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Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea

This book is at once a strong transnational history of the Arabian Sea littoral and the distinct communities that have remained largely unnoticed and unrecognized in the written record, but that are now, through Mathew’s work, made visible. In the tradition of Lincoln Paine’s The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (2015), Mathew’s book promotes scholarship that “takes to the water,” and, in so doing, offers and uncovers unique insights into global history and into human affairs. Early on, Mathew deploys the term “framing out” the market (p. 8), which he defines as an expulsion of certain trades, a pushing out, a division, elision, and suppression through repetition and reiteration. What emerges is arbitrage—the practice of performative and improvisational capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Arabian Sea. From this conceptual starting point, Mathew takes us on a wild academic journey across the Arabian Sea, and this results in a shift in our intellectual gaze in several ways. One shift in historical studies is a refocusing from land to water, “by paying attention to the blues that shade 70% of the image in the map, and letting the earth tones fade”. This shift makes many trends and patterns of world history stand out in ways they simply cannot otherwise. Through this thematic shift, Mathew upends the conventional notions of capitalism and the components that constitute it, namely, land, labor and capital. The author refers to these as terrestrial capitalism (p. 6), but through the infusion of a maritime perspective, inverts it. Instead of land, labor, and capital, we have sea, piracy, trafficking, and networks. The Arabian Sea, he writes, is an immense, fierce, opaque space that was difficult if not impossible to control. At the same time, it was a site of regular and sustained trade and exchange. But this uncontrollable site yielded differences between markets, and mercantile networks exploited these differences that gave them unique advantages for profit-making. Regulation, documentation, statistics, and economic calculation were all part of the colonial administration’s repertoire to modernize trade in the Arabian Sea. The mercantile networks used these to perform compliance while simultaneously engaging in reinterpretation, improvisation, and, sometimes, subversion. The book treats us to capitalism’s underbelly— the traffickers, the slave traders, the currency counterfeiters, the gun runners, the arbitrageurs. Yet they are as much constitutive of, and have reshaped the contours of capitalism-at-sea. Even while they operated supposedly at the margins, they are very much an intrinsic part of capitalist formations. This shift from land to water is a highly nuanced political economy set within a colonial historical framework. The author contributes to an intellectual space that continues to spur new scholarship and redefines the field of historical studies further. So, how else might the book be further nuanced? Here are two areas to consider. A Deeper Analysis of Colonial Governance: The British Empire was so vast and massive that a coherent and comprehensive governance system would have rendered it quite impossible. Karen Barkey’s Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (2014) is instructive here. When huge portions of the world are controlled or governed from a remote and distant political center (as in the case of the Ottoman Empire), Barkey argues that inevitably, the empire