Fahad Ahmad Bishara, "Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History" (U California Press, 2025)

Nov 6, 2025

Fahad Ahmad Bishara, an expert in maritime and Indian Ocean history, sheds light on his new book, which chronicles a 1924 dhow voyage across the Arabian Sea. He discusses using microhistory to unveil connected stories of Gulf commerce and cultural exchange. Bishara shares his personal maritime heritage, highlighting how his grandfather's seafaring influenced his work. Insights include the role of colonial technologies in transforming trade and the fascinating dynamics of local navigation practices and port communities. Get ready for a deep dive into the vibrant maritime past!

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INSIGHT

Microhistory Reveals Hidden Oceanic Networks

Fahad Bishara uses a microhistory of a single dhow to reveal Indian Ocean networks unseen by national histories.
The ship-centered view connects Gulf lives to broader Indian Ocean economic and legal systems.

ANECDOTE

Childhood Visit Sparked Research

Bishara recalls visiting his grandfather's refurbished ship at Kuwait's National Science Center as a child.
That early encounter planted the seed for his lifelong interest in maritime history.

INSIGHT

Ship Logs Are Portable Offices

The captain's roznama hides rich documentary layers: contracts, letters, navigational notes and maps.
Those marginalia reveal captains as active readers, thinkers, and legal practitioners at sea.

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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.

Music Credits and Links:
Prologue: The Logbook
1. Kuwait
Inscription: Debts
2. The Shatt Al-ʿArab
Inscription: Freightage
3. The Gulf
Inscription: Passage
4. The Sea of Oman
Inscription: Guides
5. Karachi to Kathiawar
Inscription: Letters
6. Bombay
Inscription: Transfers
7. Malabar
Inscription: Conversions
8. Crossings
Inscription: Maps
9. Muscat
Inscription: Poems
10. Bahrain
Inscription: Accounts
11. Returns
Epilogue: Triumph and Loss

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