Ottoman History Podcast - Indian Ocean Exchange in Early Modern Yemen

Episode Date: March 6, 2020

Episode 453 with Nancy Um hosted by Zoe Griffith The Red Sea port of Mocha enjoyed ties with London, Amsterdam, Surat, and Jakarta in the eighteenth century. But not all of the ivory, porcelain, and coffee that passed through Mocha was sold for a profit. In this episode, Nancy Um brings the eye of an art historian to the history of exchange and diplomacy in the early modern Indian Ocean, focusing on the ceremonies and gift exchanges that legitimated and lubricated English and Dutch trade with Yemen’s Qasimi rulers. Gift-giving was far more than an annoyance to the major overseas merchants in Mocha. We explore how “promiscuous” objects became valuable beyond their price tag, allowing merchants to communicate across linguistic, religious, and cultural lines. « Click for More »

Thank you. Hello and welcome to another installment of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Zoe Griffith. I'm really pleased today to have a chance to talk to Professor Nancy Um about her work on the material culture of commerce and exchange in the Indian Ocean. Nancy is a professor of art history at SUNY Binghamton, and I think the work she does is incredibly creative, will be very interesting to our listeners, is really very needed actually right now in a sort of moment of crossroads maybe in Middle East studies and Indian Ocean studies, but in the way that she blends and sort of subverts more traditional geographies and methodological boundaries in the fields. So her first book, The Merchant Houses of Mocha,

came out in 2009. It's a really fascinating study of merchant architecture in the Indian Ocean in the port city of Mocha in modern-day Yemen. I think it was very inspiring for me when I read it in thinking about taking the everyday experience of trade and exchange seriously and trying to understand the social experience of something that we think about in kind of history of capitalism or abstract terms. And then her most recent book came out in 2017 and sort of grew out of the first project, I think. It's called Shipped But Not Sold, Material Culture and the Social Protocols of Trade During Yemen's Age of Coffee. And it looks at the interactions of an incredibly diverse, underappreciated network of merchants in Mocha in the first half of the 18th century.

And there was a line in the introduction, I think, that encapsulated it very well, the idea of global history on a small scale, which I guess comes from Francesca Tribolato. it very well, the idea of global history on a small scale, which I guess comes from Francesca Tribolato. So we'll get into this global history on a small scale. Nancy, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks so much for speaking with me, Zoe. I'm really pleased to have the opportunity to talk about this book and to follow up on work that, you know, I thought I'd closed up a little while ago, but to open it up, exactly, but to open it up again and to think about it and to reflect. ago, but to open it up, exactly, but to open it up again and to think about it and to reflect. So you open this most recent book, Ship But Not Sold, with, I think, a really, another great and very evocative term, promiscuous objects. And so maybe we can sort of launch into the topic by

just having you explain what are promiscuous objects, how did they inspire the study? Sure, thank you. That is not my term, though. It is Nick Thomas's term, when he taught an anthropologist who I think has done some of the most interesting work in thinking about how objects move between different states, right, between commodity states, between gift states, between states of presentation and display to the state of becoming an heirloom object. And that was always really a useful concept for me. And thinking about a world in which objects and material culture played a huge role. And obviously, we think about commodities in a trading society. But I became aware that there were objects that were sometimes commodities,

and sometimes gifts, and sometimes played other roles in terms of presentation and consumption, and that this world of goods was much richer than just that, which was bought and sold on the marketplace. What is the specific environment that we're talking about? What work are these promiscuous objects doing in MoCA? Yeah, well, you know, it's funny because, and it kind of brings me back also to the earlier work, because the first thing that they do

is they go to the House of the Governor, right? And the architecture of Mocha is on one hand distinctive, on the other hand, absolutely ordinary to these merchants because it stands out from the other buildings from inland Yemen. It looks different from Yemeni architecture, but it also carries these very particular visual features that would make these houses recognizable

to a merchant who had come from the east coast of Africa, from western India, and possibly even further afield. And so there's certain kinds of signs that mark the merchant house. And so these houses would be recognizable to someone who's come from afar. Yeah, so the house is important, right?

And remember, having this house already signals your inclusion in this merchant class, right? And so merchants would arrive, and they would first go to the governor's house. And the governor would offer them a few objects of consumption that are going to sound very familiar to anyone who knows the rituals of consumption in Yemen. But I'm going to say my view is that they are special in the context of the merchant experience. So a cup of coffee.

I want to say that this is not the black coffee that we expect to get at Starbucks or somewhere else. This is gishur, which is made from the husk of the coffee bean that is consumed only in Yemen. If you go to Yemen today, it's very, very difficult to get a cup of boon or a kahwa made from boon. But you'd be offered gishur, which often has added to it cardamom and ginger and other spices, a lot of sugar as well, to make it palatable. It's much lighter than coffee, too. Is it caffeinated? It is. It's got trace amounts of caffeine.

But so the merchant would be offered kishir, and this is important. It's a waste product of the coffee trade, right? If you think about it, no one drinks a husk of the coffee bean. Already kind of signaling the fact that many merchants, not all of them, but many of them were coming precisely for coffee and to engage in that trade, particularly in my period, which was the moment in really the kind of rise in the coffee market, although it would fall very soon. And then they would be offered a pipe, you know, so tobacco,

which of course is a New World product that was being localized throughout the Middle East, and certainly by this time was, but to me it just kind of signals these kinds of distant connections, right? And these objects that have been obtained through these encounters always sprinkle rose water in the hands,

and of course the rose water had come from India and or Iran. And we hear about many of these merchants came, including the Europeans, but also the Gujarati ships with rose water on it. So they're being offered an object or a commodity, rather, that they are carrying on their ships, which is signaling the receptivity to this good. And there's also then the burning of incense. And the incense that we're talking about is particularly old, which has come from the East as well and also was brought by many of these merchants too. And so what I see again is the integration of these commodities

in these merchant ceremonies, which were absolutely requisite to start the trade. And so after they were, you know, welcomed in the governor's house like this, whenever they go to visit another merchant, and they would engage in these same ceremonies that I would argue similarly have particular meaning in this context, even the vessels that they were using for them, many of them, which were porcelain coming from the east as well. Also, on Indian Ocean ships, these are all weighty and salient to me, not just kind of accessories that were part of these. It was a way of signaling an integration to this world of trade and exchange and commerce.

to this world of trade and exchange and commerce? When we think about material culture and merchants, it's often framed in the context of luxury, right? So, you know, in the kind of traditional casting of it, merchants gain a certain status from their trade, which is, you know, premised on, you know, having attained enough wealth to supersede their status as mere merchants, right? And then they begin to consume as acts of consumption and to also reflect this newly attained status.

So that's the conventional way in which we think about how merchants have used material culture and art. I try to reverse that with the sense that, first of all, merchant status is not stable, reverse that with the sense that, first of all, merchant status is not stable, especially in the topsy-turvy world of the Indian Ocean, where a shipwreck, a pirate attack, even a ship that has gone off course can really affect a merchant's reputation, that merchant's livelihood. And so my feeling is that merchant status was always unstable. You could be a great merchant, but you always had to then perform the kinds of social activities of a great merchant to be able to represent yourself as such. And so these material objects then were these props in this performance of these activities of merchants. So being a major merchant in MoC or anywhere else was not being like a tenured professor at a university where you can never get fired.

It was something that every time you came into the port that year, you had to represent yourself on those terms. And we're dealing, in terms of merchants' worlds, our understanding should be that these are groups of people who come together in the interest of trade. They certainly don't speak the same languages. They certainly don't come from the same places. They're not from the same religions. We already know this. But they have to find a way to be able to communicate who they are to each other. And so this is a very kind of basic premise that I think

we could probably think about in other places as well. I just looked at it in MoCA. And really, I saw these objects and playing this active role in helping merchants signal who they were. It was very obvious when someone disembarked at the port of MoCA who they were, if they were a merchant or if they were a lowly fisherman or sailor, you know, or if they were a broker. And, you know, and there was already a kind of accounting of who that person would be and, you know, who would be worthy of trade essentially, you know, issues of creditworthiness, trust all come up here. And so the idea is that these objects are active in helping merchants sustain the status and that, again, it was very, very unstable and that you could never, you could never allow yourself to be perceived as otherwise. Yeah, I mean, you were mentioning that it's a very unstable,

sort of on an individual level, it's a very unstable lifestyle, but that you have, as you say, these yearly cycles of arrival, of ceremony. So maybe we can just, because I think it's really great to just give people the texture of what's going on there. It's such an evocative place. Absolutely. Absolutely. So first of all, I have to say the temporal aspect is really important, right? Because when we think particularly about the wind cycles that would bring the merchants, the major merchants into town every year in January and February, right? And then they would trade straight through the summer

and they would leave. You know, you had to get out of that city by August or else you would be stuck there until the next year, right? You know, unless you wanted to make, you know, short haul journeys. And so it was very much temporally defined. And to that extent, you know, when these merchants would come in, it would be just a major event and it would completely change life in that city.

There are, of course, permanent residents of Mocha and the port, but life changed absolutely during the high trade season. And so in terms of the merchants we're talking about, definitely the most important merchants in Mocha were the major ship-owning merchants from Gujarat. And we hear about these merchants in the Red Sea and the kind of profile that they cut on that side of the world. And so they were extremely important. So they had very wide reaching networks.

And was that in search of coffee or? Well, it's interesting because, you know, they're often called brokers, right? And they're certainly, they certainly served as the brokers for the Europeans. And so some of them were brokers, but some of them also, but they also traded on their own terms. And some of them were also artisans as well. So they had a number of different roles that were all kind of associated with trade and artisanry. But when they were dealing with the brokerage,

there was a lot of times for these major merchants, whether it were the ship owners from Gujarat or other parts of the Gulf and the Red Sea or for the Europeans. Of course, the problem is we hear the most about the activities of the Europeans. Of course, the problem is we hear the most about the activities of the Europeans. So we are in this position where we have really lively and rich documents

that were left by namely the Dutch and the English East India companies, to a lesser extent the French and some private merchants. But we know as voluminous as those documents are, they are not reflective of the full economic life of that city and so we have to use them to think about what merchant life was and to also understand what their limitations are and that's the big challenge and you know I never

set out to be a historian of European expansion but when I encountered these documents I realized it was an opportunity, that they made available certain perspectives that I would never get from other documents, particularly inland Arabic material, material in Arabic, and so it was something that I, you know, have struggled with in many ways. Oh, absolutely, and I think, I mean, I study commercial networks in the Eastern Mediterranean and some French and Egyptian trade. And it's not quite to the same degree. There's plenty of material from the Ottomans and Egyptians, but the nature is so different.

And the sort of the lists and the statistics and the regularity is very different. So I think it'll be very helpful for lots of our listeners to hear from you. Like, you know, as a as an art historian, as a historian of material culture, what can you do with voluminous European documents really to get at like material culture of MoCA? Yeah. So, so maybe if I could just start by saying a little bit about these documents, because they are, you know, so the most voluminous ones are the ones from the Dutch East Indie Company or the VOC held in The Hague today. And those records are just amazing in their continuity.

There is one type of document called a dog register, or they're essentially diaries, right? You know, every single, you know, we hear all of this, the petty nitty gritty of things that happen at that port, things that you almost don't even want to hear about, right? You know, just recording from all of this, the petty nitty gritty of things that happen at that port, things that you, you know, that you almost don't even want to hear about, right? You know, just recording from this eyewitness perspective. Wait, so each person kept one of these or? No, it was for the company, but it is still, you know, and I mean, it's very funny because

sometimes you'll, you know, read along, particularly during the low trade season, they'll say, you know, nothing happened today for like a period of three weeks, right? And we get a sense that, you know, they were pretty bored sometimes in MoCA. But sometimes when they do talk about, you know, engagements that they have with the governor of MoCA or with other merchants or just, you know, swarms of locusts coming in and just things that they observe, they're very rich materials. But I will say, you know, I've been working with these materials for almost 20 years now. I think I've only just started to understand them

in terms of really not just what they're telling us, because that was kind of the allure of them for me initially, but the logic of the documents, right? And how we have to read them as historians and sometimes what they say and how to interpret what they say, but also sometimes you have to really see what they're doing as well. And sometimes there's a big break between those two, which is very interesting. And in terms of material culture and even architecture,

which is what I dealt with in the work on the earlier work on Mocha, you know, they don't tell you anything that you want to hear as an architectural historian, right? You know, you're like, what is it made out of? Just tell me. How high is it? You know, that kind of thing. But they do tell you on an offhand manner, in an offhand way, how they were using these buildings, right?

And you can figure out where they had a room because they kept on getting, you know, locking things up in it and telling you that they were locking things up with it, not because they give you a ground plan of where that room is. And so they're difficult in some ways, and I think this is why art historians have generally not looked at the continuity of these records, because it's like every 50 pages you might get a little glimmer of something. But it's through the continuity of reading through them that you start to understand the texture of urban life,

and that's something that really cannot be captured. But in terms of the material culture, one of the problems with the Indian Ocean and certainly with the Arabian Peninsula is the poor survival rate of materials. So the recent book, Ship But Not Sold, is not a lavishly illustrated volume. It has some illustrations.

Many of them are comparative. Very few of them actually come from the context of 18th century Yemen we can make guesses, we can imagine what kind of objects arrive there based on things that we found in other places based on descriptions but in that way

text has to be used in this very kind of you have to mold that text in ways to make it speak to things because those merchants it's funny you know trade is about material objects and their exchange but it you know they lacked a vocabulary sometimes to really talk about those things they were just so well known to them interesting that they just conveyed you know them in lists and rather than describing them so what would be a

good example of something that you know was really taken for granted by the people recording it, but that stood out to you? Well, textiles. I mean, this is, I think, really the major issue with Indian Ocean history. We know that the Indian Ocean, the economy of the Indian Ocean was just driven by a lively textile trade, most of which came from India. And that the kinds of textiles that were coming out of India were extremely diverse, right? And we have cottons and silks, and even in the realm of print of cottons, we have printed cottons, we have muslins, we have all these different kinds of textiles. And so we know that's the case, that we have certain specimens of some of the grandest ones in some collections today. The Dutch, for instance, and the English give us these long

lists of textiles, some of which are kind of hybridized names that have come from local names that are spelled in funny ways, you know, that you have to work a little bit sometimes to make the connection to what it might be. But it's almost impossible to identify what all of these things are. We know how much they cost. We don't know what they are from a material sense, right? So, you know, we can use a cost to understand their value, but it's really frustrating for someone like me who really wants to think about objects as objects.

And I will say, you know, I mean, the trend has been really in economic history, for economic will say, you know, I mean, the trend has been really an economic history for economic historians to, you know, I've seen economic historians write full books about textile trade without even a sense of what these objects are, right? They are line items. They are not things. And so that's really something that I try to push back against, even though, again, it's a challenge. I know why they do that because it is not as if they have this, you though, again, it's a challenge. I know why they do that, because it is not as if they have this cadre of objects that they can use as exemplars. But I think the materiality, the physicality, the tactility of these objects, I think it is part of the story to understand why someone would get on a boat for that many months to come home with a load of whatever it is,

porcelain, textiles, wooden furniture, you know, these kinds of things, and to go to those lengths to bring these objects back. They had an allure and a draw that we have to try to understand as part of our understanding of the Indian Ocean trade. one of the things that i also really appreciate about the book is you know the way you explain how it came out of the first book as, you know, you read all these documents. And as you said, maybe once every 50 pages, there would be something that would

describe the architecture that you're interested in. And, you know, you were constantly just sort of cutting through all of these repetitive descriptions of, oh, we brought these gifts, and we had to sort of pay off these people. And it's so isn't this corrupt and ridiculous and a waste of our time but then you started to think like there's something here but this is the kind of cautionary tale right to every PhD student who's starting off on a dissertation they have some idea that they think is brilliant and they keep pushing on it even though it's really hard to find the sources or they're not getting the answers and you, you know, now I know that I should have told myself, well, maybe you should be writing the story, not the one that you wanted to, but I still persisted in that stubborn way. And I think I managed to, to work

that one out. And I think that answered questions that set me up to move forward. But it was absolutely the case of this whole idea of things that are shipped, but not sold. It's a very funny idea in some ways. Because what I had realized is that there were all of these items that they were spending this time talking about, right? That the majority of their time, you think it would be about commodities. But you know, particularly the discourse about gifts was so dominant. I mean, there are thousands of pages about this. And again, and I don't mean to be kind of so negative toward the Indian Ocean economic history, but I think what previous historians, I will say, is

that they have seen trade in the most limited terms possible. Trade begins from the moment when something is actually transacted in economic terms. When you see the exchange of money.

And so then my point is actually that the gift exchange that was structurally, was first of all, structurally part of the trade. And Europeans had a very hard time reckoning with this, certainly in the beginning of their encounter in the Indian Ocean, that you simply had to give gifts to start trading. And they did get it eventually,

even if in their records they still complain all the time. And they would say things like, this demand for gifts is unprecedented, when they knew it was not unprecedented, because they had done it the year before, the year before that, and so forth, right? So it's very interesting to, again, to look at the difference between what they actually did and how they wrote about what they did, right? So when you look at these gift protocols, you really understand that that was actually the substance of the trade. And so, you know, some of my colleagues, because it's really, it seems very petty, this back and forth, well, no, you know, you need to give me one more,

one more piece of muslin, or, you know, last year you gave us this, and this kind of back and forth, that economic historians have just said, oh, we don't want to deal with that, you know, let's try to get to the trade. And so my point is, that is the trade. The trade started when the boat arrived in the port. And the way in which that merchant was received at the Dhaka Moka set the tone. If he was received in the right way, he could start trading as usual.

If he was not given the right salute, and really they, again, in this, you know, kind of petty way, fought about the number of salutes and things like that. And I had all of these Gujarati merchants who said, no way. And they would turn back and they would get on their boat because they didn't want to be brought into the city under the circumstances, because they understood that that was part of the treaty, that was, you know, that they were beginning from that moment. And so that's one of the contentions that I try to make in this book, that those exchanges, which we could easily dismiss as extra commercial, are deeply connected to those processes. I mean, I really like in this book how you're able to, you know, take seriously the experience that people had

in this port. I think there's a tendency to sort of exoticize the idea of Indian Ocean trade or the European experience with Indian Ocean trade. You have these great details about, I mean, like the diary where they're like, nothing happened today. And you get a sense of this just boredom. I mean, that these, you know, you imagine these are sort of young guys, maybe sort of adventurous enough to get on a boat and go to the end, they're just sort of sleepy town. But so they would send these basically requests

back to the motherland, the home country. And it sounded like alcohol was really a big, number one request, necessity for performing trade. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, first of all, I just want to say that, you know, one thing that I always try to kind of push back against in terms of thinking about Indian Ocean history is a tendency that we, a lot of us kind of fall into is this celebratory tone about the amazingness of

cross-border interaction, the transcendence of boundaries. And, you know, we really have to be careful of that because this was a world of trade that was full of violence, that was full of exploitation. And that was, I mean, we're even thinking about the VOC, you know, they sent all these ships, ships full of, you know, of people and so many of these people were lost and died. And then they came back with all of these goods, right? And so I just think we always have to watch out for that idea of the celebration of global interconnectivity, right?

And just be very careful of our tone there. But yeah, I really wanted to get into the fabric of that everyday life. And again, this is all that stuff that we were mentioning before that appears in these registers that I was just like, oh, we're getting, again, the beer and again the wine, and I'm just trying to avoid it. And then that's when I realized, again, that this was actually the book, that this was

the question, rather, about all of these materials that were sent on boats that were not meant for the marketplace. Not just gifts, but tons of provisions. And again, admittedly in this case, this is all oriented around the European experience because this is documented. We have inventories from these European establishments or factories

that are quite extensive. And for me, the really important question was, what was important enough to put on the boat? You know, I think about the cargo hold of these ships that was essentially meant to carry goods that were supposed to be

bought and, you know, to be sold for profit. Right? That's, you know, that is the idea that we work with. But clearly, spaces were being taken up for other kinds of objects. Medicine, not surprisingly, right? Even though we have these great accounts of the Dutch surgeon or doctor

going into the market of mocha sometimes and saying, I need to find something and trying to kind of get some of his materials locally. But we have things like stationary supplies, writing, and I've written about this also elsewhere about how, of course, this is a paper empire of trade and how they had to write

in order to trade. This kind of obsessive document keeping, which has left to the archival remains that we have in The Hague, that that was part of this infrastructure for the Dutch and the English as well, and they speak extensively about how they need more paper, what kind of quills they need, and all of this. And these are obviously very important to sustaining and maintaining their trade. But really, one of the biggest concerns is alcohol. First of all, I will tell you, there was a bar, I guess we'll call that a tavern,

and it was located outside of the city where there was a small Jewish quarter. Apparently, the wine was not very good there. And so they preferred not to drink it, but they did sometimes. And every year they would send shipments of beer, wine, and spirits. And one of the points I try to make in the book is, you know, it's not that surprising, actually, that a bunch of European merchants who are very bored during the low season especially would want to have some drink on their table. But what is so interesting to me is how those supplies were then siphoned off

and became part of the gift economy. And so again, so this kind of lining and the promiscuity of objects, if you will, right? Moving between a provision, a gift, and a commodity

and how those objects that also we've always seen as external to local society were brought in, particularly for merchants who were engaging with local officials and merchants who were extremely cosmopolitan in their purview. So they had been to the ports of India and had been to Southeast Asia

and were quite familiar with the materials that the Dutch were, or the provisions that they were bringing, and we're quite hungry for them, apparently. And it became part of the identity of this port. What I think is so interesting, and in terms of the material culture of that, too, because what I realize is when you read the Dutch documents,

you know, this much beer, wine, spirits, all of that stuff came in a container. And so I have a piece that's coming out actually in a few weeks that is about the Dutch gin bottle. Oh, wow. Because the remnants of these gin bottles were found everywhere.

A colleague of mine did a study of remnants of these gin bottles in Cape Town. We know that they were in Mocha. We know that they were in Mocha. We know that they were in India, as far east as Japan, in Deshima, the Dutch factory there. And I will tell you, when I was in Leiden last year, I went to an antique store, and they had one of these Dutch gin bottles. And he said, oh, yeah, this was dredged up from a river in suriname oh my god and so i mean i see that in again i know this sounds like

ridiculously mundane to some people but to think about that legacy of alcohol provisioning it is part of this experience and the material trace it left was really quite significant and because you know it hasn't been seen as a major commodity, we haven't thought about it in the way we may want to, say, track the shipments of cloves or pepper or something like that, right? But clearly this was part of these networks in ways that I think we need to start reckoning with. Because I feel like I'm making a case to two different groups. One of them are my fellow art historians

who look at some of the things that I spend a lot of time talking about, which are things like wooden chairs, or empty gin bottles, or porcelain, and not like the grandest imperial pieces that have come out of the kilns of Jigme Jigen, but these little export pieces that were produced in large numbers

for the Indian Ocean or for Europe, these kinds of things. And I will say, some of my colleagues, I won't speak for all of them, are not that impressed with this material because this is not the stuff of art history, right? This is not the stuff.

This is, I always joke, the stuff that I look at is sitting in the back store room of a provincial museum. It's not, you know, on view in the Metropolitan Museum, you know, some of this material, right? And so I speak to that audience when I call this mundane, understanding those expectations. But I'm also speaking to historians who I think haven't thought about, you know, they know that this gin is coming

in, but they haven't thought about what that means, again, in a physical sense. You know, if you have gin, you have to have a bottle. And actually, if you have a bottle of gin, it actually came in a case. And these are all material traces. These are all things that have to be exchanged. These are all objects that have to be loaded into a boat and offloaded from a boat, you know. And so it's those processes that are so fascinating to me that I think have been ignored in the study of the trade. Even though I should say there's been some recent work that's been really exciting along these lines. I should just mention the work of Jessica Goldberg, who's revisited the Ganesha documents and asked really interesting questions about, you know, the protocols of trade. Sabu Aslanian, who's done the same for

the Armenian diaspora. Francesca Trivolato, who you just mentioned. Gagan Sud, who's not actually interested in merchants alone, but really interested in the kind of Indian Ocean and how, you know, what made it cosmopolitan, how that cosmopolitanism, you know, is really kind of, you know, what the fabric of that was, how people communicated with each other in writing, particularly because he's dealing with letters. But, you know, just questions that really get into, in some ways, just the human experience of all of these large processes that, you know, we're interested in. Oh, yeah.

processes that that you know we're interested in oh yeah i know i mean for social historians and sort of um you know the economic historians who can get so sucked into the the documents and have no idea about any of these like tactile or lived experiences so i think it's amazing i mean maybe to sort of pull things together towards the end we can or i mean since we're nearing the end um can we just think about like what what is the gin bottle made of and what would be the sort of like life path the trajectory of this bottle um let's say that it gets dredged up off the coast of mocha that and it was lost or let's not say that it was dredged up because that means that it never had the chance to enter the sphere, but let's say it was excavated somewhere.

No, no, no, absolutely. These are really great questions and these are questions I'm precisely thinking about now, actually in the afterlife of the book. So you're kind of inspiring me to think about projects that I've just kind of completed as well as ones that I'm moving toward. And so we can trace the gin bottle from Amsterdam

all the way around the Cape of Good Hope to Batavia, which is the Dutch capital in Asia, modern day Jakarta. And from there, that bottle might be then sent on a ship to Ceylon or Sri Lanka or it might be sent on the ship to Mocha or to Surat in Gujarat, right? And we know that they were, right? And the question, though, is what and Gujarat, right? And we know that they were, right? And the question, though, is what happens in Moka, right? Because, you know, I've never seen, Moka has not been excavated. But even in the surveys, we haven't seen any of these come up. And so, you know, I cannot go to Yemen right now because the situation has become so dire there. Now, when I, the next time I go back,

I don't know when that will be. I'm going to be looking for entirely different objects than I was the first few times I had visited Yemen when I had a completely different agenda. But I will tell you, though, speaking about dredging up, it's actually the right term because we are finding these Dutch gin bottles

in Red Sea shipwrecks. Oh, wow. And for me, shipwrecks are fascinating because they usually exemplify cargos. So it's not just something that was used in a port. It was something that was in the process of being shipped. It may not be, again, for sale. So again, this whole idea of things that are shipped but not sold

must be in our mind when we're thinking about shipwrecks. But it all actually shows something in movement. And of course, this was a movement that failed in meeting its end target, right? But there's been more and more information from shipwrecks that is coming forward. This requires looking at archaeological reports, which I will say art historians have not been good at looking at because they're difficult to read. Historians, I would say, have been even worse at looking at it. And so I am moving into a moment

where I want to start really trying to take this material up seriously and to really think about these different layers of access to commodities. Definitely we have that textual layer that I talked about where we've got objects that are usually not described

but just mentioned or listed, right? We have a very poor survival rate of extended objects. We have a few images that show things. But then we have these wrecks, which I think need to be now kind of brought into the picture in ways that are much more focused for the Red Sea and the Gulf region. And that's kind of a direction I'm starting to move in, to think about how all these all constitute these different arenas of knowing about things.

And they don't match up, you know, as far as from my initial understanding of it. They're not going to create this perfect picture. And there's going to be a lot of gaps between them. But in some ways, this really is the interdisciplinarity of this. I really think it's incredibly valuable to, I mean, excavate, whether textually or archaeologically, the mundane, like, day-to-day objects that people really use while they were on these excursions and journeys, and, I mean, you've given us a lot, so much to think about,

you know, looking outside of of our narrow sort of especially bounded by land or bounded by sea trying to cross some of those boundaries and thinking beyond the archive itself and you know for those graduate students don't don't ignore your uh don't ignore listen to your documents or else you or else you'll make yourself miserable, right? No, I mean, this is really wonderful. Nancy, thank you so much for joining us, for being on the podcast. It was a lovely conversation. Thank you so much, Zoe.

Tune in next time for another episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. If you want to learn more, there's all of our episodes, further bibliographies. We'll have a bibliography for this episode uploaded that Nancy will provide to us. Thank you so much for listening and tune in next time. © transcript Emily Beynon