Space and Scale between the Local, Regional and Global

The principal challenge for future historians of the Red Sea is to con­struct a schema that captures multiple scales - from the local to the regional and the global - and that explores the dynamic interrelation­ships between them.

The first long-distance/international transit trade system linked the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean. This is the macro-level setup that has shaped conventional characterisations of the Red Sea as a conduit. We encounter here commodities extracted or produced outside the Red Sea area, such as spices (the famed ‘spice trade’), textiles, muslin cloth, silk, pottery, glassware, ironware and teak. On this level the Red Sea served as a transit space connecting producers and consumers located beyond its littorals and immediate inlands. This system involved entrepot ports, sophisticated international financial arrangements and long-distance mercantile networks whose origins were removed from the Red Sea litto­rals proper. The role, operation and impact of different trading networks in the Red Sea area - for example, Cairene, Alexandrian, Maghribi, Turkish, Gujarati, Hadrami but also Syrian, Greek and Armenian - is central for delineating not only commercial orbits but also social and cultural spaces between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, Africa and Arabia.^[540] More work could be done to reconstruct the rise, decline and the social and cultural impact of different trading networks on the formation and transformation of Red Sea urban communities.

Transit trade was only one sphere of economic activity in the area. A second inter-regional intermediate commercial arrangement married a regional system of production and consumption with a cross-regional commercial setup in which different commodities produced in parts of the Red Sea area, their hinterlands and aquatic zones, were exported to Egypt and the Mediterranean and further to Europe on the one hand, and to the Gulf, South and Southeast Asia and East Africa on the other. Similarly, commodities from the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean were imported into the Red Sea region for consumption in the Ethiopian region, the Nile Valley, Yemen and the Hijaz as well as in the Red Sea ports. Goods extracted or produced in the Red Sea area and exported include the aromatics trade - especially frankincense and myrrh - ani­mal skins, gold, gems, ivory, ebony, pearls, mother-of-pearl and tortoise­shells, but also slaves, and later, most famously, coffee.

Studying the trajectories of particular commodities or merchants from a ‘global micro-historical’ perspective may be a particularly use­ful way to illuminate multiple connections that animated local, regional and global actors and networks. Tracing the circuits of labour, financ­ing, commercialisation and consumption of commodities such as coffee, pearls and mother-of-pearl allows us to bring into sharper focus multi­ple unexplored connections between local, regional and global historical processes. Though dwarfed by the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea pearling industry - to take one example - serves a case in point. The production, trade and consumption of pearls and mother-of-pearl from the Dahlak and Farasan archipelagos involved distinct infrastructures of financing, labour and commercialisation that brought together an assortment of Red Sea and western Indian Ocean actors. In the case of Dahlaki pearl­ing banks, divers who were either northeast African slaves or freed slaves and Arabs from the Arabian Red Sea coastlands provided the labour; Gulf, Hijazi, Yemeni or Dahlaki (Eritrean) boat owners handled fishing crews and provided for transportation, whereas Indian and Arab mer­chants financed pearl-fishing enterprises and purchased the luxurious marine products that found their way to Bombay and to consumers in the capitals of Europe, to the button-producing factories of northern Italy, Austria-Hungary and, perhaps, to the religious souvenir carving industry which flourished in Bethlehem in Palestine.^[544]

The third system was inter-coastal and intra-regional.

All in all, and although they sometimes overlapped and were comple­mentary and interdependent, these three spheres, propelled chiefly by economic and commercial forces, animated a dense web of multiple dif­ferentiated trade arrangements, shipping networks, currency, credit and debt systems and labour networks. They thus produced variegated spaces between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. One propitious way to examine how the three systems were interwoven is to examine the relationship between seasonal rhythms, production cycles (for example, wheat in Egypt, coffee in Yemen, cotton in India), and transportation patterns (affected by the wind regime but also by the Muslim pilgrim­age) and their impact on the circulation of commodities and people.

Of many potentially promising subjects, one set of themes that is already attracting scholarly attention and that deserves to be at the fore­front of future scholarly efforts involves the impact of extensive inter- and intra-regional migration and exchanges in the basin and beyond it on the social and cultural makeup of Red Sea urban communities and littoral societies. Red Sea port towns mediated connectivities between inland producing areas and forelands and between overseas commerce and inland consumers. Migratory flows in and out of towns were shaped by the spatial positioning and re-positioning of labour and trading flows and networks that resulted from the cyclical ebb and flow of commer­cial abatement and boom periods. It was not rare that large segments of the inhabitants of a given town were migrants from both forelands and inlands. Indeed, in many cases, ‘outsiders’, or ‘strangers’ (for example, Hadramis, Gujaratis) were the most prominent and powerful inhabitants of Red Sea ports (for example, Jiddah, Massawa, Aden). In other words, some Red Sea port towns were where actors involved in all or some of the orbits that I have described above met - at times settling together and forming new hybrid and cosmopolitan communities and spaces. Can we discern singular ‘Red Sea cosmopolitanisms’ in port towns? And if yes, what were their specific features, orientations and were they comparable to one another and to those in the broader Indian Ocean world?

Yet migration into Red Sea towns and littorals did not only involve powerful merchants and entrepreneurs. One subject that has not been studied thoroughly enough is the social and cultural integration of those many northeast Africans who either migrated or were moved in slav­ery to the Arabian coasts and who remained in its towns.^[547] Africans clearly played a role in shaping the societies and cultures into which they were gradually absorbed. In some places such as the Yemeni Tihama region, extensive inter-coastal exchanges produced Arabian-African hybrid border spaces that were perceived as socially and culturally dis­tinct by inland communities.

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A critical subject that begs further study is the question of Red Sea iden­tity. For millennia the Red Sea has been an area characterised by hybrid- ity, where people from the inlands and others coming from abroad met, sometimes mixed, creating idiosyncratic urban or coastal cultures. In the twentieth century, the modern nation-state has all too often obfuscated and attempted to erase past complex local and regional identities. New scholar­ship should take on the task to recover complex senses of identity expressed by or ascribed to the peoples of the Red Sea. It would be important to ask whether the inhabitants of the Red Sea littorals and its islands have shared in the past or still share some type of consciousness or mentalite - in the sense evoked by Annales historians - that is particularly associated with the coast or the sea. Did Red Sea port town and other coastal dwellers, as well as islanders, develop any sense of consciousness or identity as ‘Red Sea people’ or did they identify with more local/regional littoral or offshore sea spaces (mirroring the more localised naming of the Red Sea described above)? The question of identities and cultural and symbolic representa­tions connected to the Red Sea and expressed by or about the inhabitants of the Red Sea littorals is only beginning to receive attention.

A propitious way to further explore notions ofidentity in the Red Sea area is to analyse ‘local’ historical accounts of the region or ofparticular Red Sea port cities, produced by professional and non-professional historians and writers in Egypt, the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somaliland and Yemen.^[549] This should however not be limited to local histories. Studying the different cultural expressions (poetry, prose, songs, folk tales) of littoral societies such as Tihami Yemenis, the Afar in Eritrea and Djibouti, the Arabian Rashayda pastoralists of the eastern Sudan and Eritrea, or indeed island communities such as those inhabiting the Farasan and Dahlak archipelagos, may illuminate our understanding of the ways that Red Sea coastal dwellers constructed identities that related to their maritime environment.⁵⁷

One revealing anecdotic example of a derogatory appellation used by inlanders to refer to Red Sea coastal and urban cosmopolitan communi­ties, and employed on both sides of the Red Sea, is tarsh al-bahr (‘spew/ vomit of the sea’). Originally used by Arabs to refer to non-Arab pil­grims arriving to the Hijaz and Mecca, the expression is now sometimes employed by the inhabitants of the inland Najd region of Saudi Arabia to pejoratively designate the cosmopolitan inhabitants of the Hijaz and the port of Jiddah.⁵⁸ Similarly, on the other side of the Red Sea, in the context of mid-twentieth-century Eritrean nationalism, some Tigre- speaking inlanders referred to those urban cosmopolitan Arabs in the port of Massawa as the tarsh al-bahr, or those whom the sea has spat out onto the Eritrean shores, and who were ‘foreign’ to Eritrea, and therefore less legitimate in making claims in nationalist politics.⁵⁹ This example could suggest how an external designation may have promoted both a sense of identity as coastal dwellers and a shared identity with other lit­toral people in the broader Red Sea basin.