ABSTRACT
The middle of the nineteenth century was a golden age for Hadhrami Arab shippers, both those born in Hadhramaut [eastern Yemen] and those of mixed race born in the diaspora (Freitag and Clarence-Smith 1997). Indeed, shipping was probably the most profitable of the wide range of Hadhrami activities in the Indian Ocean around 1850, even though close links between shipping and trade make it difficult to disentangle the two. Despite the rise of steamer navigation from the 1860s, Hadhrami sail shipping did not decline markedly before the 1880s. Moreover, initial Hadhrami attempts to break into steam navigation met with moderate success.
