Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire by Matthew S. Hopper, and: Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean by Thomas F. Mcdow, and: Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World ed. by Gwyn Campbell (review)

Voices in the Vernacular: The Opportunities of World History

The welcome wave of sophisticated recent works on the western Indian Ocean grapples in a suggestive variety of ways with the fundamental epistemological challenge of world history: eluding the modernism of the historical discipline itself to capture the perceptions, motivations, and strategies of people who lived in other worlds of their own. The three works reviewed here offer possibilities that readers of this journal might find productive for their own research and understanding of the field, but they also illustrate the tenacious traps of the academic world we inhabit. We should avoid the temptation to see the grouping discussed here as linked by the conventional geographical category they share, the Indian Ocean, at least as defined by not only the U.S. Department of State but also the American Historical Review. The apparent prominence of slaves in these books in the caravans of eastern Africa, aboard the dhows plying the monsoon winds and currents of the nineteenth-century western Indian Ocean, and as pearl divers and date-palm cultivators in the Persian Gulf might also seem to justify grouping them for present purposes of review, but topics prominent in the historiography—like slavery—may not translate into properly historical framings in the mindsets of the people whose actions we try to reconstruct and then to understand. Apparently obvious topics, again like slavery, may turn out to be modernist observers' abstractions rather than motivating considerations even of the people involved in capturing and moving people against their wills. World historians work at the crossroads of our discipline's dual ethical obligations—being meaningfully intelligible to their readers, but also respectfully true to the axiomatically, and in this case often radically, different meaningful aspects of the lives of the people they study. Hopper, McDow, and Campbell and his contributors grapple admirably with this bracing dilemma.

Environment has always been a significant aspect of historical contexts in every part of the world, and every beginning world historian soon appreciates the utility of the seasonally alternating monsoon winds of southern Asia and the western Indian Ocean. To this enduring regularity the ten monographic contributions (and the editor's introduction) in this volume add episodic anomalies (long-term climatic shifts from ninth-century Tang-dynasty China to the Medieval Warm Period and on to the Little Ice Age, an eighteenth century volcanic eruption in the southern Philippines, cyclonic tropical storms in the nineteenth-century Mascarene Islands, and droughts in late nineteenth-century northeastern Africa). The dependable monsoon winds enabled the dhow traders who integrated eastern Africa into maritime transport of gold and many commodities in exchange for Asian textiles, carrying enslaved Africans mostly as a side-line and in numbers that are disputed here. In the meanwhile, the unpredictable catastrophic events illustrate the deep historicity of slaving as a strategy of accommodating changes of all sorts, including environmental ones, or—the other side of the coin—of restoring order in times disrupted by climate and weather events. The seemingly unlikely combination of "bondage and the environment" turns out to illustrate the importance of slaving as a contextualized historical strategy.

Editor Campbell's broad introductory canvas includes multiple forms of "bondage," beyond only slavery, to cover the familiar recurring financial obligations following droughts and famines in Asia, where rural cultivators survived failed harvests by drawing on credit from merchants and wealthy landowners, who provided relief...