This is a frustrating book. It is frustrating because the author, R. J. Barendse, has clearly undertaken an enormous amount of archival research, including extensive work in the Dutch archives, which, for linguistic reasons, have not been sufficiently exploited. His sources provide a wealth of colorful vignettes from the world of trade in the 17th century. The trip from Mosul to Basra, for example, “led through barren deserts, where the single sound was the distant wail of hyenas. No other human beings were seen for days; sometimes on the far horizon appeared campfires” (p. 44). Or the trials and tribulations of a Turkish merchant named Nasr Ali Cagasi who went to Samarkand to buy rhubarb for a Dutch merchant. When he went bankrupt, the Dutch East India Company threw him in jail to force him to pay his debts. Finally, they released him since no one came forward to provide bail; he had to labor as a domestic servant instead (p. 157). Yet the wealth of detail in the book is not presented within a coherent framework. Indeed, organization of the material is so lacking that it is exhausting to read.

In both the Preface and the Introduction Barendse says that he wants to write world history, which he sees as opposed to both national history and area studies. Clearly, an entity such as the Arabian seas would sit awkwardly in any book organized along national lines, but even area specialists, he argues, have missed the critical links that tie together the ports of the Arabian sea. Scholars of India, Iran, and Africa have seen only that part of the sea that falls within the purview of their particular coastline. In the Introduction, he maks the important—and certainly correct—point that Africanists in particular have tended to treat the continent in isolation. Since students of the Swahili coast are Africanists, they tend to stress the links of the coast to the African hinterland. According to Barendse, the ports of East Africa were a world apart from the interior and are more properly understood as the western end of a tightly knit commercial world. This world he calls the Arabian seas, an area which encompasses the Arabian Sea and the interior of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea and extends to the waters off the East African coast. “If still large, this is an area with old and deep commercial linkages, one bound by common characteristics and by common networks, which merits consideration as a whole” (p. 3).

This is the world that Barendse sets out to describe, and one of the endorsements on the back of the book is right to point out the Braudelian undertone of his project. All this is well and good, but the Arabian seas as a coherent object of study sink into the depths shortly after the Introduction and rarely appear again. The East African coast is a good example of this. After the first chapter, “Ports and Hinterland,” references to Africa are few and far between. The book is heavily oriented toward India, followed by Iran and the Middle East. Therefore, one of the primary goals of the book, as defined by the author—to draw the connections between East African ports and other ports of the Arabian seas—is not realized.

This lengthy book is laid out in eleven chapters, including an Introduction and a Conclusion. In between, the chapters are thematic. Although the author says in the Introduction that he will focus on the period 1640 to 1700, chronology is not an organizing principle for the book. Chapters 2–6 discuss different aspects of this commercial world, from ports (chap. 2) and European colonies (chap. 3) to the world of merchants (chap. 5) and the merchandise that is traded (chap. 6, more than 100 pages long). The trading companies of the major European powers—the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English—are each assigned a chapter, and the book ends with a consideration of private trade. In every chapter, the reader must struggle to make the connection not only between chapters, but even between other sections in the chapter. The first chapter, for example, begins with an interesting typology of ports along the East African coast. Then, in the following two sections, he delves in great detail into how the Portuguese tried to settle the African interior. The shift to the African interior is never explained, nor does he explain the exclusive focus on the Portuguese, given that, in the Introduction, he said that the book would concentrate on the period of Dutch dominance in the second half of the 17th century. This kind of disconnect, unfortunately, runs throughout the entire book.

Despite his professed desire to write about the Arabian seas as a whole, there is really very little on this topic. There is a good deal on individual cities, on peddlers versus capitalists, and on different articles of trade. Golden opportunities to demonstrate the contours of the world of the Arabian seas are left unexplored. For instance, in a section devoted to the merchants and markets of Gujarat, he points out that interest rates at Surat were lower than elsewhere. The explanation is that “Surat was the focal point of information on the commercial conditions throughout the Arabian seas” (p. 177). The reader would like to be shown how this worked, what the linkages were, but nothing of the sort follows. Instead, Barendse moves swiftly on to a consideration of the old arguments about the peddling trade.

Very curiously for a book that presents itself as world history, it is quite Eurocentric. Close to a third of the book is devoted to a discussion of European trade and traders. More alarming is the fact that in a discussion of the legal situation for commerce in India, Barendse lets European views about “corruption” and “despotism” stand as faithful depictions of how things actually were.

Finally, the book is very poorly edited. Some sentences are simply bizarre—“There is a whole lore, sweet as cherry pie, about the Indian nautch girls that those virile warriors preferred in their crib” (p. 97)—while many more are badly written and even ungrammatical. A sentence that appears on page 21, “Along the coast are, often closed off by sandbanks, many inlets, some of which are easily accessible from the sea, and tiny coral islands,” is rather typical. Short as it is, the brief biographical sketch of the author that appears at the end of the book manages to misspell his name in the second paragraph. The word “intersect” is used as a noun on the back cover.