The Archaeology of Modern Worlds in the Indian Ocean is a collection of historical archaeological studies from various places around the Indian Ocean World. By bringing together specialists in Indian Ocean historical archaeology, the editors, Mark William Hauser and Julia Jong Haines, create space for us to see the long histories of connections, networks, exchanges, and globalization that have created the Indian Ocean World. They make a strong case for an Indian Ocean-centered historical archaeology of the region. This framework and the chapters that act as evidence for its effectiveness are presented as a corrective to the overrepresentation of the Atlantic World and European influence within the field of historical archaeology. This book joins a small but growing collection of scholarly voices that see the archaeological record of the Indian Ocean as a useful counterpoint or contrast to Atlantic and European narratives of world history. At its center, this book emphasizes the relationality between far-flung sites of the Indian Ocean by using the productive tension between the “explicitly micro-historical, material, and situated approaches” (2) of the contributors and the broadly interconnected and transnational approach of the chapters when taken as a whole. When read comparatively, readers can make connections between various sites in the Indian Ocean, including the Mascarene Islands, Zanzibar, the Coromandel Coast, and Goa.

The book consists of an introduction, eight chapters each featuring a different historical archaeological site, and two commentary chapters acting as conclusions. Taking Hauser and Haines’ advice to read the connections between chapters as instructions, several notable interventions emerge from the work collected here. First, this book meaningfully centers the Indian Ocean within the conversation about the historical archaeology of globalization. Or, to draw on Supriya Varma’s commentary chapter, it is “a much-needed corrective by shifting the gaze from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean” (243). This shifting gaze paves the way for Chapurukha Kusimba in chapter ten to compile archaeological evidence from the Swahili world and use it to understand the Indian Ocean as “one of the oldest examples of globalization” (228). This point contradicts the persistent notion that European exploration and colonization sparked globalization. The theme of connectivity within the Western Indian Ocean is picked up by Krish Seetah, Stefania Manfio, and Akshay Sarathi in chapter four, which emphasizes interisland relationships in its examination of the links between Zanzibar and Mauritius that formed as a result of the history of slavery. They present the island archaeology of the Indian Ocean as a counterpoint to notions of islands as isolated and bounded. In contrast, Zanzibar and Mauritius are presented as hyperconnected nodes within a globalized ocean world. The notion of water as connecting geographically distant sites rather than isolating them, surfaces in chapter eight by Haines and Hauser, who use the symbolic and social roles of water to draw comparisons between sites of diasporic labor in Mauritius and on the lower Coromandel coast of India. This book succeeds in rooting globalization in regional connections rather than European intervention.

Another contribution that arises from reading across chapters is a relatively consistent argument for expanding the temporal frames of the archaeological study of the Indian Ocean. The title of the book cites “modern worlds” as a reference to the effort to focus on the historical archaeology of roughly the past five hundred years. This, in itself, is a contribution to Indian Ocean archaeology as the vast majority of archaeology in the region attends to the pre-1500 period. Varma elaborates on this theme of expanding time frames in his concluding commentary chapter wherein he highlights the tension between the modern-era orientation of the field of historical archaeology and the deeper time scale to which one could apply the methodology within the Indian Ocean (243). This book thus works simultaneously to pull the archaeological study of the Indian Ocean forward in time to consider the modern era and to pull the field of historical archaeology backward in time to apply the methodology to deeper timescales. This works better in some chapters than others. For example, Ellen Hsieh and Takashi Sakai’s thousand-year history of connections between Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean is effective in bringing together analyses of different time periods to present an argument for the utility of longue durée comparative archaeology. While forging connections between time periods is a useful aim, closer attention to the modern era might have helped provide some much-needed focus in a book that is already juggling many themes, locations, and peoples.

Finally, this book offers a series of useful cases centering on the experiences of ordinary people in our understanding of colonialism, historical heritage, migration, transnational connections, and the processes of history generally. In the context of Indian Ocean studies, this is particularly important as a mode of decolonizing history and shifting the focus away from the agency and priorities of European intervention. For example, Saša Čaval and Alessandra Cianciosi offer a gendered account of how female migrants, both enslaved and free, to the Mascarenes, experienced the colonial institution of quarantine stations. In the following chapter, Adria LaViolette and Neil Norman center an analysis of Portuguese colonialism in Zanzibar in a rural site of agricultural labor, rather than the more familiar imposing fortresses associated with this region. As a final example, Brian Wilson argues that the decline of European spatial organization within Goa did not mean that the city had fallen to ruins, as contemporary European commentary suggests, but rather made way for a robust subaltern population. His research on this population “calls for a reconsideration of the heritage management practices in Goa today that perpetuate these colonial narratives” and for centering these ordinary, subaltern populations within collective historical memory (208).

If there is a critique to be made, it is that this book leaves the implicit comparisons between chapters to do much of the heavy lifting rather than making these themes more explicit within the introduction. This would also have addressed the fact that this book does not do much interpretation for nonarchaeologists. Indian Ocean studies more generally is a rather small and interdisciplinary field, and it would be nice if nonarchaeologists had more access to the insights of historical archaeologists via this book. That said, there is much to recommend for audiences within the field of archaeology and for those willing to do the work to read across chapters. For archaeologists of the Indian Ocean, who are likely to be the primary audience, this book offers a refreshing temporal shift towards the modern era, argues for an expanded imagining of what time periods and people should be centered within Indian Ocean archaeology, and demonstrates that historical archaeology is a crucial methodological approach to studying the region. For historical archaeologists generally, this book makes a strong argument in defense of the Indian Ocean as an important space of analysis and point of contrast with other regions. This book ultimately succeeds in its goal of decentering Europe and Eurocentric narratives and instead offering some useful models for centering the Indian Ocean within the modern world.