Abraham’s luggage is a rich, innovative, and interdisciplinary study that brings to life the material and religious travel cultures across the medieval western Indian Ocean and the domestic worlds that were created by mobile people on its shores. Elizabeth A. Lambourn (from De Montfort University, Leicester, UK) sets out with a seemingly simple list that survived as a fragment among the Genizah documents. It lists baskets and bottles, rice, wheat, and sugar, raisins, coconuts, vinegar, citrus fruits, and ginger, household items, copper, and iron, among many others, often with quantities and sometimes with references to procurers. However, nothing is ‘simple’. In appealing prose, with clever caution and a great dash of methodological craftiness, Lambourn guides the reader through this twelfth-century list of items to explore a luggage of transoceanic mobility and thereby the life of the Jewish merchant Abraham Ben Yiju, who over time inhabited the trading worlds of Egypt, Yemen, and the Malabar coast in south India.
The things that Abraham packed were not only intended to facilitate a transoceanic journey with its daily dangers, necessary ‘travel knowledge’ (pp. 21–2), and culturally appropriated materialities, but also to make the port city of Mangalore his new home. Lambourn pursues an ‘archaeology through text’ (p. 32) to excavate bit by bit the various meanings, historical contexts, and possible uses of the items on Abraham’s list. Her resourceful approach manages to make sense of this compact, succinct, and functional list, a ‘nested text’ (p. 31) of the Judaeo-Arabic corpus of Genizah documents. In the vein of Finbarr Barry Flood’s Objects of translation in the context of Hindu–Muslim encounters in medieval west Asia and north India, she writes a micro-history of human circulation and material exchanges that linked South Asia and the Middle East. Her arguments, however, go beyond the conceptual boundaries of a case study. They throw light on the habitus of travelling that Abraham embodied and the transcultural world he traversed. ‘Luggage lists’ and the art of packing for ‘travel as skilled practice’ (p. 247) emerge as an intelligible and tangible way of writing engaging macro-histories of the connected worlds of the medieval western Indian Ocean.
Lambourn’s introduction starts with this luggage list as the empirical foundation of the book, followed by an interdisciplinary framework of how to unpack it. She combines approaches to documents and texts studies with an extensive historiography in the field of Genizah studies. In particular, she builds and elaborates on the doyens of the field, Shelomo D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, especially their magnum opus India traders of the Middle Ages: documents from the Cairo Geniza (‘India book’). Anthropological readings of ‘luggage-making’ and new approaches to material cultures with an ‘inclusive definition of matter’ (p. 23) go hand in hand with studies of human physiology and ethno-pharmacology.
As Lambourn reads and re-reads the list again and again, interlaced with the perusal of interdisciplinary scholarship, the meanings of items are suddenly signified. Vinegar and citrus rendered limited amounts of water palatable and quenched thirst. Coconuts served as nutritious and clean water supplies. Wooden planks and iron became useful to ‘inhabit’ the ship for a few weeks on the sea journey from Aden to Mangalore. The luggage list also appears ‘as a distinctively Jewish assemblage’ (p. 151). Bread and wine serve as its ‘religious media’, while raisins infused with water substitute nabīdh (wine) for ‘communities of “geographical translocation and scarcity”’ (pp. 148–9). Lambourn argues that, perused in the right way, the list tells us a lot about ‘Jewish gastro-politics’ (p. 132), beyond the ‘potently identitarian sign’ (p. 129) of the Hebrew script used to write it. Employing Ibn Battuta’s fourteenth-century description of a ‘dinner with the Sultan of Honovar’ on the south Indian coast as a conceptual prop and empirical guide, Lambourn also has much to say about food cultures on the shores of the western Indian Ocean. Eating bread was a ‘civilizational sign’ marking an outsider of west Asian background, just as eating rice designated insiders of the subcontinent, but the spread of these food cultures also highlighted ‘shifting food frontiers’ and changing elite cultures over time (pp. 116–19). Nevertheless, Lambourn admits that we are left in the dark when it comes to studying Abraham’s shopping habits in Malabar.
As Lambourn continues to discuss medicinal travel cultures and the issues of cooking and living at sea for weeks, she admits that she is skating on ever thinner empirical ice, as, once on a ship, sources fall silent. Normative texts especially, such as Ibn Sina’s Canon of medicine (Qanūn fī l-ṭibb), while useful, can only help to back up more general assumptions about the function of certain substances in a travel context. Lambourn’s use of travel narratives from much later periods, such as the fifteenth-century account by Niccolò De’Conti and the seventeenth-century Anīs al-hujjāj by Mulla Safi al-Din, may help to bridge some narrative gaps but at the same time can be very misleading when looking at a twelfth-century case study. Even if writing medieval history often forces one to employ such techniques to tell a story, it contributes to the assumptions that some things stayed the same over these centuries, while it is simply not possible to say whether they did or not. Nevertheless, Lambourn points to possibilities of embedding some items in the context of ‘medicine and dietetics’, weighs probabilities, and poses interesting questions, which she piles up for future maritime archaeology. In addition to its pathbreaking research, Abraham’s luggage is an exciting textbook on how to study medieval documents, how to appreciate fragmentary sources, and how to deal with gaps and voids. In this vein, an appendix provides a full transcription of the Judaeo-Arabic text in Hebrew characters, a full transliteration in Arabic script (by Amir Ashur) juxtaposed to it, as well as an English translation with extensive commentary.
Apart from putting together a biographical account of Abraham and assessing how his habit of travelling was culturally learned, Lambourn further illuminates the organization of the ‘India trade’. She discusses ‘landscapes of hospitality’ that undergirded the movement of people, such as acquaintances, business partners, and kinship ties. Cultures of friendship with a ‘reciprocal agency’ by all parties involved formed more low-key networks that guided material flows but, as Lambourn contends, were presumably similarly or more pervasive than macro-structures of trade. Within this system of ṣuḥba, objects travelled across the western Indian Ocean in both directions as part of monetized and non-monetized exchanges. Through a corpus of merchant letters, we learn that Abraham Ben Yiju was successful in building an extensive network of family relations and business partnerships, who procured him the things he needed to make Mangalore his home for several years. However, the chains of provisioning were fragile at best. Lambourn underscores her perspective on long-term circulations and the vulnerability of human interactions. One conspicuous item on the list is paper, central to the letter-writing activities that kept Abraham informed and in contact with his counterparts. Yet paper also has to be considered as a foundational element of ‘distributed personhood’ (pp. 101–2), and in India Abraham continued to identify as a ‘Middle Eastern self’.
Lambourn contributes to growing recent research on the medieval and early modern Malabar coast, such as Prange’s Monsoon Islam (2018) and Malabar in the Indian Ocean: cosmopolitanism in a maritime historical region, edited by Michael Pearson and Mahmood Kooria (2018). In order to diversify our picture of the medieval Indian Ocean trading worlds, another interesting angle would be to explore further interregional trading systems that led ships along the coasts, while avoiding the effervescent waters of the deep Indian Ocean, and to take into account other coastal regions such as the Konkan. After all, as researchers often lament, the empirical sample that informs the study of Malabar’s medieval trading links with the western Indian Ocean is also distinguished by its scarcity. Nevertheless, it is from this standpoint of marginality that Lambourn manages to write a compelling account that suggests new venues for the study of world historical processes from the Middle East to South Asia. The book will be of great interest to students of manuscripts and documents, area studies, oceanic history, Indian Ocean studies, and global history.
