Bøker i Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies-serien

This monograph is an exploration of the historical legacy of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, in particular in Goa, Macau, Melaka, and Malabar. Instead of fixing the gaze on either the colonial or the indigenous, it attempts to scrutinise a creole space that is rooted in Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism.

To counter Eurocentric notions of long-term historical change, Wet Rice Cultivation and the Emergence of the Indian Ocean draws upon the histories of societies based on wet-rice cultivation to chart an alternate pattern of social evolution and state formation and traces inter-state linkages and the growth of commercialization without capitalism.

This volume comprises a selection of essays by scholars from a variety of disciplines that discuss the exchange relationship between Africa and the wider Indian Ocean world (IOW), a macro-region running from East Africa to China, from early times to about 1300 CE.