Trade, Translation and Cultural Exchange across the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800: A Connected Historical Analysis

Abstract

Trade, translation, and cultural exchange across the Indian Ocean between 1500 and 1800 created a dense network of commercial, linguistic, religious, and intellectual interaction. The article looks into the ways in which goods, people, texts and knowledge were transported via maritime routes between East Africa, Arabia, South Asia, the Southeast, and the trading powers of Europe. They rely on scholarly literature, a historical archive, travelers' accounts, missionary records, commercial documents, and translated sources, and employ a qualitative historical design that is shaped by a connected-history analysis. It appears that trade was the material basis for maintaining contact, and that people who could interpret, trade, write, convert, and translate facilitated communication across linguistic and cultural lines. The multilinguality of port cities like Surat, Goa, Jeddah and others on the Indian Ocean became a site where commercial exchange refashioned social identities, religious practices, consumption and knowledge systems. European imperialism changed the existing networks by establishing monopolies, the use of the military force and administration, while regional rulers, merchants, brokers and local communities had a lot of agency. Exchange of culture thus occurred in a negotiated, adapted, resisted, and selective process, rather than in a single transmission. The article maintains that the Indian Ocean world has emerged from a process of interaction between commerce, translation and culture over time and across political and geographical boundaries.