The Archaeology of Modern Worlds in the Indian Ocean is a timely and thoughtful intervention in the history and archaeology of the Indian Ocean world from the early modern period to the more recent past. The book expands on approaches over the past 40 years to the historic archaeology of the Atlantic world. Through careful attention to the dialectic of text and material, the poly-vocality of sources, the interplay of locality and network, and considerations of diverse datasets such as textual, archival, archaeological, ethnographic, and oral historical, the coeditors and contributors outline an inclusive history of the modern Indian Ocean world that is attentive to a widening diversity of scales, contexts, materials, and, most importantly, people. Indeed, the book’s careful empirical attention to the histories of everyday peoples, their identities, experiences, and practices across local and translocal circulations (commercial, political, and ecological) recenters the narrative on the action, agency, and environments of those far less well represented by conventional histories of the Indian Ocean; for example, enslaved and indentured migrants, farming families, crafts producers, and householders.

The book’s thematic introduction by Mark William Hauser and Julia Jong Haines is followed by eight case studies and two concluding commentary chapters focused on the Indian Ocean world from the perspectives of Africa and India. Hauser and Jong Haines frame the volume’s approach to the historical archaeology of the Indian Ocean world as transnational, comparative, and connective, with emphases on the relational interplay between situated micro-histories with oceanic temporalities and local, regional, and global networks. Several contributors consider deep histories of circulation in Indian Ocean commerce, ecology, and politics that long predate European colonial hegemony, thereby decentering the primacy of the Atlantic world from historical narratives of modernity and providing an(other) opening to rethink how “modern” is conceptualized and periodized. Along with the focus on the daily lives and lived experiences of everyday people, this framing nicely widens the perspective from that of imperial narrative and colonial archive.

The first two chapters discuss the deep history of connectivity and circulation in the Indian Ocean world. Mick de Ruyter examines the well-known ship illustrations from the thirteenth-century Shaffer, or Paris, Maqamat manuscript and their application to interpreting archaeologically known shipwrecks. Contextualizing illustrations within the content and rhetoric of the text itself and through comparison with other Maqamat texts, de Ruyter demonstrates how twentieth-century archaeologists and historians have uncritically applied these illustrations in interpretations of Indian Ocean ship technology and shipbuilding history. Ellen Hsieh and Sakai Takashi’s chapter discusses the Indian Ocean world’s relationship to southeast Asia and China, examining the chronology and distribution of architectural features (e.g., Buddhist stupas, Islamic cenotaphs) and artifacts (e.g., architectural tiles, ceramics) to infer exchange networks from the ninth century AD through the era of early European colonialism.

Four chapters focus on migration, diaspora, and the traffic and experience of unfree labor. Krish Seetah and coauthors discuss transoceanic enslavement and indenture, specifically within the plantation economies of Zanzibar and Mauritius. Focusing on the silenced agency of enslaved and indentured peoples, they underscore the role of environmental affordances (e.g., of monsoons and unique island environments) in the diversity of localized and historically contingent responses by unfree peoples to enslavement and confinement within an oceanic and global political economy. Saša Caval and Alessandra Cianciosi investigate gendered parameters of healthcare, particularly women’s health, among enslaved and indentured laborers on Mauritius and Reunion Islands: they draw on bioarchaeological data from cemeteries and archaeological and archival data from lazarettos and quarantine stations to address the silencing of women labor migrants in colonial recordkeeping in the Mascarenes.

Selvakumar and Hauser turn attention to South Asia’s Coromandel Coast, a region of India where several European colonial enclaves were established after the 1500s and from which many marginalized peoples emigrated as indentured laborers to commercial farming colonies in the 1800s. By mobilizing a diverse range of sources—archaeology, epigraphy, palm leaf manuscripts, songs, and poetry—they chart an economic history of the region from the third through nineteenth centuries to show how agricultural and textile production and associated commerce led to the sequential development of powerful economic centers such as temples, guild towns, ports, and factories: these had centripetal attractions for labor and centrifugal effects on export markets and migrations, creating structures of inequality and other deeply rooted conditions of possibility (e.g., debt bondage, slave labor). This approach contextualizes the nineteenth-century Tamil diaspora within localized histories, broadening the scope of colonial histories of global mercantile capitalism.

Jong Haines and Hauser compare domestic architecture and water infrastructure from two agricultural settlement endpoints of nineteenth-century indentured labor circulation—Tranquebar (India) and Bras d’Eau (Mauritius)—to discuss how the politics of novel social relations and identities generated through the destabilizing effects of migration and colonial violence were navigated through settlement landscape production.

Two other case study chapters focus on Portuguese settler colonialism in the Indian Ocean littoral. Adria LaViolette and Neil Norman discuss the results of archaeological survey and shovel testing at two fortified Portuguese commercial farming enterprises in Zanzibar: they infer how locality and local responses to European settlement shaped the opportunities and failures of the extractive colonial economy. Brian C. Wilson focuses on the epicenter of the Portuguese Estadio de India, Velha Goa, exposing tensions between the European archival narrative of the city’s history and the results of his impressive archaeological survey of Old Goa. He discusses how a European narrative of abandonment and ruination, situated in archival sources, coupled with the myopic focus of contemporary heritage practices on the city’s elite monumental architecture (churches and stone houses), has silenced and delegitimized the rich and enduring settlement history of non-elite social groups in the city from its earliest occupation up to the present.

Chapters by Chapurukha M. Kusimba and Supriya Varma conclude the volume. Kusimba relates globalization and urbanization on the Swahili coast of eastern Africa to connections made and the circulations of goods and peoples established long before the era of European colonialism and mercantilism. He argues that localized oral histories entwined with multiscalar archaeology enable new interpretations of the smaller-scale politics and social relations (e.g., ritual, kinship, blood brotherhoods) of trade and commerce moving through and beyond the Swahili Coast. Varma highlights the importance of focusing on the materiality and politics of commerce, emphasizing the need to study the deeper past in the Indian Ocean world to advance our knowledge of modernity.

This excellent volume will make an enduring contribution to the archaeology of the Indian Ocean world and is essential for histories of globalization, market capitalism, enslavement and indentured labor, trade and commerce, and migration and diaspora.