Nautical Natives

Seema Alavi provides a refreshing non-European perspective on the Indian Ocean in the Age of Empire

- T.C.A.Raghavan

The author is a distinguished historian of 18th- and 19th-century India and, in this work, has widened her frame to look at the Western Indian Ocean in the 19th century. In doing so, she situates herself as part of a historiographical tradition that looks beneath the surface of the very evident European, and increasingly British, domination of these waters in order to relate a history in which indigenous and native actors play more substantive roles than as allies or supplicants of the British. The Indian Ocean in the 19th century then becomes more than a monochromatic space dominated by external powers, to a more crowded maritime terrain in which a host of local and regional players cooperate and jostle to maximise their autonomy from the increasing demands of an expanding British imperialism.

Dr Alavi's focus is on a single family that provided Oman five of its sultans over the 19th century till it became a British protectorate. But till that happened, these sultans were acting as powers in their own right, often "engaged with the Western powers from a position of strength", which "made them visible as significant Arab imperialists" in an "assemblage of powers normally viewed as the white man's club".