The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [87]
Ibn Battuta here showed a concern for his slave girls, and he wrote once of them that 'it is my habit never to travel without them.'159 He is not however referring to the same two girls all the time, for he was, as Dunn puts it in his excellent reconstruction of his travels, 'a man with a long history of abandoning we may only guess how many sons and daughters in various parts of the Muslim world.'160 He had a son to a Moroccan woman/wife in Damascus, who died age 10, a daughter to a slave girl in Bukhara, who died, a daughter in Delhi to a wife, another to a slave girl in Malabar, a son in the Maldives to a wife. Indeed, he 'married several women' in the Maldives. He pointed out that 'Any of the visitors who wishes to marry may do so, but when it is time to leave he divorces the woman, because their women never leave the country.'161 Given that he usually travelled with at least one slave girl, we can only assume his progeny were scattered all over the shores of the Indian Ocean and beyond.
In this matter he was not unusual, and we may assume that not only Muslim travellers had 'wives in every port'. Vincent Le Blanc was impressed with the system he found in Cambay (see page 98). Yet it has been found in the Muslim case much more than in other societies at this time. Some members of the crew that Alan Villiers sailed with had several wives in different places. One nakhoda from Sur had a son in Pemba, another in the Comoros, and a daughter from a secondary wife from the African interior.162 The Muslim custom of allowing several 'legal' wives, and then the practice, in theory only Shiah but in fact done more widely, of muta, or temporary marriage, which really became part of customary law among travelling Muslims, made it much easier for Muslims to follow this maritime tradition. Ibn Battuta may have been more scrupulous in this matter, for in the Maldives at least he divorced his wives before he left.
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Chapter 5
Europeans in an Indian Ocean world
This chapter provides a long analysis of the arrival, and impact, of Europeans in the Indian Ocean up to the mid eighteenth century. The aim is to locate these Europeans in the structures we have already described in the previous chapter. In a possibly perverse way, what we intend to show is that the European presence over its first 250 years certainly varied from place to place and time to time, but overall the effects on the Indian Ocean, its trade, its people, even its politics, was limited. The next chapter deals in detail with continuing structures, which by and large the Europeans were forced to accommodate, or concerning which they had no knowledge at all. Here we will look not only at trade, the topic which so far has dominated the historiography of the Indian Ocean, but also at religious movements, and the social history of people on ships. Finally we will note how the Indian Ocean was now much more part of a wider world than had been the case in previous centuries. In the terms set out by Horden and Purcell, we increasingly have to write a history where the history in the ocean, that is a history which looks beyond its geographical bounds, is more important than an autonomous history of the ocean. Yet so far these links to the rest