Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History Volume 34

Monsoon Voyagers follows the voyage of a single dhow, the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around the Persian Gulf and Western Indian Ocean, from 1924 to 1925. Through his account of the voyage, Fahad Ahmad Bishara unpacks a much broader history of circulation and exchange across the Arabian Sea in the time of empire. From their offices in India, Arabia, and East Africa, Gulf merchants used the technologies of colonial capitalism--banks, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, and more--to remake their own regional bazaar economy. In the process, they remade the Gulf itself. Drawing on the Crooked’s first-person logbooks, along with letters, notes, and business accounts from a range of port cities, Monsoon Voyagers narrates the still-untold connected histories of the Gulf and Indian Ocean. The Gulf’s past, it suggests, played out across the sea as much as it did the land.

Fahad Ahmad Bishara is Associate Professor of History and Rouhollah Ramazani Professor of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. He is author of A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950.