Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World by Elizabeth A. Lambourn (review)

Ever since the publication of the India Book extracted from the Cairo Genizah by S. D. Goitien and its fictional telling by Amitav Ghosh, the Genizah repository, replete with enchanting epistles, mysterious fragments of manifests, and trade lists, has held infinite promise for historians and their readers. Abraham’s Luggage does not disappoint; indeed, Lambourn opens for us a fascinating story of what it meant to carry goods and how life-stories, personalities, and spaces were packed into luggage that made its way through the trading world of the Indian Ocean. From a micro historical analysis of a luggage list studied in relation to a dense corpus of material on the India trade run by Jewish merchants, the author goes past the apparently confusing and even incongruous jumble of items to an exploration of what it meant to live as a trader who sojourned to the Malabar coast, lived multiple lives in Malabar, in Aden, and in transit; what it meant to eat in a society where access to daily and divine foods was restricted; and what material choices dictated the aesthetics of setting up home. The introduction takes the reader to an evocative analysis of what packing and making a luggage list involved and of what meaning and function it had for the premodern traders inhabiting and navigating the complex world of the Indian Ocean. In the process, Lambourn transforms a piece of paper catalogued for modern researchers as T-S NS 324.114 into a bioscope of fascinating meanings, images, and reflections.

The protagonist of the book is not so much Abraham Bin Yejju, whose luggage list is parsed by Lambourne, as it is his habitus in Malabar. Abraham appears almost as a generic category standing for the medieval Jewish merchant who operated a dynamic trade, made use of formal and informal networks, and sorted out his personal and social relations during his sojourning days. What makes the book so impressive is the way it reconstructs the material life of traders through a close reading of objects and their arrangement, apparently chaotic, but actually adhering to a pattern. The book is organized around two broad sections, one looking at a Mediterranean society in Malabar and the other a Mediterranean society at sea, and it takes up issues of ritual and secular consumption, organization of space, and the actual provisioning for travel. It is an impressive piece of archival interpretation and reconstruction, and it demonstrates the working of historical method ground up from fragments and their dynamic with a larger cluster of documents. In some ways the method departs from the way microhistory works in the cause of global history—it is not the stuff of global microhistories that Francesca Trivallato spoke of in her California Italian Studies article “Is there a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?” (2011) wherein a narrative holds a mirror to the larger story of connections and contradictions and takes up the challenges of dominant and hegemonic views without the burden of excessive theorization. Lambourn’s method is not to track the exploits and eccentricities of Abraham but to read the assemblage of objects that he packed for his sojourn in Malabar and at sea alongside a cluster of other documents making up the India Book to deepen our understanding of the way medieval Jewish traders lived in India, furnished their homes, prayed and ate on special occasions, and made the necessary provisions for food—for ritual and for everyday consumption.

The book starts with a luggage list—a heterogenous list with 173 items specifying food, furnishing, gunny bags, cash and carpets, textiles and pots, rat traps, and oil—and follows this up by an evocative analysis of what it means to pack a bag for a journey and a sojourn. In luggage making lies the key to what constitutes life choices and preferences. In other words, it embodied continuities...