Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c.1750–1850 - Tapa dura

Ocean of Trade offers an innovative study of trade, production and consumption across the Indian Ocean between the years 1750 and 1850. Focusing on the Vāniyā merchants of Diu and Daman, Pedro Machado explores the region's entangled histories of exchange, including the African demand for large-scale textile production among weavers in Gujarat, the distribution of ivory to consumers in Western India, and the African slave trade in the Mozambique channel that took captives to the French islands of the Mascarenes, Brazil and the Rio de la Plata, and the Arabian peninsula and India. In highlighting the critical role of particular South Asian merchant networks, the book reveals how local African and Indian consumption was central to the development of commerce across the Indian Ocean, giving rise to a wealth of regional and global exchange in a period commonly perceived to be increasingly dominated by European company and private capital.

Pedro Machado's interests in the connected histories of the Indian Ocean have been developed through extensive multi-sited fieldwork and research in archives in India, Mozambique, England, Portugal and South Africa. He received the Gulbenkian Fellowship for research in Portugal and a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh's World History Center in 2011–12. Pedro Machado has held postdoctoral and teaching positions at New York University and Santa Clara University, California, and is currently Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he teaches global and world history. His courses have covered such diverse topics as the history of slavery and unfreedom in world history; the making and unmaking of the postwar world; oceans in history; the Indian Ocean in history, culture and society; and the historiographical turn by scholars to global history. His commitment to bringing his research expertise into the classroom was recognised with an Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award in 2012. His current research interests focus on the study of human-environment interaction in the Indian Ocean through a large-scale and collaborative project organized by McGill University's Indian Ocean World Centre, and on the wide-ranging commodity histories of the ocean's pearling trades.