism
and its Consequences in the Western Indian Ocean”; Potgieter and Schofield, “Poverty,
Poaching and Pirates.”
77. Hansen, Piracy in the Greater Gulf of Aden; Little, “On the Somalia Dilemma.”
78. Lanteigne, “Fire Over Water”; Kantai and Smith, “The Dangers of Carving Up Somalia.”
79. Hansen, Al Shabaab in Somalia; Prestholdt, “Fighting Phantoms”; Lefebvre, “U.S. Mili-
tary Hegemony in the Arabian/Persian Gulf.”
80. Bouchard and Crumplin, “Neglected No Longer”; Khurana, “China’s ‘String of Pearls’ in
the Indian Ocean and Its Security Implications”; Walgreen, “China in the Indian Ocean
Region.”
81. Kaplan, “Center Stage.”
82. “Defender of a Harmonious Ocean.” People’s Daily Online, April 24, 2009. Accessed Feb-
ruary 3 , 2013 . http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90786/664473 3 .html; Campbell
and Subramanian, “The IOR and the Strategic Importance of the Indian Ocean Region
in the Post-Cold War Era.”
83 . Campbell, “Introduction: Indian Ocean Rim (IOR) Economic Association: History and
Prospects,” 2–4; Campbell, “The Indian Ocean Rim (IOR) Economic Association: A
Giant in the Making?”
84. Wigen, “AHR Forum: Oceans of History: Introduction,” 720. See also Erik Gilbert, “The
Dhow as Cultural Icon.”
85. Connery, “Sea Power.”
86. Go, “Modeling States and Sovereignty.”
87. Gilbert, “The Dhow as Cultural Icon.”
88. My sincere thanks to Gopalan Balachandran for suggesting this term.
89. Ward, Networks of Empire.
90. Zegeye, “A Matter of Colour,” 95.
91. Kaarsholm, “Diaspora or Transnational Citizens?”; Jeppe, “Reclassifications: Coloured,
Malay, Muslim”; Haron, “Gapena and the Cape Malays.” See also Karaan, “Coming
Home” and Kaarsholm, “Zanzibaris or Amakhuwa?”
92. Soon thereafter the Kenyan government signed an oil exploration agreement with China for
blocks in the Lamu Archipelago. “Mystery Ship and Chinese Genes at the Kenyan Coast.”
Nation, August 7, 2005; “Project Seeks to Confirm Roots of ‘Lamu Chinese.’” Standard,
March 23 , 2010; “Kenya Signs Exploration Contract.” Standard, April 18, 2006.
93 . Peter Greste, “Could a Rusty Coin Re-Write Chinese-African history?.” BBC.com 17
October 2010. During the 1960s, similar claims of cordial historical relationships were
made in the context of China-Tanzania relations. Lal, “Maoism in Tanzania,” 101–102.
94. Ott, “End of the Line for the ‘Lunatic Express’?”.
95. “Expo Honoring Ancient Chinese Navigator Opens in Shanghai.” China Daily July 8, 2005
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-07/08/content_458551.htm; Amal Hasson,
2010. “Ancient Treasure Ships and Oman Voyage – From China to Arabia.” Global Arab
Network, December 3 1. http://www.english.globalarabnetwork.com; Gilbert, “The Dhow

as Cultural Icon.”
96. Bissell, “From Dhow Culture to the Diaspora”; Bissell, “Conservation and the Colonial
Past”; Gilbert, “The Dhow as Cultural Icon.”
97. Kresse and Simpson, “Between Africa and India,” 1.
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Locating the Indian Ocean: notes on the postcolonial reconstitution of

Department of History, University of California, San Diego, USA

(Received 3 February 2015; accepted 31 August 2015)

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

Coherency, connectivity, closure

of analysis also forces an interpretive sieve: in order to assess speciﬁc networks of

Movement.19 This sociopolitical and economic reorientation has produced a quand-

Ocean rim, and we conceptualize historical epochs by means of human mobility, we

Sea, empire, nation

imperial policy-makers.26 In short, empire redrew the geography of the Indian

of colonialism and a valorization of the nation – shared experiences of colonialism, not

emphasized the reclamation of indigenous rights, nationalist politics frequently linked

Ocean, oil, air

migrant communities. They also outnumbered concentrations of Indian expatriates in

planner of the Westgate Mall attack.79

Reimagining the Indian Ocean

3 . Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe.

Network, December 3 1. http://www.english.globalarabnetwork.com; Gilbert, “The Dhow

Framing of Transnational Imaginaries in the Western Indian Ocean.” Social Dynamics 3 8,

Gupta, Pamila. “Mapping Portuguese Decolonisation in the Indian Ocean: A Research

Kaarsholm, Preben. “Zanzibaris or Amakhuwa? Suﬁ Networks in South Africa, Mozambique,

116, no. 5 (2011): 1269–1293 .

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