The Early History of the Sultanate of Angoche

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. D. D. Newitt

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Editors of the JIOWS

The editors are proud to present the first issue of the fourth volume of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies. This issue contains three articles, by James Francis Warren (Murdoch University), Kelsey McFaul (University of California, Santa Cruz), and Marek Pawelczak (University of Warsaw), respectively. Warren’s and McFaul’s articles take different approaches to the growing body of work that discusses pirates in the Indian Ocean World, past and present. Warren’s article is historical, exploring the life and times of Julano Taupan in the nineteenth-century Philippines. He invites us to question the meaning of the word ‘pirate’ and the several ways in which Taupan’s life has been interpreted by different European colonists and by anti-colonial movements from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. McFaul’s article, meanwhile, takes a literary approach to discuss the much more recent phenomenon of Somali Piracy, which reached its apex in the last decade. Its contribution is to analyse the works of authors based in the region, challenging paradigms that have mostly been developed from analysis of works written in the West. Finally, Pawelczak’s article is a legal history of British jurisdiction in mid-late nineteenth-century Zanzibar. It examines one of the facets that underpinned European influence in the western Indian Ocean World before the establishment of colonial rule. In sum, this issue uses two key threads to shed light on the complex relationships between European and other Western powers and the Indian Ocean World.


Author(s):  
Aniruddh S. Gaur ◽  
Kamlesh H. Vora

India has played a major role in Indian Ocean trade and the development of shipbuilding technology. The study of the maritime history of India commenced in the first decade of the twentieth century and was largely based on literary data. Maritime archaeological investigations have been undertaken at various places along the Indian coast, such as in Dwarka, Pindara, the Gulf of Khambhat, the Maharashtra coast, the Tamil Nadu coast, etc. Despite a long coastline and a rich maritime history, there are no proper coastal records or records of shipwrecks that are preserved, except some literary references, which suggest a large number of shipwrecks dating between the early sixteenth century and the nineteenth century. This article discusses important shipwrecks on which detailed work is in progress.


Author(s):  
Sue Peabody

During Furcy’s lawsuit more than half a century after the fact, two receipts were offered as proof that his mother, Madeleine, had been sold as a child slave by Portuguese traders in the French trading center at Chandernagor in Bengal, India, in the 1760s. Although these receipts may be forgeries, they offer plausible details consistent with the prevalence of children in the Indian Ocean slave trade in the eighteenth century. Frequent famines caused parents to pawn their children into debt bondage. European traders took slaves, including kidnapped children, from the Indian subcontinent to overseas colonies, thus separating families permanently. Madeleine’s mistress, Anne Despense de la Loge, was an unusual single French woman living in Chandernagor, who may have been part of an informal religious community.


2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Titas Chakraborty ◽  
Matthias van Rossum

Abstract Recent years have witnessed an expanding body of scholarship indicating the importance of slave trade and slavery in different parts of the Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago worlds. This work has not only challenged the dominant focus of slavery scholarship on the Atlantic context but has also encouraged scholars to reassess wider perspectives on Asian and global social histories. This special issue brings together contributions that explore these new horizons. Together, they take up the issue of slavery and mobility in different parts of the Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago worlds from a comparative perspective, dealing not only with the existence and patterns of slave trade itself but also with its social and sociopolitical implications. These articles require us to rethink some of the dominant perspectives in a historiography that for a long time has emphasized the unique and local character of “Asian” slaveries, positing dichotomies between slavery in the Atlantic and elsewhere, as well as between Western and non-Western slaveries. The contributions to this special issue challenge several of these existing dichotomies and provide new contributions to the understanding of the role and importance of slavery from a global perspective, as well as to the history of the Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago worlds. This introduction reflects on this collective contribution and aims to provide an outline for a relevant research agenda.


Author(s):  
Michael Laffan

This introductory chapter documents what is known of the process of Islamization across Indonesia and argues that the present knowledge is informed in large part by the acceptance of the retrospective framings and validations of seventeenth-century Sufi teachings that emphasized a mystical connection between the Prophet and a learned elite patronized by regal authorities. Numerous difficulties beset any attempt at plotting a straightforward history of the conversion and Islamization of Indonesia's many diverse peoples up to the middle of the eighteenth century. What does emerge is a sense that certain key courts took on the mantle of defenders of Islam and regularly sought validation from beyond their shores, most preferably from the person of the Prophet's lineal descendants in Mecca and the scholars associated with them. Regardless of how it was achieved or subsequently justified, Islamization brought the power of international connections that linked the Indian Ocean and China Sea ever more closely together.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya

Abstract Due to assimilation, the diversity of the region, and the problems of identification, the presence of Asians with African ancestry in some parts of the Indian Ocean goes largely unnoticed. Whilst Ethiopians came to Sri Lanka voluntarily during the sixth century, the largest known Afro-Sri Lankan community’s history dates back to the island’s colonial era, which began in the sixteenth century. Oral traditions and archival records demonstrate that the Indian Ocean slave trade carried on even after abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Although their numbers have dwindled due to out-marriage and assimilation, this community’s presence is marked out through its strong cultural memories. This article highlights the significance of film as a medium for making Sri Lankans of African ancestry visible and giving them a space to reflect about their ancestors, cultural traditions and sociolinguistic transformations.


1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Kiyaga-Mulindwa

Recent archaeological excavations have revealed two distinct pottery traditions in the Birim Valley, southern Ghana. These have been classified as the ‘Earthworks Ware’ and the ‘Atwea Ware’. In certain archaeological contexts, the ‘Atwea Ware’ succeeds ‘Earthworks Ware’, and it also continues into present-day ethnography. The discontinuity between these two pottery traditions suggests a change in population. It is therefore suggested here that the population of ‘Earthworks Ware’ makers was one of the early victims of the Atlantic slave trade from about the mid-sixteenth century and that they were replaced in this area of the Birim Valley around a.d. 1700 by the Atweafo, a Twi-speaking group, whose descendants live there to this day. From the eighteenth century until close to the end of the nineteenth century a number of Denkyira, Asini and Asante migrants also moved into this valley. During this time the militarily weak Atweafo lived at the mercy of four major powers – the Asante, Akim Abuakwa, Akim Kotoku and the Akwamu. However, the Atweafo found means to survive under what seems to have been a highly volatile political environment by shifting their loyalty amongst these powers as situations dictated.


1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 831-860 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Doyle

One of the most distinctive features of the French Ancien Régime was the sale of offices. Several European states resorted to this method of tapping the wealth of their richer subjects in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but nowhere did venality spread further through society than in France, and nowhere did its importance persist so long. Although the revolutionaries of 1789 abolished it, it reappeared for certain public functions in the early nineteenth century, and has not quite vanished even today. The origins and early history of the system have been authoritatively studied, but its eighteenth-century history has received very little attention. This is all the more curious in that France continued to be governed largely by holders of venal offices, they constituted the backbone of opposition to the government in the form of the magistrates of the parlements, and huge amounts of capital continued to be absorbed by office-buying. Even so, most historians consider that by this time the venal system was in decline. This seemed to be demonstrated by unsold offices remaining on the market, and above all by falling, office prices. For Alfred Cobban, indeed, these trends were symptoms of the decline of a whole class, the officiers. Here was ‘a section of society which was definitely not rising in wealth, and was barely holding its own in social status’ as falling office prices showed. ‘The decline seems to have been general, from the parlements downwards, though until the end of the eighteenth century it was much less marked in the offices of the parlements than in those of the présidiaux, élections, maréchaussées and other local courts.’ Resentment at this decline explained the revolutionary fervour of the officiers, whom Cobban had previously shown to be the largest bourgeois group in the National Assembly; and 1789 was largely the work not of a rising capitalist bourgeoisie, but rather of a declining professional one.


1988 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merid W. Aregay

This article draws attention to the possible importance of coffee exports from Ethiopia before the mid-nineteenth century. They may well have been a factor in attempts by Ethiopian emperors in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to develop trade in Yaman, in India and with the Dutch in Java. By 1690, coffee was being exported from Zayla, and perhaps by other outlets. In 1705 and 1737 there were unsuccessful attempts by Europeans to obtain coffee direct from Ethiopia, though meanwhile the growth of plantations in European colonies had rendered such effort superfluous. Nonetheless, Ethiopia contributed to the Red Sea coffee trade during the eighteenth century, and it seems likely that coffee was exported from Enarya as well as from Harar. The kingdom of Shawa was well situated to exploit the development of coffee exports from the south-western highlands, and they would have assisted Shawa's efforts to distance itself from upheavals further north during the Zamana Masafent. The coffee trade may therefore have been more significant in the rise of Shawa in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries than historians have hitherto allowed.


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