Historian Mahmood Kooria, one of the leading scholars of the Indian Ocean world, brings decades of research into maritime history, trade, Islamic networks and cross-cultural exchange to Indians in the Ocean: Cultures of Trade and Travel c. 1000–1500, with an introduction by acclaimed author and public intellectual Gurcharan Das. Currently based at the University of Edinburgh, Kooria was awarded the 2024 Infosys Prize in Humanities and Social Sciences for his contributions to the study of Islam and the Malabar region in the Indian Ocean world. His scholarship has consistently challenged land-based and Eurocentric approaches to history, drawing attention to the networks of people, texts, ideas and commodities that connected South Asia with Africa, Arabia and Southeast Asia.
In Indians in the Ocean, Kooria turns the Indian Ocean into the protagonist of a remarkable economic and cultural history of the subcontinent between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Long before European ships came to dominate these waters, Indian traders and travellers were crossing them in search of profit, knowledge and opportunity, participating in networks that connected distant societies and made the ocean one of the principal highways of the premodern world. Drawing on historical sources in multiple languages, the book reconstructs how maritime travel and trade transformed what Indians produced, consumed and knew, and how these encounters reshaped the social and cultural fabric of the subcontinent.
Kooria’s wider scholarship has similarly demonstrated that the Indian Ocean was not merely a route for commodities. Merchants, sailors and travellers carried books, legal traditions, ideas, stories and cultural practices across its waters. His research on Malabar has also highlighted how the region’s maritime connections produced a remarkably cosmopolitan society shaped by interactions among Indian, Arab, Persian, African and European communities.
At a time when India’s place in the history of global trade and its maritime connections with the wider world are being reconsidered, Indians in the Ocean offers a vital correction to a familiar version of history: the story of globalisation did not begin with European expansion. For centuries, the ocean was already carrying Indians, and India, into the wider world.
