Två författarintervjuer med samma författare om samma bok, som handlar om sjöhandeln längst med persiska golfen och väster Indiska oceanen. Känns väldigt passande för Kopparhavet:
newbooksnetwork.com
"Monsoon Voyagers follows the voyage of a single dhow (sailing vessel), the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around the Persian Gulf and Western Indian Ocean, from 1924 to 1925. Through his account of the voyage, Fahad Ahmad Bishara unpacks a much broader history of circulation and exchange across the Arabian Sea in the time of empire. From their offices in India, Arabia, and East Africa, Gulf merchants utilized the technologies of colonial capitalism — banks, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, and more — to transform their own regional bazaar economy. In the process, they remade the Gulf itself. Drawing on the Crooked's first-person logbooks, along with letters, notes, and business accounts from a range of port cities, Monsoon Voyagers narrates the still-untold connected histories of the Gulf and Indian Ocean. The Gulf's past, it suggests, played out across the sea as much as it did the land.
Monsoon Voyagers doesn’t just tell a vivid, imaginative narrative—it teaches. Each port-of-call chapter can work as a stand-alone module. And the brief “Inscription” interludes double as turn-key primary-source labs—perfect for document analysis, quick mapping, and mini-quant work with weights, measures, and credit instruments. It invites undergraduates into a connected oceanic world and the big questions of world history, while graduate students get a method—how to read vernacular archives across scales and languages to design their own transregional, archive-driven projects.
A quick heads-up: Traditional local musical interludes (see below for credits and links) will punctuate our voyage as chapter markers you can use to pause and reflect—as we sail from Kuwait to the Shatt al-Arab, then out across the Gulf to Oman, Karachi, Gujarat, Bombay, and the Malabar coast. We’ll return via Muscat and Bahrain, dropping anchor once more in Kuwait."
newbooksnetwork.com
"In 1924, the
Al-A‘waj, also known as the
Crooked, set sail from Kuwait on a trading journey around the Persian Gulf, through the Strait of Hormuz, to Western India and, eventually, back to the Gulf.
Dhows had sailed this route for centuries—and would continue to sail it for a few more decades still.
Fahad Ahmad Bishara talks about this specific 1924 journey in his book
Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History (U California Press, 2025)
. As the
Crooked travels the waters of the Indian Ocean, Fahad covers topics like international law, the importance of debt, piracy, how information spread from port to port, and the Arab diaspora (among many other topics)
Fahad is Associate Professor of History and Rouhollah Ramazani Professor of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. He is also the author of
A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950."