“With Our Friends or Others, as Long as They Are Well-Known and Reliable”: Networks of Exchange in the Indian Ocean as Reflected in Cairo Geniza Documents

With the recent publication of the much-awaited “India Book,” a significant part of the Geniza documentary corpus relating to the so-called India trade is now more readily accessible.  One of the many vistas opened by this corpus is that of “cross-cultural” trade and the formation of networks of exchange across denominational, ethnic, linguistic, and geographical boundaries in the region.  The relevant documents reveal that Jewish traders, some resident along the Indian Ocean littoral others traveling there from homelands in the Mediterranean, mobilized a variety of partners in the wider Western Indian Ocean world.  In procuring raw materials but also in establishing transregional networks of credit, they appear to have relied on local trading and manufacturing systems in western India, the Arabian Peninsula, and East Africa.  Responding to debates about the nature of commercial collaboration in the Mediterranean in this period and seeking to sketch out the range of network affiliations operative in the Indian Ocean, his paper examines the language of affiliation and collaboration in the letters and other documents of Indian Ocean merchants.