Oceans divide continents, but they also connect their shores. Humans learned to take advantage of the challenges this created and adjusted their relationship with the Sea. This in turn shaped commercial activities, the performance of pilgrimage, the expansion of oversea colonies and travelling in pursuit of knowledge. Indian Ocean history seeks to entangle these fields from economic and environmental, to social, cultural and political history. Growing scholarship over the last decades has established the Indian Ocean as an arena of maritime connections similar to Braudel’s Mediterranean and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. The Indian Ocean has been a seascape of human interaction for several millennia. From the shores of East Africa, to the Red Sea region, to the ports of the South Asian subcontinent and the Indonesian archipelago societies created a maritime cultures through trade, travel and travails. This course will look at a variety of primary sources to study connections and mobilities as they were forged by humans during the early modern period (1400-1700) across the Western Indian Ocean. We will cross-read travel narratives, biographical works, merchant letters, chronicles and marginal notes on travelling manuscripts to explore how mobilities led to cultural encounters, how these changed over time and how this created shared and connected experiences among societies that straddled the world of the Western Indian Ocean. These vicissitudes in mobilities will be studied from various angles and through different lenses. Accordingly, the teaching objectives are threefold: Firstly, the module intends to communicate approaches in global history by studying different forms of transregional integration on the basis of various primary source texts. Secondly, the variety of sources will exemplify the multitude of human experiences and how they are translated into different fields of historical enquiry. Thirdly, by looking at connections and mobilities this module will stress the importance of going beyond limitations as set by area studies approaches. Schließen

Casale, G., 2010. The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Oxford: OUP. Ho, E., 2006. The graves of Tarim: Genealogy and mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley, London: University of California Press. Prange, S., 2018. Monsoon Islam. Trade and faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricci, R. 2010. ‘Islamic Literary Networks in South and Southeast Asia’, Journal of Islamic Studies, 21/1, pp. 1-28. Subrahmanyam, S. 1997. ‘Connected Histories. Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’. Modern Asian Studies, 31/3, pp. 735–762. Schließen