Indian Ocean Connections

E318 | Long before European contact with the Americas forged transoceanic networks and connections in the Atlantic and Pacific, the Indian Ocean served as a maritime space that connected the many states, economies, and communities of its vast basin stretching from East Africa to Southeast Asia. In this multi-part episode, we follow this maritime space into the modern period, exploring the endurance of Indian Ocean connections. We discuss how commerce and politics fueled the expansion of the Ottoman diplomatic presence in South Asia, and we consider how lingering connections between East Africa and the Indian Ocean world forged by dhow traffic reveal both continuities and transformations in the history of economy, mobility, and empire along the coasts today. More at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/06/indian-ocean.html Nidhi Mahajan is a Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Humanities at Tufts University. Her book project titled "Moorings: The Dhow Trade and the State in East Africa" is a historical ethnography of the dhow trade and multiple regulatory regimes in the Western Indian Ocean. Jeffery Dyer is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Boston College. He is completing a dissertation on Ottoman engagement with the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Ocean in the last decades of the empire entitled “Ottomans in the Age of Empire: Ottoman Consular Diplomacy and the Indian Ocean Frontiers of the Arabian Peninsula, 1870-1914.” Chris Gratien holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University's Department of History and is currently an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His research focuses on the social and environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He is currently preparing a monograph about the environmental history of the Cilicia region from the 1850s until the 1950s. Shireen Hamza is a doctoral student in the History of Science department at Harvard University. Her research focuses broadly on the history of science and medicine in the Islamicate Middle Ages, and more specifically on the history of women's health. CREDITS Episode No. 318 Release Date: 21 June 2017 Recording Locations: Boston College / Harvard University Audio editing by Chris Gratien Music: from archive.org - Katibim (Uskudar'a Gider iken) - Safiye Ayla Special thanks to Kara Günes for permission to use the composition "Istanbul", Rajna Swaminathan for "Entangled Hierarchy", and Muhtelif for "Bint El Shalabiya"