Exploring the Hinterlands of the Indian Ocean: The Baloch in Colonial Expeditions to Australia and Africa

How did encountering the Baloch people by the British Empire connect the hinterlands of Balochistan, Africa, and Australia? By bringing together the often disconnected zones of colonial exploration histories in Asia, Africa, and Australia, I ask: What can the Baloch, as brokers, cameleers, merchants, and soldiers, highlight in colonial explorations of Africa and Australia? In what ways do employing the Baloch as assistants play a role in forming the colonial explorers’ views of the Other? In positioning the British as the latest colonial intervention in the long durée of the Indian Ocean world, I center the Baloch in the colonial narrative of exploration to reverse the imperial hegemonic representation of the Other. Through grounding the history of exploration in the point of view of the non-Europeans, a rich source of a mediated archive can demonstrate the nature of their labor across the Ocean. By taking these expeditions in the opposite edges of the Ocean as a collective enterprise, this paper reveals the capacities that the Baloch occupied via their diasporic linkages and entanglements with the British Empire. To identify the relationship between the leitmotif of the ‘martial Baloch’ and the catch-all category of ‘fanatic Afghans,’ I trace the genesis of their portability and routes of circulation among the Victorian intelligentsia. Consequently, the paper detects the interconnected Baloch historical experiences as an Indian Ocean diaspora across a global Empire. Furthermore, it aims to speculate about the Baloch's sense of obligation and belonging dynamics on the local and transoceanic scales. This paper contributes to the historiography of colonial mediations of non-European agencies in colonial interactions to historicize how British colonialism conceptualized the challenges and rewards of exploration during the nineteenth century as a socially complex endeavor in the Indian Ocean world.