Muslims of western South Asia were major merchants across the British-controlled Indian Ocean from Durban in South Africa to Rangoon in Burma. This talk focuses on the merchant homes, tangible sites of teak and brick that continue to exist today and offer an alternative archive to studying this history. Pant reflects on what colonial capitalism in the Indian Ocean looked like from the perspective of these intimate sites and considers the effective dimensions of mercantile subjectivity that produced the flexible persons central to the post-slavery era of indentured labor migration.
