Archive Results For: Indian Ocean
Note: In Opposition to the Lawful King’: Pirates and land-based authority in Sri Lanka, 1000–1500
Existing literature on piracy in the pre-colonial and colonial Indian Ocean deals with certain regions more than others, and the existence of pirates in pre-colonial Sri Lanka has not received much academic attention in English. This article is a review of evidence of piratical activity in historical sources concerning Sri Lanka for the period 1000 […] Read More
Filed under: Early Middle Ages | Indian Ocean
Subjects include: Pirates, Corsairs & Privateers
Book Review-‘The Company Fortress: Military engineering and the Dutch East India Company in South Asia, 1638–1795, by E. Odegard
Dutch rule in Asia in the era of the Dutch East India Company (VoC) was sustained by fortified ports and strategic locations, supported with small armies moved by sea to enhance the defences. The failure of any one element in this strategy would bring down the rest. The VoC was a major economic and political […] Read More
Filed under: Other (Early Modern) | Other (Eighteenth C) | Indian Ocean | Pacific
Subjects include: Administration | Harbours & Dockyards | Strategy & Diplomacy
Review – ‘The Portuguese in the Creole Indian Ocean: Essays in historical cosmopolitanism’ by Markus Vink
Using the work of French Réunion historian Françoise Vergès, ‘Indian-Oceanic Creolizations: Processes and practices of creolization on Réunion Island’ (in C. Stewart, Creolization: History, ethnography, theory Walnut Creek ca, 2007, 133–52) as an entry point, Fernando Rosa, a research affiliate in the English department at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and self-described ‘displaced Brazilian scholar’ (p. 39), presents […] Read More
Filed under: Early Modern | Eighteenth Century | Other (Early Modern) | Other (Twentieth C) | Nineteenth Century | Other (Nineteenth C) | Other (Eighteenth C) | Indian Ocean | Twentieth Century
Subjects include: Miscellaneous
Book Review – ‘People, Place, and Power on the Nineteenth-Century Waterfront: Sailortown’ by Isaac Land
This book is the first serious effort to synthesize the disparate studies on this topic and relate it to larger interpretive frameworks. Readers will find rich, vivid accounts here of the costs and benefits of desertion, of boarding houses reputable and otherwise, and of efforts to investigate and reform the waterfront. Although Graeme J. Milne […] Read More
Filed under: Atlantic | Indian Ocean
Subjects include: Harbours & Dockyards | Manpower & Life at Sea | Miscellaneous
Book Review: ‘Squadron: Ending the African slave trade’ by Clifford J. Pereira
It is refreshing to read an abolitionary narrative that is not focused on the Atlantic, but instead on the much older and longer-lasting Indian Ocean trade in enslaved Africans. Author John Broich takes an interesting though challenging angle, preferring to anchor the narrative around four personalities: Leopold Heath, George Sulivan, Edward Meara and Philip Colomb. […] Read More
Filed under: Nineteenth Century | Other (Nineteenth C) | Indian Ocean
Subjects include: Miscellaneous | Navies
Book Review-‘Pearls, People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean worlds’ by P. Machado, S. Mullins, and J. Christensen (eds)
Although the history of pearling goes back at least 7,000 years, it was not until the late eighteenth century that the fishery began to exert a stronger formative role through the interplay of local and regional political conditions and increasing engagement with the world’s markets and rising pearl prices. The transformative period of the global […] Read More
Filed under: Indian Ocean
Subjects include: Whaling & Fishing
Book Review – ‘The Royal Navy Lynx: An operational history’ by David Bowen
The naval version of the Lynx helicopter operated by the Royal Navy has this year (1918) been withdrawn after 40 years of distinguished service. Moreover, it is ‘an aircraft that has never really had its praises sung’, so an account is not only timely but long overdue. One may ask why a book about an […] Read More
Filed under: Atlantic | English Channel | North Sea | Post WW2 | Indian Ocean | Twentieth Century
Subjects include: Miscellaneous | Naval Aviation
Book Review – ‘Sovereignty and the Sea: How Indonesia became an archipelagic state’ by James Goldrick
This is a very good book. It is a detailed study by two Australian historians of the development of Indonesia’s archipelagic regime concept, from the days of its inception to its formal acceptance into international law as part of the Third United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982, UNCLOS III. The regime […] Read More
Filed under: Indian Ocean | Twentieth Century
Subjects include: Miscellaneous | Strategy & Diplomacy
Book Review – ‘The Sea in History: The modern world’ by Steven Gray
This tome forms a substantial finale to the four volume Sea in History series, a result of the huge Oceanides project. It is an 848-page behemoth, with a contributor list that reads like a who’s who of modern naval history, and indeed beyond the field. It is therefore appropriate that the volume is edited by a scholar as distinguished […] Read More
Filed under: Atlantic | Baltic | English Channel | North Sea | Irish Sea | Mediterranean | Nineteenth Century | Indian Ocean | Caribbean | Pacific
Subjects include: Battles & Tactics | Manpower & Life at Sea | Merchant Marines | Miscellaneous | Navies | Strategy & Diplomacy
Book Review – ‘A Low Set of Blackguards: The East India Company and its maritime service 1600–1834, vol. 2, Triumph and Decline 1708–1834’ by A. B. McLeod
This second volume of the history of the East India Company is a tour de force from this experienced narrator (R Woodman) … it is a mammoth page-turner in which the reader is constantly drawn onwards by the unfolding dramas of the time and places revealed. Woodman’s text details the trials and tribulations of Company […] Read More
Filed under: Eighteenth Century | Nineteenth Century | Other (Nineteenth C) | Other (Eighteenth C) | Indian Ocean | East India Company
Subjects include: Manpower & Life at Sea | Merchant Marines | Shipbuilding & Design | Strategy & Diplomacy
Book Review – ‘Feeding Globalization: Madagascar and the provisioning trade, 1600–1800’ by John McAleer
In 1798 Benjamin Stout, the captain of an American merchant ship which had apparently been shipwrecked off the southern coast of Africa two years earlier, wrote approvingly of Madagascar, describing it as ‘one of the largest and finest islands in the world’. Indeed, he was astonished that ‘no European power hath as yet made a […] Read More
Filed under: Eighteenth Century | Other (Early Modern) | Other (Eighteenth C) | Indian Ocean | East India Company
Subjects include: Merchant Marines | Miscellaneous | Strategy & Diplomacy
Book Review – ‘The Sea in History: The ancient world’ by Boris Rankov
The French-based Océanides project on The Sea in History, edited by Christian Buchet of the Centre d’Étude de la Mer at the Catholic University of Paris, has now been published in a series of four large volumes of which this, on the ancient world, is the first. The overall objectives of the series have already […] Read More
Filed under: Atlantic | Antiquity | Mediterranean | Indian Ocean | Caribbean | Pacific
Subjects include: Archaeology | Manpower & Life at Sea | Pirates, Corsairs & Privateers | Whaling & Fishing