Reflections on the Arabian Seas in the Eighteenth Century

Although this paper builds on earlier research, let me frankly confess that this is still a preliminary report as it is not based on comprehensive research in the original sources upon which my work on the seventeenth centuryis based. Given the huge amount of sources available for the eighteenth century, to write a truly thorough paper on the Arabian seas in the eighteenth century would take many years – nay, a life-time so voluminous is it. Holden Furber, perhaps the greatest historian of the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean, started to work on this topic in 1936, published a volume on the 1780–1790 period in 1948 and then announced he would write further volumes tracing the story back into the seventeenth century. But Holden Furber spent the rest of his life hunting down further archival material, with new material constantly forcing him to delay further publications for another forty years. Even then he was only able to write a preliminary survey of the eighteenth century, ending with the causing note that, of course, he had not studied the Dutch material as well as he would have liked to.