Although premised on the exchange of commodities, the trade route became a stimulus for unifying social and economic practices, the transmission of ideas and culture, and for urban development. Economic cooperation, based on specific social and economic relationships, underpinned Indian Ocean trade circulations. The traders involved in these circulations were a diverse bunch to say the least: Jain, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Persian, and Christian traders, shipworkers, seamen, and merchants from Aden to Singapore spoke Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, Persian, English, Hebrew, Malay, and many other languages. In order to protect themselves against conflicting objectives, business practices were carried out through coalitions and guilds that encouraged coordination and good behavior. Exchange involved implicit contractual arrangements with an information-transmission mechanism and a reputation mechanism to encourage cooperation and limit freeriding.6 Relying on trust networks and hiring intermediary agents to carry out their shipping arrangements was not sufficient to overcome opportunistic behaviors by these agents, thus the merchant guilds served as important economic institutions to overcome commitment problems.8 Furthermore, Ray argues, transnational oceanic trade occupied a mezzo-economic space, the bazaar nexus, of wholesale commercial operations between the informal exchange practices of “peasants, peddlers, and pawnbrokers from below” and the more formal and official “European capital from above”. These exchanges and contractual relationships took place in and were reified within the entrepots along the trade route. The waterfront locales often became “autonomous spaces” for exchange that strengthened these international trade relationships. 9 Aden, a coastal city in Yemen, is one such location. Margariti argues that, at a time when religious and political alliances were the primary drivers of growth in Europe, trade was the primary driver of urban development in Aden. 10
This medieval entrepôts is strategically situated at the mouth of the Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean, and was, at one time, one of the largest and most important ports in the transoceanic trade and home to the Yemeni Jewish diaspora. Aden’s iconic harbor was enhanced by its port infrastructure, including advanced anchors and underwater fortifications, was surrounded by an assemblage of maritime activities and structures that included supplies, services, commercial buildings, “shipowners, captains, sailors, naval fighters, divers, porters, and boatmen” and Hindu, Persian, Jewish, and Islamic families and clans.1 1 Singapore is another site of human settlement that transformed itself into a city center due to its strategic position on the strait of Malaca in the Indian Ocean. Like Aden, Singapore also became an important place of cultural, social and economic exchange by multiethnic travelers and maritime businesses. Even today, Singapore recognizes four official languages: English, Mandarin, Tamil and Malay, and its residents speak many other languages and Creoles. This maritime history and interactive cultural histories also influenced street life and urban design; even today, physical streets and street-level activities in Singapore, as well as Bangkok, Hanoi, and Melaka, can be traced to Indian Ocean trade histories. The globalizing tendencies and trade-oriented development inherent in oceanic trade had limits as well as dark sides. While Indian Ocean trade can tell us a lot about Aden and Singapore’s development through the 18th century, their trade-oriented development trajectory was sharply altered through colonialism and postcolonial independence policies in the last two centuries. Yemen’s isolationist policies and economic decline have diminished Aden’s position as an important port city, while Singapore’s market-oriented democratic policies led the small nation to jettison into a contemporary economic and technological center. Furthermore, while Indian Ocean trade facilitated the migration of cultures and people, it also facilitated the passage of slaves and indentured servants since the medieval era, many of which were inherited by colonial powers in later centuries.12 In many ways, the history of Indian Ocean trade is not connected to our generic urban histories or common approaches to planning, but it is a kind of an alternative register for interrogating and imagining the city and its possibilities. The multiethnic, international organizational innovations around the standardization of collectively accepted monetary practices were deeply embedded in social and cultural relationships, and became antecedents to global monetary policies. Today, we can see these standardizations in maritime and air traffic laws and in the expansion of global production networks. The social-spatial relationships from the trade history also unearth both positive and problematic historical legacies of rich, cultural diversity, such as in Singapore and Southeast
URBAN : MORTEM
In Sea of Poppies, a novel set during the opium trade, author Amitav Ghosh’s narrative animates these networks. The characters’ intersecting journeys span entrepôts, or port cities, like Canton (modern-day Guangzhou), Macao, Calcutta, Singapore, and Mauritius. At one point, one of the protagonists, Deeti, a farm laborer who sets sail to Mauritius to start a new life as an indentured laborer, picks up a single poppy seed and observes that “it was not the planet above that governed her life: it was this miniscule orb.” 5
29