Monsoon Voyagers follows the voyage of a single dhow, the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around the Persian Gulf and Western Indian Ocean, from 1924 to 1925. Through his account of the voyage, Fahad Ahmad Bishara unpacks a much broader history of circulation and exchange across the Arabian Sea in the time of empire. From their offices in India, Arabia, and East Africa, Gulf merchants used the technologies of colonial capitalism—banks, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, and more—to remake their own regional bazaar economy. In the process, they remade the Gulf itself. Drawing on the Crooked's first-person logbooks, along with letters, notes, and business accounts from a range of port cities, Monsoon Voyagers narrates the still-untold connected histories of the Gulf and Indian Ocean. The Gulf's past, it suggests, played out across the sea as much as it did the land.
Fahad Ahmad Bishara is Associate Professor of History and Rouhollah Ramazani Professor of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. He is author of A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950.
"Putting a dhow captain's logbooks to imaginative use, Kuwaiti historian Fahad Bishara paints a vivid and richly detailed picture of the maritime world of the Indian Ocean in the early twentieth century. Monsoon Voyagers is at once a work of careful scholarship and a captivating, beautifully written narrative."—Amitav Ghosh, author of Sea of Poppies
"A very original contribution. The book is a life story of a maritime passage, in all of its intimate detail. From this one voyage, Bishara makes inferences about larger aspects of this body of water and its many imbricated histories. Bishara is an outstanding talent, and this is an outstanding book."—Eric Tagliacozzo, author of In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama
"Rarely have a scholar's historical imagination and personal voice been so brilliantly on display as in this wonderful rendering of the Kuwaiti dhow captain (nakhoda) Al-Failakawi's logbook (ruznamah) of a sea voyage aboard the Crooked, from Kuwait across the Arabian Sea to the western Indian coast and back, in 1924–1925. Bishara subtly weaves together a wide range of mainly Arabic sources, both written and oral, to construct 'a thick account of Indian Ocean trade' that animates a complex commercial network as it operated over time and space during a critical transitional period of history. That he brilliantly achieves his goal 'to embed Gulf history back into the Indian Ocean world' is unquestioned; that he does so profoundly is a gift."—Edward A. Alpers, author of The Indian Ocean in World History
"This magisterial, beautifully written account of a Kuwaiti captain's dhow journey around the Indian Ocean is at once intimate and expansive, absorbing and urgent. It draws on the daily sailing logs of the boat, private papers of seafarers and merchants, a deep knowledge of the social and economic history of the region, and a mastery of theories of capital and trade to acquaint the reader with the less familiar currents of commerce and palimpsests of relations in this historically pivotal region of the world."—Laleh Khalili, author of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula
388 pp.6 x 9
9780520415928$29.95|£25.00Paper
Oct 2025