ABSTRACT
With its connected histories of trade, migration, and exchange, the Indian Ocean world has stretched our geographic imaginaries beyond terrestrial boundaries. While oceanic networks have played a vital role in shaping our conceptions of this region, the centrality of the sea to Indian Ocean imaginaries has also occluded from view flows, linkages, and experiences of connectivity that extend beyond the maritime. Locating the Indian Ocean world beyond its maritime frontiers, this chapter conceptualizes oceanic networks more expansively as stretching across maritime basins and coasts, into mountainous landscapes, and their subterranean depths. Unearthing oceanic linkages in places where the sea is far from sight, it uses the notion of elsewhere to examine how men who mine and trade Sri Lankan sapphires experience space, time, and connectivity in the Indian Ocean. Sapphire networks, it argues, show that to reimagine the Indian Ocean requires us to expand our spatial and temporal horizons, reaching back into geologic time and looking deep beneath the earth’s surface, where multiple pasts and presents come together to shape trade, labor, and exchange.
