The Indian Ocean World Podcast

Our usual host, Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill), is our interviewee this week, answering a few questions about his first monograph, On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c.1830-1890 (Cambridge UP, 2022) with our producer, Sam Gleave Riemann. As well as introducing the book to listeners who haven't had a chance to read it yet, they answer a handful of questions...

This week, our host Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) joins in conversation with Dr. Alice Nyawira Karuri (Strathmore) to discuss her recent chapter "Adaptation of Small-Scale Tea and Coffee Farmers in Kenya to Climate Change," published in the African Handbook of Climate Change Adaptation (Springer, 2021). Their conversation covers Dr. Karuri's economic research into the challenges facing Kenyan...

Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined this week by Prof. Justin Raycraft (Lethbridge) to discuss his 2021 paper, “Islamic Discourses of Environmental Change on the Swahili Coast of Southern Tanzania.” Their conversation covers not just Prof. Raycraft's fascinating analysis of Islam's role in his respondents' interpretation of a changing environment, but covers in depth the ethnographic proce...

This week, Prof. Pao-Kuan Wang (Academia Sinica) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to discuss the Reconstructed East Asian Climate Historical Encoded Series (REACHES) database, a staggering initiative that, under Prof. Wang’s directorship, standardizes and makes available climate data based on historical records spanning Ming and Qing China. Their conversation covers the long history of Prof...

Prof. Kasia Paprocki (LSE) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to discuss her first monograph, Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh, which was published by Cornell University Press in 2021. They discuss Prof. Paprocki’s longstanding work with peasant movements in southwest Bangladesh, challenging normative problems in international narratives ar...

Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) welcomes Prof. Ruth Mostern (Pittsburgh) to discuss her 2021 book, The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History. They consider the river’s central role in Chinese history, moving water, sediment, people, and goods, along with the research and publication processes of environmental history. Prof. Mostern is Professor in Pitt’s Department of History, where she...

Prof. Ruth Morgan (Australian National University) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to discuss her 2021 article “Health, Hearth and Empire: Climate, Race and Reproduction in British India and Western Australia.” Their conversation covers the nuances of 19th-century British imperial policy in the Indian Ocean World, the shortfalls of contemporary climatic theories of race and health, and the...

Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Dr. Julia Jong Haines (Cornell) to discuss her archeological research at Bras D’Eau National Park in Mauritius, a former sugar plantation. Their conversation covers trees as archeological artifacts, Mauritian environmental degradation beyond the dodo, and the palimpsestic legacies of slavery and indenture on the Mauritian landscape. Dr. Haines complet...

Prof. Sugata Ray (UC Berkeley) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to delve into the history of two much-maligned birds of the early modern Indian Ocean world: the dodo and the turkey. As a historian of South Asian art working at the intersection of animal, environmental, and postcolonial studies, Prof. Ray starts with pictures of these birds and expands to discuss their intertwining political...

Prof. Franziska Fay (JGU Mainz) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to discuss two recent publications, “‘Kuishi Ughaibuni’: Emplaced Absence, the Zanzibar Diaspora Policy, and Young Men's Experiences of Belonging Between Zanzibar and Oman” and “‘To Everyone Who Told Zanzis That They Are Not Omani’: Young Swahili-speaking Omanis’ Belonging in Postdiaspora Oman.” These two papers explore the Za...

Dr. Harriet Mercer (Cambridge) joins Dr. Julie Babin (IOWC, McGill) to discuss her recent article on “Atmospheric Archives: Gender and Climate Knowledge in Colonial Tasmania.” Their conversation and Dr. Mercer’s research delve into the history of “climate history,” challenging established methodologies and epistemologies that exclude certain perspectives along the lines of gender, race, class, and...

Dr. Manikarnika Dutta, a Research Associate in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, joins Dr. Julie Babin to discuss her research into the intersection of medical, colonial, and maritime history in nineteenth-century Calcutta. This research began with a doctoral thesis completed in 2019, but today we focus on the peer-reviewed paper, "Cholera, British seamen and maritime anxieties i...

Dr. Anna Winterbottom (McGill) and Prof. Victoria Dickenson (McGill) join Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to discuss the Gwillim Project, a multinational research project exploring the remarkable artistic and epistolary output of two English sisters, Mary Symonds and Elizabeth Gwillim, living in early-nineteenth-century Madras. Elizabeth Gwillim’s high-quality, to-scale natural history drawings...

What does it mean when we talk about micro-financing the rural economy? And how does micro-financing apply to Cambodia? These questions are explored by Professor W. Nathan Green, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore.  Prof. Green’s research critically examines the political ecologies of agrarian finance and infrastructure in Southeast Asia, wit...

In this podcast, Dr. Nuno Grancho, a postdoctoral fellow and Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen, discusses his research into the architecture of the island city of Diu, Gujarat, West India. Focussing on the five centuries of Diu’s Portuguese occupation (1514-1961) his work demonstrates the complex nature of overlap between spatial and function...

The IOWC Podcast team had the opportunity of interviewing Dr. Hasan H. Karrar, an Associate Professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (“LUMS,” Lahore, Pakistan) who specializes in modern Chinese and Central Asian history and political economy. In this podcast, Dr. Karrar delves into his recent working paper entitled “The Indus Delta Between Past and Future: Precarious Livelihoods a...

In this podcast, our host Philip Gooding interviews Professor Kaustubh Mani Sengupta (Bankura University, West Bengal, India) on his recent article published in the fifth volume of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies (JIOWS), entitled “William Tolly and His Canal: Navigating Calcutta in the Late-Eighteenth Century.” Specifically, Prof. Sengupta elaborates on the making of one particularly ar...

Where does your honey come from? Who produces it and who benefits from its consumption? In this podcast, Dr. Denise Matias (Associate Researcher, Centre for Development Research, University of Bonn) discusses her research into Asian honeybee farming. While predominantly focussing on indigenous practices of honey cultivation in the forests of the Palawan Islands, the Philippines, the podcast sheds...

Dr. Mikko Toivanen (Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich) joins us to discuss his research on colonial tourism and its relationship with the environment throughout various Southeast and South Asian colonies in the 19th century. While frequently considered through a historical, economic or scientific lens, these colonial strongholds were also developed as havens of leisure tourism for travelling Eu...

In this podcast, the IOWC podcast team had the pleasure of interviewing Patrick Slack, a PhD student studying under the McGill University Geography Department. Throughout the conversation, Patrick discusses his ongoing research (MA and PhD) into the role that black cardamom plays in upland, ethnic minority semi-subsistence livelihoods in the western Sino-Vietnamese borderlands. Black cardamom – a...

In this podcast, Prof. Ling Zhang (Boston College, USA) unravels the multi-layered and multi-faceted impact of a major climatic anomaly in northern Song China in the 11th-century shift of the Yellow River's course north to the Hebei province (1048-1128 CE). She tells us her initial impressions of northern China as a desolate region compared to the prosperous south made her question a crucial and u...

In this podcast, Dr Chandni Singh (Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore, India) and Prof. Roger Few (University of East Anglia) discuss the different meanings of recovery from disasters and highlight how disasters are caused as much by physical hazards as they are socially generated. Using case studies from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Singh and Few argue that long-term re...

The IOWC podcast team interviews Dr. Lisa Schipper (University of Oxford) an Environmental Social Science Research Fellow at the Environmental Change Institute (ECI). Dr. Schipper’s research explores the interlinkages between climate change and human development, as she seeks to address the question of whether fair and just development is possible in a changing climate. Our discussion covers Dr. S...

Professor Jakobina Arch (Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington) discusses her research into coastal shipping of Tokugawa Japan (17th century -19th century), and accounts of shipwrecks' survivors as insights on the religious world of sailors. Unraveling how Western and Meiji sources have spoken disparagingly of the designs of the 'bezaisen' or coastal ships of the Tokugawa period, Arch proffers...

In this podcast, assistant professor Alexandra Kelly (University of Wyoming) discusses her Spring 2021 publication of Consuming Ivory: Mercantile Legacies of East Africa and New England (Culture, Place, and Nature). Throughout the podcast, Dr. Kelly delves into the complex global legacies of the historical ivory trade. From elephant conservation efforts to the cultural heritage industries in New E...