Captured at Sea (2019) by Jatin Dua: piracy and protection in the Indian Ocean

The book

Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean is by Jatin Dua, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. University of California Press published it in December 2019 in its Atelier series on ethnographic inquiry. It has 264 pages with photographs, maps and illustrations (University of California Press).

How it was researched

The book follows how six men seized a Liberian-flagged oil tanker and negotiated a large ransom. To tell that story Dua worked in several places: among Somali coastal communities connected with piracy, aboard multinational container ships, and in the London offices where maritime insurance is arranged (University of California Press). The background to the piracy years is on Piracy off Somalia.

What is in it

After an introduction titled "An Anthropology of Protection", the chapters are:

• Protectors of the Sea, on the rise of piracy off the Somali coast
• Anchoring Pirates, on how a "protection economy" was rooted on land
• Regulating the Ocean, on the international governance of counter-piracy
• Markets of Negotiation, on how a ransom is made
• Captivity at Sea, on pirates and the sailors of wooden dhows

An epilogue is titled "The Gifts of the Sea" (University of California Press).

Its argument

Dua argues that the seas are places of regulation, connection and trade that do not fit a simple split between legal and illegal. He treats piracy from about 2007 to 2012 as one phase in a long history of "parallel and competing systems" of protection in the western Indian Ocean. In her review in Society and Space, Nidhi Mahajan described how the book links capture at sea to claims over a "pastoral commons" on land, to kin groups that pay compensation, and to the economy of khat, and how it reads captivity as a form of living together that could include shared meals and prayer (Society and Space). Laleh Khalili of SOAS wrote that it shows how insurers, shipping firms and naval forces are also part of the political economy of protection (University of California Press). The trade itself is described on The khat trade, and coastal livelihoods on Fishing and the sea.

How it was received

The book won the 2020 Elliott P. Skinner Book Prize of the Association for Africanist Anthropology (University of Michigan) and an honourable mention for the Monsoon Book Prize in Political Economy in 2024. Society and Space ran a review forum on it in 2021, in which one reviewer called it theoretically rigorous and ethnographically sensitive (Society and Space forum). The anthropologist James Ferguson described it as based on "extraordinary fieldwork".

Where to read it

It is sold in hardback, paperback and as an ebook by University of California Press and is held by university libraries. A journalist's account of the same years is The Pirates of Somalia by Jay Bahadur.