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What’s in a World? Economic, political and cultural convergence across the medieval western Indian Ocean. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.121185 Gajewska, Maria Marsham, Andrew Sarris, Peter The study of the archaeology and history of the Indian Ocean littoral is often framed through the lens of the “Indian Ocean World”. This framework goes beyond the more traditional focus on political frontiers and land-based boundaries, conceptualising the sea as a sphere of connections, not as a barrier. Despite its obvious merits, the concept of the “Indian Ocean World” is rarely defined or theorised in historical and especially archaeological scholarship focused on the medieval period. This dissertation attempts to fill this gap. In doing so, it begins with the assumption that for a “world” to be a meaningful designation for a geographical region requires not only connectivity across that region, but for that connectivity to engender a degree of political, cultural and social convergence. Evidence for such convergence from port sites from across the western Indian Ocean is examined, primarily through the prism of archaeological material culture, but contextualised through written sources. The results show that different parts of the western Indian Ocean littoral responded to trans-oceanic connectivity in different ways, and that the degree of developmental convergence exhibited by them was influenced to a large extent by the local environment, topography and climate. This provides the basis for the proposition of two qualitatively different “Indian Ocean Worlds” across the medieval oceanic littoral. University of Cambridge 2024-12-29 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) eng https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/389165 embargo 2026-09-08 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/af65805d-55b8-493c-a5f8-209967bbfad4/download a085afdcc4b98a7be484a6e49848431d https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/772c89dd-e0d5-4437-afd8-d56fa5e6ca68/download 87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved Indian Ocean Archaeology Maritime history Islamic archaeology Medieval history Economic history Indian Ocean trade