Ottoman Shipping in the Indian Ocean, circa 1650–1900

Abstract This article examines the subject of Ottoman shipping in the Indian Ocean in the two and a half centuries after 1650. With reference to both Ottoman and European sources, it first grapples with the empirical problems involved in studying the subject. It then explores how a combination of trade dynamics in the Gulf and the economic preferences of both Ottoman state and private actors attenuated the expansion of Ottoman shipping. Taken together, these factors confirm that the comparative dearth of Ottoman vessels in the Indian Ocean trade was a product of geopolitical and ecological contingency rather than entrepreneurial neglect or state aversion. Even so, as shown by two case studies, Ottoman subjects of one type or another were found in ports from Surat to Batavia at various moments before 1800. The analysis then turns to later nineteenth-century attempts by Ottoman state actors to augment Ottoman shipping. These efforts were inhibited by the contrasting incentives of private Ottoman seafarers, the dominance of European and Indian ships in the empire’s trade with India, the dislocation of nominal Ottoman territories in the Gulf, and the political economy of the Ottoman Gulf itself. Despite the fact that state-sponsored shipping came to grief, the presence of Ottoman ships in the Indian Ocean invites reflections on the highly mutable character of Ottoman identity and sovereignty, as well as the empire’s relative position in the wider commercial world of the Indian Ocean, across these centuries.