This chapter traces the developing English empire across the global tropics. Like their European rivals, English colonists, traders, and governors turned to forced labor and migration to maintain the tropical empire. As they forged this empire, English investors experimented with a wide variety of different colonial models. The early empire was not so neatly divided into territorial expansion in the West and commercial settlement in the East. English colonial architects tried to extend plantation agriculture beyond the Americas to West Africa and the Indian Ocean, and they tried to bring the spices and peppers of the East Indies to the West Indies to grow. They became both imitators and innovators, modeling the successful endeavors of European rivals but also carving their own path. Many of their overseas ventures were utter failures. Yet, slave-produced goods and factories constructed and maintained by forced labor ensured profit margins that would be high enough to continue to attract investors. By the end of the seventeenth century, slavery had become the defining feature of the English tropical empire, and there were slave majorities at most English sites in the tropics.

This chapter focuses on two passages from a historical novel in Malayalam, titled Sulttānvīṭu by P. A. Muhammad Koya (d. 1990), set in a Muslim matrilineal household in Calicut on the Malabar coast of southwest India. The first passage deals with a dispute between two groups on the appointment of a judge (qāḍī) and the right to carry out the Friday congregational prayer (in the early 20th century), while the second one involves two public debates in the wake of Wahhābism’s arrival in the region. Broadly speaking, the novel explores the gradual disintegration of the matrilineal tradition among Malabar Muslims in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at the peak of colonialism, reformism and modernism.

This chapter examines Iran’s growing security interests in Africa during the 1970s, as its sphere of influence broadened following the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf in 1971. The shah spoke in this period about his Indian Ocean policy – the plan to form an economic and security union of the countries bordering the Indian Ocean, which would work together to free the area from imperial power interference. This formed the basis of Iran’s grand strategy in the mid- to late 1970s. The chapter explores Iran’s increasing preoccupation with Soviet expansion in the Horn of Africa, and how this prompted the shah to develop relations with countries such as Sudan and, after the Ethiopian Revolution and the fall of Haile Selassie in 1974, Somalia.

During the 1970s, Iran’s relationships across Africa developed, both in terms of the number of ambassadors accredited to African countries, and in terms of the volume of trade and extent of political dialogue. At the beginning of the decade, Iran had diplomatic relations with just five countries in the whole of Africa – Algeria, Ethiopia, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia – but by the middle of the 1970s it had established formal ties with over thirty-five nations. This chapter investigates the nature of Iran’s diplomacy in Africa and why it was so successful during the 1970s. It questions why the shah was appealing to the independent states of Africa, and what strategies the regime employed to project an image of the shah as the leader of a country that had historically been an important global power and a civilising force in the world, and which aspired to continue to influence world affairs in a positive way. At the same time, after the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf in 1971, the shah sought to expand Iran’s sphere of influence beyond its immediate neighbourhood towards the Indian Ocean.

This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the principal testimonia and fragments of Skylax of Karyanda (late 6th century BC), arranged as fourteen extracts. Skylax, we are told by Herodotos, was recruited by King Darius of Persia to explore the Indus. The chapter introduction assesses recent studies that trace the echoes of his travel narrative in Philostratos’ Life of Apollonios (3rd century AD) and suggest that Skylax descended the Ganges to the east coast of India, perhaps voyaging as far as Taprobane (Sri Lanka). A specially drawn map indicates the area within which he most likely travelled.

This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the extensive summaries and paraphrases of books 1 and 5 of Agatharchides’ lost work On the Erythraian Sea (written c.145 BC) that were made by Diodoros (book 3), Strabo (book 16), and especially Photios (Bibliotheke, codices 213 and 250). Additional testimonia and fragments are arranged as five extracts. The chapter introduction reviews Agatharchides’ career, his writings, and his scholarly milieux in Alexandria and later (probably) Athens, and upholds the view that On the Erythraian Sea was a self-contained work, not part of a larger whole. The geographical and ethnographic material in this work–a historical work–is distinctive for being based on information from Ptolemaic commanders and explorers, and remarkable for its sympathy with some of the Ptolemies’ oppressed subjects. Agatharchides’ depiction of these peoples implies an evolutionary scheme of development–from hunter-gatherers to pastoralists to farmers–such as Dikaiarchos (Chapter 9 of this volume) had suggested in his philosophical works. The surviving summaries include remarkable passages on elephant-hunting and the sufferings of gold-miners; but Agatharchides’ work was more often accessed through its reworking by Artemidoros (Chapter 18) than read in its own right. A new map highlights the principal places and peoples mentioned by Agatharchides in East Africa and Arabia.

This chapter presents a new, annotated translation of the Circumnavigation of the Erythraian Sea (commonly known by the Latin title Periplus maris Erythraei or PME). Erroneously attributed to Arrian (see Chapter 27 of this volume), it was probably written in the 1st century AD, a generation or two before he was active, by a Greek-speaker from Egypt. The chapter introduction shows how the work is unlike any other that we have, in being a detailed overview of regions east of Egypt from the point of view of an experienced trader (possibly the Sosandros named by Markianos in Chapter 34), though also drawing upon a variety of written sources of disparate character. Consequently, we are presented with a combination of navigational information, useful to those commissioning or planning trade voyages, with enlivening facts such as marvels (paradoxa) that signify to the reader that its author is an educated man. He had perhaps been recruited to write a handbook for merchants, at a time when Roman naval presence in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean was increasing. Most famously, the work contains a plethora of information about specific commodities traded in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, exports from particular ports, and where those goods originated. A detailed map shows many of the ports mentioned in the text, while another clarifies the relationship between the prevailing winds of the Indian Ocean and the maritime itineraries described.

In its central position, Chapter 4, with its focus on enslaved people, brings together all the aspects discussed in Chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6. It highlights the importance of the enslaved people in Mauritius, both for their labour and as sources of plant knowledge. Making an important contribution to the history of slavery and natural history, it serves as a link between the chapters on staple crops (Chapters 2 and 3) and those on commercial crops (Chapters 5 and 6), because it elaborates on both types of crops in relation to slavery. In particular, Chapter 4 reveals the disconnects of knowledge circulation. It seeks to explain what happened when new and unknown crops were introduced and knowledge of their cultivation or preparation techniques was lacking or faulty. Lastly, this chapter focuses on the Bengali slave gardener, Charles Rama. His knowledge of cultivation earned him praise from French actors, and he was later freed because of it. In the same way, the chapter examines the work of the enslaved gardener Hilaire, who initiated and tested the new grafting methods that were adopted by European-trained naturalists in the island. These two cases not only highlight the importance of the enslaved people’s knowledge, but more importantly, they reveal the shortcomings of European plant knowledge within the creolising processes.

If it is true that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then it would seem that a vast heavenly bureaucracy was employed in the creation of the Indian Ocean as a geographic region. That any government should have a policy towards the Indian Ocean area is as unlikely as the region itself. It would be a bold analyst who would set out to give an account of Greenland’s relations with the Atlantic area, the latter defined as those territories – from Iceland to the Cape of Good Hope, from Canada to Tierra del Fuego – the shores of which are washed by that ocean. My task here is no less daunting.

Over the last decade there has been an increasing volume of writing on the politics of the Indian Ocean and its littoral states. In Australia as elsewhere, it has become de rigueur for commentators to disaggregate the larger ’Indian Ocean Region’ into a large number of relatively autonomous ’sub-regions’ the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, South Asia, etc. This has allowed analysis to focus squarely upon the sub-regional sources of international conflict and to conjecture about the extent to which superpower policies towards these local conflicts do or do not come together to form a cloth of uniform warp and weft. Such an approach seems consistent with the reality of detente and the erosion of the bipolar balance of power which has hitherto regulated local conflicts more closely.