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MDES UN3446 Societies/Cultures Indian Ocean - Discussion. 0 points.

The course is designed to introduce the Indian Ocean as a region linking the Middle East, East Africa, South and Southeast Asia. With a focus on both continuities and rupture, we study select cultures and societies brought into contact through interregional migration and travel across the Indian Ocean over a broad arc of history. Different types of people –nobles, merchants, soldiers, statesmen, sailors, laborers, scholars, slaves - experienced mobility in different ways. How did different groups of people represent such mobilities? What kinds of cooperation, accommodation, or conflict did different Indian Ocean encounters engender? Using an array of different primary sources, we look at particular case studies and their broader social and cultural contexts. At the heart of the course is attention to the ways in which primary sources provide access to the historical meanings of their contexts of production. We will read some of the newest humanities and social science scholarship, as well as primary sources ranging from manuscript illustrations, sailor’s stories, merchant letters, travelogues old and new, pilgrimage accounts, colonial documents, memoirs, and diplomatic accounts.


The goal of the course is for students to gain a basic sense of how the Indian Ocean was interconnected from medieval to modern times. We begin in the medieval period in order to get a firm sense of what the Indian Ocean was like before the arrival of Europeans, from the height of the Abbasid Caliphate in the tenth century to the arrival of the Portuguese at the close of the fifteenth century. In the early sixteenth century, the rise of early modern land-based empires across Asia and the growing dominance of European maritime powers globalized and politicized the Indian Ocean in new ways. We consider how these changes impacted the societies and cultures of the Ocean. The dominance of European empire from the end of the 18th century enabled new modes of travel, types of encounters, and textual representations. Rather than a comprehensive overview, this course provides a general set of conceptual and analytic tools for looking at societies and cultures across temporal and spatial bounds, through the lens of particular texts and contexts.