Ocean of Trade

Pedro Machado's interests in the connected histories of the Indian Ocean have been developed through extensive multi-sited fieldwork and research in archives in India, Mozambique, England, Portugal and South Africa. He received the Gulbenkian Fellowship for research in Portugal and a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh's World History Center in 2011-12. Pedro Machado has held postdoctoral and teaching positions at New York University and Santa Clara University, California, and is currently Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he teaches global and world history. His courses have covered such diverse topics as the history of slavery and unfreedom in world history; the making and unmaking of the postwar world; oceans in history; the Indian Ocean in history, culture and society; and the historiographical turn by scholars to global history. His commitment to bringing his research expertise into the classroom was recognised with an Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award in 2012. His current research interests focus on the study of human-environment interaction in the Indian Ocean through a large-scale and collaborative project organized by McGill University's Indian Ocean World Centre, and on the wide-ranging commodity histories of the ocean's pearling trades.