In the last quarter of the tenth century CE, the Arab geographer and polymath Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Muqaddasi described the port city of Aden as ‘The corridor of al-Sin [China], the seaport of al-Yaman, the granary of al-Maghrib, and entrepot of various kinds of merchandise’.Footnote ¹ Aden's rise as a leading port city of the Indian Ocean was intimately linked to events far beyond its control. The precipitous disintegration of the Abbasid Caliphate led to ‘the complete translocation of the Mediterranean trade routes’ with the Indian Ocean.Footnote ² The port cities of the Persian Gulf experienced a ‘profound decline’ after around 1000 CE, as trade routes shifted to the Red Sea, linking Aden to Cairo and Alexandria. Among the beneficiaries of this realignment were the Fatimids in Egypt, the port cities of the Red Sea, and the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, with Aden as its principal hub. The Maghribi Jewish community also benefited, dealing with a significant part of the India trade from their centres in Alexandria, Fustat, and Aden, with networks extending from Spain to the Malabar coast of south-western India. The Italian city-states, notably Venice, also inserted themselves into the Indian Ocean economy through this route.

Scholars interested in mediaeval Indian Ocean trade long faced a dearth of archival documentation from the lands around the ocean, until the monumental discovery of documents belonging to Maghribi Jewish merchants in the geniza chamber of a synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo) in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ³ They were written in the Arabic vernacular spoken in Egypt, but in Hebrew characters. The word geniza, or beth geniza, derives from the Persian word ganj (storehouse; treasure) and its Arabic cognate janãza (burial). It refers to a repository, usually attached to a synagogue or a cemetery, where documents written in Hebrew script, and invoking the name of God, were not destroyed at the end of their useful life but were stored before being ritually buried. Although genizas existed in many countries where Jews lived, to date only one significant collection of documents has come to light, for reasons that have much to do with climate. It was found in the lumber room attached to the Ben Ezra synagogue, belonging to Palestinian Jews in Fustat, the pre-Fatimid capital of Muslim Egypt, two miles south of Cairo. For unknown reasons, the contents of this geniza were not buried, from the time the repository was built in the early eleventh century until the nineteenth century, when they began to attract the attention of European orientalists and antiquarians and soon after were dispersed to over a dozen library collections in Europe and the United States.

The geniza documents consist of some 750,000 fragments of paper. Some are of a literary and theological nature, but about 15,000 were written in Judaeo-Arabic by merchants, including mercantile correspondence, legal proceedings, deeds, powers of attorney, accounts, and contracts.Footnote ⁴ During the first few decades after their discovery, they were studied for the most part by scholars of philology and Jewish studies, and one catalogue referred to the Judaeo-Arabic mercantile material as ‘Business letters and therefore valueless’.Footnote ⁵

The scholar who did most to encourage historians to use the fragments to illuminate social and economic history was Shlomo Dov Goitein, whose interest in geniza material began in the 1940s. These papers preoccupied him until his death in 1985. He deciphered, transcribed, translated, and analysed many of them, wrote his six-volume magnum opus, A Mediterranean society, and transformed geniza research into an academic subfield in mediaeval history. Following Goitein's groundbreaking scholarship, the geniza documents became the basis for numerous other studies of trade and society in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean.Footnote ⁶ These sources further inspired Amitav Ghosh's novelistic retelling of mediaeval life in the Indian Ocean, in In an antique land.

The ‘India Book’ and the trade of the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages

The posthumous publication of geniza documents specifically pertaining to the Indian Ocean trade, gathered in the ‘India Book’ (to use Goitein's informal title for the work), in many ways represents the crowning achievement of a lifetime of study. It is thanks to Goitein's student, Mordechai Friedman, professor of geniza studies at Tel Aviv University and an important scholar in his own right, that this monumental work has finally seen the light of day. It is some sixty years since Goitein first started working on it, and almost a quarter century after he passed away, leaving his notes and papers in the care of his student. The superb care, intellectual competence, and labour of love that Friedman has brought to Goitein's unfinished work have resulted in a most fitting homage by a talented disciple to his master.

Goitein worked on the ‘India Book’ from the earliest days of his encounter with the geniza. Indeed, his first publications in the 1950s were devoted to a series of papers involving merchants in the India trade. In his famous 1954 essays, he announced that he was compiling the documents on the Indian Ocean in a special reference volume.Footnote ⁷ However, he realized that he could not devote himself to the India trade without first providing ‘a full exposition of the social realities in Egypt and the countries surrounding the Mediterranean basin, the point of initiation and final station of most of this socio-economic activity’ (p. xxii). Having collected, translated, and annotated about 130 geniza documents related to the India trade in 1954 (the number would grow to 459 later), Goitein suddenly changed course in 1959, when he began work on Mediterranean society. Even then, India was always on his mind, for he incorporated evidence from the India papers into various works on the Mediterranean. In his influential 1973 publication, some India papers were pulled together in a special section devoted to ‘The India merchants’.Footnote ⁸ As Friedman points out, ‘one could say that he had an extended love affair with the India Book that prevented him from accepting with equanimity his forced separation from it’ (p. xxiii). Goitein continuously stole time from other pressing responsibilities to return to the India Book, only to be forced to put it aside. In fact, his last attempt to return to it was a month before he passed away, when he had finally submitted the proofs of the last volume of his Mediterranean society, and was eager to devote his remaining days to the India trade.

The book is divided into two parts. The first contains a useful preface by Friedman on the background to this momentous publication, as well as three introductory chapters drawn from Goitein's draft manuscript, deposited with his other papers in the archives of Princeton University, where he worked for over half a century. Chapter 1 provides a brief ‘preview’ of the India letters and acts as an introduction to the entire volume. The much longer second chapter introduces the dramatis personae, whose papers make up the bulk of the documents, with a ‘who's who’ of the Jewish mercantile community of the mediaeval Indian Ocean. Chapter 3 contains a detailed study of nakhudas, whether ship-owners or captains of vessels.

All this detailed information is extremely helpful for an appreciation of the documents translated and annotated in Part 2. The first chapter contains fascinating court papers involving a protracted lawsuit between Joseph b. Lebdi, a merchant from Tripoli in Libya and acting as commenda agent, and his partner Jekuthiel al-Hakim of Fustat. The dispute involved Joseph b. Lebdi's handling of goods that he had been entrusted to sell in a Gujarati port in north-western India. The lawsuit was convened at the Rabbinical Court of Fustat, ‘which had largely the character of a merchant’ court, since most of its members were experienced businessmen’ (p. 12). The entire surviving dossier, comprising eleven sessions held between 9 November 1097 and 18 August 1098, is translated in this chapter. Chapter 2 contains documents pertaining to Madmun Ben Hasan-Japheth and his family, who were based in Aden, were important for their role in the development of Aden's famous customs house, and occupied the highest place in the town's thriving Jewish community. The last chapter has about eighty documents relating to the family of Abraham Ben Yiju, whose life and times were popularized through Ghosh's In an antique land. The volume concludes with three sets of detailed indexes, high-resolution colour plates of fifteen sample documents, and three useful maps. Its sheer comprehensiveness and full referencing apparatus, including erudite footnotes and a full bibliography, make the hefty price tag of US$336 a little less painful to bear.

Working on geniza materials is extremely difficult. Many terms in the vernacular Arabic of the time may not be easily available in modern dictionaries. The larger problem is that the geniza is not an archive in the ordinary sense of the term, where one retains well-classified and ordered documents to refer to them at a later date.Footnote ⁹ To use Goitein's effective analogy, the geniza is rather a kind of ‘waste basket into which discarded writings were thrown often after they had been torn apart so that all of its contents were topsy-turvy’ (p. 5). Moreover, this ‘waste basket’ is nearly a thousand years old, and belonged to a far-flung diasporic community. Many papers survived only in fragments, and Goitein literally pieced them together, spending decades reuniting torn pieces from different library collections around the world. This in itself makes Goitein's work on the India documents nothing less than extraordinary.

However groundbreaking the volume might be, there are a few places where more care would have improved its overall excellent quality. Friedman's use of one of Goitein's chapters from his 1966 Studies in Islamic history and institutions is not ideal as an introduction to the volume. One drawback is that it contains no sustained discussion of the causes for the participation of Maghribi Jews in the trade of the Indian Ocean. Such a discussion appears only in a fleeting excerpt from Goitein's Mediterranean society, reproduced in the preface. Jewish merchants were confined to Mediterranean commerce until the late eleventh century, when the growing naval supremacy in the Mediterranean of Christian Europe, notably Italian city-states, compelled them to seek ‘an outlet for their enterprising spirit in the commerce with the countries of the Indian Ocean’.Footnote ¹⁰

To be sure, Friedman's task was by no means easy. He probably wanted to maintain as many of his deceased mentor's draft chapters as possible, and was compelled to fill gaps by finding material in Goitein's published work, painstakingly making his own additions in brackets. This is a predicament for many editors and compilers of posthumous volumes, and it becomes all the more daunting if the deceased scholar is as legendary as Goitein. However, there is also a responsibility to publish a posthumous work in a way that the late scholar probably would have wished, had he lived long enough. A more general introduction to the volume, citing the most recent research and highlighting the role of Jewish and other merchants, would have provided readers with a better context in which to situate the documents.

The absence of documents specifically relating to the organizational basis of trade is also regretable. The collection does not include translations of any commenda(mudaraba) contracts, even though the commenda form of partnership appears to have been one of the building blocks of trade. Goitein, in earlier publications, foresaw that some commenda contracts would appear in the ‘India Book’. Moreover, sample commendas from the geniza have been published by Udovitch, albeit not relating to the India trade.Footnote ¹¹ Friedman does provide one brief summary of such a contract, between Joseph b. Lebdi and his partner Khallūf, but does not include a translation (p. 251). Other contractual documents, such as letters of quittance (barâ'a in Arabic), are known to have existed in the Islamic and Christian Mediterranean, and in later periods of Indian Ocean trade, but they hardly merit an entry in the index, despite being mentioned in Goitein's earlier work. A separate section devoted to legal instruments of trade, and including translated documents, would have increased the value of the book for this early period, for which little information on the organization of long distance trade exists. This could have been similar in format to Roberto Lopez and Irving Raymond's volume on the Mediterranean.Footnote ¹² To be sure, these documents might be located in Chapters 4–7 of the documents section, representing papers of other geniza merchants, which are not included in this collection and are slated for a later publication (p. xvi).

Despite these minor oversights, this volume is an extremely valuable addition to the growing corpus of primary sources for the Indian Ocean. It should provide a solid documentary foundation, upon which future works of synthesis are bound to grow.

Aden and the Indian Ocean

Margariti's book is an excellent example of the kind of scholarship that Goitein's documents can generate. An assistant professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian history at Emory University, she studied Judaeo-Arabic during her graduate work at Princeton, with such renowned scholars of geniza research and Islamic social and economic history as Abraham Udovitch and Mark Cohen. Margariti was able to make use of the then unpublished drafts of the ‘India Book’, along with other unpublished geniza material from over a dozen collections around the world. Her book is the revised version of the dissertation that she defended at Princeton in 2002. It is an exemplary instance of how the sound and competent use of previously neglected and difficult primary sources produced by merchants active in the India trade can illuminate the social and economic history of Aden and its networks in the Indian Ocean.

Margariti's book focuses on the port city of Aden and its role ‘as a major entrepôt on the main axis of the trade system that linked the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean, the “India trade”’ (p. 2). Chronologically, the book covers Aden's history from roughly 1083, when the Zurayid dynasty ran the city, to 1228, when the Rasulids took over from rulers appointed by the Ayyubids, who had conquered Yemen from the Zurayids in 1173. This century and a half marked the apogee of Aden's growth as one of the premier port cities of the Indian Ocean, a time when the city became the hub of important maritime trade routes linking the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean. Her central argument is that ‘trade, not religion or politics, functioned as the main force behind urban development in this Arabian entrepôt’ (p. 2).

The book is divided into two broadly interrelated sections, examining Aden in terms of its physical geography and of its commercial infrastructure. The first section, ‘The physical entrepôt’, comprises three chapters and is devoted to the physical geography of Aden. In Braudelian terms, this is where Margariti's approach is that of the longue durée. Chapter 1 provides a study of Aden's geography and ecology, as well as an interesting account of the western Indian Ocean's ‘ecostructure’, and particularly of the monsoon seasons, which acted as a ‘clock’ for maritime cities and communities (p. 38). The direction of the wind, which changed regularly every six to eight months, provided Aden and its residents with a ‘distinct maritime calendar’, dominating and shaping almost every aspect of Aden's port life. The revenues and prosperity of the port depended chiefly on its ‘foreland’, or maritime, networks, connecting it to other port cities in the great ocean. The chapter also discusses Aden's connections to its ‘hinterland’, which supplied vital resources to the port, notably water and some agricultural produce, although it was not a source of commodities for export. This characteristic made the entrepôt similar to Hormuz or Malacca later on, and different from port cities such as Surat, Madras/Chennai, or Calcutta/Kolkata, which depended much more on hinterland commodities, such as spices, indigo, or textiles.

Chapters 2 and 3 continue the theme by closely examining the topography of harbour and city. This includes a discussion of the ‘deliberate interventions in the urban and maritime landscape, such as the building and subsequent renovations and expansions of fortifications and the construction of a protective breakwater across the harbor entrance’ (p. 3). Focusing on Aden's seafront fortifications and the documented history of maritime violence by states such as Kish (Qays) in 1134, on several occasions Margariti criticizes the prevalent myth of the Indian Ocean as an arena of peaceful trade and harmonious cooperation before the Portuguese arrived in 1498, a theme that will hopefully be pursued more systematically in later publications.

The second section of the book, entitled ‘The commercial entrepôt’, analyses Aden's commercial institutional infrastructure, focusing first on the state-run customs house (al-furda), which was able to extract revenue by efficiently skimming taxes on transit trade. In chapter 4, Margariti provides a vivid account of this crucial institution, largely because of its ‘high visibility’ in the sources, both Muslim accounts and geniza documents (p. 110). Chapter 5 contains a thorough analysis of Aden's role as an important centre of shipbuilding, and discusses business partnerships in shipping between Jewish, Muslim, and ‘Hindu’ ship-owners. Chapter 6 focuses on legal institutions that facilitated long-distance maritime trade. There is a thorough discussion of the institution of the representative of merchants (wakil al-tujjār), building on Goitein's earlier studies. There is also a brief discussion of courts, which were used by both Jewish and Muslim merchants to adjudicate their disputes.

While Margariti's sources are mainly documents from the Cairo geniza (most of which are now in the ‘India Book’), she also uses two important historical narratives about Aden, written by Muslim scholars and dating from a slightly later period: Ibn al Mujāwir's Tā'rīkh al-mustabşir, and Abū Makhrama's Tā'rīkh thaghr ‘Aden. In addition, Margariti relies on recently unearthed archaeological evidence on Aden, and on other port cities. She further draws from the geniza-like mercantile documents belonging to a Muslim merchant, recently discovered in the Red Sea port of Qusayr and studied by Li Guo.Footnote ¹³ Margariti navigates creatively between these sources. Quoting from Ghosh's In an antique land, she uses the geniza fragments to open ‘a trapdoor into a vast network of foxholes where real life continues uninterrupted’ (p. 11).

In the introduction to the first volume of Mediterranean society, Goitein describes the geniza as ‘a true mirror of life, often cracked and blotchy, but very wide in scope and reflecting each and every aspect of the society that originated it’.Footnote ¹⁴ But if the society that produced the geniza was that of Jewish merchants, it could raise the question as to how relevant or useful the geniza material might be for Islamic society as a whole, or for the social and economic history of Aden's place in the Indian Ocean. This question has particular resonance in today's world, where history writing is unfortunately coloured by ‘nation-statist’ concerns, and where ethnic and sectarian matters have parochialized the writing of the past by severing complex connections between cultures, peoples, histories, and regions.Footnote ¹⁵

It is here that Margariti's superb introduction to her geniza sources acquires particular importance. As she asks, ‘If the focus of this study is medieval Aden, a city in the Islamic world, how can a record of evidence dominated by Jewish documentary material represent the physical and institutional realities of the city as a whole?’ (p. 13). Apart from the scarcity of other archival sources, geniza materials could and should be used, as Jewish communities were deeply ‘embedded’ in Islamic societies, a term that Margariti borrows from Mark Cohen:

In other words, Jewish merchants’ identities were ‘Islamicate’, to use Marshal Hodgson's influential term.Footnote ¹⁶ For these reasons, Margariti correctly points out that the ‘geniza is not just for Judaicists’:Footnote ¹⁷ it is equally useful for the study of Muslim societies, including that of Aden, even if they might not ‘perfectly’ mirror the common cultural ground between Jews and Muslims, not to mention other participants in the India trade.

Despite Margariti's high standards of scholarship, there are a few minor oversights in her book that merit special mention. While the book sets out to be an extensive study of Aden as a mediaeval port city and entrepôt in the Indian Ocean, there is no rigorous theoretical or analytical discussion of the nature of the port cities, and their complex relations with their ‘hinterlands,’ ‘umlands’ (not mentioned), and ‘forelands’.Footnote ¹⁸ The work would have significantly benefited from engaging with the fairly substantial theoretical literature on the subject.Footnote ¹⁹ A series of pioneering essays by Rhoads Murphey focuses on the inherently cosmopolitan nature of ‘port cities’. Murphey highlights their open nature and their historical role as ‘a major force for culture mixing or cosmopolitanism’:

Port cities such as Aden had to be, by their very nature, open cosmopolitan centres, attracting a wide array of peoples from the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Occasionally, Margariti alludes to the multicultural or cosmopolitan fabric of Aden, but she does not devote as much space to Aden's cultural and human topography as she does to its physical counterpart, probably because her sources do not allow it. She notes that, unlike the Mediterranean port cities of roughly the same period, Aden does not seem to have had any public housing for strangers, for there is no trace in the surviving sources of any funduks or fondacos in Aden, to use the Mediterranean term.Footnote ²¹ Regardless of their absence from the sources, it is likely that ‘Hindu’ merchants were resident in the region, as were probably East Africans; that they were not recorded in the extant sources is an indication of either the limitations imposed by the sources on the historian or to the possibility that Aden's way of ‘housing the stranger’ differed significantly from the practice common in the Mediterranean.

Moreover, most of Margariti's comparisons are with ports in the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa, and the Persian Gulf, Siraf being very prominent. Even distant Genoa is included. In contrast, there is very little attempt to make broader comparisons with port cities in South Asia and Southeast Asia, even though the comparison with Malacca, an entrepôt similar to Aden, could have been rewarding. This may be because the literature on these port cities generally covers early modern times, falling outside Margariti's period, but comparisons based on structural features would have added valuable texture to the author's study.

Chapter 6 (‘Mercantile and legal services’) makes several allusions to Aden's crucial role, ‘by virtue of [its] geographical location’ and because of ‘its informal and formal commercial/legal institutions’, in providing ‘the organization and tools necessary to overcome the difficulties and risks of protracted travel and to track long-distance transactions’ (p. 177). The chapter also addresses the mitigation of cases of broken trust between business partners. However, it does not fully address key issues related to trust and litigations between merchants. The author could have taken the opportunity to engage directly with some of Avner Greif's controversial theories on reputational mechanisms and the monitoring of long-distance trust. This is a pity, because many of the author's findings, for example on the use of Islamic and Jewish courts in redressing litigation, appear to reinforce the recent critique of Greif by Jeremy Edwards and Sheilagh Ogilvie.Footnote ²² A more thorough discussion of legal services available to merchants involved in disputes would have added significantly to this chapter. Although the documentary trail is more than 900 years old and extremely fragmentary, the ‘India Book’ does have long sections on the role of rabbinical and Islamic courts employed by geniza merchants in cases of litigation. Margariti could have made use of this issue to address the wider theoretical points about trust and risk in Greif's seminal work.

The author makes repeated references to Aden's ‘role as an information hub’ (p. 175), as a node for ‘gathering information’ on distant markets. Here, a brief reference to information networks, and to how such information travelled to merchants in India or Cairo, would have been helpful. Presumably, such information circulated in the form of mercantile correspondence through foreland networks, possibly in combination with overland routes to Cairo, Alexandria, and beyond.

None of the above points detract from Roxani Margariti's outstanding scholarship. Her use and command of complex sources are very impressive. So is her Braudelian reconstruction, based on these sources, of Aden's ‘geohistory’, and her painstaking reconstruction of Aden's customs house and its role in fuelling the city's growth. In tandem with Goitein and Friedman's ‘India Book’, her work offers enough new material for a comprehensive reassessment of the field of Indian Ocean history in the next decade or so to come.