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Every now and then, a field reaches a moment when its questions become unexpectedly urgent. Indian Ocean Studies is having one of those moments.

For years, the Indian Ocean was treated as a geographical periphery as a blue expanse framing the "real" historical action on land. Scholars mined it for spice routes, imperial circuits, trade diasporas, and occasionally a shipwreck or two. Useful, yes. But incomplete. The ocean was flattened into a corridor: goods moved, people moved, and the...

When this Consortium was imagined to be revived, there is a quick realisation: a network is only as strong as the principles that shape it. The Indian Ocean is vast, messy, plural, and in constant motion, and the field that studies it should be, too.

We believe the Indian Ocean demands a different mode of thinking.
A thinking that is tidal, relational, critical, and collective.

If I take the publication of my article on "Gujarat and the Trade of East Africa, c. 1500-1800" in The International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 9, no. 1 (1976): 22-44, as the beginning of my self-conscious engagement as an historian of the Indian Ocean, the two most influential books that drew me out into that vast ocean were ...

My suggestion for any Indian Ocean reading list is John Guy's Woven Cargoes: Indian Textiles in the East (Thames and Hudson, 1998). The textiles that it covers transport readers along familiar networks that stretched from Egypt to India and from India to Southeast and East Asia. The impact of this study certainly extends beyond the purview of the...

My copy of Auguste Toussaint's History of the Indian Ocean has the price penciled on the flyleaf (30 South African rand). I bought it in a second-hand bookshop in Johannesburg, probably in the late 1990s. I remember scanning the index and suddenly seeing the Indian Ocean whole.