Scholar Voices: Margariti

Indian Ocean: Cradle of Globalization
Scholar Voices
Roxani Margariti

Port cities of the Indian Ocean littoral are dynamic cosomopolitan centers. Roxani Margariti in A city and the sea: Maritime trade and urban organization in medieval Aden, focuses on maritime trade and urban organization in medieval Aden (ca. 1083-1229), the topic of her doctoral dissertation.

Roxani Margariti first expressed surprise that no comprehensively source-based history of the city had yet been written, although, from the 10th century on, Aden was one of the major entrepots of the India trade. Her goal is to place the study of medieval Aden within the historiography of urban centers of the Islamic Middle East, the Indian Ocean, and the medieval world.

Margariti begins by asking a series of questions about the important structures of Aden:

Why did a major entrepot develop on the barren rocks of the Aden peninsula at that particular spot in the western corner of Arabia?
What was the city's relationship to its hinterland?
How did the physical make-up of the Indian Ocean emporium reflect the types of mercantile activity involved in "international" maritime trade?
What kinds of urban institutions grew with or in response to trade?
How did local merchants participate, what kinds of enterprise did they undertake, and what alliances did they forge in the process?
How did the different states that centered in or controlled Aden at different points in its medieval period regulate, foster, and exploit commercial traffic?

The answers to these questions come from understanding Aden as a product of organic growth and conscious development efforts by the state and its merchants. While Aden was not a planned city, it was strategically located geographically. The steady construction and improvement of physical and institutional facilities aimed at accommodating trade and maximizing commercial profits. Water resources were a constant concern for the city's success and survival, but Aden emerged as a central place at the head of a web of important routes and commanding a number of satellite sites.

Margariti attributes the enduring long-term success of Aden not to directing traffic through the city or to extracting taxes by force, but to the services that the city had to offer to traders and to the way Aden merchants became major entrepreneurs in the Indian Ocean scene. Local shipping businesses, a shipbuilding industry, and the provision of mercantile and legal services to transient traders secured for the city's merchants a central position in regional and transregional networks.

Sources for the study of the medieval port city of Aden:

Documentary

Published and unpublished Geniza document included in the projected "India Book" by S.D. Goitein (forthcoming posthumous publication, edited by M. Friedman)
S.D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton, 1973). S.D. Goitein, "Portrait of a Medieval India Trader: Three Letters from the Cairo Geniza," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 50 (1987) 449-464.

Literary

Abo Makhrama, TÂrokh thaghr adan. Ed. O. Lˆfgren, Texte Zur Kenntnis Aden im Mittelalter.
Ibn al-Mujawir, TÂrokh al-mustab_ir. Ed. O. Lˆfgren (Leiden 1951)

Archaeological

G. King and C. Tonghini, A Survey of the Islamic Sites near Aden and in the Abyan District of Yemen [School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (London 1996)].
A. Rougeulle, "Notes on pre- and early Islamic harbours of "a?ramawt (Yemen)," Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 31 (2001) 1-11.

Miscellaneous on Urban Studies/Cities/Aden

J.D. Tracy, City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2000).
R.J. Gavin, Aden Under British Rule, 1839-1967 (New York, 1975)
F.M. Hunter, An Account of the British Settlement of Aden in Arabia (London, 1877)

Roxani Margariti

Emory University

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