Indians in the Ocean: Promises of Slaves and Pirates, 1000-1500 CE 

Part of the Maritime Asia lecture series.

About the Talk

The idea that the Indian Ocean was a peaceful place before Europeans arrived with cannon-bearing ships and combined trade with warfare from the sixteenth century onward has been challenged in recent scholarship. From Gujarat to Coromandel and Bengal to Malabar, local communities participated in, benefited from, and were also subjected to a broader economy of violence, with or without state support. The forms of this violence varied, but enslavement and piracy were among its most significant means of profit-making. Yet we know very little about Indians who were taken as slaves across the seas or worked as pirates between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. This talk explores the violent worlds of maritime slavery and piracy, complicating conventional understandings of both phenomena in the Indian Ocean and the Indian subcontinent. It builds on my recent book, Indians in the Ocean: Cultures of Trade and Travel (New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2026; Leiden: Leiden University Press, forthcoming).

About the Speaker

Mahmood Kooria is a historian of the Indian Ocean world, currently teaching at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, and director of the Edinburgh Centre for Global History. He earned his PhD in global history at the Leiden University Institute for History in 2016, authored Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafiʿi Texts Across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (Cambridge, 2022), and co-edited Malabar in the Indian Ocean World: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (Oxford, 2018). In 2024, he won the Infosys Prize in Humanities and Social Sciences for his contributions to the studies of Islam and Malabar in the Indian Ocean world.

Free and open to all