This collective places ports-of-trade across the Indian Ocean within the wider framework of negotiations, exchanges and circulations.It interrogates the port-of-trade experience along the ocean from Bandar Abbas, Persia to Broome, Western Australia. With a temporal span ranging from the Early Historic Period to late capitalism, it privileges ports-of-trade from 1400 CE and their negotiations with capitalism and colonialism. Arguing for a different urban history of ports, the volume asks whether the port-of-trade urban experience, and its spatiality and identity, was different from its inland counterparts.