Margins of the Market is an important new book that gives us an incisive view into the changing modalities of exchange in the Arabian Sea from the 19th into the early 20th century. During this time, colonial states began to become full-fledged powers in this marine arena. This process changed certain dynamics of long-standing practice, argues author Johan Mathew, when it came to how trafficking and capitalism interacted as market forces. Based on a dissertation using archives scattered in England, India, the United Arab Emirates, and Tanzania, the book covers a good amount of ground both in terms of geography and the passage of time. Mathew focuses on three commodities to illustrate his aims—the passage of people, especially in forms of labor servitude; the passage of munitions; and the passage of currency. More theoretical and contextual chapters bookend these three more archival chapters, and sketch out approaches (in the introduction) and what we've learned (in the conclusion). Taken as a whole, Margins of the Market traverses new terrain both empirically and theoretically, and shows us why the Arabian Sea is a useful place to think about processes of modernity and the advance of capitalism as a crucial, linking system between regions. Examining these activities against the backdrop of the Arabian Sea, a body of water that usually remains outside mainstream scholarly literature, is an added bonus, as it allows us to see how Western and non-Western worlds collided in interesting and unforeseen ways precisely at a time when new patterns of global interaction were being inscribed.

The passage of labor was salient to Mathew's processes. Over the course of the 19th century, as the author tells us, there was a shift from slavery and slave trading to various forms of indentured servitude. In the Indian Ocean, and in the Arabian Sea in particular, this meant a gradual cascade in how slaving was seen by the various interested European powers as time progressed. A useful map on page 55 illustrates the shrinking territory available to slaving, from an initial 1822 treaty to an addendum in 1839 and then a new treaty signed in 1845, all of which pushed the allowable space for slave-trafficking closer and closer to the coast of East Africa, and away from the rest of the ocean. Mathew covers the various forms of exploitation on board ship, which crossed a range of divergent practices. A rare photo of African children being shipped into lives of slavery on page 68 gives a very human face to the social-scientific issues at hand, and shows that by 1868 even if some of these practices had been legislated into the past, they still survived into an actual present. Mathew looks too at some of the subterfuges of slave- and labor-trafficking on the high seas, including gendered practices of deception involving “slaves” and “wives,” many of which were practiced elsewhere (such as in Southeast Asia) at the same time.

The author is also concerned with munitions that were shipped illegally in the Arabian Sea. The monopoly on violence was of crucial importance to states in this arena; running guns therefore was a very profitable business, if these objects could be moved outside of the reach of congealing colonial governments. As borders started to harden, Mathew argues “pirates” also became gun runners, and the lines between practices blurred. A map on page 92 shows how guns were run out of Muscat, Oman, to a number of locales (including Persia, Baluchistan, Kutch, and Goa). Djibouti served the same function south of the Persian Gulf and along the Red Sea littoral, pushing these commodities to Aden, further up the Red Sea, and also to what is present-day Somalia at the Horn of Africa itself. Munitions blurred the already unclear lines between “self-defense” and trade, an ambiguity that merchants made use of in keeping these items as cargo, but also as protection against attack on the high seas. Munitions were hidden in a variety of ingenious places, including in bales and cargo, even (in one fascinating case) inside a coffin. The traffickers placed a rotting beef carcass inside of the wooden box to approximate the smell of decaying human flesh, and bet that the authorities would not open it because of the odor (they bet wrong). Strategies like this were again employed elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, but we have proof of these practices in the Arabian Sea discussed here for the first time.

Finally, currency was also trafficked in this huge arena, and for a variety of reasons, many of which had to do with Western regimes trying to standardize and prioritize their own monies, to the detriment of other systems of older provenance. Mathew shows how a wide array of currencies were in use in the Arabian Sea, from Ottoman, Qajar, and Mughal sources but also from smaller, petty-states along both the East African and Indian littorals. Cowry shells and a few other systems were near ubiquitous, but it was part and parcel of the imperial project to shrink alternative currencies, and to make Western currency regimes paramount in an area of diverse financial levers. Therefore there were colonial attempts to demonetize local currencies, Mathew tells us, and he provides a useful map on page 125 of currency flows, to show us where these currencies where heading, why, and in what guise. As with the other trafficked commodities, there were numerous hiding places to try to beat these new proscriptions: in tins of ghee (clarified butter), in vats of pickle, and encased inside the dense candy of prepared halwa—all of these local products in origin, and now concealing local currencies in origin as well. These were forms of engagement with increasingly totalizing regimes that strengthened as the 19th century wore on into the 20th century. For our purposes as readers, these practices collectively stand as shorthand for the choices presented to Arabian Sea peoples faced with subjugation over this time period. Outright resistance was increasingly futile, so it was through the “margins of the market”—Mathew's elegant phrase—that some space and freedom of action could be found. Capitalism flourished in this space, Mathew argues. This was not a kind of resistance that some local people might have preferred in a time of increasing subjugation, but it was a form of subaltern action that allowed certain freedoms, and also the chance to make a profit. Mathew's book is a useful and interesting take on how this happened across a wide and fluid space, all as the world became “modern” before our collective eyes.