“Perhaps this is true of any book, but Margins of the Market took a rather circuitous route from a dissertation proposal to a published book. The themes and questions at the center of the project were profoundly transformed over the course of researching, writing, rewriting, and arguably took on new meanings even after the text was etched between covers.”
The dissertation began with my interest in the cultural processes of globalization. I belong to a community in India known as “Syrian Christians,” who trace their lineage back two millennia to the conversion of trading communities in what is today Kerala by early Jewish-Christian converts from the Levant. This ancestry made me interested a much longer history of globalization than was usually acknowledged in the public discourse. But any ancestral connections to the Middle East paled in comparison to my childhood spent in the strange expatriate bubbles of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I attended an American International school, and my friends at school and in the walled compound in which we lived, were from every corner of the globe. My parents had grown up in different corners of India and my cousins and relatives were similarly spread across North America, Africa, and Asia. We had a housekeeper and caregiver from Eritrea, and the language we spoke at home was English. I did not grow up with any sense of an autochthonous culture or national identity. A globalized world was a given for me, and I wanted to understand why.
So my initial dissertation proposal and the first months of my research concerned cultural histories of globalization, particularly the links between Western India and Oman. Having had only a minimal exposure to Arabic in the expatriate life of Riyadh, I spent years before and during graduate school studying the language in Yemen, Egypt, and classrooms in the U.S. and U.K. I assiduously collected any materials I could find in Arabic and hoped to subject them to the kinds of close literary analysis that were in vogue in history departments in the late 2000s. I was working towards an understanding of different modes of mercantile correspondence and the peculiar structures of the al-Bu Sa’idi dynasty’s rule in Oman under the heavy hand of British-Indian gunboat diplomacy.
But as I pursued this work, the world was changing around me. The 2008 financial crisis and its long fallout forced many of us to pay attention to the economy and the structures of capitalism that had overturned our lives. The 1990s and early 2000s had seemed to herald the “End of History” or at least the “Clash of Civilizations” in which the debates over political economy had been replaced with cultural and religious conflicts. The Financial Crisis revealed that the apparent stability of the neoliberal world order was a mirage. The continuing reverberations of economic crisis and the persistent challenges of political economy across the globe eventually filtered into the head of an insignificant graduate student buried in the archives.
I began to see moral and legal debates in the archives over the abolition of slavery as economic debates about the nature of labor. Political and military concerns over the arms trade became inflected with commercial considerations about the security of trade routes and property rights. The voluminous but mind-numbing statistics on trade, customs revenues and industrial production did not so much encapsulate the economy as serve to conceal intensive and extensive colonial interventions in commerce. The centrality of trade, finance and capitalism to the research I was undertaking, slowly dawned in the archives and progressively expanded as I completed the dissertation.
These interests only deepened when I began my first job, in which I was jointly appointed in a department of history and a wonderfully heterodox economics department. The University of Massachusetts, Amherst was an amazing place to think about capitalism in the wake of 2008. My Marxist, feminist and generally open-minded colleagues pushed me to think through the project in new ways and exposed me to new disciplinary literatures. Thanks to the SSRC’s Inter-Asia fellowship, I spent a year integrating East Africa into the book, rewriting the manuscript and submitting it for review.
By the time my book finally became incarnate as ink on paper, I felt a strange sense of alienation. A part of my mind, my life, my labor was reified into text. This commodity was purchased and borrowed, read and interpreted, praised and critiqued, mostly without my awareness. This small commodity that circulates through different hands preserves typographical errors, historiographical omissions, and theoretical lacunae. There are many things that I would like to change, but cannot. It will always be a historical artifact of a young-ish scholar anxious to get tenure and wrestling with the crises endemic to capitalism.
My greatest satisfaction and most substantial regret about the book both emerge from the same source. As I was finishing my dissertation, there was a great deal of anxiety amongst my fellow graduate students that the “good” university presses were not interested in monographs about South Asia much less the Indian Ocean. So, I worked desperately to pare back and tone down my interest in various social theorists and scholarly debates. I was convinced that if the book was not published by a top press, I would not get tenure. So this book had to appeal to the broadest possible public, in order to gain the interest of editors. I purged the manuscript of long sentences and long paragraphs, of references to other books and other scholars, burying as much as possible in the footnotes. I simplified, over-simplified and simply dumbed-down many arguments to make the book accessible to a lay reader.
This was in many ways a great success. I have had numerous colleagues tell me that they assign parts of the book to undergraduates and that students really enjoy and engage with material. The book also seems to have found an audience beyond history departments and beyond scholars of the Indian Ocean and I find this breadth of engagement is quite heartening. However, I believe this breadth has come at the cost of a depth of impact. The reviews of my book were mixed at best, and I’m not sure how far the ideas and arguments have penetrated into the scholarship. I had made a point of cutting the introduction to a bare minimum, condemning my engagement with various theoretical and conceptual works to what I hoped would be a trail of breadcrumbs in the footnotes. But I should have known almost no one reads the footnotes! I fear that my effort to make ideas accessible is largely read as theoretical and conceptual shallowness.
But then again I don’t know, and will never know what most of the readers of this book actually think about it. It is in the nature of published work that it slowly and circuitously filters into an anonymous crowd. Sales and royalties provide a very incomplete and skewed metric of who, where and why someone might pick up this book and flip through its pages. The world changes a book as you write it, and when the book is finished, the world keeps changing: altering how and who reads it. Having alienated one’s labor and sold a part of yourself, the author must go on. I now invest my thoughts, ideas, obsessions, and experience into the production of a new book; yet another commodity whose journeys into the world I will never be able to follow.
Johan Mathew
Johan Mathew is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (UC Press, 2016) as well as articles in numerous journals including Comparative Studies in Society and History, History Workshop Journal, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. He is currently writing his second book, tentatively entitled, “Opiates of the Masses: A Biography of Human Capital.” This book uses the consumption of cannabis and opium as a prism through which we can understand how working people were treated as a species of human capital.