Sea Tracks and Trails: Indian Ocean Worlds as Method

Though historians have long imagined it as a world both unto itself and integral to histories of global capital, nation‐building, imperial rivalry, and sustainability in many dimensions, the Indian Ocean and environs have become a preoccupation for scholars from a wide variety of locations, disciplinary, and institutional, in the last two decades. The essays in this cluster offer a thematic introduction to recent work in Indian Ocean World history and studies chiefly by focusing on the question of method. Drawing on research that takes transregional, comparative, and subaltern approaches to the field, contributors map the dynamic relationships between the “regional integration” that characterizes the IOW's histories of connection, interdependence, and flow and the striated, fractious history of imperial forces always in sight, in play, and in motion in these waters.