Nicholas P. Roberts, "A Sea of Wealth: The Omani Empire and the Making of an Oceanic Marketplace" (U California Press, 2025)

Welcome to the new Books Network. Hello and welcome to new books in the Indian Ocean world, a podcast channel on the new Books Network. This podcast is for listeners who want to say a lot of the expanse of Indian Ocean, learn about its past and present. Thank you for joining me today. I'm your host, Ahmed El Mazmi. I'm a assistant professor of history at United Arab Emirates University. And with us today is Dr. Nicholas Robert, the author of "SEE of Welfth, their Money, Empire, and the Making of an Oceanic Marketplace, published by University of California Press in 2025, August. So just now, Nicholas Robert was formerly assistant professor of history at Norwich University and how old fellow for Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. He is currently earning a JD at Case with Strangely Reserve University. I'm excited to talk about "SEE of Welfth" welcome Nick to new books in the Indian Ocean world. And thanks so much for taking the time to talk about your book. Thank you and thank you for having me on this podcast. It's my pleasure to be in a while since I've done podcasts. I stopped for finishing up my PhD, which I finished a couple of months ago. So I'm really excited to get back to podcasting. And what a great way to start it with such a wonderful book as yours. But first before we talk about "SEE of Welfth", I would like to introduce you to the audience if you can't start a self by saying if you were the by yourself, where you grow up, where you went to school. And how you became interested in the Indian Ocean, the Money, Empire, and what influenced you along the way. So that's a great question how I came to this book project. When I applied for my PhD program, this was nowhere on my radar of what I wanted to work on. It had this was nowhere in my personal statement, my correspondence with the person who was my advisor. I was interested much, much more in questions of religious history, in particular, religious intellectual history of, you know, the Muslim tradition. And the idea of tradition itself. I had just completed a master's program in history at Georgetown University. And the idea of Ibody Islam had never really learned about it. And I was sitting in my interview. I had applied to work with Ibrahim Musa at University of Notre Dame. And I was sitting in my interview and he made a joke with another person who was on the committee about, you know, Ibody Islam. Because this other person was was from Algeria and was a practicing Ibody Muslim. And they were just joking with each other. And I went home that day and started to read about it. And I was kind of shocked actually that, you know, two whole years of a, of a fantastic master's degree program with some of the best teachers around. And we hadn't learned about this. That's what got kind of got me started on Oman and Ibody Islam and so forth. Originally, then the dissertation was going to be a history of state formation. I was really interested in like theory of the state ideas of the state and state formation. But slowly over time and hats off to my advisor, Professor Musa, for letting me change so drastically my project. But the book ultimately came to be this, a sea of wealth, just the idea of the Omani Empire and focus especially on the first half of the century. And I wanted to do the whole thing from the Yadurubi through the Bussayedis to, you know, a long stretch of history. But there was one particular moment where and not a grand moment or anything. Just the idea came to me of Syed's reign. First half of the century would make a great book. And so I narrowed it down to that. Thank you for sharing that. I've heard many big words such as Ibody Islam, one and so on. Or listeners who might not be familiar with Oman or its history in the Indian Ocean. Could you give us a quick sketch of the geography and the makeup of Omani history. What's the big historical picture here? And what is the sea of wealth we are talking about? Oman today is a country on kind of the southern edge of the Arabian Peninsula bordering Saudi Arabia and the Gulf itself and Yemen. The centuries ago, as I argue, and as many other scholars have recognized, it was an empire that stretched all the way from Oman that mainland Oman as we consider today. South down the East African coast with its capital in Zanzibar. And so Oman centuries ago looked different than it does today. So that's the geography we're talking about here is this idea of the Western Indian Ocean, the Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf itself and the East African coast and the Western ocean itself, the Western Indian Ocean itself. Ibody Islam, I used to ask my students, what types of Islam are there out there? And they would always say, "Suni and Shia." And I'd say, "Okay, is there anything else?" I'd say, "There is. What else is out there?" And they would always think really hard, think really hard. And some of them, the bright ones would say, "Oh, there's Sufism." And I'd say, "Well, okay, sort of." But there's also Ibody Islam, and that's a major version of Islam in Oman and parts of North Africa today. And so most people, of course, because people see it on the news and hear about it and stuff, it's Sunni and Shia. But historically, there's also been this interpretation of Islam, the Ibody. But for the best work on that, is it pertains to Oman, people need to read your work, Ahmed Nathman. Yes, to be published. Thanks for introducing Oman to us. Okay, let's zoom in to the 19th century. If we were standing on the dark, so in Mosques and 1800s, what would we see and hear? So this is such a great question. It's one, I've actually dreamt of this. I've had dreams of like, you know, sailing into Muskaat Harbor or Zanzibar Harbor. And I used to think of it when I would visit Muskaat or when I lived in Zanzibar, especially when I would go swimming. You know, in Zanzibar, I didn't do this in Muskaat, but in Zanzibar, I would go out on dows with people and just jump in and swim and try to imagine like what it would have been like. First off, you would have heard a lot of different languages. You would have heard Arabic being spoken. You probably would have heard some Gujarati being spoken. You would have heard probably some English from Americans and British people. You might have heard French being spoken. As you traveled down through the empire, you would have heard more and more Swahili being spoken. So you would have heard a lot of languages. You would have seen the customs house where all trade went in and out of. You would have seen enslaved humans, not only working and doing different things and they did do different things. It was very distinct from enslavement as we know of it in the Atlantic world. They did all sorts of different things the enslaved did. You would have seen them being trafficked as well. Muskaat was a central place for the trafficking of enslaved peoples. You would have seen shipbuilders. You would have seen weavers, women weaving. There's a great source where someone, it's a European traveler who passes through Muskaat and says, you can hardly pass by any building in Muskaat and not see women weaving things. So you would have seen it would have been very busy. You would have seen countless ships in the harbor. European style ships, Indian ocean style ships. So you would have seen and heard all kinds of different things. That's an amazing cinematic for view of a movie I would love to watch about 19th century Muskaat. And the other thing is there's a source in the book. I was always taken by people's actual physical description of what they were seeing. And Muskaat today even, you know, it's nestled in a bay. It's and it's kind of surrounded by the striking cliffs. And so the geography itself is really beautiful. One source somewhere in the beginning of the book. I think it's an American sailor describes it as a hidden harbor. And because it is it had a very privileged geography that kind of kept it naturally enclosed, but even visually Muskaat harbor is striking. It's just beautiful. And it's really beautiful. And I encourage the listeners to look it up. Now that we can imagine the scene, the site, the stage basically. Let's talk about the book and step into its world because this isn't just a history. It's a reframe of an entire regions role in the making of the modern world. And you've mentioned French and you open your book with Charles Gillian, how does his name? He's a Gillian, a French naval officer under orders to secure a treaty, pursuing the ruler of this Amani Empire, Said Ben Sultan, across the Indian Ocean. One of them intend on expanding French influence and the other determined to set the terms of engagement on his own ground. Later you describe how Said position the Amani Empire as an equal, sometimes superior partner to Europeans and Americans, compelling them to adapt to his commercial and diplomatic norms. So I would like to ask you how does this tense pursuit and stand up between a European industry and an Indian ocean ruler capture your larger argument about the 19th century global power relations. So the short answer is that this moment that I begin the book with, it shows the central argument of the book that there was an empire here. Many, many, I would say any scholar of the Western Indian Ocean or the Indian Ocean more broadly or perhaps the Middle East or even African history, any scholar working on those issues would recognize that, okay, there was some sort of Amani political formation that stretched from the Arabian peninsula down into into East Africa. And I go through all the different ways that scholars have described this. I'm arguing for, I bring front and center just no more beating around the bush. This was an empire. It was the Amani Empire. And this, I think this scene with Gilaan shows that here was a very senior French official dispatched by his superiors in Paris to form a treaty with Said Ben Sultan, the leader of this empire. And Gilaan was so frustrated he could not find Said anywhere. He followed him from Zanzibar up to muskup. And then practically in this scene, he's begging him, please, first off, please schedule a meeting with me, please. And secondly, please write down your responses. Like I need to have a record here of everything. And and Said basically spurns him says, no, I have no inclination to meet with you whatsoever. And Said lectures him actually and says, and just so you know, basically he's saying, this is you're not in Paris anymore. There's a different way of doing things around here. And so I remember coming across that source in the archive, there were a few of these moments like just light bulb moments. I thought, wow, what a fantastic amazing source at the time I had no idea I'd begin the book with it. But this moment shows that yes, first off, there was an empire here. Other other people in this time period recognized that this was imperial. They negotiated with the leader as the leader of an empire and not just the French, but the British and the Americans as well. So I would be willing to bet. And you know, this is a big statement, but I'll stand by it that if you go into any classroom teaching or let's say a 19th century world history, 19th century, you know, global history or even just world history, global history broadly conceived any time period. No one would be starting their class or a lecture on, you know, 19th century world history with a moment like this. And that's because from the perspective of world history, the Omani empire itself, all of it. The enslaved and the free men and the women, the Pearl divers and the weavers and the people who cultivated dates, no, everyone and everything included in the empire, all of it is marginalized from the perspective of world history. So what I wanted to do was bring that empire front and center to world history. Right. And that's where the book really ships our perspective because from the first chapter, you are asking us to stop looking at a month through a European lens. And to do that, you narrate the story through seven chapters, the first chapter writing a money history, then we go to the emergency empire, third contesting the Gulf for moving to Zanzibar, five politics of the marketplace, six enslavement and human trafficking and finally the money empire enrolled history. And to start this beautiful story that you tell quite well in this book and I really enjoyed reading it as somebody who read the drafts and so how this develops over time, I'm really happy to see it come to fruition in this really terrific narrative that you present to the reader. So let's start with this by framing the money empire through Indian Ocean lens instead of a European one that we had before and the older literature, how does that change the story. What do we see about the 19th century when Arabia is Africa and South Asia, our front and center. We see a lot of different so much that I think we could spend an entire podcast just talking about this issue. One of the things we see though is, you know, just a different we now have a different unit of analysis for for narrating our history of the 19th century world, which is a different empire than we're used to talking about. Everyone knows that the 19th century is a history of empires and imperialism right and I think it's time that we're going we should add others into the story like the old money empire. I remember one person once very arrogantly, haughtily saying, okay, but you know, Eurocentrism, okay, he said that's so 2000 like, you know, that kind of that died with with deep as Chakrabarti and provincializing Europe. And I remember saying back, you know, the fact that you're saying that proves just how much more work is still to be done on this issue of Euros of seeing the world in different ways. And one of the things I think one of the brilliant things about the old money empire that it does for us is it allows us to see that this is not just a historian's category looking back on the past and saying things were different back then it wasn't the Europeans front and center dictating to everyone in the world. Because we have these really dramatic sources, I mean, there's one source, I think it's in it's in chapter five politics of the marketplace, the British admit this the British admit that wow, we are nowhere near anywhere near a position where we can dictate things over here. In fact, that's they were struggling immensely to just get by. And so it shifts a lot of things, one of the things it shifts, it speaks to is what other scholars have shown like Jeremy Prestolt that this even the 19th century world wasn't just one of production, you know, of places like East Africa or the Middle East producing things for the rest of the world, it was also a place of consumerism and indeed there was thriving consumerism throughout the Omani empire. So it shifts a lot of things, another thing that it shifts is enslavement and human trafficking, you know, the 19th century in the Omani empire was far far from a period of British abolitionism of a decline in enslavement and human trafficking. In fact, probably at no other period of history did enslavement in human trafficking increase as much as it did in the first half of the century. So it allows us to see a lot of different things. One other thing I think it allows us to see, and this is me kind of taking off my historians hat, but in thinking about the future of our world right now is the world might be coming to look a lot more like it did in 1830. Let's say then 1930 in that this world this Indian ocean world is incredibly important on the world stage is incredibly connected and is not one where other people come in and dictate but rather assimilate and acquiesce. Right and once we see the world from that angle, the rise of the money empire from the 1600s to the 1800s comes into sharper focus. And during this period and over to the dynasties, Oman builds a maritime empire. But what were the strategies like not naval dominance, cosmopolitan alliances control of Zanzibar and other places that made it to work and how did they pull in European and American actors without losing control. Yes, so one is you say the Omanis have a have a very concerted history of naval dominance investing in their navy using the navy, not just for trade, but as an instrument of state policy. So enforcing things forcing people into capitulation, expropriation and expansion, the Omani navy was Edmund Roberts, one of the Americans who was in the region described it as as the strongest navy anywhere in that part of the world, the entire Indian ocean. And indeed it probably was that was probably not an overstatement. So the strategy behind the formation of the empire was one of naval expansion. Another as you mentioned was this idea of cosmopolitanism. So when you asked me what was muskot like the first thing I said was well, you would have heard a lot of different languages. And it's true. The Omanis as I read the sources, they they had a strategy here of embracing difference embracing cosmopolitanism. Not for you know, perhaps not for some kind of 21st or 20th century notion of pluralism and tolerance and everything, but for commerce, a market is stronger with multiple competing entities, right rather than just one single entity. And in fact, the Omani's knew very clearly that the most successful merchants in terms of large scale capital and financing were from South Asia. They were good jerotti and so creating an environment where they could not just move in and out of with the monsoons but actually begin to kind of put down roots and stay was central to their imperial project. And then another strategy was actually shifting slowly over time away from not putting it aside ever or forgetting about it, but shifting kind of the focus of attention away from the Gulf and Arabian peninsula more toward East Africa. And then by Saeed's time in the first half of the 19th century, that was actual state policy that if you were trading if you were a European or an American and you were trading in the empire, you could only trade in Zanzibar. And that was for better control of customs customs duties. So there were a lot of different strategies that went into this, but another strategy was we have these, these letters preserved for us that Saeed wrote to various peoples throughout East Africa was basically so long as you pay your customs duties. So long as those customs duties make it back to Zanzibar, you are essentially free to live as you wish. So Saeed would have placed on kind of a local governor there in places throughout East Africa, but they would not have overly interfered in local affairs. They wanted customs duties and that's just about it. Right. This really helps us understand how this empire was functioning and through which means it was experience on the ground, but holding an empire together navigating dangerous waters as you show on chapter three vertically and literally in contesting the Gulf. So before we move to Zanzibar and the Gulf, we meet figures like Rahmavijabar and Sultan Bansagal Qasimi, they are navigating alliances rivalries, even piracy accusations. How did their actions both undermine and in some way strengthen the rise of the Bussaydi power. So you mentioned kind of a cinematic thing earlier in a movie like as far as I'm concerned, this should be the movie is this chapter with these really amazing figures like Sultan Bansagal and Rahmavijabar and Saeed and then the British come in and the British can barely keep a they can barely understand what's even going on all of these different alliances being formed and unformed. What was going on here was, you know, expansion of empire, expansion of the Omani empire, marginalized a lot of people and a lot of those people didn't go quietly, they fought back. And they were in the midst of what we can see is the beginnings of their own state formation projects. And so this was a really dramatic period of history, but it was one word and there were spectacular acts of violence, but it was also one of protracted negotiations, everything was a conversation, everything was a negotiation. And it was backed up and buttressed by dramatic acts of violence, of course, but there was always a negotiation as the new rules, this new order of imperial force was worked out in the Gulf. And a lot of that was based on Omani naval dominance of the Gulf. Yes, and I really encourage the listeners to go and take out not just the chapter, but also your article on Ahmad Bansagal. Yes, if if I had stayed in academia, he that was going to be the subject of the next book, it would have been basically taking that chapter chapter two and expanding it into a book focusing on Rahmah. But he deserves a movie, someone needs to make a movie about him. Yes, and the history is very dramatic. This history is very dramatic. These were a group. There are some great, great stories that's part of all of this. And it was really fun to read and get to know these people. And I agree with you that would be an amazing movie to it. And while power struggles played out in the Gulf, the admins of the moon that would redefine the empire's future. When say it was all done shifted his base and the 1830s to Zanzibar, the whole dynamic changed. Can you walk us through the policies that he introduced like fix the custom rates, cloth cultivation and tax farming that turns Zanzibar into a hub for Indian Ocean trade. So the first thing is that there is something very new to all of this. We can debate, you know, was the idea of an Omani, Omani's maybe had imperialist notions for a very long time. That's not really new to the 19th century. You know, Omani naval dominance. Some people might say that's not really new. What is new here, full stop is Zanzibar as the leading port, not just a leading port, but by a long stretch, the leading place in East Africa. We have a very cryptic source from Saeed. And first off, he left behind, we can say very few sources in his own pen. One is a very cryptic source where he's writing to the British and he says, he says something like it's becoming very difficult for me to remain in the Gulf and says that, you know, things are things will be better in East Africa. And I think he was referring to a lot of different things. One is one is kind of very global, which was that this global appetite now for different things like ivory for for clothes, just beginning and also, but the East Africans appetite for products from the Atlantic world as well. So Saeed must have sensed that that these kind of changing market dimensions of the global market. So he goes to Zanzibar, but he also didn't want Zanzibar as his capital at first. He wanted Mombasa. Mombasa was an extremely well fortified place. It had a long, long history as a leading port in East Africa, but he was unable to take Mombasa for a decade. He laid siege to it and was unable to take it. I tell that story in the book. And when he gets to Zanzibar, as you said, he institutes some new policies and one was that we here in Zanzibar, we are going to start cultivating dates, clothes, I'm sorry. That itself and there is a policy that he institutes and it was if you don't start cultivating clothes, we the, the homonies, we will take your land and we will cultivate them ourselves. So embedded in that new state policy was a lot of violence and expropriation of land, but that was a major shift in Zanzibar history. The introduction of clove's to Zanzibar, they had already, they were already growing there in very, very small numbers, but nothing like what we see what one scholar, one French visitor called clove mania. Others were a flat customs fee, so no matter what, everyone would pay the same taxes as they did business there, but also as he tried to bring in more and more Atlantic and American merchants, he said, you, you are not allowed to do business on the African mainland, you will do business only in Zanzibar. And then another, another part of his policies was was augmenting the position of his customs master of gyram, Shivji, who was a Gujarati person, who managed, who was basically like the state treasury, he was the treasury department basically for the empire. So yeah, there were multiple different policies, you know, and then there were the little things, the mundane things that made this history happen in the first place, like when Europeans and Americans came in, they had all kinds of problems, they very frequently lost the anchors for their ships. So, Syed would replace those anchors, so we often it can be kind of easy to glance over this fact that getting there to Zanzibar to do business was just half they also had to make it back. And I think we should also remember this was still a period of history where see travel between oceans nonetheless was extremely treacherous. And the culture strategy of Syed in this time was was figuring out the ways to make it more efficient, so to speak, like replacing lost ship anchors, these kind of things that we can easily write up as just mundane things were actually critically important, I think. When Zanzibar was at the center, the empire's politics became a game of high stakes diplomacy might say. And chapter five we learn about the politics of the marketplace and you present us with the cases of Idman drawbirds and Richard water's among others, and the use of local institutions by the Gujarati custom master J. R. M. G. Was there a moment when this balancing act almost fill apart, if you can recall, and what does that tell us about the politics of this marketplace? Oh, absolutely, I mean multiple moments. So by the 1840s, the leading foreign merchants, I mean, non Indian ocean merchants were Americans by far. So the British admitted this they were nowhere near the leading merchants. That path to the Americans being the leading Atlanta, you know, merchants from the Atlantic world was extremely treacherous. Richard waters was was beaten several times, Richard waters being the first American console to Zanzibar, like to Syed. He was beaten, his house was stoned. Now, we don't know why, because the people, whoever it is, will beat him never left behind a source, whoever through stones at his house never left behind a source. What we do know is though we have sources from Richard waters, where he's indicating to people. He's also trying to figure this part of the world out with assimilation and acquiescence. So he knew he had to accede if he wanted to succeed. And that's precisely what he did. He not only formed a very deep connection with Syed, but also eventually with gyram Shivji, they became almost hand in hand, you know, kind of partners in the market. And the American presence in Zanzibar could have fallen apart numerous times. It might not never have taken off. I mean, the very fact that there wasn't American treaty was kind of fortuitous. So Edmund Roberts was was just I tell this story in the book. He had lost everything to pirates in the Caribbean, actually. And he was where European pirates, of course, and he took out a loan to sail to the Indian Ocean. There were very few merchants from New England in the United States, sailing to the Indian Ocean at the time. He was one of them when he got there. He was detained. He had a horrible time and he starts writing letters to Syed. Syed happens to pop onto the island, just making the short voyage over from Mombasa and meets with him and redresses all of the wrongs and outfits him back to return to the United States. And that's what starts the process of the American treaty. But that might have never happened had it not been for that very fortuitous meeting between them. And then we see a glimpse of this world on the very cover of the book. Would you say how did you come across this finding and how did you decide on making it the cover? So the sketch I remember the moment where I saw that sketch that sketch is from the Phillips libraries part of the Peabody Essex Museum. Now that sketch itself, and I begin the, I begin chapter one talking about this sketch, would be familiar as I said to really any historian of the Indian Ocean world. They would know that, okay, on the right we have Bombay, that's India, on the left we have the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, and we have East Africa. But what I'm saying here is yeah, it's, but those connections. So that's where visually connectivity has been a theme in Indian Ocean history, right? One of the things I'm trying to say in the book is yeah, but connectivity doesn't just exist. There are people forming those connections. And one of the things forming those connections was what we're looking at here on the left hand side of that sketch is an empire. There was an empire here. And the fact that whoever drew the sketch, we don't know who drew it, drew a little rendering of Zanzibar there that you see kind of shows this that that was the capital of this empire. Yes, I really like making this abstract notion of empire or capitalism as well, concrete through human relations. And we're talking about the cloth plantation. We also learn about the very humans that tend to that tended, you know, those people who tended these plantations and fuel this bustling trade networks. And in chapter six, we find that your book doesn't shy away from the fact that slavery was central to this economy. How did those systems work and how did they help say, it was sold on resist British abolition pressure while maintaining control of trade. So first off, the British failed in all of their attempts. These are not my words. These are their own words. The British console to two, two, Said, and he worked on behalf of both the East India company and the crown. His name was Atkins Hamilton. He's buried there today on a tiny little island just next to Zanzibar. So there's one source where he's writing back to Queen Victoria and you know, all of the officials in London saying, all of our attempts have failed. He says. And there's another, I remember when I found this source as well, it was one of those just amazing moments in the archives where Said writes the British are throwing all of the weight they can into pressuring Said to stop the trafficking. And Said writes back, you can kind of sense his frustration with this and this is all in the book, but he says, look, if I were to do that, he says, and this is his quote, it would be like the loss of the entire world. And I think what he was saying there is he's showing us something that historians, at least American, Americanists and some Atlantic historians have spent, I mean thousands of pages debating, you know, what was was slavery central to capitalism in the 19th century. And that source, I eat is saying you of course is without slavery, we have nothing here. And that's for many different reasons. Even if let's say ivory, if people in New England wanted ivory for their, you know, jewelry and all sorts of things and pool ball billiard balls. Slavery was a part of that when people wanted dates in their fruit cakes, slavery was a part of that when people wanted coffee slavery was a part of that and for many different reasons, it's not just to say that in slave people, let's say cultivated or went and got those things because they often didn't many, many free people, you know, drove forward the ivory trade, but slavery was a part of it all in the sense that there might be a doubt a ship that's transporting ivory from mombasa to Zanzibar, there would have been enslaved people on that down. In slave people throughout the empire did other things too, they served as local governors, they served as ship captains, of course, there were enslaved women who were mothers of, you know, future sultans, siaids, you know, heirs. And so the enslaved was just so deeply rooted in every aspect of the world, this part of the world in this time that siaid was saying, look, if I end this, everything falls apart. So I remember a moment I had just barely begun research on the dissertation and the book he was very closely to the dissertation and I called up one of both of our teachers, Fahad Bishara and I said, Fahad there's, I said, there's no way I said I have to have a chapter on slavery. And I said, I feel uncomfortable writing it because like, you know, many historians like you're trained as a historian of, you know, slavery, right. I had never taken a class on it, anything like that. And I said, I feel unprepared to write it. And he said, you know, I get that, but he he agreed he was like, yes, you have to have a chapter on slavery. And because it was central to every aspect of life in this empire. I tried my best to weave slavery throughout all of the other chapters, but I created kind of that that standalone chapter to kind of give a glimpse into just how deeply woven slavery was into every aspect of the empire and the broader world in this time. Indeed, and also enslaved humans weren't just part of this economy, but also they were part of knowledge production as I explored in one of my articles, which gives us, you know, a broader picture of how to think about the history of slavery and competitive framework, especially if we were to think about the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean context, and the Indian Ocean, of course, is lagging behind when it comes to a lot of fields and slavery slavery studies. So the chapter is definitely going to make great contributions and classrooms and seminars and any survey and competitive work to be done between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. So we are grateful for for this chapter and the book and hope which brings us to the bigger question, how does this history change the way we see the world? You make the case and your final chapter that side missile bonds, rain forces us to rethink global history. And so what changes in our understanding when we see the money empire not as a side note, but as a central player and shaping the modern world economy? Well, I don't know. Readers will have to make that determination. Readers might read this book and say, well, okay, it doesn't actually change the way I think about anything. So readers will have to make that determination whether it was successful or not. But one of the things that was always in my mind as I was thinking about this and thinking about world history more broadly is it's a source that I alluded to. I kind of borrow her words toward the very end and she's not even a historian. She's a brilliant poet named Claudia Rankine. And it's this idea that we're now deep into, you know, we talk about subaltern studies, we talk about decolonizing history, we talk about, you know, all the marginalized groups of history. And what I wanted to say was all of that work requires the concomitant, you know, restructuring of how we think of the world itself. And the units of analysis we use for writing it. So like we have this idea now of, you know, world history from below. So looking at, you know, the marginalized peoples of world history and then writing history up from that, but world history from below what? Well, the British Empire, right. And the idea, you know, the age of discovery and all of these periodizations we have for conceiving of the world. So I think that all of this type of work, you know, writing history from below requires us to also think about bigger things like the units of analysis we use for crafting world history. And so I hope that that's one of the things that the book does is is maybe encourage people to take more seriously that yes, this was an empire. Sure, it might not have looked like the British Empire or the Ottoman Empire or, you know, the French or Portuguese empires, but it was an empire. And that's why it's so important for us to acknowledge and grapple with is precisely because it was different from those European empires. And it doesn't have to look like a European empire for it to be an empire nonetheless. And this is definitely going to be a central read, I would say in thinking about many European empires enrolled history. And you make a great case in presenting an alternative way of thinking about imperialism, especially in the Muslim world, where mostly is land based. And we have an oceanic empire, you know, in a time where supposedly a European imperialism is unstoppable and on the rise. And yet you show us that called on there is another empire that is still expanding and thriving in the 19th century. And, you know, I think it also just as we have to rethink world history, those of us who broadly, you know, fall into Middle East history, have to rethink, you know, what is the Middle East. So I remember it was it was an interview, actually, a job interview, someone said, okay, tell us about the book and I told them. Many of the things that we've just talked about, you know, in this podcast and they said, well, that's great. But can you tell us like, what does it have to do with the Middle East? And I said, that's precisely it. This is the Middle East. Just because it's not Egypt or the Levant doesn't mean it's not the Middle East, right? And so that's part of a much broader direction that many scholars are now pushing is is look, first off, the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula is part of the Middle East. Let's not forget, you know, from the perspective of Middle East studies that these are critical spaces, but also that the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf don't just look toward Cairo and, you know, Damascus and Baghdad. But they look out toward the ocean, they look out towards Ansbar and Bombay. And so that's another thing too is rethinking how we think of the Middle East as well. Yes, and I agree with the with the blurbs that you received that this book not just tell a great story, but also write it very well and frames it against a global backdrop, which is very useful for any instructor wanting to teach. History of empires world history history of capitalism or the many themes that you cover in this book. So I would like to congratulate you once again on accomplishing and publishing this exquisite book that I'm sure many would enjoy reading as much as I did. And before I end this conversation, we have a tradition of asking our authors what they're working on now or plan to work on and I know the book just came out and you haven't even received your coffee yet. But I know that you published some really amazing articles recently on oceanic Wahhabism and the sultan of muskats in Vermont. Among others, so would you please tell us about these articles and where you're planning the sense. Sure. So first off, the sultan of muskats in Vermont was that comes from a source I found also in the Phillips library refers to a horse actually. But that was someone should write this the person who brought the horse to the United States William Jarvis could be the subject of an amazing work of world history. I'm thinking like a long Donald Wright, the world in a small place in Africa. He could be used to write a really brilliant world history, something like the world in a small place in Vermont. But oceanic Wahhabism is showing that even the very middle of the Arabian peninsula, you know, the area of nest where Wahhabism emerged. Contrary to, you know, how many of the, you know, ostensible experts and specialists on this have portrayed it was also part of this oceanic world. So that's what that article is about and then the Rahma article kind of impacts some things from chapter two of the book. But no, now my, my scholarly interests are more in the realm of international law and global affairs. So we'll have to see where that takes me in the future. I look forward to this new line of research and sounds really interesting. Thank you next so much for taking the time to talk about your book and again, I can't praise it enough. The book is backed with amazing stories. So get your copy. Thank you for listening to it today's episode in which we explored an equal strawberries new book as a wealth, the money empire and the making of monoshonic marketplace published by California University press in 2025. This is your host Ahmed Al-Mazmi. Stay tuned for the next episode of new books in the Indian Ocean world.