Connectivity in Motion

Island Hubs in the Indian Ocean World

Burkhard Schnepel, Edward A. Alpers, Burkhard Schnepel, Edward A. Alpers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319597256
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This original collection brings islands to the fore in a growing body of scholarship on the Indian Ocean, examining them as hubs or points of convergence and divergence in a world of maritime movements and exchanges. Straddling history and anthropology and grounded in the framework of connectivity, the book tackles central themes such as smallness, translocality, and "the island factor." It moves to the farthest reaches of the region, with a rich variety of case studies on the Swahili-Comorian world, the Maldives, Indonesia, and more. With remarkable breadth and cohesion, these essays capture the circulations of people, goods, rituals, sociocultural practices, and ideas that constitute the Indian Ocean world. Together, they take up "islandness" as an explicit empirical and methodological issue as few have done before.

Part IThemes

© The Author(s) 2018

B. Schnepel, E. A. Alpers (eds.)Connectivity in MotionPalgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59725-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Burkhard Schnepel¹

(1)

Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany

Keywords

Connectivity in motionHubIslandnessIslandsSmallness

End Abstract

The “Island Factor”

For many centuries, even millennia, the Indian Ocean has been traversed in all directions by vessels not only transporting human beings and commercial goods of many diverse kinds, but also circulating flora, fauna, ideas, ideologies, deities, rituals , charities, materia medica and therapeutics, sociocultural practices, habitus, performances, art genres, political systems, technologies, languages, and unfortunately also waste and diseases. These movements, and the maritime exchanges that have accompanied them, have been enthusiastically investigated by historians, geographers, anthropologists, archaeologists, and scholars of other disciplines. Their studies, too numerous to mention,¹ have thrown light on the various means and modes of circulating these animate and inanimate “things” across the sea, as well as providing insights into the various translations in meaning and function which they experience before, during, and after their journeys. Thus far, Indian Ocean Studies have also given us a useful picture of the various more or less stable networks that have arisen out of these movements and exchanges over time. This, by and large, is the field of knowledge, which we wish to capture by the concept of “connectivity in motion .”²

To be sure, much more collaborative work still needs to be done on such a vast region with such a long history. Among other fields of inquiry, there is the continuing challenge to look more closely at the very places and their inhabitants who are instrumental in circulating people, objects, and ideas and whose sociocultural, politico-economic, and mental characteristics have, in turn, been shaped by these activities, functions, and ideational arrangements in typical ways. Here, these special places-cum-people—paradigmatically port cities and certain islands (including their ports and even port cities)—are identified by the term “hub ,” by which is meant an agentive knot in a network of transportation systems, including the transportation of information and knowledge through the World Wide Web. As “the effective center of an activity, region, or network” (Oxford Dictionary Online), hubs are significant points, indeed “actants,” of convergence, entanglement, and divergence in the global streams of human beings, animals, finances, ideas, and other matters, as well as being instrumental in the networks that these streams create. Hubs, then, are understood as crucial elements of “connectivity in motion .” The activities of these hubs could be called, for matters of convenience, “hubbing.”

This volume looks at connectivity in motion across the Indian Ocean with a special look at the significant role, which islands or, better, “island hubs ,” have played in history and today in maritime exchanges, translations and networks across the Indian Ocean world. In an article first published in 2000, Edward A. Alpers (2009, 39–54) identifies what he calls “the island factor.” Writing especially with regard to studies of the premodern economic history of the Indian Ocean, he deplores “the continental perspective” (ibid., 41), which “only discusses islands in passing” (ibid.). In fact, his own main focus is on the African side of the Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, his statement that “although islands have certainly been recognized as an important factor in the Indian Ocean world by any number of scholars, no one has previously attempted to locate all the islands of the Indian Ocean in their relationship to the history of eastern Africa” (ibid., 40) can be extended to the history of the Indian Ocean world at large. Furthermore, his observation can also be used to draw attention to a gap in scholarship with regard not only to history, but to other dimensions and fields of knowledge as well, such as human geography, social anthropology, the study of political and economic relations, or investigations into the geostrategical and military dimensions of the Indian Ocean world.

I therefore suggest that it is time to draw encouragement from Alpers’ observation and tackle the “island factor,” that is, “the integral role that these islands have played and continue to play over several millennia in the history of Indian Ocean Africa” (ibid., 54). By extension, I suggest doing so with regard to the Indian Ocean as a whole, and doing so in more all-embracing interdisciplinary as well as systematic terms. This endeavor will be undertaken here with a focus on those islands in the Indian Ocean that count as “small.” This special focus is not meant to neglect the importance and the “insular” role of larger islands such as Madagascar , Sri Lanka , or Sumatra , which will not be left unacknowledged in the articles that follow. However, our prime attention will be drawn to “smallness” not just empirically, but also methodologically, by inquiring whether the criteria of size has made a difference and, if so, how. Smallness may count in other ways than a sense of size alone. Island identities and island imaginaries, which are significant when it comes to considering the role of islands in Indian Ocean connectivity , are ideal typically linked to small islands, while on large islands such as Madagascar or Java , a quite substantial number of people can lead and experience their lives without experiencing a sense of insularity.³

This volume includes scholars who are delving deeply into the history and sociocultural, politico-economic, geostrategic, and religious worlds of particular Indian Ocean islands and who are inquiring especially about their structural and historical roles as hubs in the Indian Ocean world. In order to enable the reader, who may not be familiar with the overall image of islands in the Indian Ocean, to locate these studies of specific places and historical periods within a larger framework, this introduction continues with an overview of the Indian Ocean world islands before raising some theoretical and methodological issues concerning islands, island hubs , and the issue of connectivity in motion in the sections that follow.

The Indian Ocean World of Islands: An Overview

There are various criteria according to which the extremely manifold and heterogeneous Indian Ocean world of islands could be envisaged in a holistic and systematic way.⁴ One criterion is their “whereabouts” within the ocean which the maps provided in this volume will help to identify if unknown before. Furthermore, looking at their geophysical origins and constitutions, the Indian Ocean islands can be divided into three types. Some have been built up, often over millennia, by the growth of corals, one well-known example being the Maldives . Others, such as Réunion, the Comoros , or the northern Moluccas, have emerged more rapidly from volcanic eruptions; and yet others are granite-based islands that have split off from continental or subcontinental landmasses. To this group belong Madagascar and Sri Lanka , as well as smaller islands such as Socotra in the Gulf of Aden and parts of the Seychelles . To apply yet another criterion: Size undoubtedly matters in many respects, even though any absolute determination of whether an island is small or large is complicated by the fact that there are so many different sizes on a putative scale that it is hard to draw a distinguishing line between larg(er) and small(er) islands. Most of the islands in the Indian Ocean (as indeed in the other oceans of the world)⁵ are indeed small(er), so that under this criterion of size, it is easier to single out those islands which are undoubtedly large. Under this heading one must, of course, subsume Madagascar , which, with an area of just under 600,000 square kilometers and a population of roughly 24 million, is the third-largest island in the world. Then, there are the larger islands of Sri Lanka in South Asia as well as the so-called Greater Sunda Islands of Sumatra , Java , Borneo, and Sulawesi in Southeast Asia .

To take a further possible criterion of systematization, any empirical overview of the Indian Ocean world of islands could distinguish between those islands which are close(r) to the mainland and those which lie further out in the sea. To the first category belong the numerous islands that stretch along the East African coast, also known as the Swahili coast , from Somalia in the north to the mouth of the Zambezi River in the modern nation state of Mozambique in the south. These islands and their port cities, such as Mombasa , Lamu , Kilwa , or Mozambique , are often so close to the mainland that, at the scales that most maps use to depict this coast, they are not easily discernible as being islands at all. Similar to these inshore islands along the Swahili coast , one finds numerous coral islands situated close to the western shore of the Red Sea . Some of these Red Sea islets functioned and still function as the seats of regionally important port cities, with Suakin in the Sudan and Massawa in Eritrea representing two prime examples. Further east, and still belonging to this “coastal group,” there are the (originally) seven islands out of which was formed the present megacity of Mumbai (Bombay) , while further south on the western Indian coast, we also find the port city of Cochin, hardly ever recognized on maps as being located (in part) on an island. Then, there are the innumerable small islands stretching close inshore along the Southeast Asian coasts of Bangladesh , Burma, Thailand , Malaysia , and Sumatra . Some of the latter have only acquired significance in the age of tourism , while others have remained perpetually in oblivion, and yet others have acquired some role in history, such as Penang in Malaysia , with its port city of George Town. Comparable to these coastal islands and still within this category are a) those islands which lie in the mouths of rivers, such as Sofala at the entrance to the Buzi River; b) located in or close to gulfs, such as the island of Kharg in the Persian Gulf or Diu at the entrance to the Gulf of Khambat in northwest India ; or c) “choke-point islands,” such as most prominently represented by Hormuz in the Persian Gulf or Singapore at the southeastern tip of the Straits of Malacca. This category can be complemented, if one adds those islands that lie close to the “mainland” of larger islands. For example, “la grand île” of Madagascar has many small islands immediately off its coasts, such as Nosy Boraha (Île Sainte Marie) to the northeast and Nosy Be to the northwest.

As far as the other part of this criterion of closeness or distance to a given mainland is concerned, there are a number of archipelagos scattered all over the Indian Ocean at some distance away from any territorial landmasses. In Southeast Asia , roughly 25,000 islands form the Malay Archipelago . Most of them, around 18,000 (of which approximately 6,000 are inhabited), today b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Themes
• Part II. Case Studies: Swahili Coast, Zanzibar and the Comoros
• Part III. Case Studies: Mid-Ocean Archipelagos
• Part IV. Case Studies: South and Southeast Asia
• Back Matter