The Indian Ocean between God and Empire

When Sayyid ‘Alawi (ca. 1750-1844 ce), the father of the main protagonist of Wilson Chacko Jacob’s For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World, crossed the Indian Ocean in the second half of the eighteenth century, he travelled on a familiar and ancient route. His journey took him along the long-established and well-worn maritime pathway that connected two key regions of the Indian Ocean: Yemen and India’s Malabar Coast. Southern Arabia was a crucial entrepôt for both the Red Sea as well as the overland caravan routes that linked the trading world of the Indian Ocean to that of the Mediterranean. On the other side of the Arabian Sea, the Malabar Coast was not only situated at the intersection between the trade circuits of the western and eastern Indian Ocean but it was also the source of the most important ingredient in the transoceanic spice trade: black pepper. As a result, the Arabian coast and southwestern India had been connected by a vigorous commercial exchange since antiquity. Participating in this exchange, however, was not without its challenges. Merchants not only needed to cross the Arabian Sea but also bridge the formidable logistical and cultural fault lines that existed between the two regions. A foreign merchant arriving on the South Indian coast with the intention of trading in pepper required a whole infrastructure of support: from something as basic as a place to eat and sleep (especially important in a region with strict rules around commensality and cohabitation) to safe storage for his goods, intelligence on market conditions, and introductions to potential business partners. Commercial exchange, then, was dependent on another, more fundamental form of exchange: hospitality. Pre-modern trade was an inherently social activity, dependent on kinship ties, personal connections, and communal networks. Reciprocal hospitality was the glue that held these relationships together and made possible sustained long-distance exchanges. Jacob, in his prize-winning book, goes as far as to regard hospitality as an “originary principle” of the Indian Ocean world (2). The business letters of the Cairo Geniza, which constitutes the richest archive on the commercial practices of the pre-modern Indian Ocean, are replete with a vocabulary of friendship, brotherhood, and love. As the pioneering Geniza scholars Shelomo Dov Goitein and Abraham Udovitch noted, the services merchants requested of another in the name of friendship were invariably granted, even if they involved a great expenditure of time and effort. What is more, they were even extended to “friends of friends.” In a more recent study, Jessica Goldberg convincingly argues that in specific contexts, the idiom of friendship implied a more formal institution of “balanced reciprocity” with finite terms. This finds expression, for example, in this business letter from one Jewish merchant to another: “As you know, every kindness (good deed) finds its reward in a like kindness, and you will not do a thing for me that I will not repay sufficiently in kind.” The use of an idiom of friendship to express reciprocal business relationships is also reflected in a thirteenth-century bilingual inscription from western India. Located at Somnath, near the important port city of Khambhat (Cambay), the epigraph is written in both Sanskrit and Arabic. Its text describes the relationship between powerful local Hindu merchants and a visiting Muslim shipowner (nakhudha in Arabic) from Hormuz as that of “righteous friends” (dharmabandhava in Sanskrit), echoing in both languages the familiar parlance of amity that underpinned and structured their professional bonds. The ability to call on the services of friendship, which centrally included hospitality in all its dimensions, was essential to conducting business …