In adapting and publishing his doctoral dissertation, Christian Lekon has performed a valuable service for scholars of modern Indian Ocean history, Islam, and the many regions touched by the Hadhrami diaspora. The ambitious reach of this volume thus stretches from Singapore to Zanzibar, Indonesia to the Hijaz. Despite working from secondary sources (often dated, frequently colonial), Lekon has fashioned a novel argument. Borrowing his theoretical apparatus from Anthony Giddens, Lekon brings to the foreground the temporal and spatial elements shaping the divergent historical courses forged by members of this diaspora. Throughout the different places and periods under review, Lekon addresses himself to four principal axes, helpfully characterised in the opening chapter. These are ‘rules of signification’, particularly important to ‘communication technology’; ‘rules of legitimation’, understood in light of ‘collective beliefs’; ‘authoritative resources’ in the context of ‘political institutions’; and ‘allocative resources’ seen as central to ‘economic institutions’ (p. 24). Each axis reappears in subsequent chapters, further refined to match the historical particularities of the moment and place so characterised. After each chapter, Lekon attaches helpful appendices, summarising the contents of the preceding pages in keeping with these key analytic categories.
After the clear, if bird's eye, first chapter, Lekon moves to describe Hadhramaut within the spatial and temporal frames of his theory. The extended migratory networks of Hadhramis are understood as a ‘locale’, that is to say in a nod to Giddens, a physical setting for social interaction. This locale is then further subdivided into regions. Lekon is not concerned with the ‘national’ regions that have been formed by the states founded within the Indian Ocean rim. Instead, the more salient categories are ‘balad (homeland)’ and ‘mahjar (abroad)’ (p. 45). The distinction between the putative homeland (Hadhramaut) and place of migration are not merely geographical: balad is imagined as a place of moral virtue and associated abundance. The balad was the ‘back’ of the region, whereas the mahjar was the ‘front’. Different standards and different interactions typified social intercourse and self-presentation in the back and front regions respectively (although, as Lekon is quick to point out, with myriad exceptions). Lekon closes this second chapter with a brief survey of relevant literature before moving to a discussion of the human landscape of Hadhramaut in the period 1863–1967.
Lekon's third, fourth and fifth chapters constitute a deserved grouping. The first of these considers ‘the segmentary society’ of Hadhramaut across the entire period reviewed by the volume. The latter two consider ‘the patrimonial society’ of Hadhramaut, but in two periods: 1863–1937 and 1937–67. These headings are not understood as ‘stages’ of inevitable development so much as categories reflecting existing structure. Thus the time-period of the segmentary overlaps substantially with the patrimonial, and neither leads inexorably to the capitalist. In a real sense, they describe different societies occupying shared spaces. Where oral communication is still paramount in the segmentary society, the patrimonial societies described here shift from written to increasingly augmented written communication — enhanced first by the telegraph and then by radio technologies and printing. Simultaneously governing social structures (‘authoritative resources’) changed from spiritually significant personages (sayyids, or those claiming lineal descent from the Prophet) towards Arab nationalists. These developments, taking place at the ‘back’ or balad, occur in dynamic tension with those taking place in the ‘front’ or mahjar, changes tracked in the bulk of the remaining chapters.
The sixth chapter moves out from Hadhramaut to arrive at the subcontinent, exploring Hyderabad from 1853 (the accession of the reformist Prime Minister Salar Jung I, who navigated the collapse of the Moghul Empire and the indirect colonisation of the British) until 1949 (the end of the last nizam or sultan Usman Ali Khan's rule — one year after the annexation of formerly independent Hyderabad by newly independent India). Hadhramis were implicated in, or affected by, the whole host of changes that witnessed the transition from nominal independence to indirect colonial rule, and finally, to annexation by India. Many of the Hadhrami of Hyderabad came first as jam'dars (troop leaders) of mercenary forces. As they integrated into local nobility, they retained their ties to the balad, and thus occasionally conflicts from balad shaped conflicts in Hyderabad as well (p. 195). Ultimately, in Lekon's account, the martial experiences and financial accumulation of Hadhrami mercenaries played the largest role in the relationship between Hyderabad and Hadhramaut. As Hadhramis were pushed out from positions of influence in Hyderabad, they returned to the balad with these resources and re-inserted themselves in local structures of authority, conducting state-building exercises in the homeland (p. 201).
If military involvement characterised the Hadhrami diaspora in Hyderabad, Lekon emphasises business activity and religious authority in discussing the Hadhrami presence in Singapore and the Netherlands East Indies (and later Indonesia). In his seventh chapter, Lekon describes the shift from patrimonial to capitalist society in Java, and engages in an interesting, if rather dated, detour into the theorisation of how agricultural and economic reforms were accomplished in Indonesia's inner islands. He also makes time for an aside into the relative economic success or failure of the Hadhrami community, compared to the ostensibly model minority achievements of the Chinese in Southeast Asia (p. 247). In the Indies, Hadhramis occupied diverse roles. During the nineteenth century, Hadhramis were prominent as successful shipowners: highly important in maritime Southeast Asia (although they were pushed out by European monopolies once steamship travel became the norm). In this region, Hadhramis did not succeed in attracting rents at the scale of the Hyderabadi community, but they were integrated into local manufacturing and some small-scale agricultural holdings (in Singapore real estate investment was a major component of the community's economic activities). Hadhrami success in Southeast Asia had a transformative effect in the balad — so much so, according to Lekon, that it comprised a rival political possibility to locally dominant actors in Hadhramaut. When colonial controls on immigration blocked further Hadhrami movement to the region during the Great Depression, that balad influence was checked and the Hadhrami migration re-directed towards closer shores.
The eighth chapter traces the Hadhrami movement to East Africa, specifically Zanzibar. Coming on the heels of the long Omani rule of the islands, Lekon characterises the diaspora here as particularly transient: ‘only a minority made Zanzibar their permanent home; the majority was a shifting population that stayed for a few years or even just a season and returned to Hadhramaut once they had earned a sufficient amount of money’ (pp. 270–71). The closing year of this chapter, 1964, represents the moment when the Oman-descended ruling elite were overthrown in a popular revolution. This also marks the close of Zanzibar as a place of opportunity for Hadhramis. Given Indian, Indonesian and Singaporean independence, this now left just Saudi Arabia, as Lekon reminds us.
In his penultimate chapter, Christian Lekon follows the Hadhramis who settled in the Hijaz (the western ‘border’ region of the Arabian peninsula, annexed by Saudi Arabia in 1925) from 1869–1967. The first year in this range marks the opening of the Suez Canal and the attendant economic and social changes wrought by dramatically increased shipping through the Gulf. The final year is selected for its importance in the balad (the overthrow of the old order in Hadhramaut as it was annexed by the Communist Republic of South Yemen), as well as its significance (the defeat of Egypt in the Six-Day War, marking the ascendancy of Saudi Arabia in the Gulf). By the end of this period, Saudi Arabia had replaced maritime Southeast Asia as the principal source of remittances: after a century of definition within the Indian Ocean world, Hadhramis at the end of the 1960s were once more ‘Arabs’.
The full scope of Lekon's ambition comes into relief in the final chapter, ‘Conclusion: Bringing globalization back in’. Abandoning what has been, despite its theoretical armature, a largely historical narrative, Lekon attempts to account for the fact that Hadhramaut changed from a segmentary and patrimonial society to a socialist one — unlike the capitalist trajectories of the disparate modern nations to which the Hadhramis had migrated across the Indian Ocean. Somewhat rushed, this final argument strives to link the range and scope of the preceding chapters into an intervention in the theories of globalisation. A compelling idea, the execution is not quite achieved. Nevertheless, this does little to detract from the highly beneficial survey of the Hadhramis across the Indian Ocean of the preceding three hundred pages.
