All Things Considered: Objects, Commodities and Histories of Materiality in the Indian Ocean

Pedro Machado (Indiana University, Bloomington)

Histories in and of the Indian Ocean have been defined in part by studies of the movement and exchange of goods and commodities across its waters and between its shores, hinterlands and interiors. Scholarship has shown, for instance, how exchange and economic activity were embedded within the social, commercial, and legal relationships that merchants and their networks and associational frameworks of credit, debt, and obligations forged across dense assemblages throughout the ocean. More recently, the texture of commercial exchange – closer considerations of the cargoes and goods that were shipped along waterways and exchanged between its producers and consumers creating relational attachments to human agents – has highlighted how materiality shaped relationships, forged political and social affinities, and reflected cultural understandings of being in the world. What is often occluded in this work, however, is the materiality of the ocean itself, which appears in narratives as if it were only a blank space across which goods, cargoes, objects, peoples and ships moved instead of a living organism. In this paper, I suggest that histories of pearling allow us to bring what appears hidden from view below the waterline into narratives about the pasts of the Indian Ocean. I do so by focusing on the Mergui Archipelago in southern Burma that in the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth became a key site of marine extraction amid attempts by the British imperial state to ‘regulate’ and ‘manage’ its pearl oyster beds.

Join by zoom:
https://soas-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/97665861045?pwd=NGRKRzMwaFlUaEp2YnJBdWtNN1B2UT09

Meeting ID: 976 6586 1045
Passcode: PzyHf9EXW0

The seminar is open to all; no registration required.
Convenor: Shabnum Tejani, st40@soas.ac.uk