Margins of the Market

"This is a superb and vitally important book: conceptually sophisticated, imaginatively researched, and beautifully written. Johan Mathew brings into view the shifting networks of commerce around the Arabian Sea’s littoral, forged in the shadows of imperial regulation—a traffic in people, guns, and gold. This book is a breakthrough in Indian Ocean history, with huge contemporary resonance. And it is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of global capitalism."—Sunil Amrith, Harvard University

"This brilliant book draws on unique primary sources and private archives to tell vivid stories, beautifully framed and theoretically rich, about the traffic in licit and illicit goods across the Arabian Sea. Its wonderful account of the smuggling of coins, guns, and humans, and also of the secret world of price-setting, shows how such trade is the shadowy other of more mundane forms of capital accumulation."—Laleh Khalili, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

"Johan Mathew's Margins of the Market provides a valuable corrective to the prevalent idea that trafficking and smuggling operate outside capitalism. Mathew shows, in vivid detail and with wide-ranging, in-depth research, how modern empires and nations around the Arabian Sea have struggled to frame the market inside a vast world of coercive profit making—based on physical control of human beings, weapons, goods, and money—whose expansive margins in fact provide capitalism much of its lucrative, adaptive dynamism."—David Ludden, New York University