IMHA

Read in the latest issue of the IJMH (November 2024) the Editorial by Cátia Antunes and Michiel van Groesen

Available in open access

https://doi.org/10.1177/08438714241278882

The final issue of the Journal this year opens with a forum that emerges from a conference at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, organised in September 2023 by a team of scholars led by Richard W. Unger, on empires and economies in the early modern Indian Ocean world. After an introduction by Unger, the forum incorporates six research contributions, more or less in chronological order as per usual. The opening article, by Amélia Polónia, focusses on the agency of women as go-betweens and brokers in the Estado da Índia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and argues that women – Portuguese and autochtone alike – were very influential in the reconfiguration of colonial power relations. Archa Neelakandan Girija, writing on the cosmopolitan port of Calicut, reflects on the city’s position in oceanic trade in the seventeenth century. Richard Unger himself argues for the hybrid nature of ship construction in the age of colonialism, tracing the exchanges of knowledge, methods, designs and techniques between European and Asian shipbuilding traditions. The fourth contributor, David Eltis, examines the value of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (www.slavevoyages.org) he helped to set up and expand for research into Indian Ocean slavery. Margaret Schotte subsequently explores the practice of (not) documenting unfree labour by the French Compagnie des Indes in the eighteenth century. And finally, Noelle Richardson provides a close analysis of the Amfioensociëteit, the company established in 1745 to regulate the import and retail trade in opium under the wing of the Dutch East India Company.

More at https://doi.org/10.1177/08438714241278882

Shifting Currents: A World History of Swimming by Karen Eva Carr

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo157942759.html

Shifting Currents is an original and comprehensive history of swimming. It examines the tension that arose when non-swimming northerners met African and Southeast Asian swimmers. Using archaeological, textual, and art-historical sources, Karen Eva Carr shows how the water simultaneously attracted and repelled these northerners—swimming seemed uncanny, related to witchcraft and sin. Europeans used Africans’ and Native Americans’ swimming skills to justify enslaving them, but northerners also wanted to claim water’s power for themselves. They imagined that swimming would bring them health and demonstrate their scientific modernity. As Carr reveals, this unresolved tension still sexualizes women’s swimming and marginalizes Black and Indigenous swimmers today. Thus, the history of swimming offers a new lens through which to gain a clearer view of race, gender, and power on a centuries-long scale.

Read the review by Julia Stryker in the August 2024 issue of the IJMH (requires subscription)
https://doi.org/10.1177/08438714241261790

The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China by Peter Thilly

https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/opium-business

From its rise in the 1830s to its pinnacle in the 1930s, the opium trade was a guiding force in the Chinese political economy. Opium money was inextricably bound up in local, national, and imperial finances, and the people who piloted the trade were integral to the fabric of Chinese society. In this book, Peter Thilly narrates the dangerous lives and shrewd business operations of opium traffickers in southeast China, situating them within a global history of capitalism. By tracing the evolution of the opium trade from clandestine offshore agreements in the 1830s, to multi-million dollar prohibition bureau contracts in the 1930s, Thilly demonstrates how the modernizing Chinese state was infiltrated, manipulated, and profoundly transformed by opium profiteers.

Opium merchants carried the drug by sea, over mountains, and up rivers, with leading traders establishing monopolies over trade routes and territories and assembling “opium armies” to protect their businesses. Over time, and as their ranks grew, these organizations became more bureaucratized and militarized, mimicking—and then eventually influencing, infiltrating, or supplanting—the state. Through the chaos of revolution, warlordism, and foreign invasion, opium traders diligently expanded their power through corruption, bribery, and direct collaboration with the state. Drug traders mattered—not only in the seedy ways in which they have been caricatured but also crucially as shadowy architects of statecraft and China’s evolution on the world stage.

Read the review by Francois Gipouloux in the August 2024 issue of the IJMH (requires subscription)
https://doi.org/10.1177/08438714241261794

Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History by Bin Yang

https://www.routledge.com/Cowrie-Shells-and-Cowrie-Money-A-Global-History/Yang/p/book/9780367484316

Originating in the sea, especially in the waters surrounding the low-lying islands of the Maldives, Cypraea moneta (sometimes confused with Cypraea annulus) was transported to various parts of Afro-Eurasia in the prehistoric era, and in many cases, it was gradually transformed into a form of money in various societies for a long span of time. Yang provides a global examination of cowrie money within and beyond Afro-Eurasia from the archaeological period to the early twentieth century.

By focusing on cowrie money in Indian, Chinese, Southeast Asian and West African societies and shell money in Pacific and North American societies, Yang synthsises and illustrates the economic and cultural connections, networks and interactions over a longue durée and in a cross-regional context. Analysing locally varied experiences of cowrie money from a global perspective, Yang argued that cowrie money was the first global money that shaped Afro-Eurasian societies both individually and collectively. He proposes a paradigm of the cowrie money world that engages local, regional, transregional and global themes.

Read the review by Hu Xinyan in the August 2024 issue of the IJMH (requires subscription)
https://doi.org/10.1177/08438714241262668

Sailing Shipping and Maritime Labor in Camogli (1815–1914): Floating Communities in the Global World by Leonardo Scavino

https://brill.com/display/title/62173

This book explores the historical evolution of a Mediterranean village that radically changed its core self-sustaining activities in less than a century, from fishing for anchovies in the Ligurian Sea to rounding Cape Horn. Drawing on a vast set of unpublished archival sources, this book addresses a micro-historical subject to investigate macro-historical processes, including the technological transition from sail to steam and globalization. At the core of the book lie Camogli’s rise in the world shipping industry and the transformations that occurred in its maritime labor system; seaborne trade, maritime routes, individual careers in seafaring represent the vivid elements that contribute to the book’s dive into the nineteenth-century maritime world.
Read the review by Andrea Zanini in the August 2024 issue of the IJMH (requires subscription)
https://doi.org/10.1177/08438714241261792

Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the East India Company by David Howarth

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300276497/adventurers/

The East India Company was the largest commercial enterprise in British history, yet its roots in Tudor England are often overlooked. The Tudor revolution in commerce led ambitious merchants to search for new forms of investment, not least in risky overseas enterprises—and for these “adventurers” the most profitable bet of all would be on the Company.

Through a host of stories and fascinating details, David Howarth brings to life the Company’s way of doing business—from the leaky ships and petty seafarers of its embattled early days to later sweeping commercial success. While the Company’s efforts met with disappointment in Japan, they sowed the seeds of success in India, setting the outline for what would later become the Raj. Drawing on an abundance of sources, Howarth shows how competition from European powers was vital to success—and considers whether the Company was truly “English” at all, or rather part of a Europe-wide movement.

Read the review by Erik Odegard in the August 2024 issue of the IJMH (requires subscription)
https://doi.org/10.1177/08438714241261791

Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars by Vincent P. O’Hara and Leonard R. Heinz

https://www.usni.org/press/books/innovating-victory

Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars studies how the world’s navies incorporated new technologies into their ships, their practices, and their doctrine. It does this by examining six core technologies fundamental to twentieth-century naval warfare including new platforms (submarines and aircraft), new weapons (torpedoes and mines), and new tools (radar and radio). Each chapter considers the state of a subject technology when it was first used in war and what navies expected of it. It then looks at the way navies discovered and developed the technology’s best use, in many cases overcoming disappointed expectations. It considers how a new technology threatened its opponents, not to mention its users, and how those threats were managed.
Innovating Victory shows that the use of technology is more than introducing and mastering a new weapon or system. Differences in national resources, force mixtures, priorities, perceptions, and missions forced nations to approach the problems presented by new technologies in different ways. Navies that specialized in specific technologies often held advantages over enemies in some areas but found themselves disadvantaged in others. Vincent P. O’Hara and Leonard R. Heinz present new perspectives and explore the process of technological introduction and innovation in a way that is relevant to today’s navies, which face challenges and questions even greater than those of 1904, 1914, and 1939.

Read the review by Piotr Wawrzeniuk in the August 2024 issue of the IJMH (requires subscription)
https://doi.org/10.1177/08438714241264919

Mediterranean Seafarers in Transition: Maritime Labour, Communities, Shipping and the Challenge of Industrialization 1850s–1920s by Apostolos Delis, Jordi Ibarz, Anna Sydorenko and Matteo Barbano, eds (in open access)

https://brill.com/display/title/61880

This volume discusses the effects of industrialization on maritime trade, labour and communities in the Mediterranean and Black Sea from the 1850s to the 1920s. The 17 essays are based on new evidence from multiple type of primary sources on the transition from sail to steam navigation, written in a variety of languages, Italian, Spanish, French, Greek, Russian and Ottoman.

Questions that arise in the book include the labour conditions, wages, career and retirement of seafarers, the socio-economic and spatial transformations of the maritime communities and the changes in the patterns of operation, ownership and management in the shipping industry with the advent of steam navigation. The book offers a comparative analysis of the above subjects across the Mediterranean, while also proposes unexplored themes in current scholarship like the history of navigation.

Contributors are: Luca Lo Basso, Andrea Zappia, Leonardo Scavino, Daniel Muntane, Eduard Page Campos, Enric Garcia Domingo, Katerina Galani, Alkiviadis Kapokakis, Petros Kastrinakis, Kalliopi Vasilaki, Pavlos Fafalios, Georgios Samaritakis, Kostas Petrakis, Korina Doerr, Athina Kritsotaki, Anastasia Axaridou, and Martin Doerr.

Read the review by Roberto Giulianelli in the August 2024 issue of the IJMH (requires subscription)
https://doi.org/10.1177/08438714241261803

American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700 by Molly A. Warsh

https://uncpress.org/book/9781469638973/american-baroque/

Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

Pearls have enthralled global consumers since antiquity, and the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella explicitly charged Columbus with finding pearls, as well as gold and silver, when he sailed westward in 1492. American Baroque charts Spain’s exploitation of Caribbean pearl fisheries to trace the genesis of its maritime empire. In the 1500s, licit and illicit trade in the jewel gave rise to global networks, connecting the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean to the pearl-producing regions of the Chesapeake and northern Europe.
Pearls—a unique source of wealth because of their renewable, fungible, and portable nature—defied easy categorization. Their value was highly subjective and determined more by the individuals, free and enslaved, who produced, carried, traded, wore, and painted them than by imperial decrees and tax-related assessments. The irregular baroque pearl, often transformed by the imagination of a skilled artisan into a fantastical jewel, embodied this subjective appeal. Warsh blends environmental, social, and cultural history to construct microhistories of peoples’ wide-ranging engagement with this deceptively simple jewel. Pearls facilitated imperial fantasy and personal ambition, adorned the wardrobes of monarchs and financed their wars, and played a crucial part in the survival strategies of diverse people of humble means. These stories, taken together, uncover early modern conceptions of wealth, from the hardscrabble shores of Caribbean islands to the lavish rooms of Mediterranean palaces.

Read the review by Tijl Vanneste in the August 2024 issue of the IJMH (requires subscription)
https://doi.org/10.1177/08438714241261805