ABSTRACT

Despite the prominent role of scholars from India and the Arabic world in anglophone postcolonial theory, postcolonial research in modern languages has often focused on transatlantic connectivities and the relationship of individual overseas countries with individual European states and North America. The synergies between postcolonial studies and slavery studies, as reflected prominently in the concept of the “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy 1993), have tended to reinforce this selective approach to the global history of colonialisms and their legacies. International historical research and some strands of literature in various languages, however, have recently accelerated the exploration of the equally dynamic historical connectivities across the Indian Ocean—before, throughout, and after the age of European imperialism—which underlines the significance of South-South relations. Since the days of Egyptian antiquity, and thanks to mastery of the Monsoon winds, East Africa, the Arabic world, India, Indonesia, Madagascar, and to some extent China have been linked through a history of trade— ranging from natural produce to gold, ivory, and slaves—as well as the move-ment of people, cultural practices, ideas, and religions. These connections led to some of the oldest diasporas in human history and to cosmopolitan cultural exchange, in particular between legendary harbor towns such as Zanzibar, Kilwa, Mombasa, Mascat, Bombay, Goa, Calicut, and Canton (Guangzhou) (see Karugia 2017; Schulze-Engler 2014). Recent research has rectified the colonial narrative of European superiority by showing that— well into the eighteenth century and, locally, such as in the case of Zanzibar and Madagascar, into the late nineteenth century—the Portuguese, French, British, Dutch, and German ventures of the early modern period merely added new competitors to a well-established Indian Ocean infrastructure. Only in the course of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did political crises in India and the imperial turn of European colonialism rewrite the political map of the Indian Ocean. But even at this stage, European colonial occupation and exploitation continued to build on the established infra-structure of the Indian Ocean universe (see Hawley 2008a; Alpers 2014; Pearson 2015; for Zanzibar and Madagascar see Campbell 2005; Nicolini 2012). The use of existing Arab-Swahili caravan routes, including relevant expertise and labor, by European colonial pioneers such as Richard Burton, Henry Morton Stanley, or Oscar Baumann, and later also by the German and British military and administration, are a prominent case in point. As is the fact that British East Africa and British relations with Zanzibar, in the nineteenth century the hub of a trading network stretching into the African interior and all the way to the Congo, were administrated from British India, building on the long-established role of Indians in the commerce, administration, and finance of the Arab-Swahili economy (see Mangat 2012, 1–63). At the same time, there is an older history of African immigration to Western India and Sri Lanka, which accelerated with the spread of Islam (see Oka and Kusimba 2008, 208–209) and is still reflected today in the distinct culture of the so-called “Sidi,” the descendants of African slaves in India, and other African diasporic communities that have recently attracted postcolonial attention.1