The Indian Ocean Read online

  As I was writing my book I had the pleasure of reading Horden and Purcell's The Corrupting Sea. It struck many chords with me, as will be evident throughout this book. Indeed, I have had to restrain myself and try not to quote too often from their stunning book, and also from Braudel's older classic.8 It is curious that the Mediterranean has now inspired two brilliant books, Braudel's for long a classic, Horden and Purcell's unarguably destined to become one. These are books which appeal to the historical profession in general, and indeed also to a wider reading public. Other maritime spaces have failed to generate such works. Certainly there are a host of worthy accumulations of data, and perhaps the present book is one such, but there is nothing to match these two path-breaking books on the Mediterranean. I wish I could say, with Isaac Newton, that 'If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants', but the giants have not written about my ocean.

  This may be because the Mediterranean is so much smaller, more manageable, than the oceans. Is the history of a sea different from the history of an ocean? Are the Baltic, North and Mediterranean seas in the same category as the Pacific or the Atlantic or the Indian oceans? The difference of scale is obviously vast: the Baltic covers 414,000 km2, the North Sea 520,000, and the Mediterranean 2,516,000. The Indian Ocean, on the largest definition, going down to Antarctica, covers no less than 68,536,000 km2, that is nearly twenty times bigger than the three seas combined. Horden and Purcell have created an interesting map which shows which parts of their sea are out of sight of land.9 There is surprisingly little, but of course this is very different for the Indian Ocean. But maybe this is a difference of scale, not a generic difference. Ties across oceans must be less strong than across seas, but perhaps the best way to investigate this is to consider all passages in seas to be merely coastal. Most passages in oceans are also coastal, but then they also have the vast voyages when ships were out of sight of land for weeks and even months, as we noted Conrad rejoicing in. Oceanic passages can connect people from very distant places; by definition passages across seas do not do this.

  There is also a difference between a history of an ocean and a maritime history of a particular country. Braudel and Matvejevic10 were trying to write a history of a sea as a unity. I consider that these two histories of the Mediterranean failed to establish the unity they claimed, for both of them ignore, or are ill-informed about, the southern shores of this sea. Leaving this aside, their aim was similar to mine, to O.H.K. Spate's in his book on the Pacific, and to the other authors in this series on the seas in history. The contrast is with books which study the maritime history of a particular terrestrial place, such as Broeze's book on Australians and the sea, Mollat's on Europe and the sea, and the collection that Ashin Das Gupta and I edited which was on India and the sea.11

  My work differs from these others in two important respects. Braudel ostensibly wrote on the later sixteenth century, while Spate's book on the Pacific deals only with the period since the arrival of Europeans. My ambitious aim is, first, to write about the whole of the Indian Ocean over the whole of its recorded history. Second, I want to avoid the concentration on the material which characterises Braudel, and most books on the Indian Ocean. Horden and Purcell noted of Braudel that 'It is material life – especially towns, ships, and long-distance trade, that mainly captures Braudel's imagination… . Perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and symbols … all these are reduced to a relatively few pages.'12 The history of the ocean is not just a history of trade and warships. I aim to describe both material and mental frameworks, the psychological as well as the geographical.

  Rather than look out at the oceans from the land, as so many earlier books have done, a history of an ocean has to reverse this angle and look from the sea to the land, and most obviously to the coast. There has to be attention to land areas bordering the ocean, that is the littoral. A history of an ocean needs to be amphibious, moving easily between land and sea. As a maritime historian, I will cover inland events only to the extent that they impinge directly on the ocean, so that my focus is the sea itself, and the coast. Yet often I have had to travel far inland, and well beyond the shores of the ocean: to Potosi and Rome, London and Mecca.

  In thinking about maritime history, comments by the late Frank Broeze have been useful. Discussing a recent book on the Atlantic, he noted 'the vital conceptual problem of how far one should go in linking maritime themes and developments to their terrestrial sources and dynamics' and complained that

  First, and perhaps most important, [the author] does not offer any definition of what I in shorthand would call 'oceanic history.' What is the grand design that holds his book together, and how far inland does the sea extend its influence when one is dealing with such various themes as naval history, shipping, the fisheries, colonisation, migration and ports? How can maritime communities be identified and what kind of relationship do they have with their hinterlands?13

  These questions were on my mind as I wrote this book.

  Chaunu wrote dismissively of 'The false concept of unity in the Indian Ocean.'14 The unity or otherwise of the Indian Ocean will be a recurring theme throughout this book, for this in turn raises the central question of whether the history of an ocean has any heuristic value. Is there something which we call the Indian Ocean and which can be studied, analysed, treated as a coherent object? Here I make an absolutely fundamental distinction between notions of unity, as compared with merely talking about intra-ocean connections.

  At first glance it is difficult to find elements of unity in this vast ocean. Most of the population of the littoral states today identify with their state, not with the ocean beyond the borders of the state. If they seek a wider identity, it would not be a maritime one but rather one based on religion, such as Islam, or a wider geography, such as Asia, Africa, the Middle East.15

  As usual Braudel is helpful here. He made the essential point that geography is not enough: 'The Mediterranean has no unity but that created by the movements of men, the relationships they imply, and the routes they follow.'16 But statements which address this fundamental matter are often nebulous and imprecise (perhaps necessarily so). Consider the following statement about the unity of the Mediterranean from Horden and Purcell:

  the region is only loosely unified, distinguishable from its neighbours to degrees that vary with time, geographical direction, and topic. Its boundaries are not of the sort to be drawn easily on a map. Its continuities are best thought of as continuities of form or pattern, within which all is mutability.17

  Chaudhuri, a distinguished historian of the Indian Ocean, has also circled around this problem of unity.

  There was a firm impression in the minds of contemporaries, sensed also by historians later, that the ocean had its own unity, a distinct sphere of influence. Means of travel, movements of people, economic exchange, climate, and historical forces created elements of cohesion. Religion, social systems, and cultural traditions, on the other hand, provided the contrasts.18

  Yet he elsewhere asked, 'Does the history of the civilizations around and beyond the ocean exhibit any intrinsic and perceptible unity, expressed in terms of space, time, or structures, which allows us to construct a Braudelian framework?' He found 'a basic underlying structure, the ground floor of material life, which remained invariant while displaying variations within certain limits.' Yet his conclusion is that for certain kinds of analysis the Indian Ocean is a single unit of space, for others it is not and must be broken up.19

  More particularly, scholars have written about such elements of commonality as monsoon winds, ports, ships, sailors, and long-distance trade. Pirates and fisherfolk are ubiquitous, the former to be seen as macroparasites, human groups that draw sustenance from the toil and enterprise of others, offering nothing in return, the latter equally predatory, for unlike peasants they extract but do not cultivate, take but do not give. Niels Steensgaard is sceptical, claiming that at the least the Indian Ocean had less unity than did the Mediterranean, the Baltic, or the Malay–I
ndonesian archipelago. This opinion is based on his finding that long-distance trade was marginal to the total economy of the area.20 But this concern with the material may have led him to ignore other elements which perhaps do demonstrate some unity.

  Rene Barendse has also ruminated on this matter. He claims there were elements of it in the seventeenth century:

  In spite of this great variety of landscapes the lands bordering the Arabian seas still had a lot in common. It is well justified to speak about a single maritime world. There was the garland of harbours along the coasts: échelles where maritime trade met land-routes. There were the common kinds of ships used. There was the current of new products cultivated – moving generally west to east, like tobacco, coffee, tea and maize in our period. There were the coins used, like the ubiquitous larin in the sixteenth century and the Maria Theresia Taler in the eighteenth.21

  Yet he later provided an important caveat, namely that we must be careful, in our search for elements of unity, to avoid negatively contrasting an essentialised Indian Ocean with an implicitly dynamic Europe.22

  World historians have been discovering areas which make up 'worlds', thanks to interaction and connections within them. One influential schema found that the three main forms of cross-cultural interaction are migration, commerce and conquest, or MCC for short. Yet one could certainly add other criteria: the movements of people who go out and return, or of disease, or of cultural elements like religion or ideology. In any case, this preliminary discussion is designed not to provide an answer, at least not yet, but merely to raise the question of whether or not we can find enough strands to depict a firm rope which binds together the ocean. Tentative answers will appear throughout what follows. Unity may be too big a word anyway. No one would think of writing about the unity of the United States, or of the Christian religion. Historians usually deal with diversity and change, not with some static monolith. At times it may be more useful to disaggregate this vast body of water, and focus on the Bay of Bengal, or the Gulf, or one of the islands.

  We certainly can find links and connections; the real problem is their significance. Many historians have stressed that connections, an early version of the currently fashionable concept of 'globalisation', were very much in place in the world long before modern transportation and communications revolutions produced the intricately connected world we live in today. Eric Wolf stressed interchange in the world at 1400. John Russell-Wood wrote on mingling and connections created by the far-flung Portuguese empire, while Fernand Braudel took a global compass when he wrote of civilisation and capitalism.23 It is crucial to acknowledge that most connections are rather minor, in the sense that most trade is coastal, most seafarers are actually just fisherfolk who do not go very far out to sea. Braudel stressed that the vast majority of navigation in the Mediterranean was coastal, in small ships of less than 75 tonnes. For these travelling bazaars the land was always in sight. These, 'the proletariat of the sea', went ashore frequently to peddle their wares.24 Romila Thapar, referring to trade from the Indus Valley Civilisation with West Asia from 3000 BCE, followed this explicitly:

  The more spectacular maritime trade was occasional, but in its interstices there was a steady small-scale contact, often coastal, which involved transporting essential supplies quite apart from luxury items. These would be ships which, to use the felicitous phrase of Braudel, tramped from port to port and were travelling bazaars, largely covering the more confined circuits. Such a low profile trade continues to the present.25

  When Braudel wrote of the Mediterranean he found very far-flung connections indeed: with the Baltic, the Atlantic, the North Sea and the Indian Ocean. So also with the Indian Ocean. Here are some more or less random examples: in 1731 the slave ship Diligent left the port of Vannes, near Nantes, bound for West Africa to buy slaves. Part of the cargo, which was to be used to buy slaves, was 7,000 lbs of cowry shells from the Maldives, and a large number of lengths of Indian cloth.26 Indeed, these particular cowries were only a small part of a vast humble trade. They were used as currency from West Africa to China. Coming from the Maldive Islands, they have been traded for some 1,500 years. At the height of the slave trade in the 1720s perhaps one million pounds were imported to West Africa to pay for slaves each year.27 The Jesuits in China used for mass wine made in Portugal which thus came clear across the Indian Ocean. The coco-de-mer, which comes from the Seychelles, drifts all around the Indian Ocean and is prized everywhere for its medicinal and aphrodisiac qualities.28 Eastern Vikings, originating from what is Sweden today, travelled to trade via the Black and Caspian Seas, to Abbasid Baghdad, and Isfahan, in other words to part of the Indian Ocean world.29 In the mid nineteenth century a town was established in Western Australia to breed horses for the Indian Army. It was given the appropriate name of Australind. This scheme failed, but later so many horses went from New South Wales to India that they were known as Walers. Karri and jarrah trees in southwest Western Australia were exported in bulk to India to be used as railway sleepers. Similarly, there have been massive movements of people over the ocean: people went from Indonesia to Madagascar, slaves came to Mauritius from Madagascar, the East African coast, India and Java; Zheng He sailed all around the littoral; half a million indentured labourers came from India to Mauritius in the nineteenth century; Europeans crossed half the world to get to the ocean. Muslim influences spread far and wide. In Zanzibar one group uses a certificate of authenticity and authority issued in Indonesia. In Mayotte, off Madagascar, South Asian Islamic reformers are active; in Zanzibar Islamic books, including Qurans, come from Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan.30

  Not only people travel and form connections. The southern bluefin tuna is a magnificent fish. Their average weight is 25 kgs, and they can live for up to 40 years. They breed in the waters south of Java, and then go down the coast of Western Australia. There they separate, with some going across the Indian Ocean to the waters of Southern Africa, and others across the Great Australian Bight, around Tasmania, up the east coast, over to New Zealand, and then north and west and so back to Java to spawn.31

  Yet as we look at these connections, a matter absolutely central to my discussion, we need to proceed with caution. If one finds a Roman coin in south India, what does this show? Does it mean that Romans themselves traded to this area? Or is this a coin which arrived over several stages? The coin is there, but does this show there was an Indian Ocean world, in this case linked to the far-off Mediterranean, with which it had some sort of commonality and integration? Remembering that most long-distance trade was in luxuries only, how many people were affected by these connections? Similarly with Chinese ceramics on the Swahili coast. If we find Buddhism, which originated in India, in Java, does this make Java a cultural colony? Connections go two ways. A Chinese pot will be used in different ways in different places, and may be copied or modified. A Hadhrami preaching Islam will find a different response in Kilwa from that in Aceh or Hyderabad, and his words will have different meanings in these two places. European weaponry found different sorts of acceptance in different places.

  Clearly we need to consider Rene Barendse's notion of the 'greater' Indian Ocean, analogous to the Analistas' 'long' sixteenth century. The former highlights connections far past the geographical limits of the ocean, the latter far past the arbitrary dates of 1500 and 1600. What is important is the turning points, not the turning of centuries. On this matter I have found a central theme in The Corrupting Sea extremely useful; I will use their terminology frequently in this book. Horden and Purcell distinguish between history in the Mediterranean, and the history of the Mediterranean. There is 'history in the Mediterranean – contingently so, not Mediterranean-wide, perhaps better seen as part of the larger history of either Christendom or Islam – and history of the Mediterranean – for the understanding of which a firm sense of place and a search for Mediterranean-wide comparisons are both vital.'32

  In 1744 John Campbell wrote that 'The peculiar Pleasure and Improvement that B
ooks of Voyages and Travels afford, are sufficient Reasons why they are as much, if not more read, than any other Branch of polite Literature.'33 I hope people will read my book. To this end, I want it to have a whiff of ozone, not just be a collection of statistics about trade. I have accumulated numerous first-hand accounts of what it was like to travel over the ocean, the earliest being from Fa-Hsien, a Buddhist pilgrim from China, who returned by sea to China in 413–14, and the latest an account of sailing in the Volvo Around the World Race in 2001–2. I have people going on pilgrimage to Mecca, I have Alan Villiers in a dhow and on a great four-master barque with 30 sails and 35,000 square feet of canvas, I have migrants going to Australia, I have Salem whalers and sealers, I have fleet commanders, Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster and Mark Twain. I have even (tried to) read novels by Wilbur Smith. I will quote extensively from these actual accounts of life on the Indian Ocean, inspissating my dry prose with their compelling descriptions.

  I want to write a more total history than has appeared so far. With all due deference, too many previous works have been almost entirely histories of trade, and especially European trade, rather than of the ocean. I want lots of connections, the ocean acting as a transmitter for disease, religion, tourists, goods, information, not just pepper and cotton cloths. To provide space for what really interests me, I will sometimes merely summarise existing literature on topics already well covered, especially to do with politics and trade, and refer the reader to more complete specialist works.

  One other caveat. I am aware that my book fails to pay the amount of attention to the Malay maritime world that a southeast Asian specialist would expect. Data to be presented throughout the book makes clear that in many important matters India was the fulcrum of the ocean around which all other areas swung. India, now called South Asia and including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, has by far the bulk of the population – about 70 per cent of the total populations of all the countries ringing the ocean.34 South Asia has a combined economy which dwarfs all the others around the ocean's rim. There are also compelling geographical reasons for not going much beyond the Straits of Melaka. The Malay world often was more tied in to the Chinese world than to the Indian Ocean one. The eastern boundaries of the ocean are porous, with the Indian Ocean flowing imperceptibly into the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. There is a clear contrast with the other areas of the ocean, and especially the western side, the East African coast. Littoral boundaries are easy here, as there is no connection with some other sea, and so also all around the shores of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. To limit my study to around the Straits of Melaka also accords with my own expertise, such as it is, and the task in front of me becomes slightly more manageable if I can avoid going too far into Indonesia.