Contributing to Routledge, Nisha Matthew provides that Arabia and the Persian Gulf have been part of the social and cultural imaginary of Malabar and vice-versa for centuries. These two regions have been pivotal to maritime trade, and have a shared history of urbanisation since the 8th century.

Nisha’s paper investigates the trajectories of the 21st century urbanisation of Dubai in the Persian Gulf, and Malabar, or more broadly Kerala in southwestern India, and presents how the two regions on either side of the Arabian Sea continue to be implicated in many of the historic connections that shaped their societies as part of the Asian maritime trade network.