Indian Ocean Histories

The Many Worlds of Michael Naylor Pearson

Rila Mukherjee, Radhika Seshan, Rila Mukherjee, Radhika Seshan

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138611818
• eBook ISBN: 9781000649895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la India y el sur de Asia

This book offers a global history of the Indian Ocean and focuses on a holistic perspective of the worlds of water. It builds on maritime historian Michael Naylor Pearson's works, his unorthodox approach and strong influence on the study of the Indian Ocean in viewing the oceanic space as replete with human experiences and not as an artefact of empire or as the theatre of European commercial and imperial transits focused only on trade.

This interdisciplinary volume presents several ways of writing the history of the Indian Ocean. The chapters explore the changing nature of Indian Ocean history through diverse themes, including state and capital, regional identities, maritime networking, South Asian immigrants, Bay of Bengal linkages, the East India Company, Indian seamen, formal and informal collaboration in imperial networking, scientific transfers, pearling, the issues of colonial copyright, customs, excise and port cities.

The volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of global history, modern history, maritime history, medieval history, Indian history, colonial history and world history.

Part I

Historiographies, methodologies and scale in the Indian Ocean

1
The Indian Ocean

Global nexus (1500–1800)

Patrick Manning

Space-age technology enables us to gain views of the Earth at night – luminous images of what humankind has done to remake the surface of our planet. Of these views, one of the most arresting is that of the great semicircular littoral of the Indian Ocean, centred on the South Asian peninsula. It shows bright spots in Southern Africa and Western Australia, brighter spots along the coasts of Arabia and Indonesia, glimmers all along the ocean shore and a dense glow throughout South Asia. This tropical semicircle conveys at once the notion of communication along the littoral and of traversing the open ocean to link ports so as to satisfy complementary needs.

This concise overview of the Indian Ocean is an effort to honour the wide-ranging analyses of Michael Pearson, combining a look at the physical extent of the region and its long-term historical experience with citations of his works on these issues. The objective is to provide a context reaffirming the particular historical significance of the period from 1500 to 1800 in the long and deep historical experience of the Indian Ocean (Pearson 2003, 2010a).¹

Today’s Indian Ocean littoral sustains the legacy of human habitation during many thousands of years. The commonality of this landscape and seascape – with shared flora and fauna, terrestrial and maritime, along its lengthy littoral – provided a welcoming habitat for the humans who began expanding ever outward from their Northeast African homeland, once they developed language. Speaking humans moved southward along the African coast and, at much the same time, moved eastward along the Asian coast, in each case moving inland along river valleys when the opportunity arose. The travel was both maritime and terrestrial from the first – across the Bab el Mendeb from Africa to Arabia, along the coast on both continents and eventually across the ocean from Sunda to Sahul. Early human settlers thus formed a great semicircle from South Africa to Australia, on and near the shores of the Indian Ocean. From this base, later generations moved inland, especially via rivers such as the Rovuma, Zambezi, Euphrates, Indus, Godavari, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Mekong and Red River. With the passage of more time, other settlers moved west to Africa’s Atlantic, north throughout Eurasia and eventually into the Americas. Nevertheless, as widely as humans were to become dispersed, the initial semicircle of settlement around the Indian Ocean remained an important base of human population, where humanity developed many of its innovations. The descendants of these early settlers gradually developed both diversification and interconnection, as the diversifying languages, cultures and social and economic patterns were linked by recurring migrations and exchanges of heritage.

Continents and subcontinents frame the waters of the Indian Ocean: this terrestrial frame generates the monsoon-centred climate that stands as the outstanding regional characteristic. The great landmasses gain heat in the summer, forcing winds across lands and waters. Asia and Northeast Africa force winds to the south during the northern summer; continental cooling during the winter draws winds to the north. These patterns are reinforced by the heating of southern Africa and Australia in the southern summer – these landmasses, when heated, force winds to the north. The seasonal shifts cause the winds to blow dependably north and south every year; the rains come from the humidity gathered over the oceans. But the monsoons vary over time according to the strength of the sun’s impact on each latitude. The strength of monsoons in each part of the ocean basin changed from weak to strong, from south to north, according to the three types of change in insolation resulting from variations in the earth’s orbit, from annual changes to cycles of many thousands of years. In addition, an east-west variation in climate imposed itself occasionally on the north-south alternation of the monsoons – the El Niño Southern Oscillation, created by varying insolation of the Pacific Ocean, brought alternations of heat and cold, humid and dry, that cut across the Indian Ocean in cycles ranging from two to seven years.

During the first millennium CE, mariners had learned the monsoons, how to sail them and how to link up the markets for commodities: the littoral linked each region to the next and to the islands, all across the great semicircle. In addition, a few major routes tied the Indian Ocean to other world regions facilitating long-distance commerce and migration. The Red Sea formed a path to the Mediterranean; the Persian Gulf opened the way to the West Asian interior; Khyber Pass was the route to Central Asia; and the Ganges and the Brahmaputra led to the interior of North India and to the mountainous route to Yunnan and south China. Finally, through the straits of Malacca and Sunda, maritime routes led to China and to the Spice Islands.

Michael Pearson’s scholarly focus on the Indian Ocean reached back into early times but settled most seriously on the period beginning with 1500, as Portuguese and Spanish navigators entered the region from opposite directions so that global communication and commerce took form, and ending in 1800 as Britain gained hegemony throughout the region and began shipping cotton textiles to India rather than the reverse. This chapter confirms the wisdom of Pearson’s choice, by comparing the commercial fortunes of the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800, with the preceding and following periods, to show that the intermediate “early modern” era was the time in which the great tropical semicircle played the most central role in the global economy.

Commerce in an era of Islamic expansion (1200–1500)

The era of the Medieval Warm Period (as it was labelled in northwest Europe) is known to have brought a warm and humid climate to most regions of the world from 900 to 1250 CE. It therefore brought ample harvests and growing population to the Indian Ocean region. From 1250, temperatures stabilised and then declined from 1350 for some four hundred years before beginning to rise. During the period to 1500, the Indian Ocean region experienced relative peace and prosperity.

Within the confines of the Indian Ocean, the ancient commercial system continued to mature. Ships from three traditions crossed the seas, trans-shipped goods in harbours and underwent repair in home ports and distant workshops. The dhows of the Western and Eastern Indian Ocean, the proas of the Malay mariners and the junks from China, each type built at varying scales, maintained their original designs yet adopted innovations from each other. The principal ports changed, over the centuries, though the regions served by shifting ports changed little. An overlapping set of languages was employed in commerce, varying across the regions and over time.

Regions, ethnicities and religions served as markers of culture and identity: the ancient settlement of the region meant that there was deep cultural diversity in the Indian Ocean region, but it also meant that devices had been developed for exchange and communication across the persistent cultural divides (Pearson 1994).² In the era from 1200 to 1500, migrations were relatively small scale and took the form of trade diasporas or missionary diasporas. Trade diasporas included those of Armenian and Gujarati merchants; religious diasporas included those of Islamic missionaries to East Africa and the Malay lands and Buddhist missionaries from Ceylon to Thailand and Burma.

Commerce of the Indian Ocean extended in various directions beyond the limits of the tropical semicircle. From the Western Indian Ocean, exchange had long taken place along the East African coast; with the Mediterranean, through the Red Sea; with West Asia, through the Persian Gulf and the Tigris-Euphrates Valley; and with Central Asia, through the Khyber Pass. From the Eastern Indian Ocean, the valleys of the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Irrawaddy led to southwest China, while the Strait of Malacca and the Strait of Sunda led to the Spice Islands and the South China Sea (Pearson 2010b).³

In this expanded network, built around an Indian Ocean core, commerce flourished as never before in the era from 1250 to 1350. During that century, a world economy linked markets from Europe to Japan through the Indian Ocean, with overland connections as well. Commodities in this trade included silks from China, cottons from India, pepper from India, spices from the Spice Islands, diamonds from India, pearls from South Asia and the Gulf, ceramics from China and Persia, coffee from Ethiopia, tea from China, horses from Arabia, furs from Siberia and wheat and rice from many farmlands. While the Mongol regime controlled the Silk Road, no one state controlled the commercial links through the Indian Ocean. Mongol-era warfare had spread advanced military techniques back and forth across the Old World, but many other sorts of exchanges took place in peacetime (Pearson 1997).⁴ These included exchanges of spoken and literary languages, religious knowledge and belief, maps, astronomy, medical and other knowledge and technical knowledge in agriculture and printing. Cowrie shells from the Maldives spread as far as the Yellow River Valley, the western Mediterranean and the Niger Valley. Cinnamon and nutmeg reached Japan and Iberia.

States rose and fell throughout this commercial network, causing disruption as they fought wars of conquest and sought to repress rebellions but protecting and facilitating commerce in intervening eras of peace. The commercial hub of Srivijaya lost its long hegemony over the straits of Sunda and Malacca as did its competitor Chola on the Coromandel Coast at the end of the thirteenth century, but Majapahit rose to replace Srivijaya and Vijayanagar rose to replace Chola. Ghaznavid rule in India and Persia came to an end in the twelfth century, but the Delhi Sultanate expanded Islam in North India from 1206. Buddhist priests from Ceylon successfully spread Theravada Buddhism to the lands that are now Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia, while Hinduism rebounded in India with the fourteenth-century rise of Vijayanagar. Muslim communities, commonly maritime, spread to East Africa to North India and along the coast, carrying goods as far as China, where they established diaspora communities. Islam had won over Arabia and Persia in its early days and entered North India from Ghaznavid times. Established mosques were expanded along the Swahili coast; new mosques were constructed in Malay lands.

At a global level, the era from 1200 to 1600 was a time of collisions and crises, which made the Indian Ocean appear peaceful and orderly by comparison with other regions. The Mongol conquests (1206–1280) and the Black Death (beginning in the 1340s) were the two greatest collisions, one in human affairs, the other with the natural world. Genghis Khan had conquered all of the Eurasian steppes before his death in 1227, and his successors had seized all of Persia and China by 1280. (But Mongol expeditions against the Delhi Sultanate were unsuccessful, and their occupation of Java was brief.) The Black Death, an epidemic of plague resulting from the bacterium Yersina pestis, killed great numbers in many parts of the eastern hemisphere in the mid-fourteenth century and then returned at less severe levels for centuries. The plague is now thought to have broken out in North China and to have killed millions there. The immense plague mortality in Europe, 1347–1351, has been well documented; a heavy but less well-documented mortality is known for West Asia, Egypt and North Africa. New research is indicating that plague mortality may also have been significant in South Asia and South Arabia and from Ethiopia west to the African Atlantic.

The Indian Ocean region was the largest region of commercial interchange and had the most fully developed practices in exchange within the region, facilitating commerce with other regions. A widely recognised emblem of the region’s achievement in commerce and navigation is the work of the maritime scholar Ibn Majid (1421–c.1500), born on the gulf shore, who sailed and documented the western Indian Ocean: his numerous treatises on navigation, along with his poetry on maritime life, brought the art of seamanship to a high level in the fifteenth century (Pearson 2007a).⁵

The nexus of global commerce (1500–1800)

In the sixteenth century, two new commercial routes opened for the Indian Ocean. The cape route to the Atlantic opened with the voyage of Vasco da Gama in 1498; the trans-Pacific route opened in 1571 as the Spanish established regular galleon voyages from Mexico to Manila. This was of course also the era in which maritime travel linked all the populated regions of the world, bringing discovery and disaster at first but eventually bringing growth and transformation. These additional openings to and from the Indian Ocean created the era, from 1500 to 1800, in which the Indian Ocean played a transformed yet distinctive role as a nexus of global commerce and communication. Such expansion of global commercial contacts was to facilitate expanded and transformed trade in every region. Iberia and Northwest Europe developed as a new global commercial centre, relying on shipping routes in all directions. The East Asian commercial hub, linking China, Japan and Korea, maintained its centrality and developed new ties, especially with trans-Pacific trade linking Manila to Acapulco. Smaller commercial centres developed in the Caribbean and West Africa, but they did not thrive. The Indian Ocean arguably benefited the most, especially early in this three-century period, because of its clear links to all other regions.

The conditions of climate and disease in this era were not initially favourable to economic growth. Global temperatures declined slowly but steadily on to 1650, an unusually cool and trying time worldwide, and only then began to rise. Epidemics of plague, while declining in frequency and intensity, continued into this period. The steady expansion in interregional contact during this era meant that diseases, both old and new, struck and occasionally reduced populations. So the expansion in the volume of Indian Ocean trade after 1500 (assuming that it can be firmly documented) is all the more impressive in that it moved ahead despite declining temperatures and the continuation of serious disease.

Changes in the Americas brought effects in the Indian Ocean. From the early sixteenth century, waves of epidemic disease led to dramatic population decline throughout the Americas, as a result of pathogens brought especially from Europe and Africa. Disease spread around the world through human communication – as an instance, syphilis, originating in the Americas, had reached Melaka in 1511 and by 1512 had reached Japan. In the “Columbian Exchange,” biota from the eastern hemisphere and the western hemisphere were exchanged, especially beginning in 1492. The results brought new crops to the Indian Ocean, notably chili peppers, peanuts, pineapples, maize, potatoes and squashes, that ultimately changed diet and cuisine.

Yet the trade of the Indian Ocean, while it expa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Indian Ocean histories
• Part I Historiographies, methodologies and scale in the Indian Ocean
• Part II Case studies
• Part III New histories
• Part IV Reminiscences
• Index