Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2016
This article examines European perceptions and misperceptions, distortions, exaggerations and misunderstandings of western Indian Ocean societies in the 19th century. For this work I have combined research on European sources, both published and manuscript, and mostly from the British archives, with field research that I have carried out in southwest Asia, Arabia, and east Africa. The fact that most European observers of Indian Ocean societies in the 19th century carried the baggage of British and French colonial policy, and that they tended to lack deep knowledge of the region as well as empathy for the people, combined to produce a certain historical, political and cultural approach to local realities, which, in some cases, is still unmodified today. Through my own field research I have met with local tribal elites in Makran, Baluchistan and Oman, and with leaders of the major Swahili families of Zanzibar. I have shared tea and stories with old women. These contacts provide an invaluable insight into local interpretations of regional history, through the historical memory preserved in rituals and tales. This research also makes possible a new understanding of the significance of places, and the historical events associated with them.
1 This expression, more pertinent to European historiography, is here used to refer metaphorically to the red color of the Omani flag. In effect, the sovereigns of Oman, between the 18th and 19th centuries, established numerous mercantile and political-strategic concessions along the shores of the Persian Gulf and of the western Indian Ocean.
Author’s note: this contribution is a revised version of a paper presented to the International Conference on Cultural Exchange and Transformation in the Indian Ocean World, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 3–4 April, 2002.
2 A.A.W., Il Baluchistan: una “terra incognita” al crocevia dell’Asia, “Storia Urbana” (edited by Redaelli, R.), year XXII, n. 84 (Milan, 1998).Google Scholar
3 I owe the description which follows to Prof. Valeria Piacentini, to whom I am deeply grateful.
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70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.