THE ARABIAN SEAS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Rene Barendse

  The object is to produce an expanded English version of my 1991
Ph.D.Thesis Koningen, Compagnieen en kapers De Arabische zeeen
1640-1700 (English version Kings, Companies and corsairs and
corsairs in the Arabian seas 1640-1700). The study aims to
provide a broad comparative account of the trade in the western
Indian Ocean, considering European activities against the
backdrop of "indigenous" commerce.
  On a theoretical level the study has three basic objectives:
first, to show that the developments in a single region can not
be understood without taking developments in the Arabian seas as
a whole into consideration. Here I will focus on the concept of
risk, protection and information as elements in the structure of
costs to trade. Second, to study the pattern of economic shifts
and fluctuation in the middle long-run, instead of the often
exclusive attention bestowed either upon short-term (political)
or upon the supposedly very long-run patterns of "traditional
Asian trade". And third, on the one hand to break down the
barriers between various "national" historiographies" regarding
European expansion in the Indian Ocean, and on the other between
the "orientalist" and "Europeanist" level of discourse on social
and economic developments which are better understood as common
intercontinental shifts.
  Within the scope of these broader theoretical  concerns, I will
present a large amount of new material from Dutch, Portuguese and
Indian archives  on a wide variety of themes relative to the
history of the Indian Ocean, which are difficult to compress into
short compass: these would range from the relative significance
of bullion-flows and cash-crop production to the Indian and
Persian agricultural economies to Brazilian shipping to
Mozambique; from attempts to reform the Portuguese empire to
Armenian trade to Astrakhan, or from the structure of government
at Basra to the social significance of the idea of a pirate's
republic in Madagascar to the seamen of New York.    


R.J. Barendse (1961) studied Modern History at the University of
Amsterdam and History of the European Expansion at the University
of Leiden. He obtained his Ph.D. at Leiden University in may 1991
with Koningen, Compagnieen en kapers, De Arabische zeeen
1640-1700. Publication in various reviews like Itinerario,
Revista cultural de Macao and Moyen Orient et Ocean Indien.