Letters to the Sheikh: Political and economic transformations in the Indian Ocean World as reflected in the letters to the ʿAbriyin of al-Hamraʾ (Oman) during the long 19th century

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Johann Büssow; Privatdozentin Dr. Michaela Hoffmann-Ruf
• Subject Area: Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies ; Economic and Social History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 446674248

This project is devoted to the social, political and economic history of Central Oman during the long nineteenth century (here defined as the time span 1792-1920). Its main source is a selection of texts from the letter archive of a local elite family, the ʿAbriyin of al-Hamraʾ. The letters will be examined with a combination of serial and qualitative analysis. Based on this, individual studies will focus on social and political networks, economic relations and historical semantics. The general aim of the project is to build a bridge between two strands of research that have been largely pursued in isolation from each other: the macro-level history of Oman and the Indian Ocean and the micro-level history of the ʿAbriyin as an important tribal group. By focussing on the concerns and strategies of local actors, the project will complement the existing research on the history of Oman by a micro-historical perspective. Another focus of research is the language of letter communication, which will be examined with regard to questions of conceptual history and historical semantics. The project intends to contribute to a new understanding of Oman as a historical region in its trans-regional framework. In this regard, we will explore the reaction of the letters’ authors to political and economic developments in the Indian Ocean. We shall further challenge basic assumptions in the research literature, such as the isolation and stagnation of central Oman during the period (in contrast to the Omani territories in East Africa). A special feature of the project is the application of digital tools that have rarely been used in historical studies so far, such as network analysis and web GIS (online geographic information systems).The applicants can build on extensive preliminary work, including a study on Sheikh Muhsin bin Zahran al-ʿAbri (d. 1873) as a political actor as well as a custom-made relational database. The analysis of the archival material focuses on five select correspondences between the ʿAbriyin and other local actors and will proceed in three steps. We shall begin with a serial analysis, which generates information on the correspondences’ intensity and duration and allows for a further selection of letters with special significance for our concerns. In the following, these select texts will be subjected to in-depth analysis within the framework of three thematic case studies. Finally, the results will be discussed in the wider context of the history of Oman and the Indian Ocean.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants