The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port

Acknowledgments

ix acknowledgments My fascination and engagement with Mocha have endured for more than a decade. During that time, many people and institutions around the world helped me make sense of ruins, documents, stories, spaces, and images . Numerous granting organizations provided the financial support for travel, research, and writing. They included the Institute of International Education, with a Fulbright grant; the American Institute for Yemeni Studies, with a predoctoral and a postdoctoral research grant; the National Endowment for the Humanities, with a Summer Stipend; and the Getty Foundation, with a postdoctoral fellowship. At Binghamton University, Dean Jean-Pierre Mileur of Harpur College provided research funds as well as a generous subvention for the production of this book. I thank these organizations for their financial support. Of course, all the opinions and conclusions that follow are my own and do not reflect those of the institutions that funded my work. In Yemen, three successive resident directors of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies in Sanaa facilitated my research—Noha Sadek, Marta Colburn, and Christopher Edens—along with the executive director, Maria Ellis. At the Centre Français d’Archéologie et des Sciences Sociales in Sanaa, François Burgat and Renaud Detalle were always helpful in every aspect of life in Yemen, both work and recreation. At the General Organization for Antiquities and Manuscripts, two successive presidents, Yūsuf Abd Allāh and Muh ˙ ammad al-Arūsı̄, provided me with research permissions x Acknowledgments and lent their continuous support. GOAM staff members Ah ˙ mad Shamsān, Mu‘ammar al-Amrı̄, and Ah ˙ mad al-Sanh ˙ ānı̄ helped obtain permissions, photographs, and access to sites. In Mocha, the gracious al-Mah ˙ fadı̄ family and Ādil Abd al-Wahhāb were the city’s finest ambassadors. In both Sanaa and The Hague, the Huh family of the Korean Embassy kept me alive with their friendship, food, and companionship. In the Netherlands , Judith Heijdra helped me make sense of eighteenth-century Dutch documents. Staff members at the National Archives in The Hague and the India Office Records of the British Library in London graciously made their documents available to me. The interlibrary loan staff at Bartle Library at Binghamton University procured more faraway sources for me than I can count. The Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, the Bibliographisches Institut and F. A. Brockhaus AG, Mannheim, Germany, the Musée Bartholdi in Colmar, France, the Musée National de la Marine in Paris, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of the Cornell University Library, the New York Public Library, and the library at Leiden University graciously provided images and permission for their reproduction. Eric Franzon, Stan Kauffman, and Eugene Park helped produce the maps, which were then refined for publication by Barry Levely. Senem Zeybekoglu expertly drafted the final architectural plans, some of which were originally drawn by Mahā al-H ˙ abshı̄. This project would have never come to fruition had it not been for the generous assistance of these people in far-flung parts of the globe. My insightful mentor Renie Bierman oversaw this project from the very start. Without her encouragement and the model of her intellectual creativity , I would never have embarked on a project envisioning the architectural history of a city that lies in ruins today. The esteemed historian Cees Brouwer, drawing from his own experience, gave me confidence that the eighteenth-century Dutch sources could be culled for a history of Mocha. I thank him for his guidance and generosity during the conversations we shared in Amsterdam. Bernard Haykel offered valuable support at every stage, and his work provided the intellectual template for many ideas that appear here. Daniel Varisco read the whole manuscript and contributed constructive comments, particularly on chapter 2. My colleagues in the art history department at Binghamton University have been overwhelmingly supportive intellectually, professionally, and Acknowledgments xi personally, particularly by shouldering departmental responsibilities while I took much-needed time off to complete this book. In particular, Charles Burroughs, Karen-edis Barzman, and honorary art historian Rifa‘at AbouEl -Haj trudged through parts of my writing and took time out of their busy schedules to comment. Jere Bacharach, Gary Okihiro, Nasser Rabbat, and Ned Alpers gave guidance and support at key stages. Fellow Red Sea scholars Li Guo, Roxani Margariti, and Jonathan Miran provided a community...