Value(d) Across the Sea: South Asians, Africans, and Consuming Passions in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Indian Ocean World

This paper uses consumption as a connective framework on both sides of the Indian Ocean to argue that an integrative and micro-historical approach is necessary to highlight how particular histories of material exchange between Africa and South Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were mutually constituted. Scholarship on the ocean has tended generally to view the years from the middle of the eighteenth century as ones in which both Africa and South Asia were inexorably ‘incorporated’ into a world economy defined by the interests of European capital. Recently there have been indications that this narrative is being challenged as an exaggeration of ‘western’ commercial dominance; however, scholars have either placed Africa or South Asia at the centre of their frames of analysis, or have provided only generalized accounts that do not capture the finer grain of more localized sub-regional experiences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

By contrast, this paper will show that the specificities of consumer demand among South Asian and African elites and non-elites created and maintained a trans-local commercial arena that not only was organized and mediated by actors largely independently of European intrusion but enjoyed remarkable vibrancy. In focusing on specific locales and peoples in both coastal and interior South-East Africa, and in Kathiawar and Kachchh in western India, which became increasingly bound up with one another in the eighteenth century through the mediation of particular Gujarati merchant networks, this paper will show that these entangled histories of material exchange were critical in enabling communities to negotiate effectively the process of imperial reach in the ocean.