Fahad Bishara’s Monsoon Voyagers offers an informed and thrilling account of a Kuwaiti Dhow—the Al-A’waj’s (the Crooked)—journey across the Western Indian Ocean in the year 1924-25. He maps its itinerary by tapping into an unusually enchanting archive: at the center of it is the Ruznamah—or the logbook of Al-A’waj’s nakhoda—Abdulmajeed Al Failakawi. This amazing ledger comprises his accounting records, charts for conversion of weights and measures, calendars, maps, and legal documents. Also included in this compendium is a second distinct handwriting of an elder nakhoda, Manur Al Khariji—the father-in-law of Al Failakawi. These, along with diaries, transaction notes, and account books of the Kuwaiti merchants like Muhammad al-Matrook and Muhammad al-Sudairawi, who transacted business across the Western Indian Ocean, offer a rare inside view of the oceanic society as negotiated, articulated, and understood by the Arab Kuwaiti men of commerce: dhow owners, sailors, merchants, brokers, investors, and their agents, contacts, and families.

The biggest joy of the book is Bishara’s narrative style. He lets the archive speak loud and clear throughout the pages of the history that he brilliantly construes for us. He tears the reader away from the Eurocentric connotations of the functioning of empires, capitalism, markets, and the production of a print technology-driven public sphere. Instead, he diverts the attention to refreshing vistas that make us think afresh from an Arab/Asian perspective on the different meanings and uses of such ideas. The micro-optic on the Al-A’waj and its nakhoda—the individual—becomes the window to tease out these textured histories and question the Eurocentrism of Indian Ocean studies.

As the Al-A’waj journeys from Kuwait through the Gulf into the waters of the Indian Ocean, Bishara puts the spotlight on the following sites of international business: local bazaars in Kuwait, Basra, Muscat, and Kathiawar; the political leverage offered by the imperial networks in colonial Bombay and Karachi to facilitate commerce; the opportunities offered to nakhodas and merchants by the rivalries of both Asian Sultanates and Western Empires for control of oceanic trade and politics; and the entanglement, in self-interest, of the Kuwaiti commercial diaspora in the webs of law, politics, and commerce across the Gulf, East Africa, and India. Indeed, Bishara unpacks these textured histories via his scrutiny of these sites, individuals, and communities and redraws the geographical canvas of the Indian Ocean. He blurs the topographically informed pedagogical divide between the Gulf and the Indian Ocean studies. In contrast to the case made in the recent work of the Gulf historian, Allen Fromherz, who underlines the uniqueness of the Gulf as distinct in its relative disentanglement with European Empires, Bishara’s protagonists push the Gulf to the center of the Indian Ocean.Footnote ¹ But more importantly, by mapping the career of the Al Failakawi family across the Gulf and into the Western Indian Ocean, or following the career of the date merchant Muhammad al-Matrook, who charted similar routes with the nakhoda’s family, he convincingly shows that the history of the Middle East is incomplete if not viewed as integral to the histories of South Asia and East Africa. The blurring of the area studies-driven pedagogy that is reflected in academic writings and in the neatly segregated university departments is a significant historiographical contribution of the book.

The book hugely enhances our understanding of the functioning of seafaring individuals. Men with the skill and acumen to produce trans-local and trans-regional communities in tandem with Western imperial networks. In this respect, the details on the functioning of the nakhoda and his team are revealing: he performs the role of the chief commander, working with his deputies, training them on the job, and striking deep personal and emotional ties with an array of workers on the Dhow. His carefully crafted community is embracive. It binds the commander with the owner of the dhow and the agents, brokers, and business partners in far-flung sites across the ocean. But most importantly, this bond is not merely of services performed. Rather, it is cemented by the nakhoda as the trainer, the teacher who passes on his knowledge of sea faring and skills to his community.

Significantly, Bishara underlines that the nakhoda’s knowledge is not necessarily confined to seafaring. He does more than ensure smooth financial deals. He is also a scholar—an informed individual with views on world markets and political developments. The fascinating descriptions of coffee houses in Muscat, where the nakhoda “traded stories of political, social and religious developments in the places they had just visited,” or “read aloud from Arabic newspapers carried in local stores, sent in from cities around the Middle East, South Asia and East Africa,” reveal the entanglement of the nakhoda in the Muslim scholarly intellectual networks that carpeted the ocean. The nakhodas not only produced an informed public sphere of debates and discussions in the port cities where they docked but were also very integral to the larger Muslim intellectual hubs in Mecca, Muscat, Zanzibar, and Cairo. Scholars have shown how these cities acted as key sites in moments of political crisis to think about Muslim reform or pan-Islamic unity in the age of empire. The close fit, often dependence in self-interest, of Pan-Islam with imperial networks has been shown by scholars such as my own self, Cemil Aydin, and others.Footnote ² But the fact that the Muslim intellectual hubs where pan-Islam was thought through were energized not just by reformist scholar elites but also by seafaring mobile Kuwaiti nakhodas is novel. The nakhoda wrote not just logbooks but treatises on religion and jurisprudence, and this lends a new spin to the intellectual world of Muslims in the long 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Monsoon Voyagers places Bishara among the top historians of the Indian Ocean world, who redraws for us both the geography and the historiography of Middle East Studies. Among other things, his envious command of the archive and brilliant mind urges us to think afresh about the making of the modern world and the novel ways of rewriting its history. Bishara’s pioneering methodology of using Arab careers as a way of anchoring Asia and the non-European world more generally to world history raises many questions: it does make the latter seem like a biography of elites alone—albeit in this case Kuwaiti Muslim men of commerce. But of course, gentlemen of color located outside Europe. Did the nakhoda-controlled interregional networks and the imperial assemblage that Bishara’s protagonists tap and navigate to their advantage offer ordinary Arab Muslims, outside this elite ambit, opportunities of making career moves across the ocean? Can the social history of careering that moves beyond business elites—like the nakhoda—and which brings together the everyday practice of ordinary Muslims and their interdependent human relationships (conviviality) offer us a fresh perspective on world history? One that is different from what we get when we view the century in the narrow frame of capital and imperial expansion alone?